Cellar Door Cooking prepped for launch

Eating a variety of local foods should now be easier than ever before.

Cellar Door Cooking, a subscription-based food box service owned by Moscow’s Ian Pecoraro, is scheduled for its first full season of deliciousness and deliveries April through November.

Pecoraro had worked in restaurants in the Seattle area for about 15 years and for some time at Second Spruce, a restaurant where the chef focused on the farm-to-table idea. He said he would see the farms were all four or five hours away, and many were located on the Palouse, which gave him an itch to move here two years ago.

“It’s really a desire to partner my local farmers with the community to make sustainable local food an accessible and enduring thing,” Pecoraro said.

Cellar Door Cooking isn’t the first time Pecoraro has created take-home dinner kits. His One World Cafe “Pasta Pop Up” events, featuring four-course dinners with pasta, were halted because of COVID-19, so Pecoraro started providing take-home meal kits. The kits were the precursor to what Pecoraro is offering at Cellar Door Cooking.

Cellar Door Cooking’s farm dinner kits are $49 each, and every subscriber will receive two boxes per month. The boxes include a three-course dinner for one. A chef’s choice box, which includes an extra treat, is $59. There also are box options for two and four people.

Pecoraro said he sources as much of the box as he can from local farmers. The food in the box can vary, so no meal happens twice. Pecoraro said he also can make the boxes vegetarian upon request.

Pecoraro said April’s first box will include a warm salad of beef fat roasted carrots and bacon with a pea shoot-feta pesto preserved wild chives and spruce tips, heirloom Kabuli Sierra chickpea cassoulet with slow-braised heritage pork shoulder and young spinach, and a buttery pound cake with foraged violet petal ice cream. Pecoraro said he also might include fresh-baked breads, crackers, pesto or vinaigrettes in the boxes.

Susan Ross, who has enjoyed dinner kits from Pecoraro in the past, said while the box is one meal, she often found the food in the box lasted throughout the week.

“It’s like a birthday present every other week,” Ross said.

She said she purchased the two-person boxes from Pecoraro and almost always had enough food to feed three people. The preparation directions each week, Ross said, were detailed enough for customers to recreate many of the recipes afterwards.

“It just became the only way for me to cook and it just makes so much sense,” Pecoraro said. “When food is local and it’s in season, it’s going to naturally taste better than anything else.”

Pecoraro said he enjoys working with the farmers in the area and said he sources his ingredients from producers and farmers like Ronnigers Farm, Day Star Farm, Wing Over Farm, Harvest Ridge, Smoot’s Farm and Palouse Brand.

Kassie Smith participated in Pecoraro’s farm-to-table boxes last year and said she loved seeing how local produce and meats could be combined into new ways. The farm-to-table kits, Smith said, exposed her to new ways to combine ingredients she was already familiar with.

The boxes also change with what ingredient is at its peak, so what came in the first box won’t still be in there in the last box.

“Every time I put together one of the meals, it tastes exactly like the day feels outside,” Smith said.

Learn more about Cellar Door Cooking and how to subscribe at cellardoorcooking.com/.

Kali Nelson can be reached at knelson@dnews.com