lummi island wine tasting mar 10 ’23
Current Hours: Open 4-6 pm Fridays
OOPS! Recent Billing Snafu…
A couple of weeks ago we noticed our checking account seemed to be standing still. Some inquiries revealed that none of the credit card sales in the shop since mid-October were showing up in our bank account. Inquiry revealed that our credit card machine (the one we have been at war with for about two years) had not been sending the charges to the various stakeholders as it is supposed to do every day. Thus we learned how to make that “batch closing” happen manually, and they now appear in your account.
The good news is that yes, we really did have some sales (see 5 ft printout at left); the bad news is that a bunch of you just got billed for purchases that happened weeks or even months ago, and are justifiably puzzled. Well, that’s the story, and yes, you really did make that purchase!
Friday Bread Pickup This Week
M
ulti Grain Levain – – Made with a sourdough culture and a flavorful mix of bread flour and fresh milled whole wheat and rye. A nice mixture of flax, sesame sunflower and pumpkin seeds and some polenta add great flavor and crunch. And just a little honey for some sweetness. A great all around bread that is full of flavor – $5/loaf
Polenta Levain –– Also made with a levain, aka sourdough, from a starter fed and built up over several days, then mixed with bread flour and polenta in the final dough mix. This bread is a nice rustic loaf with great corn flavor. – $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. – 2/$5
To get on the bread order list, click on the “Contact Us” link above and fill out the form. Each week’s bread menu is sent to the list each Sunday, for ordering by Tuesday, for pickup on Friday. Simple, right..? If you will be visiting the island and would like to order bread for your visit, at least a week’s notice is recommended for pickup the following Friday.
This Week’s $10 Wine Tasting: Small Vineyards Pre-Order Sampler
You wine shop old-timers know that once or twice a year we bring in a shipment of mostly Italian wines from a Seattle importer called Small Vineyards. Our orders usually follow a sit-down tasting at a local restaurant where we hear a story about each of the family wineries, wine makers, and the particular wines as we taste them, munch, chat. Yes, we think to ourselves... this is how wine tasting should be…relaxed, convivial, good wine, good food, good company!
As it turns out, the weather this year did not allow us to attend the Bellingham tasting. However, we hope to snag a bunch of bottles on Friday (if any are left) from earlier tastings in Skagit County. So if all goes well, we will have a selection to share with you on Friday afternoon! (see list)
Economics of the Heart: A Place to Call Home
https://www.hummingbirdsplus.org
Every living thing needs a home, a place where survival is at least possible. For most living creatures the conditions are quite narrowly defined for a habitat where they/we can at least survive long enough to reproduce, at best to thrive. As we mentioned last week, there have been numerous major extinction events in the fossil record, each one eradicating over 75% of existing species and turning the evolutionary clock back almost to zero numerous times. But life has managed to keep on ticking; pretty magical.
The species that currently exist here on our dear Planet Earth have continually been able to find the sometimes very particular places which met their needs for food, water, air, temperature, light, darkness, and shelter as conditions slowly changed over eons. Obviously, and to our great good fortune, the conditions here on planet Earth have been life-friendly for an unimaginably long time. But as we mentioned last week, many of the mass extinctions on the planet were caused not by cataclysmic events like massive asteroid collisions, but by the slowly changing background conditions on the planet, including atmospheric composition, ocean temperatures and salinity, humidity, rainfall, habitat, climate, food, predation…you know, everything.
The slow and ever-evolving conditions at every point on Earth’s surface have ever moved niches around, causing some species to perish, others to gradually migrate or adapt. But this world we live in now is in a very different situation than any we have seen in the fossil record. The habitability of this world is changing because of what our own species has done to it in the lifetimes of us current elders. Barely an eye-blink in evolutionary time, it has been long enough for us to multiply from 2 billion to 8 billion and cause catastrophic damage to the balance of Nature that created us.
Every geographic point on the planet has an historical set of naturally changing conditions that determined what kinds of life it was able to support, how well, and for how long. Every place has a story of how it has fared so far in this new world and what it is doing. So our current fantasy is to look at particular places at random and see what we can learn.
to be continued…
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2072 Granger Way