Food & Drink: Farm-to-table feast to reflect harvest

For centuries, the autumn equinox has been celebrated all over the world. Farmers, and those fortunate to join in their bounty, gather to thank the gods of the harvest by enjoying a final feast before settling into the long nights of winter.

This Saturday, you can celebrate the autumn equinox and go on your own personal journey into fall amid the vineyards of Heathen Estate at Flat Tack Farm’s Autumn Harvest Farm to Table Dinner.

A successful harvest is the result of the four elements (earth, fire, water and air) joining together to create a rainbow of produce. It’s fitting that chef Miguel Sosa, whose downtown Vancouver restaurant is called Elements, will be working his culinary alchemy for this fall celebration.

The event starts at 4:30 p.m. with a farm tour followed by a social hour with drinks and appetizers at 5:15 p.m. A family-style dinner begins at 6 p.m. Flat Tack is known for its abundant variety of peppers. Farmer Kelly Peters also expects to have greens, carrots, tomatoes, eggplant, sweet corn and squash for the feast, as well as herbs, gooseberries and blackberries.

Sosa won’t have a final menu until the event. He will visit Flat Tack Farm for several weeks to figure out what will be available and find inspiration. He’s thinking of making cochinita pibil (a traditional Mexican slow-roasted pork dish from the Yucatan Peninsula) in an underground fire pit with Flat Tack peppers, or maybe Reister Farms lamb birria (a spicy stew from the Mexican state of Jalisco) braised low and slow.