The Orcas Code of Conduct

Another Saturday, another wedding. The dining room will still be open tonight—and is completely booked, with several 6-person tables—but the event hall will also be open for the wedding reception, a smallish one of 35 people. Little kids have been running all over the property, and exiting the cabin to walk to town for the Solstice parade, I see two of the young guests with their dad on our stoop, staring at some stuff in the front garden.

“Slugs!” they shout out. “Look at the slugs!” They point their little fingers at the big juicy bugs on the steps.

“We’ve got some salt you could sprinkle on them,” I say, “but that’s not very nice.”

“Ewwwww!” The slightly older one wrinkles his nose at my suggestion.

“Would you like to see our pig instead?” I ask. The boys perk up, and together with their dad follow me out to the pig pen behind the greenhouse to visit Kartoffel, our lone Mangalitsa left on the property. (Geddes started with a herd of 5 pigs, and will be the owner of a few more living off-campus.)

He’s a big beast, but pretty friendly, and as the boys approach, he starts rubbing his side against the fence. “He’s a little itchy,” I say, but warn the littler boy to keep his hands away. They walk back over to the main property again, and start shouting to one of their cousins, “There’s a pig! Over there!”

I couldn’t pretend to know what it’s like to be a kid on Orcas…I imagine that whether or not you’re predisposed to wanderlust kicks in at a later age, but watching a few kids discover this place, they seem to be constantly exploring and marveling at what they find. I entered the kitchen yesterday to find Geddes’s daughter Clare at work on a batch of carrot cake muffins—school’s wrapped up for the year, and her and Avery’s orange hair can be seen more and more around the Inn’s property. To grow up in a kitchen like this, on an island like this, has to carry with it an early access to how things work. Kids seem to know more about plants, gardens, and animals here than anywhere else I’ve been.

And at the Solstice parade in Eastsound, I start to see why. It’s not so much that today, as Luke warned me, “the hippies come out of hiding”, but more that you see kids and parents getting crazy side by side. Parents at the parade wearing homemade costumes pull their kids behind them in Radio Flyers, their faces painted and their clothes wildly colorful.

 

The theme of this year’s Parade is “One World”, and people are dressed as the Taj Mahal, as the Pyramids of Egypt, as London Bridge, as the Liberty Bell. It reminds me of New Orleans’ Mardi Gras—two girls dressed in patched-together patterns hula-hoop their way down the street as a bunch of horn players trumpet their approach.

Women well-past the age of innocence wear bustiers made of flowers and torn-up scarves, and a woman dressed in full princess garb leads the parade, waving her wand and shaking her hips to the funky music.

You might think I’d be inured to this after going to the New York Halloween parade a few times, but the sheer pleasure and collaboration people seem to find in this little parade, even as it starts to drizzle, beats anything I’ve ever seen in a bigger parade. Stilts, giant puppets, old people behaving like young people--I'm watching the whole thing with a grin from ear to ear.

It may be, in a community like this, that the default expectation is of decency and community—of open conversation and warmth and old-fashioned neighborliness. I don’t mean to be painting Orcas with too sunny a brush, and I know that in just one month I’m way more likely to view the best of the Island rather than the full portrait. But the way exchanges happen in town, on farms and in businesses, are less steeped in individual pursuits of excellence than the belief in a common good. The Inn’s resources predominately come from local farmers, and if one of them experience problems, it’s in Geddes’s interest to help them out. Mary-Ann comes into the kitchen and tells Geddes that one of our egg suppliers at Coffelt Farms had a problem with some ravens, and so the eggs won’t be available for a day or two.

“Ravens? What could ravens do?” I ask over family meal.

“Ravens are pretty predatory,” Luke says. “They’ll come into the henhouse and peck open the eggs, and just suck ‘em out.”

“Isn’t that like bird cannibalism?” I ask.

“They don’t seem to mind…ravens, man,” Chris says, stirring up a batch of aioli. “They’re nasty.”

The rules of animal behavior aren’t quite as regimented as those of our kitchen, and there’s very little we can do beyond scramble to make up the difference. And so it is with this wedding, which initially gets off to a smooth start. Geddes and I prep a series of hors d’oeuvres again—mini crabcakes (recycling the last supplies of the crab salad), melon with goat cheese and sweet herbs, smoked salmon and avocado crostini, and cucumbers with cream cheese and espelette. I’m especially proud of this batch, as Geddes left me to devise the plating of the cucumbers myself—I decide to do mini-quenelles of cream cheese, harkening back to that horse dinner so many months ago. They come out decently enough, though my hands are still covered with cream cheese.

The salad course goes well enough, too—shaved vegetables (thankfully julienned—I’ve kept my distance from the mandoline), fresh greens, and little crisps of parmesan cheese. We plate up quickly, so Geddes can head back to the totally-packed dining room. Luke takes pictures so I can focus on getting the salads with no cheese (silly vegans) out to the right people.

But the entrée course is where things go really crazy. As we carry over our proteins to the reception hall, Geddes says that this may be the easiest wedding he’s ever done—the entire wedding party has asked for salmon, so we’ll be able to plate up quickly and send everything out the door. (He’s cooked the salmon just a few minutes before serving—something that almost never happens for wedding receptions.) And it's a gorgeous dish, one of the prettiest ones we've plated yet...

But as we start sending out plates, Suzanne, one of our servers, comes back. “The bride and groom say they ordered steak.”

Geddes’s face goes blank. “I talked to the groom this morning and confirmed that we were a go on the salmon…”

“And the bride is saying she emailed the Inn about needing twelve steaks several times…”

There’s some kerfuffle over the missed communication, and Geddes ultimately throws up his hands to head back to the dining room. “What do we do?” the servers ask.

I pause and look at the hot chafing pans full of perfectly cooked salmon, steaming vegetables, and crispy rice. “Let’s keep plating up the salmon that’s available, and he’ll bring the steak when he’s got it.” Luke and I head back to the plates, drizzling sauces and garnishing each filet with shaved vegetables and a spring of flowering thyme. I silently pray that Geddes doesn’t have to cancel the restaurant’s steak orders, or worse, cut a new side of beef to meet this late-breaking request.

Before we know it, he’s back with a giant hotel pan full of hot steaks, with Annie bearing a cutting board and knife right behind him. (Each steak has a crispy buttery crust—I have no idea how he did it so fast.) At the very last second, and in an unprecedented moment in the Inn’s wedding-hosting history, we churn out twelve succulent steak plates in 10 minutes. Out of missed communication comes an ad-hoc triumph.

The guests don’t issue a peep of complaint, and when Annie sends out two different desserts—dense chocolate cake with crème fraiche, and meringued-rhubarb tarts with lime compote—the only words we hear from the wedding party are gushes of praise.

Little do they know how many people worked their butts off to make their dinner this good. The servers all look like they need big drinks, as they bear pots of coffee and tea into the reception hall.

I finally return to the kitchen, and Chris greets me with a glass of Viognier to enjoy during station break-down. It’s still too busy behind the dessert station to completely check out, and I get a little flustered trying to scoop out a bit of chocolate ice cream for an order. “Just once,” I mutter, “I’d like to do something right the first time.”

“Oh, you’ve gotta get over that,” Annie said. “A little humility will help you get over that disappointment, and move on.” I don’t like to think that it’s pride that makes me want to avoid mistakes, as much as a silent hope to impress my teachers. Every day I have to grapple with the possibility that I’ve been doing things wrong my whole cooking life—or if not wrong, imperfectly. And though people have gobbled up my food with gusto at home, there’s a vast chasm between what I can get away with there and what I do here.

But humility, as Annie said, isn’t a liability, but an asset. After wrapping up service, she brings Melissa and I with her to a birthday party near the Rosario resort (twin sisters celebrating their birthday.) The house is as gorgeous and wild as the Island, covered in wood carvings and paintings and sculptures. The guests are like extras from the Orcas production of Hair—gorgeous men with wild hair and women with long flowing skirts, drinking wine and eating baked beans, and dancing to a mash-up of hip hop and classic soul.

Out on the porch overlooking the dark treetops, people pass a joint around a little firepit and a lone guest lounges in the hot tub, sending steam into the chilly air. Not sure if they're on drugs or this is just what people call being high on life, but whatever it is, I want to be a part of it. They ask me what I’m doing on the Island, but not “what I do”—because what I do, in their eyes, is not the same as who I am.

This is what Annie’s talking about when she talks about humility: not a lack of pride, or a lack of ambition, but a lack of constantly connecting what you do to who you are. I am more than an imperfect scoop of ice cream, a repeatedly replated dessert, a less-than-towering tower of salad greens. I’m not my mutilated finger, or my lopsided biscuits, and though I can always do more and do better and try not to make mistakes, they don’t define my potential success in the kitchen.

And most importantly, I am not the central character in this story. The central character is the pursuit of something bigger than myself—participating in the act of crafting and sharing of food. I’m starting to understand why Geddes doesn’t freak out when he has to churn out a rush order of steaks, or why Annie plates desserts at an almost meditative pace. Anything you care enough about to share it with your neighbors—be it a homemade solstice outfit or a gorgeous and perfectly cooked plate of food—requires a deep breath and an untroubled, generous state of mind.

Saturday: "Hurry Up and Wait" for Celebrations and Assembly Lines

Saturday's dinner proves a new challenge: the kitchen on a wedding schedule. We're not going to be so focused on anticipating orders as we are with plowing through them. I wander through the property before my run to town, and the ceremony and reception tent are already in place. The dining room is decked out in all the colors of an Indian wedding, red and gold and saffron orange, and huge loops of jasmine flowers hang over each window.

My hike Saturday morning is strenuous, but I'm sweating more out of anxiety over the night to come. Will the wedding requests prove more difficult than an average dinner? Or will I get just as overwhelmed when we've got 80 orders to rapidly put together and send out? And there's a nagging thought at the back of my brain: does anyone even care, besides me? I've been aiming to post every day--because there is something happening every day--but not a single comment. Are you even out there, dear readers I've so longed for?

It's nice to hear that I've got at least one reader for this project: I finally reach Mom as I'm going through the Island Market for soap to fix my dry skin. "I sent it to all my friends," she says. "It is so great that you got to do this--to try out a new career while still getting paid by your old one!

"Yes, Mom, it's great," I say, though I'm wondering how much of a career I could make out of this if I get so stressed out by a few tickets.

"I just gotta tell you that your blog is such a joy, and so spectacular...it must has suddenly gone viral because I've sent out the URL to everyone I know, and everyone is reading it and saying how great it is." I love how confident she is--and though in certain circles she could be the Kevin Bacon of Boston, what I'm really hoping is that the food writing world is reading it. Where are you, my twitter friends at food52? At The Kitchn? I need your support...

"I certainly hope you're right...otherwise I'd probably be better off spending my time reading while here."

"Just keep at it--you make it so vivid, it's like we're there. This may be the very best thing you could've done. What a great eye-opening experience, and what a little mini-sabbatical."

She's right about that--I'm seeing things a bit more calmly, less neurotically since I've arrived here. I can feel it in my bones, the relaxation that comes with finally being away from the city: I'm walking straighter and with less pain, a product of spending my entire 8-hour work shift on my feet, and my hair is growing faster than it ever has in the city. Is it the three square meals a day? The hour-long walks to and from town? Is the kitchen's conspiracy to fatten me up actually a good thing?

I can't argue with the virtues of my breakfast...I'd wandered by the "Farm Stand" sign several days in a row, and finally walked in to buy some eggs, fresh from the chickens squawking in their backyard. The whole shed runs on an honor system--a list of prices, an unlocked cabinet, and a cash box. I write in my purchase on a clipboard and walk home with my gorgeous eggs.

 Their yolks are bright orange and wildly flavorful, especially when scrambled up and eaten with my radishes on toast. They're more chicken-y than I expected, and give me a bit more energy and confidence. Wedding guests are starting to wander across our porch as I scramble up the eggs and savor every bite.

And I need it, because while the wedding reception doesn't start until 5:30, we've got plenty to do. I spend the morning sawing away at the slicer, cutting stale bread for croutons and hors d'oeuvres, which I then assemble with Geddes leading me--spreading chicken liver, cornichons, and pickled fennel onto crackers, and sprinkling chive flowers onto smoked salmon. We set up a station outside by the walk-in so we can load up trays as quickly as possible.

Everyone's doing something to ready themselves for the later rush--Angela and Chris are making huge batches of risotto and mashed potatoes, and Annie and Wally make rounds of herbed goat cheese to top the salad croutons.

But then it becomes a waiting game--or as Annie says, as she has all of us crowded around her while she prepares flatbreads, it's time to "hurry up and wait". We wander in and out of the kitchen garden as the ceremony progresses...it's a Hindi ceremony, so everything is said and then translated, making it much longer than we'd anticipated. Chris and I eavesdrop in the garden, and I snap lots of photos of the gigantic sage leaves in the yard.

The rest of the staff are pacing, dying for tasks to take on. Wally whips up a giant batch of granola for the guests the next morning. As many of them are New Yorkers, I secretly wonder how many of them will be nursing giant hangovers from the party tonight. Later I find out they drank about 50 bottles of wine--almost 1 bottle per guest, not too shabby.

It seems to take hours for the ceremony to end, but then suddenly we hear them coming into the bar area. And we spring into action--Geddes and I stand by the walk-in and throw together silver platters of hors d'oeuvres for the waitstaff to pass: smoked salmon and cream cheese, cucumber with avocado mousse and Piment d'Espelette, chicken liver, and spicy mussels with green garlic aioli for the waitstaff to take away. We have more vegetarians than we'd anticipated, so Geddes starts pulling flatbread pizzas from the oven, adored with fresh asparagus and herbs from the garden. Winfred and Molly start coming back from the reception with trays of empty oyster shells--one guest said that they were the best oysters he'd ever eaten in his life. I'm not surprised at all, and make a note to myself to make a day trip to Buck Bay, where we get our oysters, as soon as possible.

And then it's barely a half-hour before we set to work at the salad station: Annie sends bowls of dressed greens down to me. I scatter slices of shaved fennel on top, and send it down the line. Wally adds slivers of raw and boiled beets on top, and Chris adorns each salad with a goat cheese crouton. We plate almost 80 salads in 10 minutes. It's like going on a 100-yard dash, but somehow I do it without freaking out once. In a series of stress-inducing days, this feels like a major milestone.

Then we're up for entrees: we all move to the entree station, as Geddes, Chris, and Angela get ready to pull slabs of halibut and chicken from the oven. Geddes returns the fish to the oven three times before he's happy with its doneness, and then starts plating like mad: Wally scoops out some black japonica rice and roasted vegetables, Geddes slices the fish on top, and Angela adds a scoop of salad and drizzles aioli around the dish. Then they pass the plate up to me. I dollop some herbal emulsion on top of the aioli and scatter chive blossoms over the top, wiping the rim of the plate with a clean towel. The plate goes to Annie for a final check, and then out to the dining room. We repeat this with chicken breast and mashed potatoes, and with a creamy Parmesan-citrus risotto and raw vegetables. This course doesn't run as smoothly as the first one, mainly because people start changing their orders at the last second. We're watching for problem ingredients along the way--too soft potatoes, too juicy tomatoes--but somehow every dish goes out. And it leaves us with great stuff for family meal--tons of rice and risotto; juicy, buttery chicken; and lots of roasted asparagus and carrots.

And finally, the dessert is ordered up. Annie's made a special version of the cake, adored with wildflowers, for photographs, but we still need to slice up an enormous sheet cake, a sweet gingery pound cake with vanilla cream and rhubarb between the layers. On one side of the cold station, Wally and Chris drizzle rhubarb sauce and ginger-chamomile syrup onto the plate, and pass it to me to place three borage flowers around the plate. Geddes scoops out ice cream studded with candied ginger, and it goes out the door. We clean up in a frenzy, mainly so we can dive into the leftovers, and finally exhale.

It's still fairly early--9pm--so Chris breaks open an excellent bottle of wine for the sharing. It's a perfect white, crisp and subtly floral, and as I sip my second glass, I'm seized by an urge to linger and celebrate with the wedding party. I run home post-clean-up and change into my one semi-formal summer dress and sandals. Refilling my glass with a red from the cupboard, I stand outside the reception room, which is pumping up the Michael Jackson and Lady Gaga. The guests are dancing like crazy, and the bride and groom are out of their formal clothes and into more comfortable dancewear. A few guests eye me in the doorway, and one of them start to ask me about my time on Orcas. Am I starting to look like a local? Or can they tell that I'm an eavesdropper like them?

Melissa and Chris are chatting on our porch, sharing some wine and laughing at the guests who are clearly on their fourth (or fifth) drinks, and smoking something sweet and woody on the lawn. Some of the guests dining in the restaurant last night were asking for a weed connection on the island, but I'm fairly certain we all demurred to provide an answer. Nevertheless, they seem to have found a source, and one guest stumbles out onto the porch of the reception room and does a full faceplant into the grass. He stands, laughs, and stumbles back into the hall to rock out to the Indian music. It's as though the Inn has become a private playground for the night, and I'm having a good time watching the show. Molly, who's on waitstaff for the dance party, fills my empty wine glass with a bit of prosecco. I salute her, and the guests, for a good night.