lummi island wine tasting jan 24 ’25
Wine Tasting Winter Hours: Fridays 4-6 pm
Jan 20 MLK Day eve gathering (and power outage!)
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
Norwegian Klosterhagen Quick Bread: A new bread this week form a small hotel in Bergen, Norway. It uses just baking soda as a leavening agent, and still full of whole grain goodness, with fresh milled whole wheat & rye flour along with the bread flour, molasses, yogurt with lots of raisins, apricots and hazelnuts, and topped with a mix of pumpkin & sunflower seeds. Delicious! $5/loaf.
Whole Wheat Ciabatta – A seldom made bread that uses an Italian biga pre-ferment as well as a levain, also known as sourdough, which are made a day in advance. And, once mixed the dough is fermented overnight in the refrigerator. A long, slow ferment adds a lot of flavor to the final bread. Made with regular bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat. A little olive oil for more flavor and a lot of water. With so much water this bread can’t really be shaped, just cut into pieces and baked. A great rustic bread – $5/piece
Bagels! – Always popular, made with a preferment sponge mixed, shaped and refrigerated overnight before being boiled and baked in the traditional manner for a delicious chewy bagel. These come one each with sesame seeds; mixed sesame and poppy seeds; onion and garlic spice, and plain. **Each order is mixed – sorry no choices** – 4/$5
Island Bakery has developed a rotation cycle of several dozen breads and pastries. Each Sunday the Bakery emails the week’s bread offering to the mailing list. Orders received before 5 pm Tuesday (and not already claimed) will be available for pickup at the wine shop Friday from 4:00 – 5:30 pm. Contact us at least two weeks before your visit to get on the bread list .
This week’s Wine Tasting
MAN Chenin Blanc ’22 South Africa $14
Using only free-run juice preserves a clean, natural character, refreshing acidity, light, bright flavors of quince, pear, and pineapple, with palate of fresh stonefruit and apple, refreshing acidity & minerality, and a round, soothing mouthfeel.
MAN Vintners Pinotage ’22 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.
Decoy Red ’21 California $21
60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot, with splashes of Zinfandel, Syrah, and Cab; aromas of blackberry, dark plum, baking spice and savory herbs; fresh, rich, and savory on the palate with rich,
silky tannins and bright acidity that carries the flavors to a long, lush finish.
Economics of the Heart: Democracy, Humanism, & Economics
The Founders of this country were philosophical humanists. Our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg address echo the belief that all human beings have the same ongoing needs for food, water, shelter, community, safety, and well-being. A thousand years of human history teaches us that we are sometimes compassionate and caring, and sometimes selfish, crafty, and ruthless.
Despite the inherent conflict between these polarities, our country has survived pretty well for 250 years, oscillating in an ongoing balancing between these polarities because of the stability of our interlocking 3-tiered political system of executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Our Constitution deliberately steers a neutral path around religion, allowing both freedom of religion and freedom of religion. The growing pressure of the Far Right to make a particular version of Christianity our national religion is a dangerous infringement on our Constitutional freedoms of and from religion as we choose.
Historically the polarization of our two-party political system has maintained a tension between serving the want-mores and the need-enoughs. The Constitution has constrained the resulting oscillation of political influence between these two constituencies and generally maintained a certain balance of “creative tension” in our governance. But since 1980 there has been a long-term, highly organized, slow-motion undermining of our Constitutional system by uberwealthy autocratic interests aspiring to turn the United States into their very own private feudal fiefdom.
The opening act of this latest turnover seems to be a nonstop fireworks act of blowing up our institutions while we watch in horror. You know, like Dubya’s “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad that killed thousands of Iraqis under the guise of finding Iraq’s never-found “weapons of mass destruction.” Bottom line: the current “shock and awe” barrage from Bozo Central is meant to demoralize, and while it certainly is that, it is also a powerful incentive to defend our rights and our collective well-being from the tyranny of autocracy. At the same time, there there are clearly ongoing festering conflicts among the many subsets of unelected Maga players, a growing sense of public outrage, and a quickly rising stack of lawsuits by State Attorney Generals and citizens watchdog groups around the country.
In some ways this is just the usual do-si-do we have come to expect when administrations change party. Traditionally, the Democratic administration fires up the economy, creates jobs and income for ordinary people, who spend it where other ordinary people benefit from it. That keeps the wheels turning for our mutual benefit…as the Biden administration did in a time of global recession from Covid.
In contrast, as now, when the R’s take over, that all goes out the window when, in exchange for huge bribes…um..”campaign contributions”…they drastically lower taxes for major corporate donors, make CEO’s even richer, and will raise prices of everything from prescription drugs to veterans health care to rent and groceries. This will inevitably add trillions to the national debt and tank the overall economy. Which would ordinarily bring in the next Democrat to fix it, and so on. The last fifty years of history tell us we can be pretty sure they WILL loot and crash the economy between now and the 2026 midterms.
On the good news side at the moment, our new WA Attorney General and 21 other state AG’s have filed suit against Maga’s attack on birthright citizenship established in the Constitution. Numerous public interest watchdog groups are also filing suits, and we have yet to see how this Congress is going to operate, beginning with its handing of the circus of WUCN’s ( Wildly Unqualified Cabinet Nominations.) In addition, though we don’t have control of the Senate or the House, the Maga majorities are small, and we have some great lawyers and statesmen on our side.
The economic well-being of our country requires a smoothly ongoing Circular Flow of $$ from households to retailers to producers to resources and back to workers. As a primary consumer of everything, government spending keeps the wheels turning, while Maga’s promised tax cuts to billionaires, Big Pharma, Big Oil, and their ilk will as usual inevitably concentrate wealth even further. As usual, this will lower consumer demand, reduce production and employment, and increase the national debt. This time they seem to be wanting to take an even bigger bite than usual, so keep an eye to weather and your piggy bank in a safe place.
And this is only Day 3…
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2072 Granger Way