Vanessa Barrington

DIY Delicious is Here!

I got the email yesterday. It said, "I'm holding advance copies of your book in my hand, it looks beautiful. Which address should I send them to?"

I was excited but a little numb I guess. Or maybe nothing can really prepare a person for the feeling of opening a package and pulling out a HARDCOVER book with your name on the cover. I think that's it. 

So there I was trying to concentrate on work all morning, with an undercurrent in my brain saying, "it's coming," quietly, insistently, constantly. The second I went upstairs to do something, I heard the dog bark. Here it was.

I ran to the door and stood in front of it, waiting for the Fedex guy to ring the bell. I guess I didn't want to appear too eager. I opened the door, shoved the dog inside, signed the electronic thingy shakily and then grabbed the package with a feeling in my stomach like being in love. I ripped it open and just kept saying "oh my god", "oh my god", "oh my god." The dog looked worried. She shouldn't have been. 

There it was, real, concrete, and gorgeous beyond belief. The design of the cover is raised and embossed and it has a super cool blurb on the back by Novella Carpenter. I am feeling very lucky right now and also so thankful for the opportunities I've had. In the end, the dog wasn't really that excited. These are the times you wish you worked in an office, where if you shout, people will hear. I guess, that's what Twitter and Facebook are for. 

Stay tuned soon for a gorgeous new Wordpress site to do justice to this book!

This Ain’t No Chicken Factory: Soul Food Farm Tour

 
On a recent rain-threatening Saturday I set out with a friend and fellow Soul Food Farm CSA member for Soul Food’s first ever farm tour. We weren’t sure what to expect but we were pretty sure we’d like what we saw. I mean they wouldn’t invite people if it weren’t going to be a pleasant experience.

Though the wind came up, roaring through the chicken houses and causing hens to scurry and cluck, the weather held. It was a lovely romp through the different parts of the farm followed by lemonade and chicken salad sandwiches in the kitchen, where we chatted with Alexis and one another between bites. We even made it to the tail end of the Berkeley farmers’ market on the way home. Pretty perfect Saturday if you ask me.

These are the meat birds. Note the clean straw and healthy looking chickens. They take about 10 weeks to grow. These, I believe, are about 7 weeks old.

These are the meat birds inside their house. The modular houses are disassembled and moved around the farm every few months to keep things clean. The birds are never given any drugs to keep them healthy. Sage oil in their water acts as an anti-microbial. 

Sort of like a chicken/or Easter egg hunt but not. Now this is free-range.

3 day old chicks that arrive by US Mail to the post office, where Alexis picks them up cheeping away in their boxes. They look like Peeps don't they?

These are the laying hens outside, but under a shelter. Note how healthy they look. Their beaks have not been clipped, which is commonplace in the egg industry (yep, even the organic, cage free kind).

What a pretty pretty girl!

Comfortably roosting in clean, dry straw.

These were gathered in the hen houses by farm tour participants.

Llamas and chickens are friends. The llamas keep the predators away from the hen houses at night.

Here we are walking up the gentle slope of the farm. This is the site of the devastating fire last fall that nearly killed the farm just before its CSA program was about to launch. Amazing how nature renews. 

What a wonderful opportunity to be able to feel so connected to the eggs and chickens and people who feed me!
 

 

The Prospector in Twain Harte: Certified Napoletana Pizza

I don’t usually write about restaurants because everybody else does, and usually, when I’m dining out, I want to be fully present with my dining companions and the food and don’t want to take photos and notes. I have to make an exception here because The Prospector Forno Rustica is pretty out-of-the-ordinary and has not received much press.

I’m quite sure I would never know about this place if my family didn’t live in the Sierra Foothills near the town of Twain Harte, where The Prospector is located. Hell, most people I know have never heard of Twain Harte . Even if you visited Twain Harte and saw this restaurant, you’d likely pass it by, not knowing what a treasure you had just missed. Honestly, I’m not sure owner Robert Martin even cares. I get the feeling he likes operating what amounts to a sort of underground restaurant right out in the open.

Though everything is strictly legal, I say underground because the place looks like a tourist pizza joint— a place where you take the kids for gloppy, cheesy, saucy, rubbery pizza after playing mini golf at the course next door. In fact, I’ve heard that kids aren’t even allowed in the restaurant and this is NOT kid pizza (though they'd like it too). It’s honest-to-god certified Napoletana pizza from a wood-fired oven.

It’s a quirky place. For starters, there’s no stove, so everything is made in the oven. So it’s really about the pizza. But the night we went there was a simple pasta on the menu—rolled out before our very eyes, boiled in a big pot in the oven and sautéed in a skillet on the edge of the oven’s hellishly hot maw. There may or may not be salad on the menu. There wasn’t any the night we went.

It’s also about the wine. A large collection of retail priced foreign and domestic bottles. Honestly I was focused on the pizza and didn’t look into the wine at all, just poured myself a glass of something tasty and Italian from the bottles lined up on the counter. Wish I’d looked a little harder because judging from this interview with the owner in The Sierra Mountain Times, there are probably some well-priced treasures there, as a wine bar was really the original business plan.

There’s no table service. You order at the counter, pour your own wine (the glasses are helpfully marked), get your own water, table settings etc. and then settle in to watch the pizza artists at work. The pizzas are brought out one at a time by the chefs. You’ll need to order 1 per person or try another menu item because they aren’t large. What can I say? The pizza was perfection. Crisp, thin, blistered crust with structure and chewiness. Great toppings, judiciously applied. Nice combinations. We had a white pizza with prosciutto, basil, and roasted onions, and a red one with spicy salami and fresh mozzarella (made in-house, I believe).

We enjoyed a fresh pasta with mushrooms, olive oil, and Parmesan--simple and perfect. In fact, the first pasta was discarded as not good enough before it even made it to the table, and remade by the owner/chef. We watched him do it. Sorry about the bad photos. It was a little too dark.

If you’re curious and you’re not about to make it to Twain Harte anytime soon, you can go to the Prospector pizza webcam (it’s usually running during dinner service) and watch the masters at work. Honestly though, it’s kind of like watching paint dry between orders, but fascinating, as there’s sort of a wild west Slow Food vibe going on there. Oh, and you can follow The Prospector on Twitter, naturally.

Happy Glorious Delicious Fall!

Here's how I recovered from the Hunger Challenge. I went to the Berkeley Saturday Farmers' market. Wowie Zowie, so much to buy and cook and eat. I was so happy being there after a three week hiatus caused by various and sundry commitments. Pictured above is my haul. And below, my lunch: roasted River Dog delicata, County Line Farm Wild Arugula, Quetzal Farm Dry Farmed Tomatoes, Morell's Bread, Sierra Nevada Cream Cheese (from the store), and the last of the cheap eggs from the Hunger Challenge. This lunch illustrates how easy it is to eat healthy, high quality, veg-centric, local meals without spending hours and hours in the kitchen.

I also think the amount of food I got for my money was quite amazing. I was more aware than usual of how much money I was spending too and actually, it wasn't that bad. I think about $65. That's a lot of good quality food for $65. Why no eggs? Well, I joined the Soul Food Farm CSA and the first delivery was last night. 2 dozen gorgeous eggs (some of them huge!) and 1 chicken with it's head still wrapped around its body in a restful pose, and feet too! Wanna join? The CSA is still open. I got to meet farmer Alexis too and she's lovely and vivacious and seems to be recovering nicely from the devestating fire last month. Looking to support the farm? There's an event on Sunday the 11th at Pizzaiolo. Admission is $14 and you can support Soul Food Farm by buying raffle tickets. You may even win a fabulous prize!

One more good piece of fall news! We have a book title that everyone is happy with:

DIY Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch.

Chronicle Books Fall 2010. Galleys arrive next month and the designer is terrific, so it's going to be beautiful!

The Street Food Craze: SF Street Food Festival and Eat Real and I'm in Eating Well Magazine!

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area you probably know about the street food craze. Secretive food carts all over the city (mostly San Francisco) operate under the radar of authorities and post their whereabouts on twitter. This recession has sparked a reverence for scrappy, can-do, self-reliant individuals. As chefs were elevated to rock stars over the past decade, food cart operators are the new idols in the food world.

So now we have not one, but two festivals to honor the food of the street and the people who create it. The photos here are all from the San Francisco Street Food Festival last week. Put on by La Cocina, a business incubator for food concerns, it started as a way to help mostly immigrant women who had under-the-radar tamale selling businesses and the like go legit. La Cocina has been around for several years now doing great work and now there's a whole new generation of small-scale street food purveyors.

This week launches the Eat Real Fest in Oakland--similar vibe, more ambitious undertaking. Three days of activities including movies, dinners, a market area, as well as a slew of street cart and taco truck food. I'll be there at the Foraging & Canning Exchange on Friday doing a fermentation demo. I think it will be hard not to hang around the festival all weekend one way or another. Maybe I'll see you there.

In other news: If you pick up a copy of the current Eating Well Magazine (Sept-Oct issue) you'll find 6 great new recipes for beans by yours truly and an article by Steve Sando about sourcing heirlooms. It's nice to break into a food mag finally. Enjoy and let me know how you like it.

Enjoy the following street food pictures and Happy Eating!

 

January Events: Book Signing, Winter Soups and Stews Class, Fermentation Workshop

Hitting the New Year Running:

Saturday, January 10th--book signing and food samples from Heirloom Beans at Omnivore Books
3-4 PM Free!

Wednesday, January 14--Winter Soups and Stews class at Sur La Table in San Francisco 6pm. $75

Saturday, January 24--Fermentation Workshop at The Cooperative Grocery in Berkeley. Time of day to be determined. Email or leave a comment, if you're interested. The Cog is also looking for new members. Now is the time to join! Workshop Free! Bring your own veggies and jars. I'll bring salt and recipes.

Do you want to drive or eat?

Rush hour is not happy hour  8-08-08 5:15pm

I was going to post a recipe for corn chowder, but then I read this. Sorry about the political break. I’ll post the corn chowder in a couple of days.

Speaking of corn: Is it fuel or food? Well, increasingly it’s fuel, along with a lot of other agricultural crops. Politicians and pundits have been behaving as if biofuels are the answer to our fuel crisis and some of them have been throwing the blame for high food prices on newly prosperous Indians and Chinese who want to eat meat (the same crops that are used in biofuels are used to feed livestock). This always sounded to me like demonization, and now this newly released report says it’s biofuels causing the crisis.

Now I know the question above is a false choice, due to the way our cities and towns have been planned. I also know that we are privileged enough here in the US to not really have to make that choice…yet. And I’m not trying to preach because I realize I’m lucky to live somewhere that makes it easy for me to choose to bike instead of driving. I just want to make the point that we as a society need to seriously think about this question. We cannot continue to live and get around the way we have been indefinitely.

Photo Credit: Susan Fleming

Victory over Bureaucracy = Edible Civic Center Garden

It’s pretty amazing to witness the transformation from grass to edible landscape over at the Civic Center. They’ve torn out the lawn, carted it away, and designed these gorgeous circular beds. Saturday, July 11th was planting day and what a wonderful day! These plants are putting down roots in the same spot where the World War II Civic Center Victory Garden sat. At one point 40% of the produce consumed in the US was grown in Victory Gardens. We can do it again!

Victory Gardens 2008 + partnered with Slow Food Nation and City Slicker Farms to create this garden. On September 21st the garden will be harvested and the harvest donated to the San Francisco Food Bank.

It was a great day and felt historic. This movement has been going on for awhile now, but it’s been pretty easy to ignore for those who don’t pay attention to such things. It’s pretty hard to miss now!

This is a start, but I wish the garden could be permanent.

At the height of planting.

Native foods of the Americas bed

Got Biological Diversity? Watch "The World According to Monsanto"

If Monsanto has its way, we'll never ever see images like this in future farmers' markets. (this photo was taken at a tiny market in Shreveport LA). Here's a link to another post I wrote (on the blog that pays me) about the film. Not lazy, just being efficient. Please set aside an hour and a half and watch it. It's important that everyone be aware of this stuff. Make sure you scroll down to the second film link in the post under "editor's note"  as the first one doesn't work any longer.

Blogging the COG

Did you ever think, "boy if I ran this store, things would be a lot different?". Well, here's your chance. There's a new grocery store in town and I'm member number 408. The COG  is a start-up co-op modeled after the Park Slope Co-op. For now, it is located in a warehouse in Emeryville and shopping is on-line. It's all very new so there aren't any perishable goods yet, but as things evolve it will be a full-service grocery store. Think Rainbow with meat. Already It looks like the savings will be substantial over Whole Foods and other similar stores once it all gets going. For now offerings are limited, so it's a bit of a leap of faith, but one I have no problem making. Bulk is reportedly coming soon and refrigeration maybe this summer. All products are vetted based on sustainability, packaging, and quality and there is a strong commitment to carrying local products. There's a $25 fee to join and a refundable (if you leave the COG) $100 investment (payable in installments). Members must work 2 1/2 hours a month. It's one step toward getting off the corporate food grid.