incredible feast

I have said this once, and I’ll say it again: if you’re going to volunteer at events for organizations you don’t know very well, it’s best to sign up for the ones that are based on food and that feed you.

Last night, Heather and I volunteered at the Neighborhood Farmers Market Alliance’s annual fundraiser, “The Incredible Feast: Where the Farmers are the Stars“. The event paired some of Seattle’s best chefs with local farmers who provided the raw ingredients for all the dishes.

We were assigned to help out with the “Celebrated Chefs” booth, enrolling people in the free program and giving away free cookbooks! Celebrated Chefs seems like a pretty cool program: sign up and every time you dine at one of the participating restaurants, 5% of your final bill is donated back to the NFMA. Plus, recipes from all the participating  restaurants are featured in the free cookbook- which is this really nice yearbook-sized hardcover.

We managed to sample just about everything that the 28 chefs were serving up. We ate fish eggs, tuna pate, duck galantine (served by the very very cute owner of Rain Shadow Meats), roasted fingerling potatoes and Foraged & Found mushrooms, a really delicious rice pudding with peaches, an awesome lamb kabob, a yummy roasted corn and cucumber soup with a hot pepper,  an heirloom tomato panzanella (you know how I feel about a good bread salad) and a beet salad that ended up being my favorite- probably because we were stationed right across from it and were forced to stare at it for two hours.

Also of note: the guys serving up the food from Marjorie (newly relocated to Capitol Hill) were super cute – as were the reps from Tiny’s Organics. Also, there are still people out there who don’t own computers, and I think that’s fantastic.