Slow Food® Utah

PHOTO GALLERY

Rockhill Creamery Tour – October 15, 2006

• A group of Friends of Slow Food Utah traveled to Cache Valley in October for a tour of the Rockhill Creamery. Dinner followed our tour and we had a delightful dinner outside. Dinner was prepared by Tim and Tammy Vitale, Graham Hunter, and Debby Bronson. The sumptuous spread included an array of appetizers, main courses, and sides...with Rockhill Cheese used as key ingredients. Rockhill Creamery offers fine artisan cheeses such as Farmhouse Gouda, Dark Canyon Edam & Desert Red Feta. The creamery is located in Richmond, a small town in Northern Utah’s beautiful Cache Valley about 90 miles north of Salt Lake City. The folks at Rockhill Creamery are "strong supporters of sustainable agriculture and the Slow Food movement. Life is too short to be in a hurry."

(See below the photographs for a longer "short story," and specific menu items served, from Chef Tim Vitale.)

Pastry Goddesses Aimee Altizer (Zermatt Resort, Midway) and Amber Billingsley (Pine American Restaurant, Murray, Utah) talk with Jessica of Tveit Farms (Mendon, Utah).  1 of 12.  

Rockhill Creamery’s Nicholas Creede offers up some tasty appetizers from Tim Vitale and crew, Fig Crostini with Zwitser Gouda. Other appetizers included Polenta and Chard Flan, Crostini with caramelized onions and Rockhill Cheese.  2 of 12.

Jennifer Hines shows off wheels of Gouda and Edam in the creamery’s wonderfully scented aging room.  3 of 12.

Course No. 1: Baked Semolina and Gruyere Gnocchi with Sage Butter Sauce.  4 of 12.

Course No. 2: Cheese Flan with Tomato Chile Sauce and some BYOB wine from Napa!  5 of 12.

Dining al fresco with falling leaves in Pete and Jenn’s yard in Richmond, Utah.  6 of 12.

Course No 3: Salad of Julienned Collard Greens, Marinated Apples and Rockhill Creamery Feta.  7 of 12.

Dining al fresco.  8 of 12.

Tim Vitale carves up some tender Lau Family Farms Beef.  9 of 12.

Dinner waiting for the beef. Tami Coleman, beekeeper extraordinaire.>  10 of 12.

Entree: Lau Family Farms Beef with Balsamic Caramelized Onions, Tveit Farms vegetables made the mashed potatoes with horseradish and leeks, mashed sweet potatoes with gruyere and truffle oil, and roasted carrots and baby beets.  11 of 12.

Chefs Graham Hunter and Tim Vitale.  12 of 12.

Chef Tim Vitale’s "Short Story" re-capping the Rockhill Creamery Feast:

With Matt Kramer’s (out of print!) cookbook “Passion for Piedmont” in hand, we felt armed enough to feed Slow Food folks and to pitch a few trivia tidbits to the crowd for good measure. Kramer, after all, focused his cookbook on Slow Food’s birthplace, Piedmonte, where the four of us had honed our culinary teeth long ago – and again not so long ago.

We were asked to complement a cheese tour at Rockhill Creamery in Richmond with a Fall menu of Cache Valley bounty, featuring cheese and other local, farmstead products. Luckily, we received rousing support to stray from the Cache Valley-only dictum by uncorking visitors from Priorat, the honorable Dr. Sinskey from Napa and other fabled, bottled accompanists supplied by one of your own (salute).

We were all amateur cooks – nothing too frou-frou in our blood. We had smothered enchiladas and flipped burgers here and there, including a couple of us with stints at Logan’s former dining claim–to–fame, The Grapevine. If there is anything we learned both at The Grapevine and in Piedmont, it is to gather the season and focus on ingredients, ingredients, ingredients. Rockhill provided the magic there (including glorious seasonal weather), supplemented by fresh Richmond honey from Willow Valley Apiary, Lau Family Farm beef, and perfect fall vegetables from Tveit Gardens in Mendon.

The menu, then, became easy. Small tastes of cheesy this and cheesy that, in doses manageable enough to get slow people lazing away a Sunday afternoon through the main course itself – with room for plums from our backyards in the form of buttery-crusted tarts.

So, here’s what we did:

APPETIZERS:

1. Crostini w/caramelized Zwitser cheese and port-steeped fig slices, drizzled honey.

2. Seeded baguette w/Dark Canyon edam, roasted plum tomatoes and caramelized onions.

3. Polenta-gouda-chard squares. (fennel seeds did the flavoring.)

SMALL COURSES:

1. Baked gruyere gnocchi. (yes, you want more?)

2. Baked cheese flan (reserve farmhouse gouda) w/light tomato sauce and chipotle moritas.

3. Pickled apples (Cortland from the yard) on collard greens w/pickled Desert Canyon feta.

MAIN COURSE:

1. Beef tendergroin w/honey-balsamic roasted red onion sauce.

2. Mashed potatoes (German butterball) w/horseradish and caramelized leeks.

3. Sweet potatoes w/goat cheese and truffle oil (if we were in Piedmont in mid October, we’d be shaving truffles, right?)

4. Roasted beets, roasted carrots w/braised fennel bulb (braised in lemon juice, because my father in law just brought fresh lemons from his tree in San Diego).

DESSERT:

1. Rustic (which means lots of butter) plum tarts w/lavender crème fraiche.

DENOUEMENT (if still necessary):

1. Hot dogs, marshmallows, un-diet coke and a loooooooong drive home. Actually, the unraveling of the plot came early when someone from your group deflowered some Alsatian blend from Robert Sinskey called Abraxas – a god for fall indeed!