My Week at Quillisascut: Why Everyone Should Go to ‘Farm School’

Written by Vera Chang on May 11, 2012in Education, Farms, Featured, Food waste, Local food - 4 Comments

Quillisascut's Rick Misterly explains composting

Since I moved to Seattle a year and a half ago, there’s no farm whose name has come up more than Quillisascut, located in the foothills of the Huckleberry Mountains in Rice, WA. And since I visit farms as Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation’s West Coast Fellow, I have lots of conversations about food and farming. Quillisascut is a cheese company, selling what they call “traditional farmstead cheese from the pampered pets of Pleasant Valley,” but it’s also a school for the domestic arts.

After completing a five-day “Introduction to Farming” workshop at Quillisascut recently, nicely documented by Farmgirl Gourmet, I understand why this farm school is so beloved by food service professionals, healthcare students, farmers and aspiring farmers, vacationers, and other “co-producers” (as Slow Food and the farm’s cookbook, Chefs on the Farm refer to us “eaters”). Attendees from around the US and the world come to milk goats and share the dinner table with farmers Lora Lea and Rick Misterley. Celebrity chefs, such as Tom Douglas, and media, like Sunset Magazine, have lauded Quillisascut. I hope that you, dear reader, can one day visit it, too.

Making feta cheese

Since 2004, more than 23 Puget Sound Bon Appétit Management Company employees — general managers, executive and sous chefs, line cooks, operations managers, catering directors, and catering hands — have attended this farm school to expand their knowledge of sustainable cooking practices. Quillisascut offers a joyous yet frank window into, as Bon Appétit Management Company Seattle University Executive Chef Shannon Wilson describes, “all of the sweat, love, and tears that go into bringing food from farm to plate.”

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