Worth our Weight

Eastside Road, August 15, 2013—

OUT TONIGHT TO A benefit dinner for a cause we very much support: Worth Our Weight, an organization founded some years ago by Evelyn Cheatham, who we met when she came to work at the Downtown Bakery and Creamery, which Lindsey and our daughter Thérèse and (most importantly in the long run!) Kathleen Stewart opened lo these many years ago in Healdsburg.

Evelyn is a force of nature, a rara avis, a grande Nature, a magnificent woman. She is practical, intelligent, disciplined, and immensely good-hearted. And the thing she runs, Worth Our Weight, takes on what she calls young people "at risk," who have fallen into the many cracks between social classes, demographic groups, and legally countenanced behaviors.

Since Evelyn's own enhusiasm, experience, and expertise fall within the fields of nutrition and cuisine, she relies on them for the substrate, if you will, of her approach to a redefinition of the lives of these young people. In short, she exposes them to the delights and the demands of awareness and work within those fields. She trains them to cook and to serve.

More than that, though, she exposes them to the delights and rewards of their work. Every other year, for example, she finds funds to take a few of these youths to the Salone del Gusto that Slow Food puts on in Torino, exposing them to taste, to sustainability, to travel, and to the culture of other countries (for the Salone is truly international, not merely Italian).

Tonight our dinner was cooked by Mark Dierkhising, the chef-owner of Parkside Cafe in Santa Rosa, a place we like quite a bit, and his brother Roger, and his sous-chef Arturo Guzman. The dinner was one in a series of monthly benefit dinners cooked by chefs in the area on the third Thursday of each month: Evelyn's raising money to buy and renovate a restaurant in Santa Rosa, where her apprentices will be able to stretch themselves into really professional surroundings.

The menu?

Seared Day Boat Scallop and Maine Lobster with mushroom ragu
Local heirloom tomato and beet salad with basil, BR Cohn olive oil, and Sonoma Valley Portworks vinegar
Pan-seared local salmon with white corn, kale, and lobster sauce
or
Clover milk poached Sonoma lamb, Tierra cauliflower and broccoli, cabernet glaze
Fresh berries with lemon cake, lemon curd, and French vanilla ice cream

Everything on the menu but the lobster was, I believe, local, seasonal, fresh, and sustainable. It was beautifully cooked and served with real care and attentiveness by the apprentices in the Worth Our Weight program. We ate with friends at a big table, and the place was absolutely full, spilling out of the building in fact into the parking lot, where the summer evening couldn't have been more benign — completely befitting every aspect of the event. We left well fed, well received, and full of respect for Evelyn and her program, optimistic about a world — well, a community — where such promise is translated so readily into real practical value for people who are otherwise so vulnerable to the flaws of a society generally lacking such optimism, energy, and sympathy.

Third Thursdays will continue for the next few months, perhaps into 2014 for all I know. I think it's a series well worth supporting. We'll be back, I'm sure.

Sauvignon blanc, Preston of Dry Creek, 2011; Pinot noir, Simi, 2010; Cabernet Sauvignon, Benziger, 2008 — all quite sound, expressive, and — again — local

• Worth Or Weight, 1021 Hahman Drive, Santa Rosa; (707) 544-1200