Now I’m Getting Souped Up

In San Francisco, any time is a good time for soup. Even warm days here often end with cool, soup-worthy nights. On one warm Friday afternoon, I enjoyed a margarita on our front steps and when the fog rolled in, I went inside and had a bowl of Tuscan ribolita.  Here summer and winter are often just a few hours apart.

As well as good soup weather, we also have lots of good soup fixings. At the farmers market, I’ve been buying thick, gelatinous chicken broth from Marin Sun Farms or the rural folk at Mountain Ranch. This stock is completely different from the boxes of broth I used to rely on. You have to scoop this stuff out with a spoon; it doesn’t ‘pour’. It’d be icky if it wasn’t so delicious.

We also have shelling beans available this time of year. Dirty Girl sells fresh cannellinis or cranberry beans (borlotti beans). Shelling beans are delicious cooked up on their own and doused with olive oil. They’re also a lovely foil for Fatted Calf’s tonno di maiale. But I especially like using shelling beans for soup because they cook up so quickly.

This not to say that dried beans are to be avoided. dried beans have inspired most of the soups I’ve been eating lately. Heirloom Beans, the cookbook by Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo, is to thank for the ribolita, minestone, and the white bean and chard soup served with a poached egg and crispy bits of stale bread.

Stale bread is now something I consider an essential soup ingredient, and it’s an easy way to use up the last, somewhat stale bits of Tartine’s country bread. A slab of buttered bread will always be a delicious accompaniment to a bowl of soup, but a chunk of stale bread at the bottom of your soup bowl, broth-sodden and disintegrating, offers something else entirely. It adds body and texture, and if you rub it first with garlic, it adds flavor, too.

One of my go-to soups and a soup that first got me hooked on this delicious stale bread trick is Mark Bittman’s white bean and escarole soup. It’s a dead-simple recipe that I keep coming back to — something about the base of anchovies, garlic and chiles really elevates it. I’ve edited the recipe and listed it below because his list of ingredients includes items like duck or port that are never mentioned in the cooking instructions.

Escarole, White Bean Soup

• 1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
• 1 tablespoon sliced garlic
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste
• 4 anchovy fillets, or to taste (Bittman says this is optional. It’s not. It’s essential.)
• 1 fresh or dried chili, stemmed, seeded and minced, or 1 teaspoon dried red chili flakes, or to taste
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1 pound escarole
• 3 cups chicken stock or water
• 1 cup (or more) white beans, such as cannellini
• Salt and pepper to taste

Put half the oil, half the garlic, anchovies and chilies in a pot over medium heat. Stir occasionally until garlic begins to color.

Add escarole and stir; add beans and stock or water and adjust heat so mixture simmers steadily. Cover and cook about 15 minutes.

Stir in rest of garlic and cook another minute. Drizzle with reserved olive oil, and serve over slices of stale bread, rubbed with garlic or showered with parmesan cheese. (Bittman includes the bread as a “variation”. Pay no attention to Bittman. The bread is a crucial element of the soup).

Don’t Let This Fading Summer Pass You By

With our trip to Italy and our subsequent move back to SF, I wasn’t sure that I’d have time for what had become one of my favorite late summer rituals: making and freezing tomato sauce for the tomato-less months ahead.

We were still overseas when Mariquita Farms had their annual tomato u-pick. Although the farm drops off produce in SF fairly regularly, nearly every time they were in town, we weren’t able to pick up 20 pounds of tomatoes, much less prepare few quarts of tomato sauce.

One problem with our SF apartment has been the stove, a gorgeous old Wedgewood with four burners, two ovens (something I never thought necessary until I had one) and a persistent gas leak. After three visits from PG&E, after having the gas to the stove turned off twice because the stove repair person wasn’t, initially, able to eliminate the leaks, our stove appears to be back in business (fingers crossed).

And just in time: last week, Mariquita made their last SF tomato delivery of 2009 and I was lucky enough to get a flat of their San Marzano tomatoes (and lucky enough to have Mr. WholeHog to go pick up the tomatoes).

By the weekend, we found that for the first time in weeks, we had some free time and a working stove so we set to work making sauce. We rewarded ourselves with with pasta with the homemade sauce that night for dinner, while the rest of the sauce went to the freezer.

I haven’t been feeling ready for fall lately, but making tomato sauce and seeing those bright red jars set aside for the winter months, I felt like I was starting to shut the door on summer.

Outer Ice Cream Triangle

Officially, our new SF neighborhood is Noe Valley, or maybe even Outer Noe Valley. But a more accurate name for our new neighborhood might be Outer Ice Cream Triangle (shown below).

View Larger Map

We are just a block or two off the hypotenuse that stretches from BiRite Creamery to Mitchell’s and it’s almost too easy to slip down to Humphry Slocombe.

Since we moved to Outer Ice Cream Triangle, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting each establishment and indulging in some truly memorable cones:

• Mexican Chocolate (Mitchell’s)
• Brown Sugar Yogurt (Humphry)
• Apple Pie (BiRite)
• Brown Sugar Ice cream with ginger-caramel swirl (Birite)
• Pumpkin Five-Spice (Humphry)
• Rosemary’s Baby (rosemary, pine nut and sea salt – at Humphry, of course)

(Now I know that list looks like complete gluttony, but a single does come with two flavors at BiRite and Humphry.)

If you are headed to Humphry Slocombe (you should be on your way already — did I mention that the lines are far shorter than BiRite’s or Mitchell’s?), other WholeHog-approved flavors include: Secret Breakfast (bourbon and cornflakes), Salt and Pepper, Salted Licorice, Rootbeer, Ancho Chocolate, and Peanut Butter Curry.

The Test is Over

On Monday, for the first time in nearly 10 months, I woke up in San Francisco.

Yes, before we left for Italy, we signed a lease on a flat in Noe Valley. Timing-wise, it was ridiculous. We went to Italy for two weeks, came back and immediately started packing.  But despite the work that moving inevitably involves (even when you hire movers and have parents to help), I’ve been pretty blissed out about being back in the City.

It’s just so darn pretty here. Instead of riding BART alongside highways and over industrial areas, I take the J Church now which takes an almost comically lovely route past Victorian homes and along the brilliant green Dolores Park where you get a view of the city skyline.

I’m inspired by this city in a way I didn’t adequately appreciate until I didn’t live here.

But this isn’t meant to be a list of all that I prefer about San Francisco. In fact, thanks to Julia Child’s book, My Life in France, I’m thinking more positively about Oakland.

Despite the title, My Life in France isn’t just about France. In the book, Julia and her husband, Paul, also live in Germany, Norway and the U.S. and I couldn’t help but notice that she found something to appreciate about every place she lived.

She acknowledged that France was her true home (she called it her ‘spiritual home’ but I loathe the word spiritual), but in Germany, she relished the sausages and the beer. In Norway, she appreciated the excellent fish. And, of course, in France, she delighted in almost everything.

Reading her enthusiasm for all the places she lived encouraged me think a little differently about my life in Oakland. It wasn’t my ideal home, but there were things I liked about it.

My bike rides may never be as idyllic as they were in the East Bay, riding through lower Rockridge and down the wide, leafy Elmwood streets. Even the short ride to the Temescal Farmers Market went down quiet streets lined with mostly charming little houses. And I really appreciated being just a quick bike-ride away from a decent farmers market.

I’ll miss being able to pop into Bakesale Betty for one of their excellent fried chicken sandwiches (I made sure to have one before moving). I still want to try more of their pies since I liked the blueberry pie we had on the Fourth of July (and I especially liked that we were able to spontaneously bike over and pick up a pie on a holiday).

For more fried chicken, I’d love to go back to Brown Sugar Kitchen, a great, old-diner feeling place in the midst of a very industrial area. I really liked the combination of  fried chicken, a cornmeal waffle and apple cider-syrup: fat, salt and sugar all on one plate.

La Farine is no Tartine, but it was convenient and rarely crowded and there’s a certain comfort in knowing that a slice of lemon cheesecake is just a few blocks away.

Aside from food, service in the East Bay was often unbelievably nice. Even though Bakesale Betty often had Tartine-style lines, there was none of the Tartine-style attitude or indifference.

One of the things that initially drew me to the East Bay was the Craftsman homes (in fact, it still calls me. On returning to Oakland since the move, I still thought to myself, “This looks like a nice place to live.”)  But I didn’t realize how many stunning Art Deco buildings are in downtown Oakland, like the green I. Magnin building.

I’m tempted to joke about the Fox theater sign (what city needs a giant neon sign to tell you where you are?!), but the truth is, it’s awesome. I also love the Tribune sign and tower. It feels like something out of a comic book.

There’s a small part of me that feels like perhaps we didn’t give the East Bay the chance it deserved, but I mostly feel like we knew immediately that it wasn’t right for us and the nearly 10 months we spent there were plenty.

The differences are immediate. The hardware store in our SF neighborhood is open on Sundays, and the corner market is open at 10:30pm. Across the street, a chef picks vegetables from a rooftop garden. A man sits on the corner and plays guitar at night.

That first morning back in SF, I woke up coughing and congested so I stayed home from work. I sat on the couch, left by the movers in the middle of the living room, surrounded by boxes and packing material and a ladder. From my landlord’s basement recording studio, I could hear the faint sounds of bluegrass music. I could hear the J Church streetcar clatter down Church Street. To some people, maybe these sounds would be disruptive. But to my ears, it was the happy sound of other people, of life, nearby.

Getting Pickled

I want to learn how to can and preserve foods, to have a pantry of canned tomatoes and homemade jam.

But, for now, I cheat. I freeze tomato sauce rather than canning whole tomatoes, and instead of going through the hot work of boiling jars of pickles, I making refrigerator pickles.

I’d never heard of refrigerator pickles until I read a post on the blog Tea & Cookies that linked to this recipe for refrigerator dill pickles. It looked surprisingly easy and required only a few relatively easy to find ingredients.

The one ingredient I was never able to find was pickling salt. But someone at BiRite told me I could use kosher salt as long as I made sure the salt had dissolved before pouring it over the cukes and so far it’s worked out just fine.

I first made these pickles about a year ago and I thought my first batch was decent, but I wasn’t really a good judge. I don’t eat many pickles these days, but I happen to have a friend who is more likely to have a jar of pickles in her fridge than a quart of milk. She confirmed that the pickles were better than decent. I believe she even drank the brine (do I even need to mention she’s German?) and raved to our mutual friends about ‘my’ delicious pickles.

The vote of confidence from a serious pickle eater/German was all the encouragement I needed to start making pickles more regularly. They are one of the simplest and most rewarding things I’ve made. They take perhaps 20 minutes at most. The hard part is waiting for your brine to turn your cukes into snappy dill pickles. (I even decided to pickle some green beans recently).

I’m especially enjoying having a jar in the fridge this summer. On those rare warm summer days, a slice of pickle, straight from the fridge, is pretty refreshing.

Pickles also go well with another food I hadn’t realized that I missed: hot dogs. The Fatted Calf started bringing hot dogs to the market earlier this year. Of course, a Fatted Calf hot dog is made with recognizable ingredients, like grass-fed Marin Sun Farms beef. Thanks to the farmers market, we’ve been eating locally produced franks and beans lately. It turns out that a Fatted hot dog in an Acme bun, with a side of Rancho Gordo beans and a wedge of crisp pickle makes for a perfect summer meal.

Gonna Spread My Word Standing On This Box

I was reminded of the food industry recently while reading New Yorker on my ride into work on BART. The New Yorker’s financial writer, James Surowiecki, described the consumer finance industry as “an industry which keeping customers confused often seems to be a business strategy”  — and it’s just as fitting a description of our food system.

There’s talk of a new consumer financial protection agency, but to my knowledge, there are no plans for an agency focused on consumer food protection — despite the seemingly endless recalls (yesterday’s recall: 800,000 pounds of ground beef). At least the House passed a pretty decent new food safety bill last week.

So given that there are clearly problems in our food system, how do we, as eaters, make better choices? Going back to the New Yorker quote, how do we become more educated about the food we buy?

Local Options

You probably have some resources in your area, like a good local market. In my experience, a good market can make it easy to make better food choices. Many local markets have very knowledgeable staff, and are more directly connected to their suppliers. (When was the last time you saw an actual butcher at Safeway, or someone who could tell you if the beef they carry was grass fed or even hormone-free?).

Two of my favorite SF grocers, BiRite and Rainbow, both post a list of the eggs they carry and how the eggs are produced. It makes it easy to see what farms are de-beaking the chickens, for example, and what (few) farms are raising chickens on pasture.

The Eatwell Guide may be able to direct you to a local market.

Of course, the shortest supply chain is at the farmer’s market. Often, you can ask the farmer herself how the food she’s selling was grown and how the animals were raised. (And it’s worth asking about food production, even at farmers markets.  At our local market, there are both stands that sell pasture-raised eggs and stands that sell essentially industrially produced eggs.)

Online Resources

The web can also help us decode food labels and better understand where our food comes from.

Dairy – The Cornucopia Institute has this useful report card for organic dairies. You can click on each dairy to learn more about their practices. You’ll find out if the cows are on pasture, for example, or if the cows are given hormones or antibiotics.

Food & Water Watch also has a handy guide to finding rBST-free dairy products. Just click on your state.

Eggs – Egg marketing can be quite deceptive, so it helps to know what terms like ‘cage free’ and ‘organic’ really mean (the short answer: not much). The Humane Society provides a clear guide to egg carton labels.

One important word that isn’t on the Humane Society list is pasture. So far pasture  is one word that means what it says: the chickens don’t just have “access” to the outside, they are outside, on the land, scratching and pecking and doing all the things chickens do.

In the Bay Area, farms that produce pasture eggs include Soul Food, Clark Summit, Marin Sun Farms, and TLC. (TLC is even available at Whole Foods).

Meat – The meat department is another landmine of terms that may not mean what you think. “Natural” sounds good, but it only  means that the meat has been minimally processed, and as this brief article by Bill and Nicholette Niman clarifies, it still may include hormones and antibiotics.

Food & Water Watch explains organic meat requirements and attempts to clear up some more misleading labels.  Even the USDA publishes a list of labels, but to get to common terms like ‘natural’, you first have to get past definitions for thing like “mechanically separated meat” (which  is, apparently “a paste-like and batter-like meat product”. Enough to make one a vegetarian).

My post on finding pasture-raised meat can be found here.

On my reading list: Nicholette’s book, Righteous Porkchop — so wish I’d thought of that title! — includes a lot of information on meat labeling.

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)

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

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.)

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.