Six talented Petersburg chefs are coming together next Wednesday for a unique culinary event that aligns with the Little Norway Festival, celebrates local foods, and helps raise funds to revitalize the Rainforest Festival which aims to return to its former glory this fall.
"Forest to Sea: A Local Culinary Journey," scheduled for May 14 at the Elks Lodge, will feature a six-course Norwegian-inspired meal showcasing locally harvested ingredients-from foraged foods to fresh seafood.
The event began with a simple conversation between Petersburg Rainforest Festival organizer Stephanie Payne and Alisa Jestel, chef and co-owner of the charter vessel M/Y Dauntless.
"Stephanie had approached me about donating to the Rainforest Festival," Jestel
explained. "For me, it's something I enjoy. I like that they're into promoting foraging and harvesting and water safety and getting out in the wilderness-it aligns with what we try to do in the summers."
What started as a donation discussion quickly blossomed into something more ambitious.
"I said to Steph, what if we do a dinner focusing on the Norwegian influence in town, but also the foraging and local ingredients?" Jestel said. "I have so much on my plate, I can't do the whole thing, but I think it'd be really cool to get as many chefs as we can to participate, and that way we each just have to do one course."
The response from Petersburg's culinary community was enthusiastic. The dinner will feature contributions from Ashley Kawashima and Amanda Birchell of The Board Chicks (charcuterie boards), Ariel Norheim of the Little Shed (locally
foraged salad), Shalene Mccollum (sourdough bread), Stephanie Payne and Sunny Rice (soup), Jestel herself (white fish course), Jessica Hawley of Compass Cookery (Norwegian hunter stew), and Kelsey Hammer (Norwegian cheesecake).
"The excitement amongst the chefs is awesome," Jestel said. "Everybody's like, 'This is so much fun!' We get to actually be creative. We just have to worry about one course ... as chefs, we kind of get to have a playground."
The timing of the event intentionally coincides with the kickoff of the Little Norway Festival and features
Norwegian-inspired dishes, but it also represents an important step in reinvigorating the Rainforest Festival, which decided a few years ago to try dispersing the festival events across all four seasons of the year. But the festival's modified efforts faltered somewhat, especially during the peak of the pandemic.
"We are going to go back to just doing the Rainforest Festival in the fall, one busy weekend with all of these things, just like it used to be," said Sunny Rice, a longtime festival organizer. "We've got new energy, though. We've got Steph now, and we got a couple new board members, too ... new energy and, soon, new funds."
The Rainforest Festival often came together on a shoestring budget, but there are bigger ticket expenses - field expeditions and the travel costs of bringing specialty art, science, and cultural teachers and keynote speakers to Petersburg for the festival.
Rice hopes funds raised at the dinner and auction will serve as local seed funding that can help the organizers raise future grant funds. "Usually, if you write a grant, you need to find matching funds for that," Rice noted.
The event will feature a silent auction, with approximately a dozen items.
The centerpiece offering is a day cruise to LeConte Glacier and Thomas Bay aboard the Dauntless with Chef Alisa and with interpretation provided by Rainforest Festival naturalists.
"We're going to have Sunny go and talk about marine mammals, and Mary Clemens is going to talk about flora," Payne explained.
Other auction items include works from local artisans like fiber artist Karen Dillman, who makes garments using remarkable natural dyes she creates from local lichen and fungus and other wild elements.
The fundraiser dinner represents a potential new tradition for the Rainforest Festival.
"This could be something that would be a fun annual event, doing the multi-chef meal," suggested Jestel. "Maybe next year it goes to fall where we have a different abundance of things to forage."
Jestel's very good idea fits nicely with the Rainforest Festival's rich history of celebrating local foods. There used to be a foraged foods feast which was spearheaded by Christina Sargent and often showcased a few local or regional chefs. Sargent has since relocated to New Zealand around 2020 with her spouse, Dr. Chris Sargent, but their contributions to the festival are fondly remembered by the event's organizers.
"Those dinners were highly participatory," Rice recalled. Volunteers embarked on popular foraging expeditions coordinated throughout the year to gather wild ingredients for the feasts.
Rainforest Festival organizers have already secured a grant from the Petersburg Community Foundation to bring a wild foods expert to town for the fall festival, which will include workshops and a harvest potluck, though
the full details of the festival's events are not yet decided.
For next week's dinner, tickets are selling fast, they are $80 and available at Lee's Clothing. Doors will open at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday May 14 upstairs at the Elks Lodge.
This dinner will be a nice way to help kick off next week's festivities, Jestel noted. "Everybody's excited about Little Norway Festival, and if we can do [this dinner] right after the trunk show and the sweater show, people can make an event out of it."
*This story has been corrected to reflect that the Board Chicks, Petersburg's charcuterie board specialists, are Ashley Kawashima and Amanda Birchell. The Pilot regrets getting one of their names wrong in the initially published version of this story.
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