I get asked a lot about when I am going to be doing a pop-up. The truth is that I have been doing them but in keeping with my desire to make them different, this year I have been doing smaller affairs with selected guests. Last Friday I cooked dinner for 8 people at Heron Pond Farms on Tower Mountain. This was a chance for me to do a Wandering Table style event. There are advantages to feeding 8 people rather than 128, but it is still a lot of work and I am no Adam Hegsted.

On October 9th I will be cooking brunch with friends at Quillisascut Farm as a fundraiser for their scholarship fund. There will be food and some cider pressing to get involved in. Join Quillisascut’s Facebook page to get the details as soon as they are released.

All of the Pop-Ups have been different and this one was different-er then most. This was somewhere between an event catering and event vending. Midweek events are a bit of a problem for my schedule so I tried to make it as simple as possible for myself by doing a brown bag dinner. Quick and easy. Just hand people a bag. In order to pull off this easy event I worked a fifteen hour day to bake off 40 baguettes, roast and slice 6 lamb legs, cook 3 kinds of lentils, 8 pounds of chick peas, pickle 20 pounds of apricots, pickle 10 pounds of shiitake mushrooms, pickle carrots, diakon radishes and black radishes and make 1 gallon of aioli. After all of that I still needed help from Don and Irina to construct, wrap and bag the 120 sandwiches. 

Besides Don and Irina, I need to thank Doma for providing the cold brewed coffee and Jennifer Hall for making the event possible. 

The two sandwiches were Meat and Veg. The Meat had lamb, pickled apricots, sriracha aioli and arugula. The Veg had pickled vgetables, cabbage and marinated tofu. They were both served with a chick pea salad. The chick peas and lentils were all donated by PNW co-op, a collective of 700 family farms in the Palouse (check them out on Twitter and Facebook).

The biggest response I received was about the lentil salads. Everyone wanted the recipes but there were no recipes. The lentils are just that good. I seasoned one salad with lemon juice, garlic, and olive oil. Another one had balsamic vinegar, basil and tomates and the green lentils were mixed with cocoa powder, tomato paste, cumin, cinnamon, cholula hot sauce and beer. I cooked them all without soaking in some salted water. They cook fast. When they were just at the first stage of soft I pulled them off of the stove and cool them in the cooking liquid. When cool I strain them. 

This pop-up had a different audience so I am considering doing a brown bag event again in a more spontaneous fashion. 

I will be offering up some food at a great local event for anyone in Spokane that cares about what they eat. My participation will be to provide sandwiches and side salads. You will have your choice of a vegetarian Vietnamese sandwich or a Moroccan-Style lamb sandwich. I will have some lentil and chick pea salads to sample. The legumes are from the PNW Co-op in Moscow ID and representatives will be on hand to talk about the 700 family farms they represent. Doma is providing  cold brewed coffee. Here is the official event info. Hope to see you June 7th.

Join us on Tuesday, June 7th for the kick-off conversation, Food & Health in Spokane County: A Closer Look, intended to build into a Food Policy Advisory Roundtable in Spokane! Your expertise will be vital to the development of the diverse voice necessary for a real evaluation and discussion about our local food system.

The event will be kicked off by local chef David Blaine’s popular PopUp Restaurant, so you don’t have to worry about grabbing a bite between work and the presentation! You can focus on relaxing and socializing over a fun meal.

Missoula author, Jeremy Smith, Growing a Garden City, will start us off, as we learn more about our community’s food realities. 

Invite friends! The presentation (6-8pm) is free. Dinner tickets (4:30-5:40pm) need to be purchased by June 4th - http://www.brownpapertickets.com/event/169154 

Additional background leading up to this event can be found here - Learn more about the Food Access Coaltion <http://www.srhd.org/services/sfac.asp> . 

Since there are so many new people who have been asking about the next Pop-Up I figured it was time to catch everyone up on what is going on. 

Last year we did 8 events and served nearly a 800 people. Grass fed Hamburgers, Handmade Pasta, Omelets, handmade sausages, and spit roasted lamb all done with local ingredients sourced directly from the producers or grown by me and cooked outdoors.

The goals for 2010 were exceeded in every way which puts the pressure on this year to find new ways to commit random acts of food in 2011. One goal is to collaborate with other chefs from the area. Recently I sat around a table at Quillisascut Goat Cheese Farm with 18 like minded people to discuses the regions food identity. From those conversations I expect to see some great opportunities to build a wider food community by seeking new ideas for the Pop-Up project.  

A personal goal for me is to figure out ways to accomplish these goals while working within the established Health Department system. Being an outlaw was never the purpose. The kind of real change that needs to happen requires cooperation at at all levels.

Thank you for your support.

Pop-Up #7 Pasta This is the portrait of local food. Pasta, Pesto, Sausage made by me and all of the ingredients were grown by me or someone I know- even the flour. 

There are a few things that need to be covered. Pop-Up has been busy doing private events. Some of them really small but all of them fun. There are at least two big events coming up in August but then things will be small for awhile. This will allow me to have more fun with the concepts. Once we started feeding more than 100 people at an event, the dynamics changed and it started to feel like work. 
This project has turned out to be a good deal different then I had envisioned. Partly because of the media coverage. Remi is right in saying that once you cross a certain line underground events can never go back. Pop-Up will be what it will, but as a by-product I have been able to acquire some pretty sweet on-site cooking equipment that I am making available to anyone who wants to do their own random acts of food. Cost of rental is just one plate of food. Hopefully this will keep some of that spunky upstart spirit going.

Ben Tobin Photo

A friend sent me this link to a street food guideline matrix for some top street food cities. The interesting part is the discrepancy between rules governing bathroom access. In Spokane if you are using a mobile food permit and plan to stay in one location longer than 2 hours then you must have a signed bathroom access agreement on file for that location. 

The website also has good coverage of the recent debate about changing San Francisco’s rules governing street food.  Seattle is going through the same process right now.