I Heart Farms

Guillermo's Progress; Something Green

Last Friday night, we went over to take dinner to Guillermo Payet, who had been released from the hospital a few days before. (If you haven't read about it, Guillermo was badly injured in a hit-and-run, suffering skull injuries and more earlier in April. You can read about that here.) In addition to his mother, Teresa, who'd traveled up from Peru, and his sister, Mariana, Guillermo's friend, Doug, was visiting. I'd made two pork tenderloins with the Lime Mojo and Latin spice rub, and cooked my last pound of Rancho Gordo cannellini beans. Knowing I would have an army of free hands, I brought over quite a lot of fava beans to be shelled and blanched. A last minute traipse through Epicurious for fava recipes turned up one that had some promise: Fava Bean, Asparagus, and Arugula with Shaved Pecorino.

IMBB #23: Viva la France!

Blustery weather yesterday provided the perfect inspiration for participating in the current "Is My Blog Burning" themed event: create a French meal and pair it with a French wine.

Having recently acquired a Borner V-Slicer Plus (for only $25!), I was eager to try it out on French onion soup. But while perusing three or four cookbooks, I also made a list of other dishes I might attempt if time or lack of ingredients forced me. I might like to try Coq au Vin, or Boeuf aux Carrottes, or any of a dozen dishes from the Williams Sonoma Savoring France book. But I also pored over the Bouchon cookbook, since Thomas Keller's onion soup recipe looked pretty good. (I was also checking out the same recipe in James Peterson's Glorious French Food book, but do you know what? That man uses five pounds of onions and 25 cups of cheese! I passed on the Peterson.)

Other tempting recipes included a recipe from Bretagne—Soupe aux Huîtres Trois Herbes (oyster soup with three herbs), a cassoulet from the Languedoc, and another recipe from Provence, this one for Canard au Miel de Lavande (duck with lavendar honey).

An Ode to the Pig

When I first read about Slow Pig Weekend Blogging, I went and bought a pork tenderloin, which I've cooked successfully lots of times. Then I thought I should cook something I never have before—and came home from the DeLuxe Foods (the fancy grocery store in Aptos) with a two-pound pork shoulder roast. Having no idea at all what I was going to do with it, I started hitting my cookbooks before the playoff games on Saturday. After going through a dozen or so, all my faithfuls let me down. What's a girl to do? Hit Epicurious, of course.

Happy New Year & News

Really, if you can't curl up on a rainy day in footie pajamas, what can you do?

So back in August, during the Eat Local Challenge, there was a collective effort to find and support chefs and restaurants who are buying directly from our local farms. This is something I am passionate about, and so I decided to make it an ongoing project of mine. I used my food forum (MouthfulsFood.com, the one that they'll ban you for mentioning it at eGullet) to keep adding to the list of Bay area (and beyond) chefs and restaurants buying locally, with direct input from farmers, growers, and diners/bloggers who know about these things.

If you know of any restaurants in all of California that should be on this list, feel free to e-mail me (tana AT tanabutler DOT com). Or join MouthfulsFood.com and post there. (Hey, you food bloggers, you should be at MouthfulsFood anyway! It's an open-minded place, and most of the foodies I know are open-minded.)

4th St. Bistro in Reno & Other Tasty Tidbits

When it's time to get the hell out of Dodge, Reno seems as good a bet (pardon the pun) as any. Bob is constantly receiving offers from the Siena hotel for free stays. The beds are as comfortable as the Ritz-Carlton in San Francisco and, as Bob likes to say, "It's out of town." Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and traditionally I cook a 22-pound turkey. (That's it, pictured at left, about ten years ago..and the lighting is wretched--the bird wasn't that dark. But I was that slender. Do you think I look psycho? You try holding a 22-pound bird while someone sets up their camera. "Take the picture! Take the picture!" Audrey Hepburn fans unite.)

This year, we just wanted to escape.

The drive through the San Joaquin valley was beautiful. The November sky was moody and grey, and we passed dozens of vineyards that held golden-green leaves on their vines. One pretty little farm, on the banks of the Mokelumne River, just outside the Sacramento County line, caught my eye: orchards, rice paddies, beautiful trees grown up around the farm house...I've been Googling for hours, trying to find out more about it. I wonder if this could be the place.

The Vanilla Queen Speaks: Patricia Rain on the Importance of Real Vanilla

I am blessed to live in Santa Cruz county, which is home to not only some of the best farmers in the world, but to the sort of open-minded, free-thinking, generous-of-heart-and-spirit people with whom I am most comfortable. (And is it really a big secret that I never returned to Georgia after age 18 because there were no health food stores open on Sunday?) I once belonged to a culinary group here, and it was there that I first met "The Vanilla Queen," Patricia Rain.

I ran into Patricia at my favorite little farmers market a few months ago, and we caught up with each other's lives. I realized that she's helping the small, independent vanilla growers for the same reason I blog: we love what these people do.

Gobble, Gobble

Last night, I made soup from the beautiful Marina Di Chioggia pumpkin from Crystal Bay Farm. It was a labor of love, requiring both the food processor and the blender, and a great deal more stock than the recipe I used stated. I think this is a dense pumpkin: the pith and seeds were not wet and stringy at all.

I roasted a head of garlic, too, and threw some of that in, along with coriander, cumin, and a little cayenne. (The spices were a variation on a recipe from A New Way to Cook.) For kicks, I topped it with some of the Bodega Bay goat cheese I got from Ferry Plaza last weekend, and that was a great match. You can see how the spice darkened the color, which was so bright it surprised me when I cut into the pumpkin.

I would make this again, but I think I'd organize differently. There is no way two pounds of pumpkin fits in a food processor, much less with the addition of chicken stock. So I'd purée in batches. I might also roast the pumpkin with a bain-marie, and let the steam help soften it.

We also had a small roasted chicken from TLC Ranch, along with roasted carrots, potatoes, shallots, and orange bells.

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Today I am researching regional Thanksgiving recipes. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday: gratitude makes such a nicer showing than greed and compulsory gift-giving. I'll have more to say about it all later, but wanted to take the opportunity to share a coupon code from LocalHarvest.org for $5 off the price of a turkey. They have heritage turkeys (woo hoo!) -- just plug in code #TRK2005 at check-out, and you will get the discount.  

TLC: The Ranch and the Concept

Out south of Watsonville, and inland a little ways from Elkhorn Slough, one of the most scenic parts of the Monterey Bay, sits a pretty little piece of California, preserved in the form of TLC Ranch. I took Logan and Rowan out to meet rancher, Jim Dunlop, whom I've talked to at the Sunday farmers market. It was just a wonderful visit: we spent nearly two hours traipsing around the place. The photo above is the approach to the entrance of TLC Ranch: a neighboring farmer has corn, sunflowers, and some wild and crazy squash that no mere rail fence could contain.

We started with a tour of one of the chicken coops: Jim's raising 500 hens (Bard Rocks and Black Australorps) that won't lay until next year, and he will have $3000-$4000 into the brood by then. On the other hand, his hens will be putting out 50 dozen eggs a day, which fetch $5/dozen at the farmers markets. (I've had these eggs: they are huge, and they are delicious.)

Logan, alas, suffers from the genetic imperative of little boys all over the world: he cannot resist the impulse to run after the birds and make them scatter. All the bribes and threats in the world ("No Raffi in the car if you don't stop, Logan!") didn't work very well.  Jim was a great sport, too, and tried to explain to Logan why his strategy was lacking in forethought, but Logan was impervious to reason, and we stepped out of the coop.

Eat Local Challenge and more

Who needs three kinds of potatoes? Not me, I need four. You can't see the giant white ones that are on top of my refrigerator. You also can't see: seven (SEVEN) baskets of golden raspberries that we got on Friday and yesterday, three baskets of strawberries, all the halibut, the eggs, most of the basil, the baby carrots (three bunches), the lemon cucumbers, two eggplants, more Romano beans, yellow wax beans, three pounds of Tongue of Fire shelling beans, or several kinds of heirloom tomatoes--all of those things have been eaten in the past few days (four of the baskets of golden raspberries went into Logan, three before we got home from the market). The rest is what came from the farmers market on Sunday and Tuesday.

For the record, there are: golden zucchini, Zephyr squash (the yellow ones with the green tips), poblano peppers, basil, Early Girl tomatoes, Russian fingerling potatoes, Romano beans, Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, Hass avocados, yellow creamers, Yukon gold potatoes, Walla Walla onions, and cipollini onions.

Bike2Barn, Bloglines, Farm Food

Big news from my friend, Guillermo Payet, the creator of the brilliant LocalHarvest.org website for consumers looking for farms, CSAs, and more. He and a friend, Megan, are off on a trial run for Bike2Barn...riding their motorcycles to Southern California and visiting farms en route. They're blogging about it, so check it out. Next spring, they're heading out for two months on a cross-country tour of farms.

Speaking of blogging, I have some very helpful information. A friend showed me how to use Bloglines, and I installed a bookmarklet into the toolbar of my browsers that lets me instantly subscribe to any blog or site I like. Once I subscribe, Bloglines lets me know when one of my subscriptions has new content on it. Checking the subscribers of various sites is also really useful: many of them have subscriptions to sites I haven't yet seen, and I've found some great material that way.