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.

Date night in San Francisco

The following notable things happened today:

1. It rained. I am pretty sure this is the first time it has rained in San Jose since April or May. People on the East coast -- you really don't know what that's like. It's weird. This is definitely my first rain experience since Alaska.

2. We drove into San Francisco to go to a play. On the way, we decided to visit Bi-Rite Creamery, due to a) extremely positive reviews from friends and b) a gift card wedding gift from one of those friends. After spending about twenty minutes trying to find parking (grrrr), we finally made it. Salted caramel ice cream. Yummy.

3. On the way from Bi-Rite to the American Conservatory Theater, we almost got in a car accident. I had a slo-mo moment of watching the front of the car get closer and closer to the idiot who decided to pull out of their parking space on a major street without looking. Thank you, Subaru brakes. No damage done.

4. We got to the theater just in time to make it into our seats (we were literally running up the stairs) for the opening act of Rock 'n' Roll by Tom Stoppard. It was excellent.

5. We had dinner reservations at Canteen, and it was everything I had hoped. Canteen is this tiny restaurant in a diner space that was opened several years ago by a chef who'd been working at high-end Rubicon and decided to open his own space. There are four first courses, four second courses, three desserts, and three seating times -- that's it. There are maybe 19 seats. We sat at the counter. They sent out an amuse bouche of thinned goat cheese -- sort of a goat cheese soup -- with chopped raw apple. Then we got amazing fresh-baked melt-in-your-mouth brioche rolls (and by "fresh" I mean we had watched them pull them out of the oven about five minutes earlier). I had a salad of raw fall vegetables (wild mushrooms, celery, fennel, celeriac with pomegranate seeds, herbs and vinaigrette), and Stacey had pork tenderloin with figs. I had sole with tarragon; Stacey had steak tartare with a poached egg. I had their signature vanilla bean souffle, and it was perfect. Stacey had a pear and roquefort tart, which was perfect for her, since she always wants a cheese course for dessert (fool).

6. It is a Saturday night at 9:15 PM, and we are going to bed. Yes, we are that lame.

September

Yesterday, Stacey and I celebrated the end of the summer with a trip to Santa Cruz.  Our first stop was Bonny Doon Winery.  We have been buying their excellent wines for a while, so we were excited to finally make it to their tasting room in the mountains above Santa Cruz.  We tasted, among other things, a very interesting dry Orange Muscat and an amazing dessert wine called Le Vol des Anges.  Our visit might have been perfect had a bus full of screaming drunk winery-hoppers not arrived while we were there.  One woman stumbled across the floor, lost her shoe, and then ran out of the tasting room, stealing a bottle of Viognier Doux on the way.  Classy.

Next stop: Santa Cruz Boardwalk, which just celebrated its 100th birthday.  Santa Cruz has plenty to offer, including some great beaches and the beautiful campus of the University of California at Santa Cruz, but my wife is from the Jersey Shore, after all, so she does enjoy a good boardwalk.  We had fun riding the Logger's Revenge and playing pinball.  We also thought it would be fun to ride the Sky Gliders, below.  They moved slowly and looked tame.  Too bad we are both afraid of heights!  I think we hyperventilated the whole way.  They're higher than they look.

We also attempted a round of mini golf in the pirate-themed Neptune's Kingdom, which is delightfully tacky (see below.  That volcano "erupts" periodically, and cannons shoot smoke rings into the course).  But it was incredibly busy, and after waiting...and waiting...after the first two holes, we finally cut our losses and went to dinner.  Aaarrr!

Two weeks ago, I helped Loa, my cousin Jeff's wife, throw a baby shower for Jessica, my cousin Rick's wife.  Their daughter is due on October 20th.  I'm looking forward to meeting her!

At work, we are participating in a department-wide photo journal this month.  Since we work in seven different offices across the country, it gives us a chance to see what everyone else's work life looks like.  I thought I'd include a picture of the view from our library, below.  That's the Ferry Building and the Bay Bridge in the distance.

Labor Day in Marin County

For Stacey and me, Marin County has served mostly as a gateway to Sonoma County, its neighbor to the north and oenological superior. However, for our Labor Day outing, we wanted something slightly closer to home. So we headed up to San Francisco, over the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin, with its million-dollar views and multi-million-dollar homes.

Our first stop was Muir Woods National Monument, so Stacey could finally see some redwood trees. I have been to Muir Woods before, and as I recalled, the drive there is as good as the destination. From the peninsula, you drive through San Francisco and over the bridge. On a clear day like today, the view is stunning. Once in Marin, the road winds through eucalyptus trees, the scent of which finds its way into your car even with the windows closed. Eventually, you are driving along the edge of a valley with views of the Pacific Ocean (you can barely see it in the picture below).

Muir Woods is lovely but tends to be crowded. Of course, today was no exception -- but it was a nice walk nonetheless.

And we saw deer! Three of them were eating along the banks of a stream with no concern for the hoard of tourists snapping photos a few feet away from them.

When we'd had our fill of nature, we drove into the town of Sausalito. Sausalito, with its ferry from San Francisco, its views of the city, and its downtown shopping, is a major tourist destination. Somehow we managed to spend the afternoon there without getting anywhere near the crowds -- even though the Sausalito Art Festival was going on this weekend.

Our primary destination was Fish., a small restaurant on the docks that's run by a former fine-dining chef with a staunch commitment to sustainable seafood. It was worth the wait in line for our food: a Miyagi oyster po' boy with a spicy chili-lime slaw, and a crab roll with fresh-cut shoestring fries. The po' boy was delicious, but the crab roll, below, stole the show. This may be the West coast's best answer to New England's lobster rolls: a buttered and grilled roll (from local bakery Acme Bread Company) filled with a pile of Dungeness crab, dressed in just a bit of butter and some chives. Better than a lobster roll? I'm not telling.

After lunch, our path back to the parking lot just happened to lead past the Heath Ceramics Factory Store. Heath is a local ceramics manufacturer that's been making simple, beautiful tableware for sixty years. They aren't cheap, but the pieces are timeless and sturdy -- and luckily, you can buy discounted seconds and discontinued items at the factory store. I picked out the vases below. I love them.

Happy fall, everyone! OK, I know it doesn't start until September 22nd, but it might as well be fall once we're past Labor Day. My first week of school went well: one down, fourteen to go!