lummi island wine tasting june 25-26 ’26
Open Friday & Saturday from 4-6 pm
- Fridays tend to be louder and more crowded...
- Saturdays tend to be calmer and less crowded
Friday Bread This Week
Black Pepper Walnut- Nice mix of bread flour, fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A fair amount of black pepper and toasted walnuts give this bread great flavor with just a bit of peppery bite to it. Works well with all sorts of meats and cheese- $5/loaf
Four Seed Buttermilk – Includes cracked wheat and bran in the bread flour instead of milled whole wheat berries, plus buttermilk and oil for a tender bread and a little tang, honey, sunflower,- $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Maple Pecan Brioche –– A rich brioche dough made with plenty of butter, eggs and sugar, rolled out and spread with pastry cream, sprinkled with a maple pecan filling, rolled up and cut into individual pieces. – 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting
Maryhill Winemaker’s White ’22 Washington $15
Sauv blanc, viognier, semillon, albarino, pinot gris; careful early morning harvest, slow press cycle, limited oak, and blended to keep each varietal’s profile in both aromas and flavors– a complex, versatile, and tasty white blend!
Maryhill Winemakers Red ’22 Washington $15
Aromas of blackberry, cherry, and baking spice with hints of chocolate and dried herbs; ripe black currant and cherries on the palate with hints of tobacco and a rich, chewy finish.
Stoller Helen’s Pinot Noir ’19 Oregon $25
Elegant nose of heady floral, baking spice, and red fruit, which gives way to secondary notes of earth and black raspberry. The palate is layered and vibrant, which carries red fruit flavors and a ferrous minerality through a long finish.
Economics of the Heart: The Grift That Keeps on Grifting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Liberty
Our beloved 250-yr old nation has suffered a long, Hellish ten years of concerted Republican trashing of everything noble this nation has ever stood for. Whether you call it MAGA, or Project 2025, or the Republican Party/Heritage Foundation’s traitorous efforts since the seventies, the Reagan Revolution’s trashing of “fair and balanced” news reporting, or the breathtaking hubris of modern wannabe Southern slave-owners, it has become starkly clear to the entire world that the United States of America is being dismantled and sold for parts by a small group of disturbingly emotionless billionaires.
It is also clear to everyone that the so-called “President,” family, and friends (yes, hard to imagine…) are raking in $billions on bitcoin, selling the White House piece by piece, and selling Presidential pardons to those who can afford them, while trashing the iconic landmark with cheap trinkets or destroying it completely. It is heartbreaking that any President could possibly be so tasteless or vain to do such a thing to “the People’s House” on the whim of a moment. It can only be understood as a deliberate middle finger to the entire nation by a sadistic psychopath.
Our nobly motivated Constitutional government of, by, and for the People has been beautifully symbolized since October, 1886 by what Americans have always known as New York Harbor’s Statue of Liberty. The French nation and artists who crafted it called her “La Liberté éclairant le monde,” or “Liberty Enlightening the World.”
And, indeed, she has been a symbol for the whole world, welcoming visitors and immigrants alike to our shores. She stood for something rare and beautiful that gave hope and welcome to immigrants longing for a better life. As Americans, we all stood with her and should still be standing with her, because that’s who we are.
The past year and a half have generated many yardsticks for how far we have fallen, losing respect from traditional allies and foes alike for the subversion of our values, the dumbing down of our leadership, and the shadows over what we really stand for as a nation.
Indeed, the Statue represents over two and a half centuries of competent, human, caring, and Reliable alliances, understandings, compromises, and promises. For some years now Congressional Republicans have rejected all of these values and replaced them with loyalty only to the $bottom lines of billionaires, and been largely silent as federal employees, military leaders, and Inspectors General whose job it is to keep agencies following the rules were eliminated on Day 1.
All that needs to happen to “make America Great Again” is to restore the values represented by our long history and symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. Sure, in one sense it’s just a metaphor. In a much more important sense, though it is an iconic symbol of the ideals, the meanings, and the guarantee and commitment to “certain inalienable rights” that Really made America Great in the first place.
lummi island wine tasting june 19-20 ’27
Open Friday & Saturday from 4-6 pm
This weekend we are open both Friday (louder)and Saturday (calmer)
Friday Bread This Week
Fig Anise – Made with a sponge fermented overnight, then the final dough is mixed with bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. Honey, dried figs and anise evoke all the flavors of the Mediterranean. – $5/loaf
Semolina Levain – Made from durum wheat, a hard wheat often used in pasta. The flour has a lovely golden color that comes through in the bread. This bread uses a sourdough starter that ferments overnight before mixing the final dough of bread flour, semolina, and fresh milled whole wheat. Great toast!- $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Pain aux Raisin – Uses the same laminated dough as croissants. The dough is rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with a mix of golden raisins and dried cranberries soaked in sugar syrup, rolled up and sliced before baking. Baker’s favorites! – 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting
Maryhill Viognier Washington $14
Carefully picked and slowly pressed to extract vibrant aromas of melon, pear, and apricot with traces of pineapple and grapefruit, continuing into a sensational and crisp fruit finish.
Goose Ridge g3 Red ’20 Washington $14
Syrah-cab-merlot blend; supple ripe plum and blackberry notes with hints of spice, vanilla, black currant and Bing cherry. Nicely balanced with a lush, round mouth and a long, lingering finish.
Can Blau Can Blau ’20 Spain $16
From the lovely Montsant wine region SW of Barcelona; aromas and flavors of cocoa bean and ripe, dark fruits and berries; seamless texture and silky finish that improve with aeration.
Economics of the Heart: A Social-Political Theory of Relativity…?
From the “Doonesbury” archives. (Courtesy of Universal Uclick)
The media have been spending an inordinate amount of time (every minute of every day….really?) on all things Tweetster— as if everything he says, however hateful, ignorant, self-serving, or detached from any observable reality, is in fact the Real Truth about our real enemies, from whom Only He Can Save Us, like some magical obi-wan-trumboni.
These myths date way back to the 80’s when cartoonist Garry Trudeau often made him a character in his comic strip “Doonesbury,” including one strip in which his character admits the Presidency is the only office he would consider. And it was Funny because even then everyone knew it was a ridiculous idea.
Yet somehow Trumpism has dominated world news since that ride down the escalator in 2015 launched us into this never-land fantasy world in which the entire nation became the target of a small group of extraordinarily wealthy white “Christian” men who wanted complete control of the entire country, replacing Constitutional government with an authoritarian police state, and dumbing down education enough to ensure an End to Critical Thinking altogether.
Women would become servants at the pleasure of their husbands and families, “barefoot and pregnant” housewives banned from higher education. In recent days political analyst Joyce Vance has posted an attention-deserving piece on the substantial movement supported by many young women to embrace that kind of dystopian future for themselves and their future families. It’s hard to imagine how anyone could imagine a world that small for themselves without running around screaming!
The series of conversations with these young women is astounding in their unquestioning acceptance of letting husbands make all their decisions for them, giving up voting, working outside the home, careers, or even basic equal rights. It’s creepy!
A similar view is evident in this brief CBC video.
The bad news is that so many people are so gullible. The good news is that every day more and more Americans are waking up to the reality that our nation has been taken over by a bunch of pandering under-achievers who, like the apparently large numbers of Christian women who would be content letting their husbands vote for them. Is that what young women are really like in Red States?
Underlying all of this brings us to the social value of education and learning. In 1970 Harvard Prof William Perry began a years-long inquiry into how people learn to think. Over many years of working directly with many students, he realized that everyone has their own unique relative understanding about self-and-the-world.
We all begin with something of a two-dimensional world of opposites like good/bad, better/worse, this/that. Over the years, the countless distinctions among things reveal a broad, multi-layered matrix of inter-dependencies among facts and reason.
So…what can Perry teach us about the contradictions we see all across today’s American political landscape? The answer takes us back to H.L. Mencken’s famous observation: “For every complex problem, there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
Perry’s deepest takeaway about student learning was that deeper understanding doesn’t make relationships simpler, it makes them more complex by infusing reality with interacting conditionalities and dependencies that drive our beliefs.
The Tweetster’s months of bombing Iran have lost massive goodwill, trust, and respect for our country from all around the world. We may or may not be getting out of Iraq soon, but our position in the world has been forever changed by the first year and a half of this accursed Administration, and America has lost of lot of fans because of it.
lummi island wine tasting June 12-13 ’26
Open Friday & Saturday from 4-6 pm
This weekend we are open both Friday (louder)and Saturday ( calmer)
Friday Bread This Week
Pain Meunier – aka miller’s bread; pre-fermented dough of wheat berry flour, whole wheat, cracked wheat, and wheat germ…Great toast! – $5/loaf
Sunflower Seed — from an overnight pre-ferment with milled rye, toasted sunflower seeds, and malt syrup…a classic German seed bread – $5/loaf
…and pastry this week…
Gibassiers – Delicious sweet dough of milk, butter, eggs, olive oil, orange flower water, candied orange peel, and anise seed before brushing with melted butter and sugar. – 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting
Valminor Albarino Rias Baixas ’22 Spain $23
Straw yellow-green; nose of mandarin orange, lime, apricot, and orange blossom, with fresh, lively, and full-bodied palate, good structure, well-integrated acidity, and a decadent, lingering unctuousness.
Angeline Cab Sauv ’23 California $16
Fruit-forward with aromas of lush cherry, cassis, rich cherry, and plum flavors with hints of vanilla and soft oak that over-deliver for the modest price.
Brunelli Martoccia di Luca Rosso di Montalcino ’22 Italy $24
Classic, dignified structure with approachable, wonderfully bright fruit; bright nose of cranberry, cherry, and slate; smooth, integrated tannins, and thoughtful, composed finish.
Economics of the Heart: Matters of Law and Honor
courtesy socialstudieshelp.com
The high bar that has represented the minimum standard for military officers was best summed up in this little essay “The True Gentleman by writer John Walter Wayland way back in 1899. For a very long time every new midshipman at the US Naval Academy has had to memorize it and be able to repeat it (in one breath sometimes!) to any upperclassman who might ask. The text sets an eloquent standard for honor which has been systematically abandoned by Republicans since 1980:
“The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.”
We can go back to George Washington, “the Father of our Country” for a pretty clear model of a “True Gentleman.” After two terms as our first President, he refused to run for a third term, establishing a precedent that only changed briefly with FDR during WWII.
Washington had inherited the family estate and its substantial population of slaves at Mt. Vernon when he was only 11 years old. He became increasingly uncomfortable with his role as slave-owner during the Revolution, the writing of the Declaration of Independence, and later the Constitution. His deliberate refusal to run for a third term set a precedent that lasted until FDR and WWII, and like many of his contemporaries, he became a proponent of church/state separation, believing that religious beliefs are personal and outside the purview of governments.
The current, ongoing Republican coup against U.S. democracy began with the selection of Reagan by wealthy, reactionary Republicans at the Heritage Foundation, who had been in a perpetual rage since the “Black Thursday” stock market Crash of Oct. 24, 1929 and the subsequent election of FDR as President.
These were men of enormous inherited wealth, suffused with a deep sense of personal entitlement and privilege, but who had failed to restore prosperity in the shaky years of the Great Depression. Economic recovery was not based on corporate will or investment, but rather on public subsidies for economic development across the country. Those policies, along with the enormous resource demands of WWII, created jobs, developed industries, and built a global economy which benefited not just the ultra-wealthy, but also laid the foundation for a thriving middle class.
This current moment in the American economy is neither pretty nor promising. The current so-called Federal Government has shifted its focus sharply away from “providing for the common defense, forming a more perfect Union, establishing and maintaining Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general Welfare, and securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”
Instead, the current, ongoing coup is nothing so much as a massive looting of the Federal Treasury to multiplying the wealth of a handful of the world’s richest multi-billionaires even more, while at the same time cutting off or sharply reducing needed financial transfer payments for people who already live at the economic margins of society.
There is on proud display an ongoing cruelty and anger toward the poorest and neediest, including many young immigrant families and children that were actually born in this country. Every day it’s a continuing litany of cruelty against the most needy, exorbitant profits for the rule-makers, and a breathtaking disregard for the suffering of others.
In the case of the Tweester, he just likes to watch people suffer, hear them scream, and enjoy a satisfied smile at their misery. And pretty much the entire Republikan party is right there with him.
WTF is wrong with these people…?
lummi island wine tasting june 5 ’26
Open Friday from 4-6 pm
a long-ago sunset-moonset
Friday Bread This Week
Dried Cherries and Pecans –A nice rustic loaf from a levain that mixed with a sourdough starter the night before final mixing of the final dough from the levain, bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat, and loaded up with dried cherries and toasted pecans . –$5/loaf
Pan de Cioccolate – Also made with a levain, this delicious chocolate artisan bread is a rich loaf made with bread flour, fresh milled rye flour, honey for sweetness, vanilla and plenty of dark chocolate. – $5/loaf
…and pastry this week…
Rum Raisin Brioche: A delicious brioche dough of eggs, butter and sugar, filled with golden raisins, chunks of almond paste, and a chocolate glaze. – 2/$5
This week’s wine tasting
Chapoutier Belleruche Blanc ’23 France $14
Delicious blend of grenache blanc and roussanne; fragrant and perfumed with a light, grilled-lemon note over ripe melon, and a lingering palate of rich white peach.
MAN Vintners Pinotage ’23 South Africa $14
Aromas of dark coffee beans, red berries, nutmeg, and vanilla spice turning to dark berries and smoky plum; rustic yet silky and juicy, with smooth tannins, balanced acidity, and comforting intensity.
MAN Shiraz ’23 South Africa $16
Aromas of leather, forest floor, and balsamic notes wrapped around a core of red fruit, notes of fresh dried herbs, sweet spice and red currant; medium bodied with juicy mouthfeel, soft tannin, and a lingering finish.
Economics of the Heart: Meanwhile Back on Planet Earth…
it’s all in Our Hands, folks….
Macroeconomics is the theoretical foundation of how economic systems interact, including natural resources, businesses, consumers, workers, transportation networks, government agencies. Microeconomics is the theoretical foundation of how individual economic players (“households”) allocate their time and resources to earn income and exchange it for goods and services in markets.
Every person, household, business, and agency must continually balance their income stream and expenditure stream. When (income > expenditures), savings occurs; and when (expenditures > income), dis-saving occurs. Every purchase is a cost for one party and income for the other; both the buyer and the seller feel better off after each willing exchange.
This particular moment in American history seems curiously driven by the soulless and self-centered greed and cruelty of a handful of extraordinarily wealthy men so devoid of emotional sensitivity they are incapable of feeling empathy, curiosity, or awe at the fact of our very existence together for awhile on this lovely little planet.
With cool resolve and sneering superiority they systematically loot our Federal Treasury, sell our national secrets to our enemies, and take away public assistance for food and health care from our most needy families. Similarly they assault and round up tens of thousands of non-citizens regardless of immigration status, beat them, imprison them in unsafe and unsanitary captivity, or “disappear ” them, never to be heard from again.
The Even Worse news of this moment is the growing understanding that our once-noble country has been successfully boarded and taken firmly into the hands of a strain of emotionless, Borg-like human pirates, devoid of empathy, kindness, personal responsibility, or historical perspective. Perhaps they are driven by what my college roommate described as:
“…there are only so many “good deals” in the world; so the more people you can F**k Over, the more good deals will be left for you!
The apparent unifying Project 2025 intention seems to be to convert the former United States of America into a second-rate, armed, “White Christian” police state where women are essentially owned by their “husbands,” required to carry all conceptions to birth, and barred from higher education or employment outside the home. All facts, whether scientific or historical, will have to conform to conservative Biblical interpretation.
Imagine Winston Churchill thoughtfully puffing his cigar while muttering something like, “Noooo…I don’t think so…”
2072 Granger Way