I Heart Farms

International Blog Day: My Fab Five

I'm a bit rushed right now: we're on our way for a day in San Francisco, playing hooky with Logan. It's a glorious day, and a boat ride is calling us.

For International Blog Day, here are five food blogs that are either relatively new, or new to me.

First and finest, StephenCooks, up in Maine, consistently turns out beautiful food, beautifully photographed, and with entertaining commentary. I would love to visit him some day: I think we've got a lot in common except he's ten times the cook I'll ever be. Stephen is an example of what I love most about the internet: using your creativity to inspire it in others.

Aloha and ciao to Rowena, in Lombardia, and her blog, Rubber Slippers in Italy (land of my soul, despite having been dropped by a lazy stork in Alabama). Again, the photography is crackerjack. You won't see me linking to blogs with photos taken on cell phones, I'll tell you that. She says: "It's a long, long way from Hawaii to Italy. Living in the land of pasta, pizza, and wine is everything that you might imagine, but one thing remains true. You can take the girl out of the island but you can't take the island out of the girl."

Another inspiring food blog is the visually sumptuous Travelers Lunchbox. Beautiful Melissa, an American, lives with her German husband in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Up in San Francisco, the mysterious "NS" blogs about the most beautiful city in the country at San Francisco Gourmet. He loves the city, and it shows.

And finally, though my French is as rickety as a rocking chair made out of toothpicks, I subscribe to Station Gourmande, and I cannot tell you anything more than that.

COMING UP TOMORROW: A wrap-up of the Eat Local Challenge for August, 2005. Also, a visit soon to VB Farm.

Entry #2 for Today: "Memories of Childhood Food"

NOTE: Scroll down to the next entry to read about TLC Ranch.

Having been tagged by "Kitchen Mage" for a "meme" (a word not quite as annoying as "blog," eh?), I am requested to address the subject above: memories of childhood food.

I grew up in the Deep South in a family that often bordered on poverty. Worse than poverty, though, was growing up in a suburb in the Seventies, when things like Tang and TV dinners were considered appropriate for human consumption. With the exception of tomatoes and corn, most of our vegetables came from cans or were frozen, and the only lettuce that existed was iceberg. Most of my food memories are of deprivation, or are riddled with the horror now of knowing that we ate garbage.

Despite that, I do have some pleasant memories, and almost all of them take place away from our house. In no particular order...

PEPPERMINT ICE CREAM
On my sixth birthday, we still lived in Miami, where it was hot all year. (And where the ocean was warm, as oceans should be.) I remember requesting peppermint ice cream for my birthday, and we actually got to go to a restaurant that served it. It was air-conditioned, and there were white tablecloths. I was in heaven. My love affair with peppermint ice cream did not last into adulthood, however. Nevertheless, this is a very strong memory, almost enshrouded in an overlay of the exotic (a restaurant was exotic to us) and luxury. Air-conditioning, curtains on the windows, carpets, and white tablecloths. I wanted to be that rich when I grew up.

TLC: The Ranch and the Concept

Out south of Watsonville, and inland a little ways from Elkhorn Slough, one of the most scenic parts of the Monterey Bay, sits a pretty little piece of California, preserved in the form of TLC Ranch. I took Logan and Rowan out to meet rancher, Jim Dunlop, whom I've talked to at the Sunday farmers market. It was just a wonderful visit: we spent nearly two hours traipsing around the place. The photo above is the approach to the entrance of TLC Ranch: a neighboring farmer has corn, sunflowers, and some wild and crazy squash that no mere rail fence could contain.

We started with a tour of one of the chicken coops: Jim's raising 500 hens (Bard Rocks and Black Australorps) that won't lay until next year, and he will have $3000-$4000 into the brood by then. On the other hand, his hens will be putting out 50 dozen eggs a day, which fetch $5/dozen at the farmers markets. (I've had these eggs: they are huge, and they are delicious.)

Logan, alas, suffers from the genetic imperative of little boys all over the world: he cannot resist the impulse to run after the birds and make them scatter. All the bribes and threats in the world ("No Raffi in the car if you don't stop, Logan!") didn't work very well.  Jim was a great sport, too, and tried to explain to Logan why his strategy was lacking in forethought, but Logan was impervious to reason, and we stepped out of the coop.

Happy Birthday, Chez Panisse; a Visit to Crystal Bay Farm, & Other Treasures

On August 28, 1968, Chez Panisse opened its doors. Look what Alice Waters started! I haven't been up there to eat yet—the day I arrived in Berkeley with my friend, Suvir, Chez Panisse was closed, and we were forced to eat next door at César. (Everyone should suffer this kind of deprivation. César was fabulous.)

I know Alice Waters has her detractors, and that not everyone is her fan, but I am an admirer. I got to meet her and photograph her two years ago, at Frog Hollow Farm in Brentwood. It was a sweltering day, and I loaned her my giant umbrella to keep the sun off. It was nearly as big as she was. It's well known that Alice is one of the biggest fans of Al Courchesne's peaches, and the dinner was in the middle of one of his orchards.

Photographing Alice that day was a challenge: she had so many cameras in her face you'd have thought she was the Playmate of the Month. Actually, the Playmate of the Month that day was the perfect Cal Red peach served to each guest at the end of the meal.  And she wandered down to our end of the long table as twilight deepened, and talked to us about the program she'd initiated to have all California elementary schools have a garden.

Thinking Inside the Box: Liberated Summer Cooking

My buddy, Steve, sent me a link to a story in the New York Times today: "The Summer Cook: Nobody Ever Slaved Over a Hot Toaster Oven." He knows because we talk so often, how my new toaster oven has changed my life for the better. It's been on my mind to write about it, and the article nudged me.

Our four-slice toaster had died while I was traveling in May, and it needed a replacement. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted a toaster oven, even though I am not the sort of person who needs every appliance and gadget in the world. We live in a rented house, and our electricity is covered in our (exorbitant) rent. Since Bob had replaced our old electric stove/oven with a propane one (for which we buy the fuel), our costs went up (and on a side note, I'm having to learn to cook all over again, as I understood the idiosyncrasies of the old oven perfectly). I also reasoned that it's ridiculous to heat an entire oven (and the whole kitchen) for a meal for two people, no matter what.

Eat Local Challenge and more

Who needs three kinds of potatoes? Not me, I need four. You can't see the giant white ones that are on top of my refrigerator. You also can't see: seven (SEVEN) baskets of golden raspberries that we got on Friday and yesterday, three baskets of strawberries, all the halibut, the eggs, most of the basil, the baby carrots (three bunches), the lemon cucumbers, two eggplants, more Romano beans, yellow wax beans, three pounds of Tongue of Fire shelling beans, or several kinds of heirloom tomatoes--all of those things have been eaten in the past few days (four of the baskets of golden raspberries went into Logan, three before we got home from the market). The rest is what came from the farmers market on Sunday and Tuesday.

For the record, there are: golden zucchini, Zephyr squash (the yellow ones with the green tips), poblano peppers, basil, Early Girl tomatoes, Russian fingerling potatoes, Romano beans, Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, Hass avocados, yellow creamers, Yukon gold potatoes, Walla Walla onions, and cipollini onions.

Bike2Barn, Bloglines, Farm Food

Big news from my friend, Guillermo Payet, the creator of the brilliant LocalHarvest.org website for consumers looking for farms, CSAs, and more. He and a friend, Megan, are off on a trial run for Bike2Barn...riding their motorcycles to Southern California and visiting farms en route. They're blogging about it, so check it out. Next spring, they're heading out for two months on a cross-country tour of farms.

Speaking of blogging, I have some very helpful information. A friend showed me how to use Bloglines, and I installed a bookmarklet into the toolbar of my browsers that lets me instantly subscribe to any blog or site I like. Once I subscribe, Bloglines lets me know when one of my subscriptions has new content on it. Checking the subscribers of various sites is also really useful: many of them have subscriptions to sites I haven't yet seen, and I've found some great material that way.

Green Letter Day & Two Good Books

Pictured here: lemon cucumbers at the farmers market Friday afternoon, on the west side of town.

Yesterday the sun broke through the clouds for the first time in a couple of weeks—and I'm not talking about the weather.

It started at 9 AM with a letter from a Daniel Sullivan, a senior editor at The New Farm (I wrote about them a couple of days ago). I had been brazen enough to contact them via the website, inviting them to look at this blog, and to tell them how great I think their site is. (It really is attractive and well-designed, but I would expect no less from the Rodale Institute.) He praised my blog and said he was going to pass it around to the rest of the New Farm team. They intend to promote Small Farms on their site, along with another blogging farm team, Gardens of Eagan. (Check out the essays, please: very moving.) Gulp. Oh, and wheeeee!

Windmill Farms: A Brief Visit

Just a quick note to say that Logan and I finally got over to Windmill Farms to visit Ronald this morning. The foggy weather amplified all the colors beautifully.

I'll write up a longer report later but here is a thumbnail sketch. The farm is a simple one: besides a lot of strawberries, Ronald is growing carrots, beets, kale, dandelions, chard, and spinach. Soon to be ripe are green beans and winter squash.

New Farm, Metafilter, & more

I recently subscribed to the newsletter from The New Farm, produced by the much-respected Rodale Institute. Today my first issue landed in my in-box, and I was delighted to see Andy Griffin, one of my favorite farmers, holding court there with this article: "Small farms can go mano a mano with food shows like 'Iron Chef' in reconnecting Americans with good food." (Speaking of "Iron Chef," that's Logan doing his very best Chairman Kaga imitation with one of the first ripe tomatoes from our garden.)

One of Andy's best customers is Traci Des Jardins, one of San Francisco's finest chefs. Her ardent fans gathered recently in the city to watch her best Mario Batali, who himself is probably one of the most respected chefs in the world. In an article in the San Francisco Chronicle: Did she get to bring California ingredients? "No," [Des Jardins] frowns. "And when there was a comment that a dish wasn't quite as good as it could have been, I told them it's because my ingredients came from New York!"