Up From the Frying Pan into the Fire

It’s no secret that I’m a meat eater. After all, my love of pork — of nearly any meat that comes from the pig –  is one of the reasons this blog is named Whole Hog. But I’m particular about the meat I eat. I try to eat only meat from animals that lived a natural life, on pasture, with room to roam and animals that are fed food that they can actually digest.

It’s not always easy, of course. As Food Inc and The Omnivore’s Dilemma point out, it’s surprisingly (and intentionally) difficult to find out where our food comes from these days. Plenty of feedlots call themselves farms or ranches. The words farm and ranch conjure up images of animals on pasture, but that’s not often the reality.

To me, it’s worth the extra effort and extra cost (feedlots are subsidized by the government, pasture isn’t) to eat pasture-raised meat. It means that I don’t have to choose between eating vegetarian nutloaf and E.coli-tainted beef. And I don’t have to worry about the latest beef recall, or inadvertently dosing myself with hormones and antibiotics via my dinner. Avoiding factory farms is also a ‘greener’ choice: factory farms can produce as much waste as a small city.

Even better, perhaps, pasture-raised meat is really delicious.  If you’re a pork lover like me, there’s simply no comparison between pasture-raised pork and industrial-raised pork. Try it. You’ll see. Here’s how:

Finding Pasture-Raised Meat

The simplest way to find pasture-raised meat is to shop at your local farmers market. You’ll get to learn what pastured-raised meat is available in your area and meet the rancher and ask questions. A good local market can also help. BiRite has introduced me to new providers.

Or, use online resources, like Eatwell Guide, Eat Wild (a guide to grass-fed meats), and Certified Humane to find local ranches, grocery stores and restaurants that use more responsibly-raised meats, nationwide.

If you’re in the Bay Area, here are some farms that raise animals on pasture:

• Marin Sun Farms* (eggs, chickens, beef, lamb, pork, goat)
  This diversified farm in Point Reyes farms takes a Joel Salatin approach to farming. They do farm tours so you can see firsthand how their animals live.
• Devil’s Gulch* (pork, rabbit, lamb)
• Soul Food* (chickens, eggs)
• Prather Ranch/Range Brothers (beef, pork, lamb, chicken, lard)
  The animals aren’t raised in the Bay Area, but Prather has a shop at the Ferry Building and comes to many Bay Area farmers markets. Prather has their own USDA inspected slaughterhouse.
• Clark Summit Farms* (chicken, eggs, beef, pork)
• Five Dot Ranch* – (beef) Available at Napa’s Oxbow market
• TLC Ranch (eggs*, lamb, pork)
• Pozzi* (lamb)
• Watson* (lamb)
• Gleason Ranch* (chicken)

*Available at BiRite Market in SF.

Salamis, Sausages and Prosciutto from pasture-raised animals:

• Fatted Calf (salumi, sausage)
  Their store is in Napa, but you can also  available at the Saturday SF Farmers Market (ferry building) and the Berkeley Farmers Market.
• Boccolone (salumi, prosciutto)

You Tell Me Summer’s Here

My annual Tahoe trip is really my summer. Sure, San Francisco has Indian Summer. In September and October, it’s usually warmer or at least less foggy. But the key word is usually. Even in September and October, sunshine isn’t guaranteed, it’s just more likely.

In Tahoe, though, I can rely on a daily dose of sunshine (with occasional breaks for balmy thunderstorms). It’s one of the few times when I get repeated, back-to-back hot days, days when I wear sandals every day and never carry around a jacket “just in case” (as required in unpredictable SF).

In Tahoe, showers come at the end of the day to wash off the sweat, the sand and the sunscreen, rather than in the morning to prepare for work.

Even the nights were warm so we ate dinner outside and slept with the windows open and the fans going strong. This year, we even took nighttime swims under the stars (the low lake level made for relatively warm water).

But as much as I loved my dose of sunshine, I’m not used to unrelenting heat anymore, and at times, it was too much. I missed the ocean breeze we get in the Bay Area.

And I missed California produce while I was in Tahoe. Finding California-grown produce was surprisingly hard near the state line. If it weren’t for the Tuesday South Lake farmers market, it’d be a food desert.

I walked through the supermarkets in disbelief, asking myself, “how do people live here?!” The local Raley’s had Straus milk and yogurt, but not a single California-grown tomato. The Chilean/Canadian/Mexican tomatoes they did carry were hard as rocks.

Now that I’m back home, I’m back to fresh food and strong coffee, but summer’s gone. I came back to Mark Twain’s “coldest winter”: the fog hasn’t lifted for days, and the wind is cold and damp. People on BART have been wearing sweaters, and a friend turned her heater on this week.

As I looked for my wool coat this morning, I found myself asking the same question: How do people live here?!

In Tahoe, we stayed outside as long as possible, but now, I rush to get inside and out of the wind. Last weekend, we were eating corn salad, but I’m looking at recipes for corn soup.

Without the sunshine filtering into the room in the morning or the sound of my relatives downstairs, it’s been harder to wake up. Our little Oakland house seems incredibly small after being in the huge cabin, and summer seems a long way away.

Get It Together

Even though Tahoe is relatively close by, we’ve been preparing for the trip. Instead of worrying about luggage restrictions or 3 ounce liquids, though, we’re focused on food.

Mr. WholeHog and I try to bring beer, wine, food and coffee up to Tahoe with us. It’s a way for us to contribute since my aunts all pay for the cabin, and it’s a way for us to insure that we don’t end up eating feedlot meat, or drinking supermarket coffee or Costco-brand beer.

Tahoe has grocery stores, of course, but that requires leaving the cabin, driving  on Highway 50, and mingling with the oft-trashy South Lakers — all of which I try to avoid as much as possible.

I’d also rather avoid most supermarkets since they doen’t tell you anything about the food: where is the meat from? where were the vegetables grown? And if last year was any indication, supermarket produce can be abominable. Last year, produce was literally rotting on the shelf.

South Lake does have a farmers market (we went last year but won’t be in town for the Tuesday market this year) and there is also a decent meat option:  we found Overland Meat Company a few years ago, thanks to the Eatwell Guide. But while the meat is free of hormones and antibiotics, it’s generally not pasture-raised. Aside from meat, Overland also sells a pretty good salsa, cheeses and some good wines.

Here’s some of what we’re bringing to the lake this year:

1 jar Massa almond butter (in an effort to avoid feedlot lunch meat or Salmonella-infused peanut butter)

2 packs of Primavera tamales

2 lbs Rancho Gordo beans

2 packs Fatted Calf Mexican Chorizo

2 lbs Blue Bottle Coffee (much of it made into coffee concentrate by Mr. WholeHog)

5 lbs Prather Ranch ground beef

2 Gleason Ranch chickens

6 bottles of wine

12 Arizmendi english muffins

Packed Like Sardines in A Tin

In just a few days, I go to Tahoe for my family’s annual vacation and I just can’t wait. I spend much of the year looking forward to Tahoe the way some people look forward to Christmas. How often do you get a chance to vacation somewhere beautiful with people you adore?

Tahoe is a true vacation. The goal of each day is to do as little as possible. There are no museums to visit or sights to see. We just eat, read, swim, play cards, watch the sunset, rinse and repeat.

The challenge at Tahoe is sharing space with 20 people since we cram as much of our ever-expanding family into one giant cabin. Cabin really isn’t the right word for the place, since it’s not at all rustic. Cabin also implies a smaller place and this one is massive. Initially built as a duplex, it has five bedrooms, five bathrooms, assorted sleeping alcoves, and two living rooms.

But even though there’s plenty of room for our big group, it’s still odd to go from living with the quiet Mr. WholeHog to living with a pack of my very loud relatives. And it’s strange to live with my parents again, and also my aunts, uncles, cousins, and now, increasingly, cousin’s kids. It is, as my grandfather used to say, an unusual combination.

We may be family, but we don’t all live the same way. We don’t have the same schedules. Some of us sleep in until noon (Brendan), while others (Mary Jo) get up early and, inexplicably, shuffle cards.

We eat different things as the extra-crowded fridge attests (low-fat milk and soy milk, pasture-raised meats and Oscar Meyer bologna). We have different ideas of what is clean and what is dirty, what should be recycled and what should be thrown away, what is too noisy and what is just right.

Even in the extra-large cabin, we get in each others’ way, especially in the kitchen where if you open the fridge, whoever is at the sink is stuck in the kitchen, and whoever wants to get to the garbage, say, has to wait. There’s also never enough hot water for all the showers, so we learn to brace ourselves for the shock of cold water in the shower, as someone else siphons off the hot water.

But mostly, living together is what makes Tahoe so fun. Everyone wanders down to the breakfast table when they wake up and we spend hours there, visiting with each new arrival and trading sections of the newspaper, while someone inevitably burns the toast. Often, we’re still at the breakfast table when lunch time rolls around, playing cards or deep in conversation.

Every night, after dinner, we all head down to the beach to watch the sun set behind the mountains and take our yearly family picture. From the picture, you can’t tell who had the cold shower, or who was woken up by the sound of shuffling cards. Instead, it just looks like a happy, if unusual, combination.

Rave: Oakland! video

“It’s crappy here, and that makes it authentic!”  That pretty much sums it up.

If you go to youtube, you get to read whiny posts by Oaklanders who are put out by this video. I should have expected it since people in Oakland get so defensive about being negatively compared to San Francisco, and yet, they repeatedly compare Oakland to San Francisco, striving to find ways that Oakland is “better”.

When  we moved here, almost everyone we met mentioned was quick to point out that “Parking is easier here than in SF”, or “It’s warmer here than SF.”  This actually made me start to believe Getrude Stein’s famous quote “there’s no there there” in Oakland.  Parking and warm weather don’t make a city. Sacramento also has easy parking and warm weather. So does Modesto.

What makes Oakland special? What makes an Oaklander love where they live (aside from that it’s not SF)? I’m still trying to figure it out.

Happy Ever After in the Market Place

People probably think we’re nuts for religiously shopping at the farmers market each Saturday and carrying home nearly all of our groceries on public transit. (Although I bet seeing Food, Inc. will inspire others to do the same). But rather than scale back, we’ve got to a point that one trip to the farmers market isn’t enough anymore.

So we’re going to more markets, at times, to two markets in one day: taking BART to our usual SF Ferry Building Farmers Market in the morning, and then biking to the Berkeley Farmers Market in the afternoon. Or, more often, we go to two markets in a weekend: the SF market on Saturday and then over to the Temescal market on Sunday.

Going to both SF and East Bay markets gives us the ability to still shop and visit with our Ferry Building market favorites (and still get our Primavera fix for the week), while also at least trying to be a part of the E.B. farmers market community. Plus, we get to try out farms and producers that don’t come to the Ferry Building markets, like Riverdog, Highland Hills and Phoenix Pastificio.

Multiple markets also make it easier to get summer’s delicate fruit home in one piece. I don’t have to worry about swishing peaches or tomatoes in our already packed bags. Other seasons have such hearty, durable produce, but summer peaches, nectarines, tomatoes, and berries all need to be somewhat protected to survive the trip home on BART or on our bikes.

Given all that’s in season at the market in the summer, it also makes the difficult decision of what to buy a little easier. I can pass up the strawberries on Saturday, knowing I can get them at another market, if needed.

Mostly, though, going to more markets has just become a necessity for us, given all we are now buying locally. It’s not just produce we’re hauling home, it’s eggs, cheese, butter, meat, bread, flour, rice, and beans. Making multiple trips keeps our loads slightly lighter, especially in this super-abundant season. It allows us to buy a few pounds of flour or the heavy three pounds (!) of Primavera’s masa for tortillas or a watermelon, say, because we know we can pick up other items at another market later in the week.

In a Bowl of Hot Sauce

I was shamed into making my own salsa by a post of Steve Sando’s a few years ago on his Rancho Gordo blog. Why did people buy salsa, he asked, when making it was so easy?

So using his instructions and recipes as a starting point, I started making salsa. I don’t own a comal so I just use a cast iron skillet. Instead of a molcajete, I use a food processor or a blender. The results aren’t award-winning, but when so many supermarket salsas taste solely of cooked tomatoes or garlic, it’s not hard to make something decent. Even the salsas I’ve thrown together with the least care — no blackened chiles, or charred tomatillos — have turned out fine, really.

Now, I looked forward to making salsa every year (although I admit if Eatwell Farm ever brings back their heirloom tomato salsa, I might abandon my amateur salsa making).

But the trouble is that tomatoes come into season here in the Bay Area in early summer (in late winter, if you’re willing to eat hot house tomatoes), while jalepenos and other hot chiles, essential for salsa-making, don’t arrive until mid-summer.

Each week, I’ve been stopping by Happy Quail, a Palo Alto-based farm that focuses almost exclusively on peppers hoping for hot salsa-making peppers.

At its peak, the Happy Quail stand is completely covered with peppers of all shapes and sizes, and all different ranges of heat. But this early in the season, they have mostly frying peppers, like my beloved padrons, and Basque peppers. Today, there were a few new peppers at the stand (the long light green ones in the photo above) and I was hopeful, but the people at the stand said they weren’t very hot. I bought a few anyway, in hopes that even a mild salsa will satisfy, will hold me over until the hot peppers arrive.

But then I noticed that Catalan Farms, a farm that stands out both for being woman-owned, and for growing such a huge variety of produce, all organically, had jalepenos. So I bought some of those, too, and they made for a spicy tomatillo salsa this Fourth of July.

(The salsa recipe can be found in Steve Sando’s terrific Heirloom Beans cookbook. I’m saving a few of the jalepenos to make another Heirloom Beans recipe for taqueria-style pickled jalepenos and carrots later this week.)

Police Blotters – June 2009

• 2:14 p.m. — A caller reported the theft of a tortoise. The tortoise was found to have walked down to the lake.
• 3:07 p.m. — A man reported he was assaulted by his neighbor after their dogs began fighting. He said the neighbor’s dog attacked his dog and when he kicked the dog to stop the attack, the dog attacked him. He said he defended himself by nearly choking the dog unconscious. The neighbor then hit him in the back with a full wine bottle to get him to release his chokehold. He did not need medical attention, but said the neighbor told him he was going to get a shotgun. Neither party wished to press charges.
• 8:18 a.m. — A caller reported someone put what could be yogurt all over a vehicle. {Key words: “could be”.}
• 6:45 p.m. — A caller reported a man stumbling into traffic. He was found to not be drunk. {Just clumsy?}
• 8:16 a.m. — A woman reported someone had been entering her residence, eating food and making phone calls.
• 7:12 p.m. — A woman reported she had been pretending to call the police because her 5-year-old son was acting bad and the boy then called 911. He told the dispatcher he called because “Mommy was lying.” He was advised on the proper use of 911.
• 11:43 a.m. – A caller reported a neighbor who was not mentally ill was leaving incoherent and very religious phone messages to local residents.
• 10:42 p.m. – A caller reported someone threw a dummy onto the road, causing drivers to swerve.
• 9:10 p.m. – A caller reported that she was out for about four to five hours and when she returned, her shower was running with hot water.
• 2:37 p.m. — A man called for a welfare check on his wife. Her son called to tell him she was acting crazy and talking about God and ponies. A neighbor called at 9:06 p.m. to report she was flipping out, on the neighbor’s property, banging on the ground and calling for angels. The woman was arrested on suspicion of disturbing the peace.
• 11:18 a.m. — A caller reported two small girls climbing the scaffolding behind a movie theater. The two women were employees.
• 6:41 p.m. — A caller reported neighborhood kids stuck plastic forks, tines up, in the lawn.
• 8:25 p.m. — A caller reported a neighbor was yelling and vomiting on the front porch. He was found not to be drunk.
• 3:07 a.m. — A caller reported loud karaoke. Two men agreed to turn it down.
• 9:10 p.m. – A caller reported someone broke into her house through the bathroom window and took her daughter’s purse and pair of shorts.
• 11:29 p.m. – A caller from the emergency room reported a woman’s son bit the tip of her thumb off.
• 4:30 p.m. — A caller from a business reported a man with no shoes had come in twice to ask for a Bible and was scaring customers.
• 10:40 p.m. — A caller from a business reported a “karate guy” was causing a disturbance.
• 2:20 p.m. — A woman reported finding a rectangular black sheet in her car after leaving it unlocked. It was found to be an insert from her reusable grocery bag that fell out in her car.
• 6:09 p.m. — A caller reported a drunken uncle was refusing to leave. He then left, but returned at 7:30 p.m. and was ringing the doorbell. He agreed to leave and was waiting for someone to pick him up. {I love the description of a drunk uncle, as if everyone’s got one who periodically shows up and refuses to leave.}
• 9:37 a.m. — A caller from a business reported a singing man was bothering the customers.
• 11:17 p.m. – A caller complained of a loud wedding. The home was called and the nuptials were calmed.