Eating California

October is "Eat Local" month around the country, and I doubt any city in the nation has embraced the challenge quite like San Francisco. Today I went to Mixt Greens, one of my favorite places to grab a weekday lunch, and bought a salad made with locally sourced mixed greens, Asian pears, blue cheese and walnuts (plus some golden beets, apparently not local). It was delicious.

I've been eating local food in some capacity since childhood, when my father grew tomatoes, peppers, lettuce, cucumbers, onions, garlic, asparagus, beans, peas and herbs in our backyard. I've dug potatoes and picked (and eaten) a lot of blueberries in our friends' garden in Maine, and in Attica, New York, we used to eat corn grown on my grandfather's land. Or maybe I'm conflating different memories. Anyway, ever since I've become more tuned in to the food world, I've been thrilled to support restaurants, like Fish. and Mixt Greens, that serve locally sourced ingredients. Stacey worked at The Blue Room for several years, cooking food that was purchased, when possible, from local Massachusetts purveyors like Verrill Farm (in Concord) and Woodbury Clams (in Wellfleet), so she is no stranger to the pleasures of cooking and eating locally.


There are plenty of reasons to eat local food -- because it's delicious, because it supports local farmers, because the short distance it travels to your plate requires less gasoline -- but plenty of people have written well-researched and passionate books on the subject, so I won't try to do that here. If you're interested in local food, you might pick up Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, or Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals (more about the U.S. industrial food system than about local food, but the connection is significant), both of which I've enjoyed reading in the past year, or check out The 100-Mile Diet. The term "locavore," meaning a person who seeks out locally produced food, was coined in 2005 and selected in 2007 as The New Oxford American Dictionary's Word of the Year.


Not that we necessarily qualify. I'd be embarassed to admit the number of meals we eat at Chili's, and we don't have the space or time to buy a quarter of a locally-raised pig or grow our own salad greens. We do grow cherry tomatoes, jalapeno peppers and herbs in pots on our patio (see pictures above), and buy West coast seafood and local, free-range chicken from Race Street Market, down the street from our apartment. We buy olive oil from Stonehouse and The Olive Press, both of which use California olives; most of the wine we drink comes from Santa Cruz or Sonoma Counties. And we do get almost all of our fruits and vegetables these days from Farm Fresh To You, an organic produce delivery service that operates out of Capay, 115 miles from us (doesn't quite make the 100-mile mark, but not bad). This isn't our first experience with CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture), either. In Massachusetts, we participated in farm shares with Parker Farm in Lunenburg and The Food Project in Concord. But farm shares in the Northeast are more limited than in California: the seasons are longer here, the land supports a greater variety of plants (including fruit, which I rarely got in Massachusetts farm shares), and, in many cases, we can opt in and opt out as often as we like, rather than making a season-long commitment. Every Thursday, Farm Fresh To You delivers a box of fruits and vegetables to our apartment. Here's what we got last week, and how we used it.

2 lb Starkrimson pears

These are gorgeous. I ate one and poached the other four, using a recipe from Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything (a modern classic, we think). Red wine (local, from Healdsburg), sliced lemon (not quite local, from an organic orchard in San Diego county), cinnamon stick and whole cloves (emphatically not local, packaged by McCormick in Maryland and probably grown in Asia), and sugar (don't ask).


I was inspired to make them because we had some leftover mascarpone cheese (from Wisconsin -- oh well), which I happen to know makes an excellent topping for poached pears. And it did.


1 lb slicing tomatoes

A couple of these went into BATs (Bacon, Arugula and Tomato sandwiches) on Sunday with arugula left over from the previous week's delivery. We don't normally keep bacon around, so this was a rare treat.

1.5 lb butterball potatoes

Stacey boiled these until tender, then sliced about half of them to add to a pizza with Parmigiano Reggiano, truffled cheese, and chopped rosemary from our patio. It was delicious, and the leftovers made a fantastic breakfast the next day, topped with a fried egg (local and cage-free, from Ripon, the self-proclaimed Almond Capital of the World, a "small community whose Quality of Life shines like a small jewel in the . . . San Joaquin valley." I couldn't make this stuff up if I tried). You should really try to get Stacey to make you a pizza sometime. She's a master.

I decided to use the leftover potatoes to make Crash Hot Potatoes, a recipe I saw on a food blog called The Pioneer Woman Cooks (not quite as, um, historical as it sounds). We ate them with roasted Sonoma County chicken and roasted green beans left over from the previous week's delivery.

1 bunch radishes and 12 oz. baby lettuce

Salad on Wednesday, with broccoli from the previous week and the rest of this week's slicing tomatoes.

1.5 lb crimson grapes

I brought a bag of these to work with me most days to snack on. Except for Concord grapes, I had never had local grapes before we moved to California. These are great.

1 lb yellow onions

Sauteed with the previous week's peppers for pork fajitas.

1.5 lb Gala apples

I've been snacking on these all week. New England apples are better, but I'm biased.

1 pint cherry tomatoes

By Sunday these were a bit worse for the wear, so I made a cherry tomato confit using garlic from a previous delivery and rosemary from the patio. This recipe from the New York Times is really simple. We ate it over linguine.

2 acorn squashes

To be decided. Stacey wants to make them into a soup.

It's Thursday again, and more fruits and veggies have arrived. Much of the same, but we did get two kinds of pears this week, Fuji instead of Gala apples (I'm glad), some garlic and our first head of Napa cabbage. It's a long weekend, and I'm hoping I'll have some time to use that cabbage to make Mommy's Meatballs, a recipe from my friend Lisa's mother, who lives in Taiwan. I've never made it before, but I have an approximate recipe and a memory of watching Lisa make it, so I'm game.

Oh, and we got two more acorn squashes, so we better get cracking on that soup.