It started with a brick of butter. A 7-inch cube of the yellowest, sweetest, creamiest butter—made with the milk of cows mooing nearby at Kurtwood Farms on Washington’s Vashon Island.
Kurt Timmermeister invited a troop of 25 Tasters of Washington out of Evergreen Escapes vans and into a vine-laced building. A long wooden island laiden with rounds of the famed Dinah’s Cheese abutted a basket of giant crusty loaves of bread, baked across the street.
Andrew Will Winery owner and winemaker Chris Camarda started palates with glasses of crisp, butter-colored Cuvée Lucia Viognier. As he talked, eyes drifted to the Jersey cow milk Camembert-style cheese chef-turned-farmer Timmermeister is famous for. The rounds bowed slightly with ripeness and the warmth of the day, and when we were invited to cut wedges of the rich cheese, I wasn’t alone in going back for seconds and thirds. Butter was chunked off the block, eaten on hunks of the chewy, spongy, crusty bread—or topped with a pinch of salt and popped shamelessly in our mouths.
We strolled out for a tour of the farm, snatching extra dollops of cheese for the walk and topping off glasses with freshly opened Two Blondes Bordeaux blend. The richly layered red proved an excellent pairing for the handful of butter I snuck, as well as for drinking while watching a fellow farm walker wipe out in a sludgy trough of “not mud.”
An adorable calf wore a number 20 on her ear and watched as we checked out the tiny, single-hooped milking parlor. After farm dog Daisy chased a rooster at our feet, we returned for a lunch of foraged greens salad and yellowy, green-flecked pasta made with eggs from the farm and browned in the same butter that likely bore our fingerprints.
Outside on the patio, Laura Cherry opened bottles of her Pippin and Wild Fermented flavors of Dragon’s Head Cider, made just down the road. The heirloom apples lent balanced sharpness and funk to the earthy, nettle-laced lengths of pasta and mint-studded salad.
A final treat of ice cream had some of us contemplating never leaving. With Kurt Farm Shop opening on Capitol Hill shortly, we were treated to a preview of the rhubarb and Flora’s cheese flavors, the latter studded with tiny cheese curds. We sipped nutty, Pollard Coffee, made on Vashon by Robin Pollard, while licking ice cream that was rich but not overly sweet.
When it was time to go, we took final sips of funky cider and acid-forward white and toasty coffee and bold red, and had a last glance toward the plate from which the butter had all been eaten.
