Cool As A Cucumber In A Bowl Of Hot Sauce

I hate feeling like someone is pushing their beliefs on me, so I try not to push my beliefs on others. But it’s hard to avoid talking about my beliefs at times, like when people ask me why I shop at the farmers market.

There are so many reasons I shop at the market and the incredibly fresh and delicious food is just one reason.

Another reason is that I believe supporting local farms helps keep California’s rich soil producing food, not housing developments.

I also believe that local farmers are focused on providing a quality, healthy product and farming in a way that is healthy for the farm workers, healthy for the land, healthy for me and keeps their farm in business.

I don’t believe food conglomerates are particularly focused on providing nutritious food. (If you want to feel truly jaded, read up about how Kraft sells something they call “guacamole” that has less than 2% avocado in it. Then try to think of what the remaining 98% of the product is made of). Like Kraft, many “food” companies produce “food products” that are full of preservatives, chemicals and hormones. The use of petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers to produce these “food products” further pollutes our water and our land.

But I know firsthand how easy it is to dismiss someone who talks this way as crazy. I graduated from UC Santa Cruz for Christ sake, I spent years with these sort of people. And the only thing I learned from them is that I never wanted to be like them.

So when asked why I shop at the farmers market, instead of focusing on the controversial or political reasons (after all, someone might have that Kraft “guacamole product” at home in their fridge!), I appeal to their greedy side. I talk about the food you can get at the farmers market that you can’t get anywhere else.

I know this approach works because as much as I believe that supporting farmers is an important thing to do, I also know that I’d be hard pressed to get up early and head down to the market every Saturday if it weren’t for Primavera.

Primavera has what I consider the best Mexican food in the City and probably in the bay area — and it’s only available at the market. Sure, you can buy their terrific tamales at local grocers (even at the local Whole Foods), but the market is the only place you can get a plate of chilequiles, or their better-than-Baja fish tacos, or that crazy delicious pork and peach chile relleno they served a few weeks ago. Don’t get me started on their beans. Or their agua frescas.

Here are some other items that are hard to find outside the farmers market and worthy of a trip to the market:

Happy Quail’s Pimientos de Padron – Thanks to Calvin Trillin for alerting me to the existence of padron peppers. Saute these peppers in olive oil until they blister and sprinkle with salt — you’ll have a snack that is delicious, occasionally spicy, and dead-easy to prepare.

Fatted Calf’s Tonno di Miale – The name refers to tuna and that’s because this pork is cured in olive oil as if it were tuna. It’s a happy day at the market when Taylor’s selling tonno although it means Mr. WholeHog will refuse to go out to eat. He only wants to be home with the tonno.

Fatted Calf’s bacon – You thought all bacon was delicious. You were wrong.

Della Fattoria’s polenta cake – I like this cake for breakfast, for dessert, or as a post-market snack as I had last Saturday. I like it plain, topped with fruit or with a scoop of ice cream. It’s versatile and delicious.

Other items I’ve already written about (and truthfully, every item above deserves its own post):

Rancho Gordo’s magical beans

Devoto Farm’s magnificent apples

Della Fattoria’s panforte

Mike D’s out Back and He’s Growing Onions

We could smell the garlic from the car as we turned off Highway 101 and onto the instantly more rural stretch of Highway 25.

Although I’d only been back in SF a week, I jumped at the chance to visit Mariquita Farm’s field in Hollister to take part in their tomato u-pick. Mariquita stopped coming to the Saturday farmers market this year — a serious blow to those of us who loved their produce — and their u-pick offered a rare chance to see their farm and get great deal on their produce ($0.50/lb for tomatoes).

Is there a happier place to be than in a field of tomato plants in September, knowing that in a few months this seasonal crop will be gone? And, is there a better place to welcome Fall than standing in a pumpkin patch? At Mariquita, there was both, only a wide dirt path separating the two, and we could transition from Summer to Fall simply by walking through the farm.

Being at the farm made me feel like a kid again, like the world was a rich, growing, vibrant place and I was lucky to be in it.

Considering the price of most heirloom tomatoes, I felt a little like John Sutter must have felt when he discovered gold in California, standing there surrounded by vines of heirloom tomatoes. There were tomatoes as far as you could see — red, orange, and green zebra heirlooms — some so large and heavy that they’d dropped right off the vine and begun to rot in the soil.

I started tearing huge, orange tomatoes off their vines, as if the u-pick was a competition that I would win if I picked the biggest, the ripest and the most tomatoes from the field, before Mr. WholeHog reminded me of the real challenge ahead of us: we had to eat everything we picked. It was a sobering thought, but it didn’t slow us down much.

Heirlooms had to be eaten soon, but San Marzanos could be turned into tomato sauce and enjoyed through the winter. And the San Marzano field held more potential sauce than we could imagine. It was thick with tomatoes, and we filled our shirts with them, depositing them in our basket and committing the rest of our weekend to making sauce for the winter.

The final haul was 25 pounds of tomatoes (for $12.50).

At home, we set up a mini-assembly line, blanching the tomatoes, cooling them in ice water and then pulling the peels off.

By the time we cooked the tomatoes down, we had 5 pints of sauce which is probably headed to the freezer. I say probably because we had pasta Sunday night, with Fatted Calf sausage and a cup or so of the fresh tomato sauce. It was so delicious that I feel like having it again for dinner tonight. I’m afraid that our winter supply tomato sauce may not last into October.

You in Your Autumn Sweater

I know the calendar says it’s Autumn, and SF certainly served up an Autumn dish last week with gray skies, cloudy weather and our first rainfall in ages, but I refuse to accept it.

Even though there’s much that I love about Autumn, I don’t feel ready yet. I dread how early it will get dark, how the night eats into my days. I rue the thought of spending another winter in our drafty, poorly insulated SF apartment. I grimaced at having to carry (and use!) an umbrella this past Saturday.

I try to remind myself about all that I like about Autumn – the crisp, clear days; pumpkin readily available in everything from ice cream to lattes to soaps; trips to the wine country to see the vines turn gold; my birthday – but none of that made me feel any better about the colder months ahead as we trudged home from Saturday farmers market in the rain.

But on Sunday, standing in a field of sugar pie pumpkins at Mariquita Farms, I started to feel downright excited about Autumn.

There would be pumpkins and pumpkin pies. There would be roasts from the Fatted Calf and Marin Sun is raising their first turkeys this year. We will drink more red wine. We will cook more, knowing that the best place to be on colder, darker nights in a drafty SF apartment is in front of the stove.

Fast & Fiber-rific

I try to eat as locally as possible, but there are few foods that I haven’t been able to find locally. Peanuts, for example, don’t appear to be grown in California but I can’t live without peanut butter (especially during apple season!).

But at least peanut butter is produced in the U.S., unlike my Irish oats. I don’t know of any steel-cut oats from California and that’s a shame because Irish oats make for a delicious, fiber-rific breakfast.

Aside from the food miles, the problem with steel cut-oats is cooking time. These oats usually require at least 30 minutes to cook, and my weekday mornings don’t come with an extra 30 minutes to spare.

But thanks to Mr. WholeHog’s mom, we have a nifty trick for making practically instant steel-cut oatmeal: we use a thermos. Before we go to bed, we combine boiling water and oatmeal in a thermos and cap it. In the morning, we open the thermos, pour out the perfectly cooked oatmeal and top as desired.

I usually crave oatmeal on cold mornings and this week marked the return of SF’s cold, cloudy mornings, but it’s worth eating on even the most blindingly sunny mornings, too, because this time of year, you can top it with the end of the season raspberries and chunks of crisp Fall apples.

Hotels Trains and Ships that Sail

In seven days, we traveled nearly 1,000 miles in a cherry red rented Pontiac. We traveled through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Washington DC and just barely into Maryland.

We amused ourselves on the long drives by reading aloud anything unusual or silly. A South Carolina river named Ashepoo. A Myrtle Beach restaurant called “Suck Bang Blow”. A sign for a returning military man in North Carolina that said “Welcome Home Daddy. I Can’t Wait to Meet You!”. A Virginia church announcing that “God is like Coca-Cola. He’s the Real Thing”.

For all my planning, I missed every possible Farmers Market. I tried to eat locally but there wasn’t much, just some Georgia shrimp and North Carolina bluefish and crab. I picked up some raspberries in Virginia only to find they were grown in Watsonville, CA.

There were times the trip was all I anticipated: the Savannah squares, shaded with trees thickly draped with Spanish moss and humming electrically with cicadas. The tall grass lined dunes of North Carolina leading down to the warm Atlantic. The summer thunderstorms.

My dad cringing at the price of a night’s stay in a respectable hotel. The whole family laughing until we had tears in our eyes when faced with a particularly awful meal.

The food: the barbecued pork, hoppin’ john, collard greens, corn pudding, and biscuits — my do I love biscuits! And the hot and humid weather which we handled pretty well, although after a particularly stifling night, my dad announced that he “was ready to go back to San Francisco where there was fresh air.”

And times it surprised me. I didn’t expect roadkill to consist of armadillo. I didn’t expect there to be so much vegetarian/vegan food for my sister — and for all of us. I’m so grateful for places like Brighter Day Foods in Savannah, GA, Tidal Creek Coop in Wilmington, NC and to Ellwood Thompson in Richmond, VA — all of which kept us from an all fried food diet.

I didn’t expect the Southeastern coast to be so alive. Under the placid surface of the Pimlico Sound in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, shells scurried back and forth, powered by little crab legs. And I didn’t expect the bugs: cockroaches, mosquitos at all hours of the day, even when we were on an island 2 and a half hours off the shore of North Carolina, 4 inch long spiders with huge webs. I was happy to leave them behind.

But then it was over. In a day, our little family of four split in two. The Pontiac went back to Hertz. My mom and sister continued along to New York City. Dad and I traded the Southeast’s humidity for the stale air of the airplane and then emerged into the longed-for fresh San Francisco air.

We cheered seeing Peet’s coffee at the airport. We loved being outside without needing bug spray. We inhaled the dinner Mr. WholeHog made for us — the Marin Sun steaks, the heirloom tomatoes. We lingered over Mr. WholeHog’s strong coffee.

We were home.

The Trip’s The Thing

I’m heading off on a vacation or what I hope will be vacation: a road trip with my parents and my sister up the Eastern edge of the country.

It’s a return to the trips of my childhood since all of our family “vacations” were road trips. This isn’t our first family trip since my sister and I left the nest (we took a shorter road trip around New England two years ago), but it may be the last.

Getting on the road again with my family is a bit of a gamble for me, since I didn’t particularly like our family car trips.

Our cars weren’t well equipped for the open road and neither was I. Since I get car sick from the slightest bend in the road and the family car overheated at the slightest incline, we spent a lot time on the side of the road, rather than on the road.

Many people have romantic ideas of a road trip, but I know the reality. I know what it’s like to blow a fan belt in Winnemucca, NV. Or to stand on the narrow shoulder on an exposed mountain pass because the car overheated.

Car trouble was at least a chance of pace, though. Mostly what I remember from our car trips was the boredom. Sitting in the back seat with ice chests tucked under my legs for hours. Rolling into a new town, hangry (that’s Tablehopper-speak for being so hungry you’re angry and my family frequently suffers from this ailment, especially on the road), and with no place to stay.

In hindsight, I can see that financially, road trips were my family’s only option. A nurse and a teacher with two kids and a mortgage can’t really afford to fly somewhere, stay in a decent hotel. So instead, we drove…and we camped.

Camping meant finding room for 4 sleeping bags, a decent-sized tent, and cooking equipment in the car (do I even have to say that it was a station wagon?). And it meant rolling into new towns dusty as the Joads and smelling like a camp fire.

This trip should be better.

It’s too far away to consider camping, Reed’s ginger chews help my car sickness, and our rental car is pretty much guaranteed to be in better shape than the old overheating station wagon.

But now, there are new concerns: my mother’s intense snoring, for example, and my father’s intense frugality. (While I like to try local restaurants when travelling, my dad would be perfectly happy to buy a 12-inch Subway sandwich and snack off that for 4 days straight). And then there’s my sister’s relatively recent refusal to eat animal products — and we’re not headed to a region known for their vegan cuisine.

I’m different, too. I’m used to living with Mr. WholeHog, who is decibels quieter than my family. I’m used to San Francisco’s 65 degree weather. (I’m seriously frightened of the heat and humidity we could encounter next week.) And I’m used to knowing where my food comes from.

Going on the road, for me, means having to let go of control and that doesn’t always come easily.

But it’s an adventure. As my grandfather famously said, “The trip’s the thing.”

We know where we are starting and ending our trip, but we’re leaving the middle stretch wide open. We hope to have some good meals, and assume we’ll have some crummy ones, too. We’ll drink weaker coffee, swim in a warmer ocean and breathe a thicker air. We’ll try to see how the other side of the country — geographically and politically — lives.

Trip Planning

I’m in the midst of trip planning. When I travel, I usually want to go to an independent bookstore, hit up a good bakery, and go to a farmers market, so I tend to do a fair amount of research before a trip and don’t rely too much on guidebooks.

Here’s some of what I look for:

Neighborhoods
When I visit a city, my focus is on neighborhoods. I want to see where and how people actually live. I think you can learn so much more about San Francisco by going to the Mission, Hayes Valley, the Inner Sunset, even the mediocre Castro, than just staying in Union Square. I like to think the same is true of other cities.

Wikipedia often has a description of neighborhoods. Otherwise, I look to find out where the independent bookstore is located or where there are restaurants that serve local food and start looking into those areas.

Independent Bookstores
A local, independent bookstore will tell you so much about a community, like what local people are reading and what books local booksellers recommend. Displays in an independent bookstore are for books that the bookseller believes in or thinks deserves the extra attention; displays in chain bookstores are essentially advertising space, paid for by the publisher.

This is not to say you should avoid all Barnes & Nobles and Borders, they are very handy when travelling because they have public restrooms.

To find an independent bookstore, Booksense.com has a store locator.

Farmers Markets
You might all expect farmers markets to be the same, but we’ve found that every market we’ve been to has something new or surprising to offer. The Portland, Oregon market, for example, had a surprisingly number of vegan baked goods. In Paris, you can buy a whole rabbit and have it skinned and gutted right in front of you.

I use Local Harvest to find U.S. farms, farmers markets and restaurants that buy from local farms.

Local Foods
I try to eat locally in San Francisco and I try to eat locally when I travel, too. The Eatwell Guide is a great resource for finding restaurants and stores across the country that support local farms.

Local Designers
As well as eating locally, I also want to shop locally. I don’t need to go to the GAP when there’s one in SF. I’d rather find a store that is selling goods made locally. Ideally, I want a store like Rare Device (a store I visited and loved in Brooklyn and that is now coming to SF!).

There’s no an easy way to find these type of stores that I know of. Usually I’ll start with a SF designer and see if their products are carried in other stores and then I google those stores.

Coffee
Coffee is an essential part of life and finding good coffee can be a major problem when traveling, as I wrote a little about here.

And Then We Came to Summer*

Some people are hoping for summer to end (an East Coast blogger recently wrote, “I’m so tired of summer”), and the media thinks Labor Day signals the end of the season.

But I’m here to tell you that in SF, summer is alive and well. It came to SF last week, bringing 70+ degree days.

We slept with only sheets and the windows open wide. We left our stuffy apartment and wandered out into the warm night. We waited in line for the best ice cream in town.

We sat on the deck at night and watched the moon pull up over Liberty Hill. We sat on the deck during the day, an especially quirky NY Times Sunday crossword puzzle spread across our knees.

We ate BLTs. We aged a white wine too long. We opened another bottle. We preserved the summer by blanching sweet summer corn and freezing it for when the season changes, when the fog comes back, even if it’s later this week. Even if it’s tonight.

We knew summer was here because even the Inner Sunset, our old ‘hood, was sunny and it’s usually one of the foggier areas of the City.

We returned to the places we loved in our old neighborhood, picking up breakfast (and lunch) from Arizmendi Bakery and going to the arboretum (now called Strybing Botanical Gardens). We found a clearing and spread out a blanket, half in sun, half in shade, and read the Sunday paper. We pretended we were on vacation.

But by Monday, we were anxious. The days were slipping by too fast and with too little to show for them. Work was approaching soon.

We were grateful, though, to be on the coast, at the beginning of our Indian Summer, and free from the panicked feeling that summer is over and we haven’t done enough.

*Inspired by Joshua Ferris

Police Blotters – August 2007

The New York Times caught on to the craziness of small town police blotters in this article (registration may be required). While they report on Nebraska’s nuttiness, I’ve got more from the foothills of California:

• At 11:03 a.m., firefighters responded to T– Court, where a man was trying to get toilet paper out of a tree by starting it on fire.
• At 10:53 p.m., a caller from the 12000 block of P— Trail reported multiple firearms had been stolen three and six years ago. Police determined that the person had been drinking.
• A 5:24 p.m. a caller from the 900 block of S– Way advised that radiation was burning her alive.
• At 12:04 p.m., a caller from Highway — at the C— off ramp reported a reckless driver in a blue El Camino. The driver had a mullet hair cut. An officer was advised.
• At 9:47 p.m., a caller from the hospital reported a 46-year-old mentally ill man with “scary hair” involved in an earlier traffic accident had left the hospital. He was off his medication and was actively hearing voices in his head.
• At 5:22 p.m., a caller from the 10000 block of W— Lane reported two people in a silver pickup truck with a flag on the hood were trying to sell meat.
• At 11:09 a.m., a man called from a gas station on the 2000 block of N—- to report a woman in a green Subaru tried to drive off with the pump nozzle in the vehicle. When the caller tried to get insurance information from her, she said, “Not today, dude,” and drove off.
• At 6:43 p.m., a woman called from the 10000 block of R– Drive to report her intoxicated roommate was in the yard, naked and out of control. Deputies arrested the 57-year-old man on suspicion of public drunkenness.
• At 11:55 p.m., a caller from a business on the 100 block of M– Street reported a woman in a nightgown was outside. She also was out there the previous night. Police arrested the woman on suspicion of indecent exposure and trespassing.