Say Goodbye...

The day for moving is drawing near, and in true restaurant fashion our apartment is littered with cardboard boxes labeled "eggs", various vineyards, Sriracha, Chimay Trappist, perishable, and an assortment of other random logos. It seems we are always saving boxes for someone at Lola, and this time it's me. My wife is flying to the area this week to secure a place to live, somehow I always forget about the "living" part. While all the necessaries are finally being squared away, there is a part to the moving process we are looking forward to… ROAD TRIP! Pack up all the plants (at least the ones that have been named… such as Macho & Macho, the Passion, Sideshow, etc.), grab a suitcase full of necessities, the GPS, the list of food stops along the way, and cram them all into the Subaru. The mountains have been calling us for far too long, and now we have a date.

With departure on the horizon there are so many goodbyes to say, hugs to give, and even the occasional tear to shed. All of which I have excepted and accepted, but there are some other goodbyes that are bit more unexpected. The Herbfarm's food philosophy is based on the support of local ingredients, and the people who make them available. What does that mean? It means I have a few goodbyes for some old friends: mango, pineapple, banana, lemon, lime, tamarind, coconut, kaffir lime, orange, passion fruit, guava,and so many more.

Preemptive thought has been a necessity for this endeavor, and I'm trying a new approach to this. Actually a very old approach, I decided to use the crazy contraption called a notebook. An unruled, five by eight, black covered, mole skin note book. I know, it's crazy. Even crazier, I can draw in this little contraption, pretty nifty eh! I'm hoping that all the thoughts from the notebooks will make their way to this blog, helping to catalog it even further.


For so long I have cooked with the mindset "what can I get", almost to the point that it has limited my approach to flavor. Many of these loved ingredients have become a crutch, limiting culinary mobility and stunting intellectual growth. Really the ingredients do not do this, I am at fault for that. I am looking forward to the idea of "what CAN'T I get", limiting myself in ingredient approach, finding refinement in simplicity, and learning that the only way that you can see outside of the box is if you are standing