Rave: Bourdain in SF

Saturday, March 21st, was a typical Saturday for Mr. WholeHog and I: we went to the Ferry Building Farmers Market and lined up at Primavera.

I’d vaguely noticed a camera man as we walked back to Primavera’s stand but I didn’t think much of it. It’s not that unusual to see TV cameras at the market, often following a local chef or personality around while they shop.

But the man at the front of the line for Primavera looked familiar to me, even from the back: he was tall, long-legged, and thin. He wore jeans and a leather blazer. I elbowed the Mr., “It’s BOURDAIN,” I whispered.

At least, I think I whispered. I’m one of those idiotic people that gets a little batty in the presence of celebrity. For all I know, I screamed, “IT’S BOURDAIN!”. And then I started grinning foolishly and openly staring in my typical, ridiculous celebrity-sighting way. (I’m also a terrible celebrity spotter. Walking on Irvington Place in New York City, Mr. WholeHog said to me, “Did you see who that was?”. I guessed: “Patti Smith?”. It turned out it was Ric Ocasek, from The Cars.)

Picture from The Travel Channel

Seeing Bourdain was something special, though. I wasn’t just seeing the author of Kitchen Confidential at my farmers market, I was seeing Bourdain at Primavera, one of my favorite stands at the market. I was seeing someone I admire as a writer, sure, but more so as an eater, appreciating some of my very favorite food.

Primavera clearly has plenty of admirers at the market. There are lines nearly every week for their food. We’ve seen local chefs and food bloggers in line from time to time.  But maybe because Primavera is only available at the Saturday market or perhaps because Primavera is based out of Sonoma, not SF,  it gets surprisingly little attention from local media. (The SF Chronicle  remains sadly focused on the entirely mediocre La Taqueria).

So it was gratifying to me that Bourdain was there with his camera crew for No Reservations, his show on the Travel Channel. It initially gave me some additional confidence in his show, too: if he found Primavera in SF that means his finds in other cities may be just as good. (Although watching the San Francisco episode of No Reservations this week, I wasn’t impressed with the other places he went in SF).

I have to say that I didn’t wholeheartedly approve of Bourdain’s order. He went with the tamales — which are arguably Primavera’s specialty. Their website, after all, is Primaveratamales.com. Primavera’s tamales are terrific and worth trying, especially for an initial visit.

But as someone who eats at Primavera nearly every week, I know that the tamales are always on the menu, while the weekly specials only come around a once a month or,even a few times a year. (I’m still waiting for them to bring back the enchiladas with poached eggs Mr. WholeHog ate one Saturday when I was out of town in 2007).

At Primavera, you order whatever is under the chilequiles on the menu and above the tamales. It may be fish tacos, tlycoyos, panuchos, carnitas tacos, tacos al pastor, squash blossom and ricotta quesadillas. On the Saturday Bourdain ate at Primavera, albondigas were on the menu. Albondigas are meatballs. Primavera serves them in a tomato sauce with Primavera’s perfect beans and tortillas. When Primavera has albondigas on the menu, it’s like hitting the jackpot.

So it was a clear mistake to order tamales, even delicious tamales, when you have the option of meatballs. But you know, I’ll let it pass this time. It’s clear Bourdain will be back. He loves San Francisco, as he wrote in his take on San Francisco’s food.

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.

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.

And On Back to Springtime

Maybe it’s all the sunlight and the shock of springtime greenery after these (admittedly mild) winter months, or maybe it’s that wedding planning is very soon going to turn into wedding-happening, but these days, I feel like I’m coming out of a fog, as if I’ve been hibernating and am just now starting to be back in the world.

What happened to February? I asked Mr. WholeHog recently. I don’t  remember it. It passed in a flurry of rain and wedding invites, days spent unpacking in the East Bay and desperately missing SF. I realized how overwhelmed I’d become when my mom said, “The wedding is going to be fun”. Until that point, I hadn’t  allowed myself to even think about it being fun. It was just something that needed to be done.

But I’m happy to say that today, at least, I feel giddy. Maybe it’s that all the wedding stuff is nearly done and I feel lighter without that to-do list haunting me. Some people talk about being depressed after their weddings but at this point, I am so looking forward to getting back to our life: to hikes and camping, to cooking and trying new restaurants, to exploring new neighborhoods and planning our fall trip overseas.

Or maybe I’ve got spring fever. The trees on my walk to BART have transformed from skeletal to lush. Certain blocks in our tree-filled neighborhood glow with new-growth-green. There’s just no way to watch plants seemingly erupt from the dirt and trees explode into blossoms not see this time of year as a fresh start.

The farmers market is always my best seasonal reminder but each year, I’m surprised at how early spring produce arrives. In early March, when the trees were still bare, the market was full of  asparagus, fava beans, artichokes and pea shoots. Amazingly, this weekend brought the first strawberries of the year.

With the move and the wedding, our meals have often been simple, but all this bright new produce has led us back to some of our favorite recipes from one of our very favorite cookbooks, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Truly one of the cheeriest-looking dishes is Zuni’s take on carbonara: those bright Marin Sun eggs make for such a sunny dish, speckled with Fatted Calf bacon and green fava beans (instead of peas). With the asparagus, we turned once again to Zuni for the super easy pancetta, asparagus and rice soup. The artichoke recipe takes the most time but it’s worth it: halved ‘chokes are massaged with salt and oil and nestled in a bed of yellow onions, lemon, mint and olives.

Of course, the promise of free time and the good food of springtime help boost ones mood but let’s be honest: a healthy dose of giddiness is just a drink away. And we’ve been doing a lot of drinking these past few weeks (all necessary wedding preparation, I can assure you).

May I suggest that if you are going to procrastinate on one part of your wedding, put off deciding on your wine. We’ve spent many of these pre-wedding nights getting looped on wine. (A taste is not nearly enough to make a decision. You’ll want to know if you like this wine after one glass, and what about after two?). One night, we ate pizza with sparkling wine. I loved that.

The extra wine consumption feels indulgent and decadent and yet the wedding makes this one of the few times in life when drinking can also be considered productive. How can you decide what wines to bring to your wedding unless you try them? So try them all. Try them often. And try them late.

California All the Way

Yet another reason I love California: locally grown tomatoes in February!

Bruins’ Farms is able to grow such perfect looking tomatoes in the midst of winter because they use greenhouses.

It’s a little gratuitous, I know. Especially since there are lots of  things to eat at the market. With all these carrots and greens and even early fava beans, we don’t particularly need tomatoes yet. But I bought a few because when a recipe calls for a can of tomatoes, I love being able to use fresh, California-grown tomatoes instead.

Something To Grow On

It’s legume city at the farmers market these days. There are more green beans than I knew existed: Romano beans, jade beans, Kentucky wonder beans, Blue Lake beans. And there’s always something to shell whether it’s cannellini beans freed from their soft white pods or the gorgeous magenta and white mottled cranberry beans.

A week ago, I spotted a new legume at the market. Catalan Farms had a box of very small green pods. The beans looked almost like uncured olives or tiny green acorns.

I asked about them and learned that these mini pods hold garbanzo beans or chick peas.

Now I’ve eaten plenty of garbanzo beans before but nearly every one came from a can. I’d never considered what a garbanzo bean looked like before it was canned, and although it’s called either a bean or a pea, I never imagined it in a pod.

This is what I love about the farmers market — the discovery of what food really is, what it looks before its processed, and the work required, at times, to make a plant into food.

Work is the operative word for garbanzo beans. I generally find shelling beans oddly satisfying, even double-shelled fava beans. But garbanzos were quite labor intensive and tested my patience. There was a lot of shelling for a pretty meager pile of beans.

The un-shelled garbanzos weren’t uniform in color or size. Some of them looked as I’d expected, while others were especially tiny, green colored instead of tan, and wrinkled like a brain.

I just boiled them until they seemed done and perhaps I should have followed more of a recipe because I didn’t really love the taste. Only the beans that looked like fully formed garbanzos actually tasted like garbanzos (if you happen on fresh garbanzos, buy the more yellow-y pods, not the bright green ones).

But I loved what I learned from the process and I’ll never look at a can of garbanzo beans the same again.

Step From the Table When I Start to Chop

I try to eat only pasture-raised meat. It’s easy, for the most part. I buy meat at the farmers market or at grocery stores like BiRite, and when I go out to eat, I aim for restaurants that serve quality (ideally local) meat.

But Mexican food is a real challenge for me because most taquerias aren’t focused on quality ingredients (the few that do aren’t very good) and I simply can’t live without carnitas. So I took matters into my own hands. If the taquerias weren’t going to make carnitas from humanely-treated pigs, I’d learn to make it myself.

Most recipes I found included the one ingredient I didn’t want to see — lard. I could understand lard for baking pies or biscuits. After all, isn’t Crisco just an industrialized version of lard? But for some reason, cooking meat in lard just seemed akin to deep-frying a cheeseburger.

I think it speaks to my love of carnitas that there is currently a tub of lard in my fridge and I used some of this lard to make my first carnitas.

If you’re looking for lard, Prather Ranch keeps theirs in a refrigerated case. (This case has a picture of a happy family on the side of it that says “They’re happy because they eat lard!”). Marin Sun Farms also has lard, although you may need to special order it.

The carnitas was pretty simple to make and while it wasn’t the best carnitas I’ve ever had, it was tasty and well worth the adventures in lard.

I followed the general instructions I found on Chowhound:

• Put lard in pot or dutch oven and heat until liquid. (I used maybe 1/2 – 3/4 cup lard per 2-3 lbs of meat)
• Add cut up pork shoulder, a chopped onion, some cilantro, and a sliced orange. (In most areas, oranges are not currently in season. We happen to still have a stand selling oranges at our farmers market).
• Cover and cook for an hour.
• Remove cover and cook until carnitas is crispy.

Don’t assume that the carnitas will be crispy once the lard had cooked off. The carnitas is relatively crispy way before this point. If you wait for the lard to cook off — as I nearly did — you’ll have a burned pot and potentially burned carnitas. I was able to salvage most of my precious meat because I am impatient and decided to pull some out “early” — turns out I was almost too late

This picture doesn’t really do the carnitas justice.
You’ll just have to take my word that lard + pork = delicious.

Next up: Despite the bucket o’ lard in my fridge, I’m going to give Diana Kennedy’s no-lard carnitas recipe a try. She cooks her carnitas in water which concerned me initially. As much as I didn’t want to use lard, I understood that good carnitas are somewhat greasy and lard = grease. But water? Who wants watery pork? Then I read that the water heats up the fat of the pork shoulder and creates its own lard-y sauce. Mmmm. Lard sauce.

Make the Most of It

Summer produce eats up my farmers market funds like nothing else.

This time of year, there seems to be something newly in season at the market every week, and we end up bringing more and more home with us.

This Saturday’s haul included corn, nectarines, peaches, cherries, strawberries, cucumbers, tomatoes, snap peas, squash blossoms, avocados, radishes, lettuce, potatoes, fresh shallots, and English peas.

I still didn’t leave with everything that I’d wanted to buy. I skipped the raspberries, blueberries, apricots, and the late season fava beans.

Every week I assume we’ve overdone it, that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs, but this time of year, we eat nearly everything we buy. We often end up back at the Ferry Building for the smaller Tuesday farmers market just to replenish our supplies.

Summer foods are just so wonderfully easy to eat. So much of what we get at the market is perfect just as it is — a ripe peach, a handful of cherries, a Persian cucumber, sugar snap peas. A snack is as simple as walking through the kitchen.

Meals feel particularly effortless this time of year, too, since most of what’s in season needs nothing more than a quick sautee. Our dinners lately are really just side dishes. We had stuffed squash blossoms for dinner one night, along with a bright salad of English peas, radishes and feta cheese. One night we made a fresh salsa and guacamole thinking it would be a snack, but it ended up as dinner, with a side of sauteed corn.

When the weather participates, we’re likely to skip cooking altogether. One warm night a week or two ago, we brought a loaf of Tartine’s bread and a tupperware of sliced tomatoes and mozzarella to Dolores Park.

I’m particularly appreciating the simplicity of summer this year, since our return from 2 weeks on vacation. It’s so easy to drop back into our daily routines and take on too much, but summer brings a reminder to do less, to spend less time cooking and more time outside, to bring a little taste of vacation into our daily lives.

Just How Fresh Can You Get Y’all

So many people abandon the farmers market in the winter months. I appreciate that my farmers market isn’t so crowded during the cold season, but I wonder if people really know what they’re missing.

I can understand that people may be too busy fighting a mild bout of seasonal affective disorder to get to the market; these last few weeks of rain have been a struggle for me, too. But if there’s one place that reminds me that winter is temporary (even when it feels most permanent), and that not everything wilts and dies in these cold, dark days, it’s the farmers market.

I should point out that I mean a California farmers market. The market might not hold the same appeal if you live in an area that isn’t able to produce much in the winter. My sister’s New York City farmers market is grim right now. It’s all potatoes and root vegetables, she says. There’s nothing green. A Seattle-based blogger reported recently that there were only a handful of stands at her farmers market. But those of us in California have no reason to stay home (other than the allure of a warm bed, which is admittedly strong on these blustery mornings).

Don’t listen to anyone who says that there is nothing at the farmers market in the winter. Our market has has so much to offer than it’s almost embarrassing. There’s wealth of greens, different kinds of kale, rapini, chard, dandelion greens, arugula, cabbage — add in some of the beans available and you’ve got all the makings of a good soup, and what else would you be making this time of year?

There’s so much at our farmers market that we’ve tried three new vegetables this past month alone: nettles, sunchokes and celeriac. The celeriac preparation I chose resulted in a disappointing green slop, but the sunchokes were delicious. It’s a bit strange to eat something that has the taste of an artichoke and the texture of a potato. (To make the sunchoke even more strange, I read that they’re are actually part of the sunflower family). Regardless, they’re worth seeking out.

I was not enthusiastic when Mr. WholeHog suggested trying nettles. If a food is so prickly that you can’t touch it, isn’t that a sign that you shouldn’t eat it? But I found that nettles are worth the hassle (and if you have a pair of tongs, they aren’t even really a hassle). We parboiled them and initially we had them on a pizza. We sauteed our second batch. Regardless of the preparation, the nettles were terrific and they’re also worth eating if you are feeling a little weather-related malaise because their bright green color is like spring on a plate.

Perhaps even better than the greens and the new vegetables this time of year is the citrus. During this dark time of year, I seek out anything that makes the days seem brighter and my replacement for the sun in the last few weeks was the neon-like cheer of Meyer lemons.

Oranges are at the peak of their season right now and this past week, we bought three kinds: clementines, Satsuma mandarins and cara caras. The cara caras are an incredible cross between a grapefruit and a Navel orange. To me, the result is far better than the components — and a fruit like this offers another reason to hit the farmers market: I’ve never seen a cara cara at a regular grocery store.