EcoFarm 2013 Farm Tour

Cover crops! It is winter, after all. 

You may remember my post last year about the annual EcoFarm Conference down in Asilomar, especially how much I gushed about the small spotted piglets at Fogline Farm. I couldn't pass up the chance to go back this year, and there are many animal photos to prove it! 

Here are the highlights: 

Our first stop was Jacobs Farm in Pescadero, where farmers Larry Jacobs and Sandra Belin have grown culinary herbs since the 80s. Larry Jacobs remembers a time when he could "satisfy the entire San Francisco [culinary herbs] market with [whatever he could pack into] a red honda". We learned all about their farm production and the profitability of culinary herbs, but I was most taken with some down-to-earth policies and practices they have on the farm, including: 

• The farm built solar houses for the crew, which are now filled with families of crew members. Larry lives in one of these solar houses. 
• While the farm grows culinary herbs for sale, they keep a small plot of land to grow food for the "Food for us" program, which produces weekly CSA shares for people who work on the farm.  

Solar houses for people who work on the farm 

Our second stop was Harley Farms and Goat Dairy, where farmer and founder Deborah Harley started out hand-milking 32 goats on a daily basis. They've since grown their herd to 200, which is at capacity for them, and make four soft cheeses (they are now experimenting with some aged cheese). They aim to stay small, and supplement their operations by offering farm dinners, goat tours, space for weddings and events, and a farm shop. 

Deborah Harley

We made a couple more stops, and got to hear amazing stories from farmers. I'll leave you with just a few more photos - because I can't resist posting cow photos. 

When in Seattle, Drink Like a Seattleite.

I know it's been a while. I needed some time to rest and focus on my health, and decided to take a mini-break from the blog. Nothing serious, I just needed a breather. But I miss you all. So I'm back, and I promise to check in more next year. 

My mother, happy with her latte at Black Coffee Coop

There's a new coffee shop in Seattle. Despite the seemingly over-saturated coffee market in the Northwest, this new space has some big ideas to offer. Earlier this Fall, an amazing group of people got together and opened Black Coffee Coop in Seattle's Capital Hill neighborhood, a worker-owned cooperative cafe and community space. It's the brainchild of my good friend Scott, and came together with the help of community and an indiegogo campaign. If you're in the area, you should definitely check them out, either to try their vegan grub, attend one of their events, or browse their public library and displays of independent literature. Or, you know, to get a cup of coffee. 

As a part of their fundraising campaign, the collective offered various services, including barista training. This sparked an idea. I have a mother who wants nothing more than to make a decent cup of coffee from her home kitchen, but can't figure out how (and I'm no help). Wouldn't a private lesson on home coffee making be the perfect Christmas present? 

We made it happen, and now I'd like to share a few things we learned. 

Coffee - like wine, chocolate, and basically anything - has different flavor profiles depending on the conditions in which it grows. The same variety of coffee plant may have a completely different underlying taste or bitterness depending on growing conditions such as geographic location, soil composition, or temperature. Just like wine drinkers will talk about berry notes or honey in their wine, despite the lack of berries or honey, coffee drinkers should also be able to detect flavor notes that come out of the coffee itself. 

We started our lesson by smelling beans from three different countries: Panama, El Salvador, and Kenya. We then got to smell the beans ground up, which releases more scents. 

Manual drip coffee maker

Since we were learning about at-home coffee making techniques, we focused on drip coffee and the french press. For drip coffee, we used a manual drip coffee maker, pictured right. This type of coffee making uses a paper filter, and you need finely ground coffee so that the water doesn't run through too quickly. The process goes something like this: 

1. Fill paper filter with fine ground coffee. 
2. The more coffee ground you use, the stronger the coffee. 
3. Pour hot, almost boiling water evenly over the grounds. If you boil water, you can take it off the heat for about half a minute before pouring for optimal temperature. Black Coffee Coop pours water at 204 degrees. (Boiling is 212 degrees.) 
4. Try to keep the water level just above the grounds as you're pouring. 

Perfecto!

For the french press, you need to use more coarsely ground coffee. This is so you don't get grainy coffee pieces in your brew when you press the coffee. Here are the steps: 

1. We used four tablespoons of coffee for the entire french press, but you could use two tablespoons if you're only filling it halfway with water. 
2. Put the coarsely ground coffee into the empty pot, and then slowly add your hot water (see temperature notes, above). 
3. Place the lid on the pot, and after four minutes, press down to filter out the coffee grounds. 
4. Pour and enjoy! 

We did a quick tutorial on latte art. Lattes use espresso, so it's hard to do at home without an espresso machine. The trick to the art is to get both the espresso (which uses very fine ground coffee) and the milk frothy, and then pour. 

Making espresso

One interesting fact I learned is that the bitterness in coffee comes from the caffeine, and caffeine is a natural pesticide. Coffee plants that grow closer to the equator don't need to be as hardy as those grown farther away, so they tend to produce less caffeine, and as a result are less bitter. 

Black Coffee Coop is a comfortable space with many ideas - and great coffee - to offer. Give them a like on Facebook or stop in to see what they've got going on. Now, go forth and make great coffee. 

Doing a traditional cupping

Pomegranate & Potatoes: A Fall Salad

Roasted fingerling potatoes and delicata squash, delicate pomegranate seeds, fresh arugula and ground pepper, and a dressing of shallots, lemon juice, olive oil, champagne vinegar, dijon mustard, and honey. This just might be my favorite fall salad. 

This isn't a recipe that I created, being the amateur home cook that I am. It's taken from a CUESA food demo by Sam Mogannam of Bi-Rite Market. You can see the full recipe here, and I'll just tell you a bit about the ingredients I used. 

It's delicata squash season again, and if you haven't cooked with this you're missing out. It's easy to prepare, seeing as it tends to be a smaller sized squash and you don't need to peel it, and it has a rich creamy texture that lends itself well to baking and sautéing. And it's lovely in a fall salad. I've been buying my squash from Catalán Family Farm and Lucero Organic Farm, both at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market on Thursdays and Saturdays. 

It's also pomegranate season, and I highly recommend using these flavorful fruits in everything from salad to dessert. Trick: Cut and separate the pomegranate while it is submerged in a pot of water. The white pith will float, and the seeds will sink - all without spraying you with a deep purple juice. Right now Twin Girls Farm and Hamada Farms has pomegranate on Tuesdays and Saturdays at the market. 

In terms of the dressing, I want to highlight one of my favorite condiment brands. OrganicVille, despite its cheesy name, is a pretty great company that makes USDA certified organic condiments and salsas that are gluten free. The products I buy in local stores are processed in Oakland, making this sort of local - right? I used their dijon mustard for the dressing. 

All in all, this is a fantastic recipe to take advantage of the seasonal bounty, and the result is so visually beautiful it's sure to be a hit. Enjoy!

Shallots from the market

Who needs gluten? Heirloom Expo's Bounty

Yesterday was National Celiac Awareness Day (who knew?!). This day was formally designated by the Senate to be on September 13 to commemorate the birthday of Samuel Gee, the first physician to publish a "modern description" about Celiac Disease and theorize that diet may be related to controlling symptoms. In 1888! Took long enough for all of us to catch on... 

September 13 also happened to be the last day of the Annual National Heirloom Exposition in Santa Rosa. I was lucky enough to go this year, and the sheer abundance and variety you can get within each fruit and vegetable category is amazing. There were dozens of pepper varieties, mountains of squash, and little red-orange fruits that looked like a pepper/tomato cross but turned out to be eggplant. There were even showcases of heirloom chickens, ducks, turkeys, rabbits, and all manner of livestock. And it all got me thinking - it's easy to get hung up on what you can't eat, be that sugar, milk, brownies, cheesecake, peanuts, meat, or even gluten. Sometimes it helps to put it all in perspective and realize that in the grand sceme of things, there is so much more at your disposal to taste, smell, and experience. Seriously, I'm pretty sure I counted 100 varieties of tomatoes alone.

I wanted to share some photos of the bounty. Heirloom fruits and vegetables are incredibly important to sustainable agriculture. Heirloom varieties are fruits and vegetables that were commonly grown prior to the advent of modern agriculture, and have quickly declined in use. They can sometimes be identified by open pollination methods (like in potatoes). Their importance is threefold: they are often more nutritious than modern varieties, they have more diversity which helps protect against all manner of agricultural ailments, and they often (always) taste better (or at least give you more taste options, since there are so many varieties). Seriously, for anyone who says they don't like tomatoes, I have 100 varieties for them to try before they can truly stick to that statement. Actually, here's a list of 600. The expo was definitely worth going to, if only to remind yourself that the earth is always providing interesting things to eat.

So how many varieties of pepper can you name? 

Gluten Free Pop-up in SF: Yes Please!

Those of us with Celiac Disease know how hard it is to eat out. Unless you can find one of those rare restaurant gems with a dedicated gluten free menu, a typical dining experience includes asking your server multiple questions about cross contamination, sneaking a peek at the kitchen to see if any bread is touching your food, trying to convince your dining companions that you actually have a medical condition and aren't on a no-carb diet, and generally anxiety that the food in front of you is laced in poison (also known as gluten).

My take on this Zenbelly recipe

So imagine my excitement at the fact that every Saturday this month, Gluten Free and Paleo chef Simone Shifnadel is hosting gluten free Paleo pop-up dinners. Shifnadel is the brains behind Zenbelly Catering, a gluten free catering company. She recently ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to start a shared gluten free kitchen in San Francisco, which I wrote about here. She also has a fantastic blog, and I can personally attest to the tastiness (and clear instructions!) to both the "Perfect Roast Chicken" and the "Baked Eggs with Spinach and Roasted Garlic" recipes. Seriously, good stuff. These are a few of the many reasons why I'm excited about these pop-ups, and you should be too!

The following is the sample menu, and a link to buy tickets is at the bottom. Join me!

Zenbelly Catering Presents

Organic farm to table dinners at Food Lab in downtown San Francisco

The Menu:

100% gluten-free & predominantly Paleo, sourcing grassfed meats from Fallon Hills Ranch in West Marin and organic produce from Miramonte Farms in San Juan Batista.

ONE

fresh nectarines | arugula | crispy pancetta | plum vinaigrette

early girl tomatoes | fresh herbs | reduced balsamic | unfiltered CA olive oil

grown-up greens | feta cheese | strawberries | toasted almonds

TWO

Moroccan spiced bone-in Fallon Hills pork chop | Stone Fruit Slaw

Grilled Fallon Hills Flank Steak | Chimichurri | tallow fries

Wild salmon | coconut green curry | cauliflower rice

PEI mussels | white wine, garlic & grassfed butter | tallow fries | Bread Srsly sourdough

Moroccan Chickpea & roasted vegetable stew | cauliflower rice | mint yogurt [v]

THREE

grainfree brownie | coconut ice cream | coconut whip

summer berries & whipped cream | almond shortcake

grain-free carrot cake | cream cheese maple frosting

artisan cheeses | figs & marcona almonds

3 courses | $32

additional sides | $7.

tallow fries

sweet potato fries

collard greens with ham hocks

Bread Srsly bread basket | grassfed butter

(seriously, do it)

Mushroom Farming: Far West Fungi

Author’s note: I am not a biology or mycology expert, so please forgive any small discrepancies in this article. To learn more about mycology from people who actually know what they’re talking about, visit the Mycological Society of San Francisco or the Mycological Society of America.

When you buy your mushrooms at the market, you may think that they are all foraged in the woods. And while this might be true for some varieties, most mushrooms customers buy are actually grown on mushroom farms. Mushroom farms!  

Last month I got to tour Far West Fungi’s Moss Landing location and learn all about inoculation. Far West Fungi is a long-term member of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, and also has a permanent storefront inside the Ferry Building. Customers can buy chanterelles, truffles, portabellas, oysters, buttons, and more, as well as a variety of truffle oils, dried mushrooms, truffle salts and mushroom powders. They do work with some foragers for products like chanterelles, but grow most of their mushroom varieties at their cultivation farm.

The Process
Far West grows mushrooms that would naturally grow on trees in nature, so they are basically trying to re-create a natural process. They use sawdust, a medium perfect for growing mycelium, mostly red oak and cherry sawdust. Because sawdust has small particles, it provides more opportunities for the mycelium to inoculate and grow. Far West Fungi goes through a pile once every two weeks.

The sawdust is mixed with organic rice bran, which provides sugars and proteins for the organisms that produce mushrooms. They separate the sawdust mixture into polypropeline bags lines with a resin and a micron filter patch to make sure spores can’t get contaminate the mixture. Each bag is called a block. They heat each block to 254 degrees for 3.5 hours in order to kill all contaminants.

Each block is then sprinkles with about a teaspoon of the organism, in a room that pushes the air in one direction and the workers shower and wear suits before entering to prevent contamination. Then the blocks go into incubation rooms, where the airflow and temperature is controlled.

All the blocks Far West Fungi produces go into the same incubation rooms for four weeks, where the organism grows through the block. The oyster mushrooms are ready after four weeks, but others like the King Trumpets need a few more weeks, while the shitakes need an extra nine weeks (oyster mushrooms are the easiest, and will grow on basically any carbon source). These are moved to separate inoculation rooms that have dripping water to keep the humidity up.

The mushrooms are the fruiting body of the mycelium, and fruit when the bags are split and the mushrooms have enough time to grow.

Of Note

Many mushroom farms are in the area, because the coastal climate is perfect for mushroom cultivation. That being said, Pennsylvania is actually the biggest producer of mushrooms. 

When you bring your mushrooms home, store them in paper bag in the refrigerator (not crisper). They might dry out, but you can re-hydrate and still use. Wood based mushrooms are more nutritious than compost based mushrooms, and all mushrooms pick up vitamins when grown in light.

Mushroom Recipe Picks:

• Quinoa Mushroom Pilaf or Quinoa Stuffed Portobello Mushroom recipes from Gluten Free Goddess
• Gluten Free Stuffed Mushrooms from Adventures of a Gluten Free Mom
• Gluten Free Mushroom Marsala Sauce recipe from Gluten Free Works

If you want to see the farm for yourself, watch this informative video made by the Pacific Coast Farmers Market:

Four Ways to Use Stone Fruit

Who doesn't love stone fruit season in the Bay Area? Farmers bringing in sweet peaches, rich nectarines, pluots and plums and apriums and apricots, not to mention those CandyCot apricots at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market (FPFM). It's hard not to just eat everything raw, but there are plenty of great ways to enjoy stone fruit. 

Here are some ways I've used stone fruit in the last two months: 

Crumble

Clafoutis

Pie

Yogurt+Fruit

Firstly, where do you buy these gems? 

I love fruit from Tory Farms. Last year I couldn't stop eating their pluots, and their current nectarines and peaches are incredible. Even when they aren't soft, the flavor is amazing. Tory is at the FPFM on Thursdays and Saturdays. 

You can only get CandyCot apricots from CandyCot Fruit Company, which you can read about here. The farmer, John Driver, developed these varieties after bringing back hundreds of seed varieties from Central Asia and developing his own crosses. Enough said. 

After CandyCots, Blenheim apricots from Everything Under the Sun Farm are my favorite. Blenheims are the one variety of apricot that ripens from the inside out, and even though they are a bit cosmetically challenged, they are tasty. 

Bella Viva Orchards has these beautiful dusty green pluots with a deep red flesh. They are utterly surprising when cut open, and taste just as amazing. Bella Viva is at the market on Tuesdays and Saturdays and has other great stone fruit. 

Twin Girls Farm also has a great array of stone fruit, especially their donut peaches. They're at the market on Tuesdays and Saturdays. 

This isn't stone fruit, but Yerena Farms has a great variety of berries that is perfect on their own or in pies. Their strawberries are fantastic, as well as their raspberries and blackberries, but they also have interesting picks like ollalieberries and tayberries. They're at the market on Tuesdays and Saturdays. 

Finally, what would any of these fruits be without some rhubarb? While Happy Quail Farms is known for its peppers (try their padrons!), they also sell some amazing rhubarb on Tuesdays and Saturdays at the market. 

What to do? 

My first foray into fruit baking was with a clafoutis recipe from Gluten Free Goddess. Clafoutis is a lovely breakfast cake made mostly with eggs and a small amount of flour - this recipe uses coconut and brown rice. It's sweet and savory and egg-y all at once: I've used this recipe upwards of 10 times over the past couple of months, and it's fantastic. I've used many different combos, including: peach and tayberry, strawberry and raspberry, cherry and aprium, and nectarine. You can find the recipe here. You can substitute honey for the maple syrup.  

The easiest way to utilize all this great stone fruit is an easy crumble. Just use your favorite flour mix (brown rice, almond, and coconut, anyone?), and cut cold butter into it. If you're using rhubarb, mix some sugar into the fruit mixture before you lay the crumble on top. Bake at 400 degrees until the top is browned and the fruit is soft and sweet. Serve with Greek Yogurt. 

And then there's pie. I have to admit, I still haven't tried to attempt a gluten free pie crust. You know what I discovered? There are some lovely pre-made gluten free pie crusts out there that make piemaking a snap. Try the crust from Zest Bakery in San Carlos, or if you're in a pinch, the Whole Foods brand gluten free pie crust tastes just like the "real thing". 

All you do is cut up your fruit, and mix it with some sugar and about a tablespoon of brown rice flour. If you're using rhubarb, use a bit more sugar to sweeten. Pour the mixture into the pan and cook at 400 degrees for 20 minutes. Turn down to 375, and cook until the liquid is bubbling, about an hour or a bit more. Take out, let cool, and then devour with some yogurt. 

Finally, if you don't have the time, just cut up some fruit and mix with yogurt. Delicious.