I grew up in the forest. As a child, I would study plants, examining the gradation in color, the texture, their resiliency, and by careful disassembly, their components and interiors. I spent hours gathering plants, pressing flowers into the pages of our phone book, identifying them, and arranging them on paper and labeling them.
As I moved around the country, I looked down. I watched the forest floor carpet itself in blooms under bare tree limbs in New York springtime. I walked through alpine grazing fields, flanked by yellow aspen to gather grasses, seeds, and sage to weave into garlands and wreaths in Utah autumn. I sat silent and still in the mountain wildflower fields in Wyoming summer, among the same family of pines that I knew during my childhood in Alaska. And I wrestled with kudzu jungles in north Georgia beside thick canopies of maple.
When I travel, I look at the wild places. I look for what I know, and I examine what is new. There is grounding when you know what surrounds you. In my career as a pastry chef, I have worked around the country with local and culturally expressive ingredients and methods. Upon moving to Portland, Oregon in 2001, I fell in love with the abundance of excellent ingredients and the creative lifestyle. As a crafter of spirits, I feature hand selected, place specific ingredients to capture the spirit of the pacific northwest forest.
Join me, let's take our cocktails to the forest!
Faith Dionne