lummi island wine tasting nov 5-6 ’26
This weekend open Friday & Saturday 4-5:30 pm
note earlier closing time due to the earlier darkness of “standard time”
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Pain au Levain – Made with a nice mix of bread flour and freshly milled whole wheat and rye flours. After building the sourdough and mixing the final dough it gets a long cool overnight ferment in the refrigerator. This really allows the flavor to develop in this bread. A great all around bread – $5/loaf
Dutch Speculaas Raisin – Aka cinnamon raisin but for this bake uses a poolish of bread and fresh milled rye flours fermented overnight before mixing with bread flour, whole wheat, & rolled oats, some honey for sweetness, a little milk for a tender crumb, and loaded with raisins and a healthy dose cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg anise, ginger, cardamom and a hint of pepper…a hearty rustic loaf, great for breakfast toast, even better for french toast – $5/loaf
and pastry this week…
Individual Cinnamon Rolls – Made with a rich sweet rolled dough that is full of eggs, butter and sugar, rolled out, spread with pastry cream and sprinkled with cinnamon sugar before rolling up and slicing into individual rolls for baking. And boy are they delicious!! – 2/$5.
This week’s wine tasting
Juggernaut Chardonnay ’22 Sonoma $17
Barrel fermented; aromas of apple, Asian pear and lemon meringue open to rich, lingering flavors of stone fruit, honeysuckle, and yellow plum, with finishing notes of vanilla, butter cream and hints of clove.
Idilico Tempranillo ’21 Washington $19
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.
Phelps Creek Pinot Noir ’19 WA $28
Polished acidity balances a rich nose of leather and tobacco; palette of bright red fruits, lush texture full of
earth and spice notes reflective of Gorge volcanic soils.
Economics of the Heart: MAGA Hits a Blue Wall
Tweetster takes a well-deserved early retiremen…?
The Tweetster’s 24/7 dominance of national media has been going on nonstop, every minute of every day, for ten years since Putin set him up to walk down that staircase in 2015. He has spent a lifetime driven by spotlight addiction to the fawning attention of any audience. His never-ending spontaneous and pointless monologues have been an exhausting, irritating, and inescapable torture of self-aggrandizing claims and malicious ad hominem attacks on anyone and everyone who might be more famous, better liked, or actually respected by others.
At best over these years we have been occasionally hopeful, or fingers crossed, or in active opposition in our own ways, but emotionally worn down by the years of bizarre Vanity, law-breaking, and ever-unfolding nonsense-o-logues of self-aggrandizement and spontaneous insults to or against anyone else who receives media attention. That includes especially comedians who made fun of him and newscasters who dared to criticize or make fun of him. That has been the exhausting everyday script.
And now, suddenly, this week’s midterm election results have set Maga back on its heels (it has So Many!) with massive Democratic gains and voting majorities in both Houses of Congress for the next two years. It is an extraordinary, long overdue, and welcome accomplishment which opens the doors of Congressional investigation to the very long list of harms perpetrated on the American people over the past two years by this crooked, thieving, murdering, torturing administration and the silent, obeisant ‘look down silently at their fingernails‘ Republican Senators and Representatives who have enabled them.
Everybody knows about the extraordinary looting of the Federal government by the Trump family, the ongoing cruelty of ICE agents against innocent ordinary citizens, the arrest and torture of entire families sent illegally to prisons across America and the world with no due process, no appeal, and no representation where they are tortured, separated from each other, and brutally beaten, starved, and/or murdered. This isn’t a government; it’s coup by the organized criminals who wrote and have been executing Project 2025 behind the scenes.
Beginning with hateful-to-his-bones Tweetster hit man Stephen Miller, the current White House Cabinet consists entirely of unqualified appointees who know nothing about the agencies they control, but will do whatever dirty work is requested. As is so sadly exemplified by current AG Todd “yes-man” Blanche, there is no evidence that any of these people have the background, will, or skills to perform these functions according to the law.
Now, quite suddenly none of that is particularly important, because it will hopefully all change when the new Congress is seated in January. Substantial Democratic majorities in both House and Senate open the door to hearings, investigations, and penalties. Republicans in Congress and appointees in the White House will all be questioned by appropriate Congressional committees and appropriate actions taken. It will take some time and it should prove interesting.
But even while these inquiries unfold, the new Democratic majority in Congress will be passing legislation to restore Constitutional boundaries to Executive actions. So on the one hand it is good to feel these moments of euphoria because a door is open before us that we have longed for for years. It wasn’t there last week, and though we can expect resistance from the Administration’s battalions of ICE Thought Police to handing over the reins of power in January, we need to start claiming it and fighting for it immediately.
In a strange way at this moment we seem to be adrift in yet another ambiguous “Leonard Cohen moment,” as articulated in his meandering song Hallelujah. On the one hand, we suddenly find ourselves in a hopeful place after two years of nonstop on-air presence of an increasingly insane, sadistic, mean-spirited, and selfish old man who enjoys making people suffer and whose mind has become quite detached from reality. On the other, there have been a lot of hints that the current Project 2025 government has its own plan underway to loot federal assets and coffers, perhaps in cahoots with Putin, or China, or for their wet-dream Christian Nationalist state where a handful of ultra-wealthy white men will rule over a hard-right Christian Nation following the Seven Mountains Mandate in which women are the property of husbands, do not require higher education and have multiple children. There are crazies in every direction, so despite this moment of euphoria, this war will go on for some time to come.
It will be a long two months till the new Congress is seated, and Republicans being what they are (i.e., only interested in increasing their own personal wealth), chances are they will be fine with ditching their leader if they can pull a profit out of the process. You can be sure the wheels are turning in all those Red Minds about how to transition away from the Tweetster without hurting their bottom lines.
While this weird situation feels a bit like that old curse: “May you live in interesting times,” we are all experiencing a birth of new hope since the horror of the 2024 election results (yes we do believe it was rigged). Also, while it is a bit off the subject of the moment, I for one think that Joe Biden was very possibly the best President of my lifetime despite what I now recognize in myself as the growing familiarity of forgetting what I was just saying if interrupted. Under his leadership the nation enjoyed relative prosperity in the global recession unleashed by Covid that set back the much of the global economy.
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2072 Granger Way