Rave: Tacos

Tacos could be the most perfect food. I prefer a taco to a burrito any day – unless of course we’re talking about a machaca burrito at La Posta in San Diego. But at most taquerias, I stick with the tacos and I’m even happier at a taco truck. I’ve told Mr. WholeHog that if we ever decide to get married, I would seriously consider having a taco truck at the reception.

We’ve been making our own tacos lately and they’ve become a weekly staple. They are easy, fast and especially delicious because we make our own tortillas. Mr. WholeHog bought me a tortilla press last year for my birthday (I recommend it!) and we get masa from Primavera at the Farmers Market. It’s a whole lotta masa (3 lbs!) and we never use it all.

Fresh masa makes great tortillas and great tortillas lead to great meals. There are lots of possibilities: for breakfast, we’ll have tortillas with beans, eggs and avocado; for dinner, tacos with Fatted Calf’s Mexican chorizo or Marin Sun Farms steak.

Last weekend, we used Diana Kennedy’s instructions and made sopes — essentially thicker tortillas with pinched edges. They almost seem like a little plate for your toppings. We topped our sopes with beans, chorizo and potatoes.

Marin Sun Farms Tour

This past Sunday, we drove to Marin Sun Farms in Point Reyes for their farm tour. It was so clear that we could see the Pacific from the ranch. But the sunshine was deceptive: the day was a biting coastal combination of bright, sunny skies and bitterly cold winds.

David Evans is one of the family farmers at the Historic H Ranch in Point Reyes, and the founder of Marin Sun Farms. He knows just about all there is to know about West Marin and about ranching, particularly ranching on federal land. And he’s such a good communicator that he kept the attention of motley group of cold, wind-blown visitors. (Evans was in sandals the whole day while I shivered in my “windproof” REI jacket.)

A side note: It was a truly strange group. One of those experiences that Mr. WholeHog and I have had at concerts of bands that we like where we look around and think, we should have something in common with these people given that we are all here, but all interactions seem to point out our many differences.

Back on the Farm: “I don’t say we’re a sustainable farm,” Evans told is right off as he noted how often the term “sustainable” is thrown around these days and how few things are truly sustainable. “I say we’re working on creating sustainable models.”

Evans showed us some of the models they are using – such as their rotational grazing system for their cows, goats and chickens. We saw where the baby chicks and turkeys live for their first few weeks and then how they are protected when they are brought to pasture. We visited the free ranging laying hens that squawked in protest when we all peeked into their mobile coops. (I forgot to bring my camera but Marin Sun has some great pictures on their website).

And, this being a real farm tour of a farm that produces primarily meat, we also saw where the chickens are slaughtered, Joel-Salatin-style. This is one of the best aspects of buying locally and supporting local farms: you can literally see how these animals live before they end up on your plate.

The tour wraps up with lunch at Marin Sun Farms’ butcher store in Point Reyes Station and a peek at the butchering facilities and their meat refrigerator (where I happily spotted a whole hog!).

We left even more committed to Marin Sun and grateful that we can support someone like Evans who tends his animals and his family’s land with such thought and integrity. We left jealous of those in Berkeley who have access to a meat CSA from Marin Sun – a MEAT CSA! It’s such a good idea it deserves to be shouted out!! – and packed our little cooler with a dozen eggs and one whole chicken, feet and head still attached.

We were so tired that we were almost literally holding our eyes open across the bridge on our drive home and promptly crashed out for a lovely Sunday evening nap.

You Know It’s Summer When…

….the farmers market starts to get seriously crowded. Even our early start didn’t help us avoid the crowds but we were able to get more than we needed and brought back examples of the best of summer produce.

We know it’s summer when we bring back such a huge haul. Mr. WholeHog had the genius idea to take a picture of what we lugged home this last Saturday. He set it up and took the photo (he takes nearly every photo shown on this site because I take Terrible Pics).

There’s just such bounty: not just blackberries, but blueberries, raspberries and strawberries (and we came home with baskets of 3 of those 4 varieties). We couldn’t hold back on stone fruit either, buying peaches, nectarines and apricots.

We’ve been eating incredibly well, needless to say. Meals come together so easily when you have fresh food on hand.

Rave: Bi-Rite Market

All neighborhoods should have a Bi-Rite. Bi-Rite is a small grocery store full of the most carefully chosen items from the freezer case to the wine section. It’s as if someone who really loved you had stocked the store just for you – at least that’s how I feel.

It’s clear that the store shares my value in food so I may be a little biased. (Case in point: their website links to an excerpt to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma.) They support local farmers and local artisans. In the produce section, you’ll see what farm grew the produce and where the farm is located; I can buy the same eggs at Bi-Rite that I can buy at the farmers market; and most of the meat they carry is grass fed and/or a heritage breed.

They recently had blueberries from the Bi-Rite family. The checker said these blubes were grown on the Bi-Rite family property in Placerville, picked and packed by the matriarch of the Bi-Rite family herself. When was the last time a checker at any other nameless-parking-lot-surrounded-grocery-store could tell you anything about the store owners?

Bi-Rite uses their pristine ingredients to make delicious pre-made foods. If we don’t feel like cooking or going out, we may come home with their huge Sicilian meatballs for meatball sandwiches, or, this past Wednesday, I bought their Niman Ranch carnitas and it was better than what I’ve had in most taquerias in The City.

Their pesto is the best pesto we’ve ever had so it always ends up in our basket. We eat it on pasta, of course, but also on a slice of bread, or on crackers, or as this morning, slathered on an Arizmendi English muffin with a fried egg (Marin Sun, natch) and a slice of Fatted Calf bacon. A true breakfast of champions.

One downside: it’s a small space and it can get crowded. There are often bottlenecks so expect to scream out your deli order across the heads of people waiting to check out, and expect to get beat in the head by someone’s basket or to beat someone else in the head with your basket.

Bi-Rite isn’t even really in our neighborhood. We have other options where we live: a health food store a block away and a hideous grocery store two blocks away, but needless to say, we almost always walk the extra 6 blocks to BiRite.

(Bi-Rite also has a Creamery, which will have to be another post. As you might expect: it’s magically delicious).

A Little Help from Our Friends

It can be hard for Mr. WholeHog and I to find friends that we both like equally, so we consider ourselves extremely lucky to have one couple that we both adore. They are the sort of friends that you happily drop everything when they call. A week or so ago, we considered going to a movie. But the phone rang: it was our friend, who was in San Francisco and had had a rough day. So instead of the movie, we jumped in the car to pick her up, opened a bottle of wine and ordered pizza. Her husband and their baby showed up shortly after.

They are the sort of friends that when they are at our house or we are at their house, it doesn’t feel like we are visiting. It feels just as comfortable as being at home. When they were new parents, they brought their little guy over and mom and baby crashed out for a nap on our bed. I loved that.

We live across the bay from these friends so it’s relatively easy for us to see each other regularly. But working in academia, I learned, means not necessarily staying in one place. So even though, they love their East Bay life, they’re moving. I knew the move would probably happened this year, but I still got tears in my eyes hearing that we might have as little as three months before they leave.

They aren’t going very far so we comfort ourselves by talking about all the places we could meet between San Francisco and Oregon, we talk about how much we’ll learn about Oregon by visiting them, we talk about all the good Oregon wine we can drink there, we talk about how this is a good step for them and what a great adventure it will be. But I’m still sad.

Pork and Beans, PORK AND BEANS!

My favorite In Living Color skit.

The Magical Fruit

Once summer my mom and my aunt were on a health kick and they planned to make a 9-bean salad. My cousin and I tried to think of nine beans: pinto, black beans, kidney beans. We included both coffee and jelly beans but never came close to naming nine beans.

If you stop by the Rancho Gordo stand at the Saturday farmers market, you’ll learn that there are way more than nine beans out there. There are goats eye, borlotti, yellow Indian woman, cannellini, marrow, Vallarta. There’s a basket of these different varieties available for you to run your hands through as if you were Amelie, and when you’re wrist deep in beans, you might just start to feel excited about cooking a pot of beans.

I know what you’re thinking: cooking a pot of beans is up there with weaving your own rugs. I thought so too. And beans do take time, just not as much time as you think (FRESH dried beans don’t need to be soaked more than a few hours) and they are so worth it.

But like Lavar Burton says, you don’t have to take my word for it. The descriptions of Rancho Gordo beans initially sparked our interest (that, and the unexpected joy running my hands through the basket of multi-colored dried beans): some are said to have a chocolate-y taste, others a coffee-like aroma.

Photo from www.ranchogordo.com 

My mom sounded appalled when I mentioned that we’d had a wonderful meal of beans. “We cooked beans when we were truly poor,” she said. She was probably already picturing me hauling out a loom and starting to weave a rug in my living room. But when she came into town, we cooked up a pot of Goat’s Eye beans and she was quickly converted.

I put a sack of Rancho Gordo beans in her stocking this last Christmas. This past weekend, she left the farmers market with 4 lbs of beans stashed in her bag. That’s how we feel about these beans.

this is a type of kinda like a formal dedication

 

Giving out a shout for much inspiration…

Image from www.beastieboys.com 

As I’ve tried to make clear in my few early posts, I’m a more than a little obsessed with the Beastie Boys. You Might Think That I’m A Fanatic.

It’s hard to explain my obsession to those who still associate the Beasties with the juvenile antics of their earlier albums or with the yoga-fied lyrics in some of the later albums. But their music has been a part of my life since 5^th grade when I memorized all the lyrics to Paul Revere, and unlike most bands, the Beasties have stayed with me. There were times I wasn’t as into them but I always came back. And I often found that albums that didn’t initially resonate with me became the albums I relied on most. They’re still what I turn to when I’m feeling down or having a hard time.

I’ve been through many times
In which I thought I might lose it
The only thing that saved me
Has always been music

The humor in the lyrics makes me laugh even when I don’t feel like laughing, their politics make me feel like I’m not alone in this nightmare, and the beats get me moving again when I feel terribly stuck.

Of course, there’s a lot of ego in their music, too, as much as they’ve tried to let that go, and hear it gives me a jolt of confidence. Sometimes I need that reminder to

Take A Piece Of The Pie, Why Not, I’m Not Quitting
Think I’m Gonna Change Up My Style Just To Fit In

On a day like today, for example, when I Think I’m Losing My Mind This Time, This time, I’m losing my mind and I’m ready to tell my manager what I really think (You can kiss my ass you funky boss!), I can put on my headphones and feel renewed and ready to deal with the world again.

Today is even better, though, because in my email, there’s a confirmation for two tickets I bought in this morning’s presale to see the Beastie’s (cold kickin’ it live!) in August.

Summer in the City

A summer day in San Francisco makes you want to cancel all your plans or call in sick to work so that you can sit on your deck, surrounded by the flowers and herbs your boyfriend tends, in a sun hat that should have been replaced years ago, and read.

I don’t want to make you jealous since you may not have a deck where you live, especially a deck that overlooks gardens that are starting to flower, or a deck with a view of charming little houses set into the hills that opens up to include the Bay Bridge and part of the downtown skyline.

Some people head to the beach or the park when the weather is warm, but when you have a deck like ours, you can get that same vacation feeling without leaving home.

I think San Franciscans appreciate a warm sunny day more than most people because they’re rare and often unexpected. We don’t get the 3-4 months of summer weather. Our seasons last a few days, some times only a few hours. You can wake up in winter and by noon, it may feel like springtime, or you may head to work under sunny skies only to watch the fog roll in.

Last week, I made the classic novice SF mistake: I looked out my office window, saw that it was sunny and left without my jacket. Within a few blocks, I realized I’d made a mistake but I held out hope since it’s usually warmer at the Tuesday farmer’s market. But no such luck: the cold wind brought tears to my eyes and kicked up my allergies so that I was sniffling and practically weeping as I shopped. And yet I had to laugh at myself. This last May marked my 8th year in San Francisco — you’d think I’d have learned by now never to go outside without a jacket.

A week later, it’s a balmy 75 degrees and the jacket I carted around with me all day was never put to use.

Rave: Miette Confiserie

One of my very favorite places in SF is Miette Confiserie. It’s Willy Wonka for adults. The Hayes Valley candy store has a sweet vintage feel: there are glass jars of gummy candies, hard candies and licorices reaching all the way to the ceiling. A table in the center is dedicated to chocolate and they carry many brands that you just won’t find anywhere else in SF. And they carry nougat – when was the last time you saw nougat?! (It’s magically delicious, by the way.).

To top it all off, they also have Miette’s own treats – their cookies, cupcakes, those wickedly good salted caramels and their Parisian style macaroons.

Image from www.miettecakes.com

Before Miette, my last licorice encounter was either the all-natural Panda brand that my mom would buy at the health food store or the junky black licorice sticks that you can buy just about anywhere. I liked licorice before, but now I LOVE licorice.

As it turns out, there is some seriously cool licorice out there and Miette is a great guide to all the impossible-to-pronounce varieties. You can get super chewy ones that threaten every filling in your teeth or super soft squares that practically melt in your mouth. You can get classic black licorice in the shape of Scotty Dog’s (made by SF’s Gimbels!) or you can get complex flavored bites like one that has a delicate molasses flavor to it.

My very favorite, though, is a salted licorice. I knew I loved chocolate with salt and caramel with salt, so I was willing to try licorice with salt. I should warn you that I find it totally addictive. My favorite, so far, are salted on the outside and shaped as fish but we’re trying different kinds nearly each time we drop by.

I like to go to Miette nearly any time, although I must admit that I hate most of the public transit options to Hayes Valley. The underground is easiest for me but then I have to walk those skanky blocks of Market and Franklin. (This morning was especially ugly – redolent of urine and packed with sleeping vagrants, their belongings, wheelchairs and/or walkers). Regardless, you should go. Licorice travels well so I try to go before a trip. Or if you need further reason to visit, it’s less than a block from Blue Bottle.

I personally think an ideal trip to Hayes Valley includes a visit to Miette, a Blue Bottle macchiato and popping into Lavish, Flight 001 and/or Rag.