If you’re reading this, you probably share our passion for ecologically produced food. Last month, our friend Azmin Ghahreman and Sapphire Restaurant hosted a Full Moon Harvest Celebration, inviting The Ecology Center and South Coast Farms to participate in the bounty.What an amazing evening!
As seen in the Coastline Pilot Newspaper, a re-cap of the dinner celebration:
All About Food:
A Passion for Sustainable Foods
We would like to state clearly that we are not on the payroll at Sapphire; but between Azmin Ghahreman’s boundless energy and enthusiasm for new projects and menus, as well as the fact that he has an amazing publicist in Marguarite Clark, who keeps us abreast of the news, we seem to be writing a lot of articles lately about the doings at Sapphire.
Recently we attended the fascinating Local Harvest Dinner Party at Sapphire that brought together a number of people who are interested in promoting environmental awareness and local sustainable products. Azmin himself, only uses products from California and is committed to these principles.
In addition to a delicious dinner, we had the opportunity to talk with Evan Marks, founder and director of the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano, Tim Hussman, president of the Newport Meat Co. (a Laguna resident), Janet Andrews and Kelly Yrarrazaval, “the bee ladies” who are the proprietors of Backyard Bees, and Gary Edwards, a part-time cheesemaker and full-time marketer and supplier from Sonoma.
All of these people are Azmin’s good friends and match his passion for what they do. At some point in the evening, each one of them separately praised Azmin for his great heart.
Evan, who describes himself as a surfer, is a native Californian who became interested in the environment when he joined the Surfrider Foundation and discovered that people have the ability to directly impact their environment. Going on to study agroecology at UC Santa Cruz, he later worked in Hawaii, Costa Rica, Peru, Mexico, Ghana, Nigeria and California in the area of ecological design and sustainable agriculture.
Eighteen months ago, he founded the Ecology Center, which is at South Coast Farms in San Juan Capistrano.
The goal of the center is to engage members of the community in fun, hands on activities that teach environmental solutions at the household and community level. The method is to learn by doing. He and Azmin are engaged in developing a program for the kids at St. Anne’s School so that they can participate in the entire life-cycle of planting, tending, harvesting and eating what they grow.
The vegetables, grown by schoolchildren at the farm, were featured at the dinner. They were the highlight of the vegetarian entrée, which included winter squash soup, stuffed zucchini blossoms, squash cubes with farro and zucchini ratatouille.
Thank you Elle and Terry from Coastline Pilot Newspaper for their commentary on the evening. For more info, go here.
