This Week’s Events

| Posted in Events

Wednesday — Wine Wise is teaching a class on Merlot at The Wine Bar.

Thursday — there will be wine tastings at Kitchen & Cork in Scarborough and Leavitt & Sons in Falmouth, and Cultivating Community is holding one of their biweekly Twilight Dinners.

Friday — an Italian wine tasting is scheduled to take place at the Rosemont Market on Munjoy Hill.

Saturday — there will be a wine tasting at the Black Cherry Provisions.

Sunday — the next 20/20 wine tasting/charity event is being held at the Snow Squall in South Portland, Wine Wise is coordinating a sailing wine class aboard the Casablanca, and Cinque Terre is holding their 3rd Annual Eco Appetito to raise funds for the Ferry Beach Ecology School.

Farmer’s Markets — the traditional series of Farmer’s Markets are taking place Monday (Monument Square), Wednesday (Monument Square) and Saturday (Deering Oaks Park). Cultivating Community is running their new series of markets Wednesday, Thursday and Friday at various locations around the city.

For more information on these and other upcoming food happenings in the area, visit the event calendar.

If you are holding a food event this week that’s not listed above, publicize it by adding it as a comment to this post.

Portland Farmers Market

| Posted in General News

The Maine Observer has published a piece about the Portland Farmers Market.

Located directly across from the Portland Public Library and surrounded by the high-standing buildings of corporate offices, the market is hard to miss. You know you’ve entered it when you see the reusable shopping bags decorated with cheerful images of trees and animals. Stamped messages like “I am a plastic bottle” or “I am earth-wise” gloss over the underlying goal of buying and grown locally: to personally meet your food’s producer and to pollute less.

The weekend market is taking place this morning in Deering-Oaks Park and will be there until noon. For more information on the market, visit their website.

Review of Local Sprouts

| Posted in Reviews

The Portland Phoenix has published a review of Local Sprouts.

…So perhaps I should not have been surprised that the food at the Local Sprouts Café, worker-owned and democratically run by the Local Sprouts Cooperative, was so very good.

But I was surprised, and very pleasantly so. One gets nervous about group-think, and it is worrisome that the cooperative’s first decision was to call itself “local sprouts.” And perhaps the big, curving bird-themed earthen bench that dominates the dining room, as well as the dormitory-style couch occupying prime territory near the window, reflect iffy decision-making. But when it comes to food, Local Sprouts is making all the right calls — from ingredients, to preparation, to price.

Fall Maine Restaurant Week

| Posted in Events

Maine Restaurant Week has expanded their calendar to include a Fall series which will take place October 24-31. The standard MRW in the Spring is scheduled March 1-12, 2011.
At both the Fall and Spring series, participating restaurants will offer 3-course dinners for $20, $30, or $40, and some are planning $15 lunches. Menus and a list of participating restaurants will be published in October on www.mainerestaurantweek.com.

Twilight Dinners

| Posted in Events

Tuesday’s Locavore column in the Portland Daily Sun was about the work done by Cultivating Community and the biweekly Twilight Dinners they run throughout the Summer at their farm in Cape Elizabeth.

For the fourth year running, area chefs will display their locavore prowess by preparing dishes using produce grown, meat raised and fish landed within 20 miles of the farm. No chocolate. No olive oil. Yes delicious.

Eating outdoors is rare these days but for most of history and throughout much of the world beyond these shores, it has been the norm.

PPH: Apples, Evangeline and Permaculture

| Posted in General News, People

The Food  & Dining section in today’s Press Herald includes an article about this year’s apple harvest,

“We have two orchards, and at the one in Manchester, which is near Augusta, we ended up with half a crop because of the frost when we were in full bloom,” said Marilyn Meyerhans, who owns the orchards with her husband, Steve. “But the rest of the crop is good. And then our Fairfield orchard, it’s a full crop but it’s coming so early that we’re picking like crazy about a week before we should be. But they’re ready.”

a report on the Apple, Swine and Wine menu taking place all this month at Evangeline,

“Since the apples are in microseasons all through September and October, and the pig has so many parts, it will give me the opportunity to do a new preparation every day,” Desjarlais said.

Look for shaved Liberty apple with peameal bacon and fennel.

and an interview with Lisa Fernandez and David Whitten on their permaculture backyard farm in Cape Elizabeth.

Tucked into a typical suburban neighborhood in Cape Elizabeth where lawns and flower beds dominate the landscape, Fernandes and her husband, David Whitten, have done away with their lawn and packed their third of an acre lot, just two houses from the South Portland line, with a growing backyard farm.

Urban Farm Fermentory

| Posted in Profiles

The Forecaster has published an article about the work Eli Cayer and David Homa are doing to launch the Urban Farm Fermentory in Bayside.

Hops grow up from a pot of soil along lines of string connected to the wall. Bees swirl around two hives next to a makeshift greenhouse that grows nasturtium, lavender, hyssop, ginger, lemongrass and mint, among other things.

Homa, who oversees the garden, said the idea is to work with the landscape, even if it is of the industrial variety.