Flowers and cheese
09/04/24 01:05
Back in 1978, after graduating from seminary and before beginning our first call as pastors, we traveled with my parents and a sister and her husband through Europe. Other than Canada, I had not previously been out of the United States, and in those days a passport wasn’t needed to travel to Canada, so we applied for and received our first passports in preparation for that trip. Our flight from this continent to Europe took us from Edmonton, Alberta to Amsterdam, where we picked up a rental van with which we toured several European countries, visiting friends and touring dozens and dozens of cathedrals and castles. As our plane descended for its landing, I was at the window getting my first glimpse of the Netherlands. I strained to see tulip fields, but it wasn’t the season for the bulbs to be blooming, so what I saw were fields of green. The next day, as we drove from Amsterdam to The Hague we saw some of the famous tulip fields.
That was a long time ago. These days, one of the treats of April where we live is a trip to Skagit County, just south of where we live, to visit the tulip fields. I didn’t know until our son and his family moved to this area that Skagit County produces the majority of the tulip bulbs sold in the United States and exports cut tulips to florists across the country. Today we will walk through the fields at RoozenGaarde, a large commercial producer of tulips and daffodils. We are going mid week because the weekends get pretty crowded during the tulip festival. RoozenGaarde features over 50 varieties of tulips and each year we are greeted with stunning beauty.
The tulips are a very popular feature of Skagit County. Mount Vernon, where our son is the community’s library director, promotes tulip tourism year round. A large smokestack, once part of a milk dehydrating facility, now is painted with a giant tulip. There is a huge tulip sculpture along the riverfront and tulips bloom from planters around the town.
The tulip fields are not universally celebrated. For some coast Salish people they are a symbol of colonialism. The fields where tulips now grow were once tidal marsh areas where indigenous people padded their canoes during the spring floods and harvested a variety of native foods. The floods are now controlled by a combination of dams and dikes and the rich soil deposited by centuries of flooding now produces fields of bright blossoms.
I have learned to slightly adjust my thinking. Once I associated tulips with Holland, and I know that there are still stunning tulip fields there. But now, when I think of tulips, I think first of the Skagit Valley’s beautiful farms. It is one of the blessings of the place where we now live and we treasure our annual visits during tulip festival.
I’m learning that flowers aren’t the only adjustments to my thinking. For example, when I think of American cheese, I think of Wisconsin. Cheesehead is a reference to a fan of the Green Bay Packers, but it is also an acknowledgement of that state’s fame for producing excellent cheeses. However, when it comes to the World Championship Cheese Contest, Wisconsin came in third place when it comes to smoked provolone.
Second place went to a cheese producer in South Dakota. That’s right, our former home state is home to some of the best cheese in the world. In the tiny town of Dimock, south of Mitchell, home of the world’s only Corn Palace, is Dymock Dairy, which produces premium handcrafted artisanal cheeses. Dymock Dairy earned second place for smoked provolone in the World Championship Cheese Contest.
The first place for smoked provolone went to (drumroll please) Ferndale Farmstead, just a few miles from where we live. Ferndale Farmstead is a seed-to-cheese farm. It grows crops that are fed to cows that produce milk from which the farm produces a variety of award winning cheeses. This year they won awards for four categories, fresh mozzarella, Latin American style melting cheeses, Latin American style hard cheeses, and was the first place winner in smoked provolone.
The farmstead produces about ten varieties of cheeses and ages them in a temperature-controlled area on the farm. Cheeses take anywhere from one day to one year to make. Fresh cheeses are handled like fresh fruit and shipped to local stores quickly. Aged cheeses are treated more like fine wine and left to age at the farm until they reach the height of flavor.
Ferndale Farmstead uses local sources for the wood that is burned to cold smoke the award-winning provolone. They import the culture for the cheese directly from Napoli in Italy where the cheese makers have a mentor in Raffaele Cheese. It isn’t a large production facility. The volume of cheese produced in Ferndale is small, similar to the production of the South Dakota Dairy. There are several cheese producers in Wisconsin that are much larger. Agropur is an international cooperation with 7500 employees while Ferndale Farmstead has a total staff of ten cheesemakers.
The cows that produce the milk for Ferndale Farmstead’s cheeses have all been raised from birth on the farm. One side of the farm’s cheese production is overseen by Nidia Hernandez, who heads a tiny team of Latin cheesemakers who market their products under the brand Familia del Norte. Familia del Norte won first place in the Latin American style hard cheese category for its panela cheese, scoring higher than farms in Illinois and Wisconsin that placed in second and third. Our county is home to several first rate restaurants that feature Familia del Norte cheeses, including their award-winning quesillo/oaxaca melting cheeses. The cheese makes a huge difference in authentic Mexican cooking.
Every place that we have lived has surprised us with local enterprises that we did not expect. We were unaware, for example, that our first congregations were in the center of some of the largest producers of confectionary sunflower seeds in the world. The huge blossoms all facing the sun were a delight every summer and fall and my affection for growing sunflowers has followed me to every home we’ve lived in since. Today will be another wonderful day filled with beauty as we take advantage of the beauty of the place where we have found ourselves.
That was a long time ago. These days, one of the treats of April where we live is a trip to Skagit County, just south of where we live, to visit the tulip fields. I didn’t know until our son and his family moved to this area that Skagit County produces the majority of the tulip bulbs sold in the United States and exports cut tulips to florists across the country. Today we will walk through the fields at RoozenGaarde, a large commercial producer of tulips and daffodils. We are going mid week because the weekends get pretty crowded during the tulip festival. RoozenGaarde features over 50 varieties of tulips and each year we are greeted with stunning beauty.
The tulips are a very popular feature of Skagit County. Mount Vernon, where our son is the community’s library director, promotes tulip tourism year round. A large smokestack, once part of a milk dehydrating facility, now is painted with a giant tulip. There is a huge tulip sculpture along the riverfront and tulips bloom from planters around the town.
The tulip fields are not universally celebrated. For some coast Salish people they are a symbol of colonialism. The fields where tulips now grow were once tidal marsh areas where indigenous people padded their canoes during the spring floods and harvested a variety of native foods. The floods are now controlled by a combination of dams and dikes and the rich soil deposited by centuries of flooding now produces fields of bright blossoms.
I have learned to slightly adjust my thinking. Once I associated tulips with Holland, and I know that there are still stunning tulip fields there. But now, when I think of tulips, I think first of the Skagit Valley’s beautiful farms. It is one of the blessings of the place where we now live and we treasure our annual visits during tulip festival.
I’m learning that flowers aren’t the only adjustments to my thinking. For example, when I think of American cheese, I think of Wisconsin. Cheesehead is a reference to a fan of the Green Bay Packers, but it is also an acknowledgement of that state’s fame for producing excellent cheeses. However, when it comes to the World Championship Cheese Contest, Wisconsin came in third place when it comes to smoked provolone.
Second place went to a cheese producer in South Dakota. That’s right, our former home state is home to some of the best cheese in the world. In the tiny town of Dimock, south of Mitchell, home of the world’s only Corn Palace, is Dymock Dairy, which produces premium handcrafted artisanal cheeses. Dymock Dairy earned second place for smoked provolone in the World Championship Cheese Contest.
The first place for smoked provolone went to (drumroll please) Ferndale Farmstead, just a few miles from where we live. Ferndale Farmstead is a seed-to-cheese farm. It grows crops that are fed to cows that produce milk from which the farm produces a variety of award winning cheeses. This year they won awards for four categories, fresh mozzarella, Latin American style melting cheeses, Latin American style hard cheeses, and was the first place winner in smoked provolone.
The farmstead produces about ten varieties of cheeses and ages them in a temperature-controlled area on the farm. Cheeses take anywhere from one day to one year to make. Fresh cheeses are handled like fresh fruit and shipped to local stores quickly. Aged cheeses are treated more like fine wine and left to age at the farm until they reach the height of flavor.
Ferndale Farmstead uses local sources for the wood that is burned to cold smoke the award-winning provolone. They import the culture for the cheese directly from Napoli in Italy where the cheese makers have a mentor in Raffaele Cheese. It isn’t a large production facility. The volume of cheese produced in Ferndale is small, similar to the production of the South Dakota Dairy. There are several cheese producers in Wisconsin that are much larger. Agropur is an international cooperation with 7500 employees while Ferndale Farmstead has a total staff of ten cheesemakers.
The cows that produce the milk for Ferndale Farmstead’s cheeses have all been raised from birth on the farm. One side of the farm’s cheese production is overseen by Nidia Hernandez, who heads a tiny team of Latin cheesemakers who market their products under the brand Familia del Norte. Familia del Norte won first place in the Latin American style hard cheese category for its panela cheese, scoring higher than farms in Illinois and Wisconsin that placed in second and third. Our county is home to several first rate restaurants that feature Familia del Norte cheeses, including their award-winning quesillo/oaxaca melting cheeses. The cheese makes a huge difference in authentic Mexican cooking.
Every place that we have lived has surprised us with local enterprises that we did not expect. We were unaware, for example, that our first congregations were in the center of some of the largest producers of confectionary sunflower seeds in the world. The huge blossoms all facing the sun were a delight every summer and fall and my affection for growing sunflowers has followed me to every home we’ve lived in since. Today will be another wonderful day filled with beauty as we take advantage of the beauty of the place where we have found ourselves.
