Bookmarked: Farm Blogs

One of the things I miss about belonging to a community supported agriculture (CSA) program was the newsletter that came with our bi-weekly produce box. The newsletter detailed all the little things that the farm had done to get our food to us that week — how the weather had impacted the crops, or how a broken tractor affected the farm’s ability to harvest in time. It put my food in a larger context.

But I’ve found that I can get that same insight into life on the farm by reading farm blogs.

I get to see what crops look like when they are newly planted and also when they are harvested. I can see how the animals are raised and what the animals eat. I get a true appreciation for the work involved in producing food.

Reading about what it takes to grow food and raise animals also offers a much-needed reminder that the farms we imagine, Old MacDonald’s farm from nursery school, diverse farms with animals on pasture still exist.

Here are some of my favorites:

Eatwell Farms

Eatwell is a truly diversified and progressive farm near Davis. Their blog is updated daily and covers everything from what they’re planting and harvesting to how they are irrigating their fields — even how the farm puts San Francisco’s compost to use.

Eatwell seems to always be working on something new to bring to the market and the blog is a way to hear about what we can look forward to. After all, this is the farm that brought locally grown wheat and a grinder (!) to the Ferry Building so we could grind our own flour. From the blog, I learned that the farm will have new grain CSA with fresh, local cornmeal, barley and other grains.

Riverdog Farms

I didn’t know much about Riverdog Farms until facing a 172 pound Riverdog hog at the Fatted Calf’s Basic Pig Butchery class. Riverdog doesn’t come to the San Francisco Ferry Building Farmers Market, but they do bring produce to the Saturday Berkeley farmers market.

Given the Fatted Calf class, I know firsthand how delicious Riverdog pigs can be but their Hog Blog showed me why their hogs taste so good: they’re on pasture, they eat well and their pigs are crossbred with a truly freakish looking wild boar.

Riverdog’s chickens have their own blog  Coop Scoop. The gorgeous pictures take you through a day in the life of a Riverdog chicken, from pecking around in the oat grass to their mobile super coop.

Ghost Town Farm

Eatwell and Riverdog are established farms with acres of agricultural land. They both have CSA programs and go to many farmers markets. But Ghost Town Farm is different: it’s in Oakland, in a truly urban environment. It’s not a business as much as it is a way of life for Novella Carpenter who details how she becomes a farmer on her blog. Her new book Farm City is on my summer reading list. I can’t wait to read more about how she got started, and what she’s learned about farming in a city.

Wise to the Demise

Last Saturday, instead of heading to the farmers market, we spent the day in Napa, at The Fatted Calf with a 172 hog.

It takes a lot for us to miss a market. We even went to the market the morning of our wedding (which was admittedly insane, but it sounded like a good idea at the time). But we couldn’t pass up The Fatted Calf’s first Basic Pig Butchery class (part 1).

I always want to learn more about where my food comes from, particularly the King of Meats: pasture-raised pork. And who better to learn from than our friends at The Fatted Calf?

The Fatted Calf is where we learned what real bacon tastes like (and if you think what you normally eat is tasty, hold on to your hats). Their pork chops smell like bacon as they cook. The Fatted Calf is where we ate a porchetta sandwich so delicious we still talk about it a year later, and it was also thanks, in part, to Fatted that we had our best meal of 2008 at Solociccia. (Taylor, one of the owners of The Fatted Calf, was one of Dario Cecchini’s first interns.)

The class wasn’t just an opportunity to learn from Taylor, it was also a way to be a more honest meat eater. I don’t want to hide the fact that meat is part of an animal.

It’s easy (too easy, in my opinion) to forget about the animal when you buy meat. When you look at a pork chop, you don’t see a pig. A steak doesn’t make most of us think about a cow.

But when you are breaking an animal down into its more recognizable cuts of meat, you get to see where your meat actually comes from, how it is part of a whole. Your pork chop was once connected to the ribs. That prosciutto had to be carefully separated from the center of the animal in order to cure correctly. That bacon? You can see it clearly when you divide the animal into its primal cuts (in fact, you can pretty much see it in the photo above).

Our class pig was a mix of wild boar and a heritage pork breed that had spent its life on pasture at Riverdog Farms. It was already split in half so there was no blood or organs to deal with. Taylor showed us how to separate each half into its three primal cuts, and then into the cuts that are more familiar to us meat eaters: tenderloin, ribs, chops, shoulder.

I’d taken cooking classes before where you learned to work a knife in small, concise ways to dice vegetables or mince garlic, but separating the half pig into those first three parts required totally different knife skills.

There’s a reason they call it breaking down a pig. We had to use real force – driving the knife down through the flesh until you broke through the skin and then, ideally, pulling the blade through the muscle one clean, powerful pull. To get through the bone, we traded in our knives for a hacksaw.

We removed the tenderloin and separated the ribs into spare ribs and baby back ribs. We separated the back leg and the shoulder blade. We sawed off the trotters and the feet (the front feet are called trotters, the back are called feet), and carefully cut removed the skin. (The Fatted Calf uses every part of the animal – the feet go into soups and stocks, the skin becomes cracklins).

We turned one side of the hog into a rib roast we had for lunch, while the shoulder and leg that we’d practiced on was ground into three kinds of sausage: British bangers (a poached sausage), a spicy Italian sausage called a chipolata, and a magnificent batch of crepinettes, sausage patties studded with roast hazelnuts and wine-braised figs.

We got to take home much of the meat we’d made that day– two packs of crepinettes per person and easily a pound each of the bangers and chipolata. Most of our haul went into the freezer, but Mr. WholeHog and I ate some of the chipolatas we’d made on Saturday afternoon for dinner that night (just how fresh can you get y’all).

That’s the kind of meat eater I want to be.

Rave: Rainbow Grocery

The longer I live in the East Bay, the more I miss Rainbow Grocery.

I’d expected to miss my beloved little BiRite, but I figured we’d find plenty of alternatives to Rainbow. After all, Rainbow is an old school health food store, and I figured that by moving closer to Berkeley, I’d be closer to the country’s original health food stores, probably still run by aging hippies.

But I’ve been sorely disappointed in the East Bay’s grocery stores. Even the famed Berkeley Bowl left me cold. Sure it has a huge produce section, but I get my produce at the farmers market, and aside from produce, I found little to distinguish the Bowl from any other grocery store.

I do appreciate that many East Bay markets carry local foods, but they’re often priced far higher than San Francisco stores do (or even the farmers markets). Straus milk at the grocery store closest to our East Bay home is twice what BiRite charges (and BiRite isn’t exactly known for their low prices). They also charge $11 for a pack of Primavera tamales that we can get at the farmers market for $8.

Of course, I could try to go to a different store that charges less, but most stores close right around the time that I’m getting off BART. (This could be another post: why do so many places in the East Bay close so early? Grocery stores close at 7pm on weekdays (earlier on weekends!) and even many restaurants close by 9pm. Is this because the E.B. is packed full of families and kids are put to bed by 9pm? Please explain.)

Rainbow is different: it’s open until 9pm; it stocks lots of local foods and it charges less for them. You’ll find food from some of the same farmers that come to the Ferry Building Farmers Market: produce from Knoll Farms, Rancho Gordo beans (in bulk and cheaper than anywhere I’ve seen), St. Benoit yogurt  (again cheaper!), raviolis from The Pasta Shop (in bulk!), Primavera tamales.

Rainbow’s bulk section is unparalleled. You can get nearly any grain, legume, dried pasta, chocolate chips, olive oil, vinegars, tea, even salt in bulk. Their bulk selection goes beyond food, though: you can also get organic liquid soaps, shampoos, conditioners, lotions, and laundry detergent. It made it easy to make ‘greener’ choices. We brought home far less packaging when we shopped there. Our pantry was transformed from disposable to reusable. We threw out less, too, by simply refilling a container of hand soap, for example, instead of buying a whole new bottle.

If you haven’t been to Rainbow yet, a few words of warning: it’s not Whole Foods. It’s a basically a warehouse, the floors are concrete, the cashiers may have dreads and aren’t likely to chat with you, they don’t sell any meat, and it’s in an absolutely hideous location (South of Market, under the freeway) — a place I hate to walk or drive.  But you should go there. I mistakenly avoided Rainbow for years for exactly these reasons, but now I struggle to live without it.

Beneath the Blue Suburban Skies

Living in the East Bay got a little better for me once I got a bike.

Mr. WholeHog has long wanted me to get a bike, but I just couldn’t imagine biking up and down San Francisco’s massive hills. Here in the flatlands, though, a bike makes sense and it’s also made some of the things that I haven’t liked about the East Bay seem like attributes, like how flat it is.

From the front windows of our SF apartment, I could see Sutro Tower and the fog pouring over Twin Peaks. Our back deck looked out towards Liberty Hill and the sky-scrapers of downtown.

From our East Bay home, the front windows simply show the house across the street. The back windows look into someone else’s backyard. It’s a little claustrophobic, but it certainly makes for easy biking. I hardly have to shift gears because there are so few inclines or declines. (Of course I haven’t specifically headed towards the hills, but that’s just it: here one can avoid hills. In SF, I’d simply be trying to avoid the biggest hills).

The East Bay is also more spread out than SF. Commercial areas are separated by large residential stretches and businesses tend to close earlier than I’m accustomed to (grocery stores that close at 7pm, say). As a result, we were driving more than we wanted to.  But now that we both have bikes, we’re getting back to a more car-free life.

The pace is slower, too. Pedestrians wait to cross on the light, even when there are no cars coming, and I never see anyone jay-walk. Cars will wait for the light to turn green rather than making a right-on-red.

Maybe because people are in their cars more or at home tending their gardens or their kids, I don’t see many people on the street. When we moved, I was reminded of the time my sister and her girlfriend visited SF from New York City and were baffled by the lack of people on SF’s city streets. Compared to NYC, SF was sleepy to them. I feel just like them at times in the East Bay. I peered out the windows endlessly when we first moved here, hoping to see someone walk by.

But deserted suburban streets and a more leisurely pace have helped me adjust to being back on a bike. I rarely have to maneuver around pedestrians or cars.

Living in the ‘burbs has given me time to get used to riding again, and time to gradually adapt to biking near moving vehicles — all skills I’ll need when we’re back in the City.

Police Blotters – May 2009

• 11:54 a.m. — A woman reported her green Honda was stolen Saturday by a man named Jimmy.
• 3:24 a.m. — A man reported his roommate was going crazy with a machete and he needed his lip sewn up. Officers found the roommate in bed asleep when they arrived.
• 10:21 p.m. — A caller from a business reported a naked man banging on the door. A man was arrested on suspicion of indecent exposure, battery, being under the influence of a controlled substance and battery on a peace officer.
• 10:19 a.m. — A caller reported finding human teeth buried in the yard.
• 11:55 a.m. — A caller reported a “cardboard cat” was in the middle of the road last night and the caller removed it.
• 8:48 p.m. —A man reported his son “took exception” to being asked to clean his room and hit him in the jaw.
• 5:20 p.m. — A man reported his neighbor came into his house uninvited while he was sleeping. The neighbor allegedly came in his room with a bottle of wine and asked him to open the wine. The man’s dog bit the neighbor “on the butt.”
• 5:56 p.m. — A man reported receiving third-hand information that a man was being held against his will and “only being fed KFC.”
• 2:04 p.m. – A caller reported someone driving a red Hyundai taking loose baby wild turkeys.
• 8:30 a.m. — A caller reported a blue and white cooler sitting in a planter. The caller was concerned it might be a bomb. The cooler was found not to be a bomb.
• 9:53 p.m. – An intoxicated female caller reported her roommate just got on a tractor and broke down the front door with it. The woman wanted the man arrested for ripping the porch off the house with the tractor and using it to break out double glass doors to her trailer. Officers told the woman the man owned the trailer and could do anything he wanted to it. {I can’t understand at all what’s happening in this entry at all, but there’s something so odd about tearing off a porch with a tractor that I had to include it.}
• 2:00 p.m. — A caller from a business reported finding a note on a trash can that said “I want to kill someone today.”
• 3:29 p.m. — A caller reported a dog had been stolen in October 2007.
• 8:03 p.m. — A caller reported a man with a collapsible baton following a couple.
• 10:10 p.m. — A caller reported his neighbor was playing his drums loudly.
• 5:15 p.m. — A caller reported an 8- or 9-year-old boy was driving a blue Honda around the parking lot. The vehicle then left, possibly driven by the boy’s grandmother. {Or, possibly driven by an 8-9 year old boy. No need to be alarmed.}
• 7:29 p.m. — A caller reported a man looking at his reflection in cars and screaming at himself.
• 9:18 a.m. — A caller reported a dog bite to the rear.
• 9:51 a.m. — A caller reported finding a full catheter bag on the caller’s property. The caller would take it to the hospital for disposal. {How does one lose a catheter bag? Actually, I’d rather not know.}
• 12:48 a.m. — A caller from a business reported a woman with dreadlocks tried to use an ID that wasn’t hers. The caller kept the ID. {I love it when they include such defining characteristics as dreadlocks or a mullet. In this area of California, both are quite common.}
• 6:30 p.m. — A caller wanted information as to the legality of Spanish Fly.