Dining at The Ravens: Over 150 Nourishing Vegan Recipes from the Stanford Inn by the Sea - Softcover

Stanford, Jeff; Stanford, Joan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1941631657 ISBN 13: 9781941631652

Verlag: BenBella Books, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

At The Ravens, dinner is more than just a meal. It's a feast for your spirit.

Located on the Mendocino coast at the only vegan resort in the United States, The Ravens Restaurant at the Stanford Inn by the Sea embodies a mindful, compassionate, and sustainable dining experience in an enchanting and unforgettable setting. Now in Dining at The Ravens, Jeff and Joan Stanford, the Inn and restaurant founders, bring the Ravens culinary experience into your home.

Teeming with beautiful photographs, Dining at The Ravens features more than 150 delicious vegan recipes and shares the charming history of the Inn and restaurant, cooking tips for perfect recipe execution, and even inspiration for creating your own garden.

Discover one of the restaurant's most popular breakfast dishes, Citrus Polenta with Braised Garden Greens and a Creamy Toasted Cashew Sauce, and many others, such as:

Ravens Sea Palm Strudel

Indian-Spiced Polenta Napoleon

Mushroom Pesto and Sun-Dried Tomato Burger

Ravens Spicy Peanut Curry Sea Palm

Sweet Summer Corn Bisque

Peach Huckleberry Cobbler

Pull up a seat and find out why vegans and non-vegans alike flock to The Ravens for an extraordinary dining experience.

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Jeff and Joan Stanford came west to Carmel California to find careers in education, agreeing to help manage a small inn while looking for work. Jobs were scarce, the United States was in recession, and they found themselves enjoying their guests and rehabilitating the property they managed. Looking to the future, they chose to continue inn-keeping, and by 1980 they were in Mendocino starting a family. Joan ran the front, while Jeff remodeled the inn and created their certified organic farm on the site of what had been known as the China Gardens during Mendocino's logging era.

The Inn allowed both of them to return to their former interests. Passionate about early education, Joan trained as a Montessori teacher which led her to discover the power of art to transform human experience. She enrolled in psychology at Sonoma State University and received an MA, specializing in Art Therapy. Today she is a registered art therapist, collagist, and educator.

Jeff recognized that the "state of realization" that so many sought in the movement of the 1970s and 80s must come from a new relationship with life, beginning in the kitchen, where decisions affect the practitioner and the planet. He became vegetarian as a first step to honor all life, not only the lives of his family, friends, and pets. He and Joan sought to create an inn that sat softly upon the earth. They created one of the first "green" bed and breakfast inns without realizing they were doing so.

Understanding that their Inn was a destination, Jeff and Joan wanted to provide the highest quality food to their guests, which Jeff began cooking in the early 1990s. The restaurant followed their philosophy serving a whole food, plant based dishes designed to rival the cuisine found at the highest rated restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. They discovered that many cooks can create great food, and they created a co-creative kitchen where all are invited to comment and tweak dishes. The final arbiter is Jeff, but the process is dynamic and assures that each person in the kitchen can express their creativity.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Dining at the Ravens

Over 150 Nourishing Vegan Recipes from the Stanford Inn by the Sea

By Jeff Stanford, Joan Stanford

BenBella Books, Inc.

Copyright © 2016 Jeff and Joan Stanford
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-941631-65-2

Contents

Prologue, 
Foreword by Colleen Patrick-Goudreau, 
PART ONE: About the Stanford Inn and The Ravens, 
A History of North America's Vegan Resort: the Stanford Inn, 
About the Restaurant and Historic Farm, 
The Philosophy of This Cookbook, 
Tips for Cooking Success, 
The Best Thing about Serving Vegan Cuisine to Non-Vegans by Sid Garza-, 
Hillman, 
PART TWO: The Recipes, 
MORNING FOOD, 
BREADS & BAKED GOODS, 
SAUCES, DIPS & SPREADS, 
APPETIZERS & SIDES, 
Black-Eyed Pea Cakes, 
SALADS & DRESSINGS, 
SOUPS, 
ENTRÉES, 
DESSERTS, 
PANTRY BASICS, 
Metric Conversion Charts, 
Acknowledgments, 
About the Authors, 
Online Resources, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

A HISTORY OF NORTH AMERICA'S VEGAN RESORT: THE STANFORD INN

The Village of Mendocino sits above the Pacific Ocean on headlands extending from the western edge of the redwood forest, more than an hour and a half from the nearest major highway. Just to the south of the village, Big River Lodge, as the Stanford Inn was originally known, overlooks Mendocino Bay on property that was and remains a highly energetic enclave — a sloping meadow, surrounded by forest ridges and the bay. This setting — this place — has a momentum and direction of its own. As we settled onto this land, we didn't have a clue.

We did not come to Mendocino to start an organic farm with an inn, a vegetarian and eventually vegan restaurant, and a spa. We wanted to create a showplace: a stellar resort, with an outstanding gourmet restaurant, cocktail lounge, meeting rooms, tennis courts, and a golf course: all that it takes to create a premier destination.

Our desires far exceeded our capacity to achieve them. We had no money and had only been able to purchase the inn in part because the sellers loaned us a substantial portion of the down payment. They did not want to give up their residence, which they divided from the property. With no house, we lived in one of the inn rooms that had an adjoining kitchen. Occupancy was so low that the depleted room inventory was not a problem.

With no money, we began landscaping. This we could afford: our labor, a few plants, and the major purchase of a lawn mower to cut grass after the first rains.

Six months after we closed escrow, in the midst of gardening, Alex, our son, was born. He arrived on one of the few days in the history of our innkeeping that there were no guests. We were fully able to attend to the miracle of his birth.

We began to feel a custodial responsibility to the property, and the land seemed to respond. Joan, standing on the deck in those first few months, wished for a better ocean view. Along the old highway that cut in front of the property, 100-year-old cypresses blocked much of the view to Mendocino Bay. Shortly after Joan made her wish, on a calm, cloudless day, the cypresses began to fall onto the old highway. We later rationalized that rain must have undermined their roots. Whatever the cause, the trees granted Joan's wish. Much later, when deciding to expand and build, we were trying to figure out building placement to avoid killing trees. They, too, gave way unexpectedly, and not during storms.

Our first season came, and with additional funds borrowed from friends we began to change a motel into an inn, installing wood-burning fireplaces, paneling with real wood, and refurnishing. Jeff built and Joan ran the office, greeting guests and showing them to their rooms, all the while caring for and carrying Alex.

By the time Kate, our daughter, was born less than two years later, we had taken over another of the inn's rooms to serve as our bedroom. Kate arrived just after the holiday season. As with Alex, we were able to attend to her birth. The four of us lived in our newly expanded quarters with Toronto, our Labrador; Rivers, an Australian sheep dog; and Gimpy, Thumper, Stormy, Chessie, and Sebastian, cats who had joined us over the years.

The inn was changing, and so were we. Before coming to Mendocino, Jeff cooked and was known for barbecue and specialty dishes such as marinated seared roast leg of lamb; now he found he had no taste for meat or fish — a former fisherman and midwesterner, he had seen the suffering of a walleye pike, a chicken, and a cow. Friends asked why he no longer chose to eat meat, and he answered, "I can't ask someone to do something for me I wouldn't do for myself — slaughter an animal!" His awareness of suffering led Jeff to begin experiencing energy fields around people, animals, and plants. He saw discrete energies, devas, as moving light. Later we learned that a "line" of "earth energy" moved across the property, through the actual rooms in which we lived. In England this energy is called a ley line, and monuments such as Stonehenge, St. Michael's Mount, and other sacred sites are said to lie along these energy lines.

As we began our sixth year, we decided to "landscape" the lower part of the property. A pond sits above what is left of an orchard planted before 1900. The land had been covered with clay removed from the bottom of the pond years before, leaving a rough terrain with sparse grasses and weeds. Kris Williams, the son of the original owners, and Jeff double-dug five beds for biointensive gardens cutting through the heavy clay. Our goal was to create beautiful landscaping that also fed people. We were determined to do so without the use of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. We mixed the native clay with compost made from our continental breakfast food waste, garden clippings, grass cuttings, and llama and horse manure.

Gardening was challenging, and we adopted practices advocated by Machaelle Wright of the Perelandra Center for Nature Research in Virginia, and by John Jeavons in Willits, California. From Wright we learned to work with garden energies, or devas. From Jeavons we learned companion planting and intensive gardening. We set aside areas for predators and for pests. Gophers were "allowed" some beds and all of the ornamental landscaping. Every year, and sometimes several times a year, we requested that they stay out of the remainder of our vegetable beds. They did. At least, they did until Jeff forgot to ask them to stay away.

In our first year of ownership we had sought and received a coastal development permit for much of what we believed would allow us to become a premier destination. The following years we ran into one obstacle after another. Money was a problem, and frankly we were not ready. There was much yet to learn.

In 1987–88, Alex and Kate were beginning school, and after eight years living behind the office and small lobby, we built "The Barn" for animals, storage, and ourselves. Finally we could sleep on a real bed rather than the sofa bed in our living room/dining room/bedroom. We were not able to build new guest accommodations, a lobby, and a restaurant. The buildings were far too expensive, but we did manage to build a pool and a greenhouse enclosure.

Jeff focused on learning more about the human energy system and we continued working with the energies on the land. We brought Dana Ecelberger into the gardens. She knew nothing about gardening and began learning as we had, from doing. She, too, became aware of our co-creative...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BenBella Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1941631657
• ISBN 13: 9781941631652
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar