For an omnivorous cafe, what could be better than a donated pig from a small local farm? Loading the pig and delivering it to market.
Last week I went out to Glen Raven Farm to load the donated pig into the horse trailer of David Hatfield, pig farmer and owner/chef of Cafe 3546.
Dave and I spent two hours cajoling the pig into the trailer, to no avail. The pig had drank all of our bribe milk and was not about to enter the trailer. You can’t lasso a pig, you can’t wrestle a pig, you can only encourage a pig. We had run out of ideas. We left the trailer covered in pig mud, defeated and waiting for a bright idea.
I called Sean and Jerre of Dancing Cow Farm the night before I needed the pig to go to the butcher. I explained the now complicated situation: the horse trailer was in front of the gate and was now hemmed in by a trash bin. Jerre said it wouldn’t be a problem. It wouldn’t be a problem? I asked what kind of magic they knew. No magic involved Jerre said, just experience with moving a lot of animals. She said not to worry, it was time for the pig to go, and it would.
Jerre called me this morning to let me know the pig was in the trailer.
Thank you Glen Raven. Thank You Sean and Jerre of Dancing Cow. Thank you pig.
When you eat at Common Table, especially when you eat the meat, say a word of thanks to the animals.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
wet snow 2/15
Snow fell on Bend wet and heavy, breaking trees, downing power, and making life slow for all.
Common Table is serving three meals only, as we are short on staff: crab meat sandwich, salmon sandwich, and minestrone soup served with Sparrow bread. Come and eat with us, the power is on!
I’m thankful today for warmth and dryness.
Buffet
Buffets. They remind me of the South. Vegas. Chinese restaurants. They remind me of my childhood, going to Furr’s cafeteria with my grandmother, where you picked up a plastic tray and walked along the chrome bar sliders perusing stewed green beans, bbq chicken. Common Table is doing a version of the buffet, sans plastic tray, with an array of gussied up bloody marys and bubbly mimosas, come and see. Sundays 10-2.30.
Eureka – Walnut
There are countless pieces to the organization called Common Table. Today a big piece came to us in the form of a plank of walnut, four inches thick, 32 inches wide, 20 feet long. This will be the piece that is the table at Common Table.
The other week, days after taking possession of the Common Table commercial space, Bob Pearson and I worked to remove the letters of the former restaurant off the exterior window. Many people passed by as it was the weekend of the annual food festival called Bite of Bend.
Late in the afternoon our walnut man came riding down the sidewalk on a beautiful wooden Renovo bicycle made in Portland. I commented on the bike and asked if it was what it looked like, made of wood. It was, and after a few minutes discussing the bicycle and a few more discussing the Common Table project, the man mentioned that he had a walnut plank that might be just right for the Common Table.
A few weeks have passed since this initial conversation, but today we went out to look at the piece. The plank the man has in mind for us is one of several milled from an old walnut tree felled on the property of a Catholic church in the Willamette Valley. Each plank has the wavy varied edge of the natural tree, as unique as each person that will one day sit around it.