eating pork at the Herbfarm

On Sunday, Danny and I ate the best meal of our lives at the Herbfarm. The meal was too splendid to recount again. If you would like, you can read about the entire meal here.

But we did want to share here some of our favorite bites, which of course included pork.

We did not, however, eat meat from the pig you see above. That’s either Basil or Borage, the two Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs that live in the Herbfarm garden. (In a pen, of course.) If you go for dinner at the Herbfarm, you’ll take a tour of the gardens first, sampling squash blossoms, tasting rose geraniums, and meeting the pigs. (Basil and Borage are actually one of the recycling/compost systems for the restaurant!)

It was a good sign. We were in a food mecca, the kind of place that greets its customers with well-loved pigs.

We certainly felt well-loved by the people who cooked for us and served us that food at the Herbfarm.

This was our third course of nine. The freshest, most elegant breakfast dish I have ever eaten. And really, what’s breakfast without a little pork?

Those are potatoes that had been picked from the garden that morning. Grilled clams from Quilcene, Washington. A perfectly poached egg. And tucked in, with nearly every bite, house-made sausage. It tasted flecked with fennel seeds, fresh as pork ground that morning, and warm with browned bits that hit the tongue just right. Each bite was a wonderful comfort.

See that salmon? The slow-roasted, reef-net-caught salmon from Lummi Island? Beautiful, like butter, lovely and wonderful.

Stop looking at that. See what’s on top? That’s a prosciutto chip. It was porcine goodness with a crunch.

We think they must have baked it, at a low temperature, until it crackled.

We’re going to be attempting this at home soon. We’ll keep you posted.

Finally, the palate cleanser. And perhaps the most surprising bite of the night.

This is sour cherry sorbet with tarragon. On top, a pickled sour cherry. And to the side, a bacon chip, made from Mangalitsa bacon.

Oh the goodness of puckered-sour-cherry taste in the mouth and the crisp bite of great bacon.

We are hooked.

(And we’ll be telling you more about mangalitsa pork soon. It’s a delicacy, here in the Northwest.)

If you love pork and you want to go to the Herbfarm (you do, you do!), you might think about attending the Makin’ Bacon theme in November. We’re hoping we can be there.