Lunch at Naramata Inn
My muffin top has transformed this week into a full-on three-tiered wedding cake-top. (With me playing the girl bursting out of the top of the cake, if you can envision it – or at least bursting out of my capris.) But each tier is so totally worth it.
To refresh your memory, I’m at the Okanagan Food and Wine Writers’ Workshop – the first annual – a small group of 11 attendees plus a handful of presenters (me, Taryn, Michele and Craille) and Food Girl (Wonder Woman`s culinary cousin), who pulled this all together. The food is sublime. I mean truly-not just some of it, all of it, with wine always following close behind. (And before. And during. And after.) I’m going to crash head-on into food withdrawl tomorrow at around lunchtime. I’ve also just realized I haven’t made dinner in over a week. So not complaining.
Forgive me for backtracking here, but I just can’t keep up, and have to linger a bit over each venue to avoid diluting them all. Let me preface this by expressing publicly how IDIOTIC I am to have driven through the Okanagan approximately once a year for I don’t know, MY ENTIRE LIFE and not once curled around the bottom of the Okanagan Lake and paid a visit to Naramata.
Lunch today was received on the backyard patio of the century-old Naramata Inn, at the end of main street Naramata. (If you`ve never been, it`s a town totally worth poking around – they have a general store where you can procure fantastic local wines and a bag of sour gummy worms, and there`s a small grassy park and beach a few blocks away.) The tiny hotel itself, which back in its day was a girls`school, is something out of an old American sitcom or romantic comedy- the idyllic quaint-country-inn setting of a couple`s first weekend away together, where hilarity (or drama, or romantic angst) ensues.
For lunch they brought out warm rock oven-baked focaccia with olive oil and salt, with platters of local tomatoes, plums, trocedero melons, chantrelle mushrooms, purple basil from their garden, Poplar Grove double cream camembert, dry cured bison, shinkenspeck, bruleed chicken pate and duck rillette. We drank house-made sparkling cider and an `07 Reserve Chardonnay from Joie. Then two of us shared crispy chicken under a brick (served on polenta, with cubes of sweet potato) and a roasted squash and chicken pizza topped with fresh basil.
Dinner was at Township 7, but seeing as it`s five to one in the morning, you`ll have to wait for that installment. I can`t rush this one.
And also? I dropped $100 today on 8 bottles of vinegar. Don`t tell Mike.
September 20 2009 | eating out | 9 Comments »
