Et Pork

lPork is sweeping the nation! Spotted at the Eugene, OR Farmers Market:

The Scoop

My first job was at a frozen yogurt shop. Well, it was primarily a frozen yogurt place, but it also had a small ice cream selection and unfortunately, it also offered espresso. (This was before Starbucks had set up shop on every corner of the world and before anyone knew the term ‘barista’, but I still cringe at the memory of what I must have served, especially knowing what I know now about coffee.)

I lasted only one summer at that job, but it didn’t diminish my enthusiasm for frozen yogurt. In college, if I had time between classes, I went to Yogurt Delite. I made friends with the staff. I considered a medium cup a complete meal. And I guess I overdid it because post-college, frozen yogurt lost its appeal.

That is, until this summer, when I re-discovered frozen yogurt – homemade, er, Cuisinart-made frozen yogurt made with fresh summer fruit.

We got a basic ice cream maker and David Lebovitz’s recipe book, The Perfect Scoop, for Christmas last year so we could start making our own ice cream. But the frozen yogurt recipes were so much easier than the ice cream recipes, and most called for ingredients we usually had on hand: yogurt, sugar, lemon, and fruit.

I was hooked after our first batch of blackberry frozen yogurt, made with berries picked that day in Mr. WholeHog’s mom’s backyard. I blended the ingredients, strained it to remove the seeds, and poured it in the ice cream maker. By the time I got back from walking the dog with my dad, it was ready.

And it was delicious, particularly eaten outside on a warm summer night.

Since then, we’ve made peach frozen yogurt (a tad more work since you have to cook the peaches down before blending), and made our best batch strawberries from the u-pick. Even Mr. WholeHog who doesn’t like strawberry ice cream thought the frozen yogurt was outrageously good.

Homemade frozen yogurt, as you might imagine, is nothing like the swirl of soft-serve you’ll find around town. But it’s still a delite.

Another Time or Place

Since San Francisco doesn’t have normal seasons, I often rely on the farmers market to let me know when the seasons change. I know it’s Fall when the peaches are gone and only Bay Area farmers bring tomatoes.

In SF, Fall takes longer to arrive. This time of year is about as close to summer as we get. Our days are more reliably warm and even or evenings have been fairly mild. But there is still a hint of Fall in the air, a feeling that even the warmest days won’t be stifling.

We began to get a glimpse of Fall around SF this past week. The gingko trees that line many of San Francisco’s streets have started to turn, their fan-shaped leaves changing from green to gold.

First Sign of Fall in the City: Gingko leaves on Eureka St.

The gingkos are about all we get in terms of foliage in the City, and while lovely, they pale in comparison to the vibrant Fall colors you see in the wine country this time of year.

In Sonoma this past weekend, it was a shock to see how dramatically Fall arrives. The trees seemed on fire, their leaves a mix of bright oranges and deep reds (“Those trees don’t look real,” one of my cousins announced in awe), and the grape vines turned the color of cabernet.

Rave: Tamra Davis Cooking Show

You can buy a ticket to see your favorite band perform, but how often do you see your favorite band in real life?

Beastie Boys fans are lucky. Thanks to Tamra Davis and her online cooking show, we don’t have to resort to stalking the Beastie Boys in order to see what their lives are like off stage.

The point of the show isn’t the B-Boys, of course, it’s cooking. Most of the meals Tamra prepares for her family and friends are organic, mostly vegetarian (some include fish) and kid-friendly. But while I’ve picked up some new recipes from the show, I admit that the real reason I tune in is for the glimpse of my favorite band in their natural habitat: whether its backstage on their European tour or on vacation, eating fresh fish in Hawaii or making crepes in the Hamptons with their famous friends. The whole Beastie clan shows up for a barbecue in at Mike and Tammy D’s place in Malibu. Ad-Rock hangs out with Mike’s kids while MCA makes lemonade and Tamra prepares grilled fish sandwiches.

I should warn you that if you aren’t a Beastie fan, you may not be as enthralled with the show as I am. (I know Mr. WholeHog finds it boring.) But for me, even in the episodes that don’t include the Beasties are worth watching to see woman try to balance all the things she loves in her life — filmmaking and motherhood, cooking and yoga, good music and good friends.

Bookmarked: Wedding websites

I committed early on not to let wedding planning get out of hand. And so far at least, I’ve been mostly successful. I haven’t looked at a single wedding or bride-related magazine,  but confess that I have spent more than my share of time on websites devoted to weddings.

It started for practical reasons (I swear!): an annoying part of trying to find a wedding location is that most places are only shown Monday through Friday, 9am-5pm. Which is to say, during work hours. I tried to get around this. One Saturday in June, I attempted to peek in the windows of a place only to find that — duh! — there was a wedding going on.

So to avoid taking time off work or crashing someone else’s wedding, I turned to the internet. I googled. I flickr-ed. And I discovered a plethora of wedding websites that posted pictures of other people’s weddings, giving people like me the chance to see pictures of possible locations while sitting at our desks, pretending to be hard at work.

I should have stopped there, but I didn’t. Instead, I kept looking at wedding websites, bookmarking ideas and pictures as I bounced from one wedding website to another.

Eventually, I stumbled on A Practical Wedding, one of the few places on the web to escape the Marital Industrial Complex (Meg, the writer behind A Practical Wedding, calls it the Wedding Industrial Complex, or WIC). She highlights atypical weddings — picnic weddings, brunch weddings and dinner party weddings — and she celebrates couples who do what works for them, whether that’s having a budget wedding or not.

But what keeps me coming back to A Practical Wedding are Meg’s posts about planning her own practical wedding. Often, she writes about something I’m also thinking about or struggling with, like her post about making decisions that are “not always the cheapest option, but it’s the option that keeps us sane.” Just reading this blog has helped me feel sane (so far) through this strange rite of passage.

I may think that Mr. WholeHog and I are planning an untraditional event, but Off Beat Bride shows me just how untraditional weddings can be. The brides here often don’t wear white, they may have a goth or punk theme, and many are “inked”, that is, tattooed. I don’t necessarily relate to all the weddings featured on Off Beat Bride, but I love (and often need) the encouragement to take liberties with the whole wedding concept and to make our wedding whatever we want it to be.

Harvest

It was Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that initially inspired me to start putting aside some summer foods for the winter months by canning or freezing.

To be honest, canning scares me. I’m not the most thorough person. I tend to cut corners and do things a little, um, half-assed, and canning just seems like the kind of thing that requires more precision and attention that I can give.

But freezing is something even I can do. It’s easy — no pots of boiling water or tongs needed — and safer since there’s less of a chance of that pesky botulism developing.

U-picks have been particularly motivating for us since we inevitably pick more than we can eat. Our apple picking trip yielded a few pints of homemade applesauce, awaiting those dark days when apples are out of season. Thanks to our trip to Swanton Berry Farm, we put aside some berries, too.

But the most space in our freezer is devoted to tomatoes.

Much of the 25 pounds (!) of tomatoes we picked Mariquita Farm’s u-pick last year ended up cooked down into sauce and frozen. We ate that tomato sauce all winter long, with rapini and sausage on polenta, or on whatever pasta we had on hand.

Sadly, we couldn’t make it to any of Mariquita’s tomato u-pick days this year.  Instead, we picked up some 20 lbs of San Marzanos at one of their drop-off nights instead of visiting the farm and spent a Friday night cooking it down.

So while the fall usually brings San Francisco’s most summery weather, in the WholeHog home, it’s harvest time.