I Heart Farms

Lindencroft Farm's CSA Dinner, and "One's on the Way"

Pictured here: a porchetta from Severino's Community Butcher, expertly prepared by Chris LeVeque, who works at the butcher shop.

Over a week since my last post: all I can say is "All work and no play make me a dull girl."

Last Sunday afternoon, Linda and Steven Butler threw open their gates and their doors, and hosted an amazing meal for the members of their CSA at Lindencroft Farm. I guess I am an honorary member, because my little family got to attend.

As you can tell by the photo here, no effort was spared to make a beautiful, bountiful meal, and I was a fool not to beg for a plate of leftovers. Damn.

It's Not Easy Being Green: Ask Guillermo

It's been a while since I wrote about my friend, Guillermo Payet, who is pretty much fully recovered from a very bad hit-and-run accident last April. Now that he's feeling better, I've been happy to invite him on excursions, our most recent being the Pork and Beer dinner at the Big Sur Bakery on Sunday night. Justin Severino* and two other chefs produced a multi-course extravaganza that was finger-lickin' good...and the band, Sex Farm. (Don't worry, it's safe for work: only a link to Spinal Tap lyrics, which I assume is where they got the name.)

Guillermo is pictured here with the pig noses that graced each table setting.

* Justin's pork products (cuts, sausages, patés, etc.) are sold at farmers markets in the Santa Cruz-Silicon Valley area weekly. You can check his market schedule here.

I Heart NY

Pictured here: Chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill restaurants in New York.

I have had New York much on my mind lately, and then a little flurry of good things came over the transom. (The link goes to an image, since I bet many of you young whippersnappers have never seen a transom in your lives.)

First, I was catching up on my blog subscriptions, and saw that, over at Edible Nation, Bruce Cole has posited that Chef Dan Barber has been body-snatched by an Evil Twin. Please set aside about 20 minutes of your life to watch Dan's most recent presentation at Taste3. Bruce writes:

Taste3 invited Dan Barber's twin to come and speak for the second year in a row, and I say twin because this guy is a masterful story teller, an actor and performer, and so obviously not the same Dan Barber the chef I've heard of. At last years Taste3, this Barber brought down the house with his hilarious story of carrots and castration, with special emphasis on Boris the boar and his back end (click here for last year's talk). In other words, can you say boar's balls?

(I recommended it a while back.)

Summer Meadow's Farm

NOTE: I am still trying to figure out the technical difficulties that people on PCs are having viewing the site. I think it has something to do with the fact that I wanted to use pictures 400 pixels wide—heck, Heidi Swanson's pictures are 545 pixels wide. For now, the solution I proposed to one reader is to copy and paste the text (select all, copy) into a blank e-mail. Sorry for the work-around, and hope it is temporary.) [Help, Mister Wizard!]

I visited a sweet little farm with over seventy goats last week. Pictured here is the woman who runs it, Lynn Selness. We met at Rebecca King's "sheep warming" a couple of weeks ago. (I had the pleasure of bringing my own personal hero, Guillermo Payet, who founded Local Harvest. You haven't heard of Local Harvest? Honey, get thee there, plug in a zip code, and find yourself a farm, farmers market, CSA, restaurant, and more—all designed to help you eat well locally.)

I want to write more about Lynn, and will do so very soon, but meanwhile thought you would all like to see the baby goats. The one she's petting here (is it Angel or Holly? I think Holly) is so tame, and so sweet.

There were also a pair of twins that were only two weeks old. The female is the one lying down. Her brother is taking a break from his hijinks.

 

Lynn, who's been raising goats for thirty years, provides shares of goat milk to the Live Earth CSA here in Santa Cruz county. She is the mother of seven children, and is a grandmother. I can only assume that drinking goat's milk keeps you young, because she is very young and healthy-looking.

There is more I want to add here, but cannot do so this morning: the new job beckons.

I'll leave you with one last peek at a velvety pair of ears we got to pet.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (cribbed from DonRockwell.com) from Terry Thiese on "cooking like a girl":

By the way, my definition of "girl-food" is it's not only food you love, it's food that loves you back. It doesn't seek to "impress" though it often does. It wraps you in a nexus of appreciation for the honesty and beauty of ingredients. It's the difference between "look at ME!!" and "Look at THESE!" The first is I-thou, I-the-diner looks at you-the-chef (and is impressed); the second is companionable and collaborative: I-the-diner and she-the-chef look TOGETHER at the beauty she has found and seeks to share. It also lays more emphasis on deliciousness than on dazzling. It's got juicier soul.

Thanks for visiting.

Dee Harley: Farmer of the Year

I booked reservations several weeks ago to take a tour at Harley Farms Goat Dairy, hoping to reacquaint myself with Dee Harley and her lilting Yorkshire accent. A drive up the coast to Pescadero on Highway One, with overcast skies and unseasonally cold weather, took me along the coast and brought to mind pictures I've seen of coastal Scotland.

It's a drive I've made dozens of times. I never take it for granted: especially on summer weekends when the roads are dense with people from all over the world.

While sometimes the sentiment in California can be traced to a bumpersticker I saw in San Diego in 1979 ("Tourists Go Home, But Leave Your Daughters"), I try to be more tolerant under certain circumstances. One set of circumstances is the coastal road. There were more parasailers than I've ever seen over the water at one bend in the road: summer has started in earnest.

I arrived just in time to join the tour as they gathered at the gate to the goats' pen. My hope that there would still be lots of baby goats was realized immediately: dozens of kids, some barely knee-high, scampered among their mothers and aunts. Some were so small that the grass came to their shoulders.