Running Water

Coterie Cellars very generously donated a case of wine for the Bounty of Heart’s Delight dinner this Saturday, and last night I went over to pick it up. As they say on their website,

By creating a new generation of winemakers dedicated to producing great wines within the communities in which they live, the Urban Winery movement is taking the country out of Wine Country. Coterie Cellars is pioneering this movement of small wineries in the South San Francisco Bay Area. Situated by Willow Glen just south of the San Jose downtown, our winery is centered between some of the best vineyards in the world. Napa and Sonoma are just two hours north, the Santa Lucia Highlands are an hour and a half south, and the foothills of the Sierra Mountains are just two and a half hours east. What’s more, if you’re one of the millions of people that live among the urban communities of Silicon Valley, you’re likely just a few minutes from us.

Since we’re an urban farm, it’s a great match.

They’re located in a small industrial park area just east of Almaden Expressway. But step inside, and the smell of oak and fermenting grapes leave no doubt about what’s going on.

Their primary fermentation is taking place is large plastic bins.

Kyle Loudon is the winemaker.

He told me that he worked in East Bay wineries for a few years, making more and more wine himself, until he and his wife decided that they could take the best of the grapes from different regions of California but make great wine in the neighborhood where they live.

They can’t make it to the dinner themselves, unfortunately, since their weekends are still taken up by the harvest. But he gave me a letter to read.

Coterie Cellars is proud to contribute to Veggielution. Recognized as on of the Best of the New Crop wineries in 2008 at Pinot Days in San Francisco, Coterie Cellars is a tiny, local winery located just ten blocks south of the San Jose downtown. The winery produces wines made by hand, berry to bottle, from highly regarded vineyards in the Russian River Valley, Santa Lucia Highlands and Fiddletown. The winery is open to the public one weekend each month, during which you can taste its wines for free. The next tasting is Sunday, October 25, from 3 to 6 pm.

The Coterie Cellars 2007 Casatierra Vineyard Rosé is a Californian expression of the rosés found in the South or France. It was a Gold Medal Winner in the 2009 Fiddletown Wine Competition. Only 65 cases were made. Coterie Cellars also produces award-winning Pinot Noirs from Saralee’s Vineyard in the Russina River Valley and Fairview Road Ranch in the Santa Lucia Highlands. You can read more about the winery and its wines at www.coteriecellars.com.

They’ve also offered to host a special tasting day for us, when tasting fee proceeds and part of the sales of wine would benefit Veggielution. I’m proud to be able to serve the wine on Saturday.

In between everything else on Thursday, I blitzed through all of my accumulated apples to make an apple pie to take up to Calistoga. Using my wonderful peeler-corer, slicer, I soon had a huge bowl of sliced apples,

which macerated in lemon juice and sugar overnight, before combining with two boxes of puff pastry for an enormous pie.

Of course, that many apples leave a significant pile of peels and cores behind, parts of the apple that are especially rich in pectin, and suitable for jelly.

I added water, boiled for an hour or so, then let the whole sodden mess drain in a jelly bag.

That’s an awful lot of juice. I’m saving it to make jelly after the dinner is over.

I drive up Highway 1 to Año Nuevo at least once a month, and there are lots of meaningful landmarks which I usually pass at speed. So this past Thursday, since I was driving up to Pescadero to pick up beans for the fundraiser dinner, I decided to take it easy and photograph the sights on my way up.

This time of year, it’s pumpkins, pumpkins, pumpkins.

Rodoni is set back from the highway. It’s the first pumpkin patch north of Santa Cruz.

Fambrini’s is a bit further along. They put in this objet earlier this summer. It looks as though it should be used for pagan rituals, but I guess it’s just art.

Then we get to Davenport.

For years and years, this was where we would eat fried calamari after New Year’s walks at Año Nuevo. They’ve also got good pastries, excellent ollalieberry pie and yummy artichoke bread.

North of Davenport is Seaside Pumpkin Farms, where I bought a Jarrahdale pumpkin, in case we don’t have enough winter squash for the dinner.

(They’re the grey ones in the background.) Next farm in line is Swanton, home of strawberry U-pick, both here and at Coastways, just across the highway from Año Nuevo.

Note that these are just the farms with stands open to the public. The entire marine terrace between Santa Cruz and Half Moon Bay is farmed intensively, with artichokes, brussels sprouts, leeks, strawberries and pumpkins.

Waddell is the last beach before Año Nuevo. It’s named for the last person in California to be killed by a grizzly bear (in 1875.) When I first moved to the Bay Area, these pocket beaches at the mouths of creeks seemed incredibly exotic to me, used as I was to So Cal beaches that go on for mile after sandy mile. On a windy afternoon, Waddell is alive with kite surfers. You can just make out Año Nuevo island on the horizon.

Pigeon Point is named after the Carrier Pigeon, which ran aground during a storm in 1853. As I relate in my guided walks, Col. Albert Evans testified in 1874 about the need for lighthouses along the San Mateo County coast, saying “It is a place where black reefs of rock rear their ugly fangs, like wild beasts waiting for their prey.”

Further north is my favorite of these pocket beaches, Bean Hollow, as much for the name as for its cozy size and climbable rocks.

Even though Pescadero means “fisherman,” the town is a couple miles inland (along a tsunami evacuation route, in case you ever need to know.

It lies behind Pescadero Marsh.

At the crossroads is Duarte’s, home of cream of artichoke soup, cioppino, and another great ollalieberry pie.

There are farms scattered around the town itself, including Harley Farms, maker of lovely goat cheese.

These goats across the road came running up to the fence when I stopped my car to take a photo.

Finally, at the end of Pescadero, you come to Phipp’s Country Store.

Inside, indeed, are more dried beans than you’ve ever seen together in one place.

I got about 12 lbs of Arbolito, which originally came from El Salvador,

but are now grown in the Phipps bean fields.

And since I was having such a nice day out, I had lunch at Gabriella Cafe in Santa Cruz.

And I visited Mission Santa Cruz.

Yesterday morning, I bought new clippers, got in my car and drove the lengths of Highways 680 and 12, and much of Highway 29, ending up at the vineyard of Heather’s father and stepmother, Frank and Inger.

Their place is just south of Calistoga, in the middle of the Napa Valley, in fact, bordered on the east by the Napa River. It’s well off the highway, and so very quiet, peaceful and beautiful.

They have a huge deck shaded by a truly enormous oak tree, that dropped hundreds of ballistic acorns while we were there.

Heather, and later Stan, made ultimately futile attempts to sweep them up. Inger is already making wine, which she ferments in large garbage cans.

Heather hopped aboard the tractor to carry out the wooden lugs,

and we went out to pick grapes.

Stan even took some photos of me. Sine we were having a Napa Valley experience, we also stopped for lunch and wine.

That’s Bud and his daughter Laura, who are going about the winemaking in a serious way. Almost all of the grapes we picked went home with them, and they plan to buy a 30 gallon oak barrel and even build a shed to house it. My basement was deemed a wee but too inconvenient. We picked a bit more than 600 lbs of fruit,

which we determined by weighing it.

The stemmer-crusher is a fine example of Italian industrial design.

It’s pretty simple inside. A large auger runs along the bottom of the hopper, and stems get pushed out the side,

while the crushed grapes pour out the bottom.

Bud saw no reason to improve on the garbage can method, and we filled five large cans half full with the crush. They all went into the Explorer afterward.

We cleaned everything up and sat around on the deck for a while, feeling pleasantly tired and enjoying the sunset.

I brought home about 60 lbs of grapes to make my own batch of wine. On the to-do list is buying my own plastic garbage pail.

I did enough food-related things today for three posts, but I have had enough trouble with daily inspiration that I’m going to parcel them out. But a second post today is necessary for the Thursday CSA report.

Here we have (clockwise from bottom left) basil, dandelions, arugula, spinach, nappa cabbage. Greens, greens, greens! If I get the same assortment next week, you’re seeing it in our field salad on Saturday. The dandelion and arugula I’ll cook with pasta, the spinach I’ll use to make this intriguing enchilada recipe and the nappa cabbage will become either slaw or okinomi yaki, unless I discover some new recipes.

Beets, carrots, green beans and peppers. I’ll use the carrots in the vegetable stock for the dinner, the beets are going into a beet bag, the peppers will be roasted, and the green beans may make a Nicoise salad, if I can bring myself to buy tuna.

Lots of heirloom tomatoes. Three are slightly damaged; there was a box of squishy extras for people to take if they wanted. I brought them to Veggielution this afternoon for the high school kids to cook with. About which more later.

And eggplant. They’ve already been transformed into baba ganouj, which I’m bringing with me tomorrow, along with a truly enormous apple pie, which has finally used up all of the apples in the house. But I still have way too much food in my kitchen; I need a walk-in of my own.

Tomorrow? We’re going up to la casa de los padres de la Jefe, Heather’s dad’s house in Calistoga, where we’re going to pick 1200 lbs of grapes to make wine, which will fill up a barrel in my basement. Stay tuned.

I’m off to Pescadero today, to get dried beans at Phipp’s Country Store. I’m sure it will be a beautiful drive up the San Mateo County coast; the NY Times even has an article about it, although from the other direction. And the whole Sunday Magazine is about food again.

Thanks to Rebecca Thistlethwaite who gave a shout out to the Bounty of Heart’s Delight in her TLC Ranch newsletter this week. On Sunday I’m picking up the pork from the Mountain View Farmers Market, where I’ll also get mushrooms from Far West Fungi for the vegetarian entree.

And, in more miscellaneous links, the Coastal Commission reversed its August vote and decided to give San Diego a waiver from the Clean Water Act after all. A new commissioner from San Diego joined the body after the last vote, and

San Diego didn’t offer any substantive changes to its waiver application. There was speculation that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who supported another exemption, had pressed the commission to override itself.

“The politics in the last 60 days changed the vote because there was absolutely no new information,” said Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, an environmental group in Santa Monica that opposed the waiver. “It’s not like all of a sudden the marine environment got cleaned up.”

This new waiver is supposed to let San Diego focus on wastewater recycling, but

several commissioners voiced concern about what they saw as a lack of accountability from [Mayor Jerry] Sanders.

“The city hasn’t set any goals or milestones,” said Commissioner Sara Wan of Malibu, who cast a no vote. “There is no commitment here to actually implement the (wastewater) recycling.”

As for what it was really about,

“I feel very good about it,” Sanders said. “It’s the most important issue we have going right now — saving $1.5 billion for the ratepayers.”

So I made lots of cookies yesterday. I looked at lots of biscotti recipes, which are mostly normal cookie-type doughs (butter, sugar, eggs, flour, baking powder) but I was intrigued by a recipe in The Italian Baker, by Carol Field, which was more of a genoise-type batter (beaten eggs and sugar) without the butter. But just as I poured the sugar into the eggs, I realized that I am not, in fact, going to use sugar for the Bounty of Heart’s Delight. Rather, I am going to use local honey, so the ingredients in front of me were now useless for the purposes of test baking. So I made a cocoa kind of cookie with them, which would have been better if the bottom tray hadn’t got too hot in my oven and burned a bit.

Anyway, I retreated to teh interwebs (where I spent far too much of the day, anyway) and looked into the intricacies of baking with honey. I was advised to reduce baking temperatures by 25º and add an extra 2 Tbsp. flour for each cup of honey, but otherwise it didn’t seem as though the sugar to honey conversion would be too fraught.

So I took a stick of butter and creamed it with about ¾ cup of honey.

I was heartened by how normal and smooth it looked. I added an egg, some lemon zest (although that means I’ll have to source some local lemons) and about 1 tsp. of the fennel seeds I picked yesterday,

which I crushed slightly to release their oils. Then I added 1 tsp. of baking power, a pinch of salt and three cups of flour. I got what looks like a regular cookie dough.

I really have no explanation why I was so unnerved by baking with honey, but there you go.

Biscotti are, indeed, baked twice, with the first baking being a long loaf,

which is then sliced and baked again. I baked the loaf for 20 minutes at 325º and the slices for another 20 minutes at 275º. Et voilà!

And they’re pretty tasty, too, with the fennel and honey coming through without being overpowering. These proportions made about two dozen cookies, and I imagine I’ll want 12 or 14 dozen for the dinner (depending on whether people get greedy and take more than two each.) It remains to be seen whether I’ll bake them at home or at Eulipia, but I want them to be fresh, so I won’t do it until next Friday at the earliest.

Then it was time for crackers. I like the look of this recipe for Olive Oil Crackers. The main problem is the flour. This recipe relies on developing the gluten in the dough to allow one to roll it out thinly, but the flour made from the Sonora wheat grown at Pie Ranch is a low-protein, soft wheat with minimal gluten content. Notice that the original recipe calls for semolina flour, which has a lot of protein. But needs must, so I just added enough flour to make a dough of the right consistency,

cut it into pieces, and let it rest.

After an hour, I rolled it out with my pasta machine (and this is the second time I’ve used it since starting this blog, surely a record.)

Then I laid each piece on the pizza peel, liberally sprinkled with cornmeal, and sprinkled three with mustard seeds

and the other three with black pepper. I baked them on a pizza stone preheated to 450º for 10 minutes, then let them cool before trying them.

Pretty tasty, although I think they could stand to bake for another minute or so, for maximum crunch.

Now how many to make? That was six large crackers for 2 cups of flour. Allow 2 per person? I’m a pig at events like this, but will everyone hoover down appetizers the way I would, and spoil their dinners? Not everyone will come to the farm beforehand, so say 120 crackers, which is 20 times this recipe. I’m glad I got 20 lbs of flour.

This morning brings two articles, one from the Merc, and one from the Chron, about a report (link goes to a 15 MB PDF) issued by the San Francisco Estuary Institute about the health of the bay.

The coverage of these issues is as interesting to me as the issues themselves. The news is that suspended sediment in the Bay has dramatically decreased since 1999, which will allow sunlight to penetrate more deeply and stimulate the growth of phytoplankton. This sediment is a legacy from the Gold Rush, when hydraulic mining blasted away entire mountainsides, and mercury was used to separate the gold. While this sounds like a good thing, excessive phytoplankton growth can, when the dead plants sink to the bottom and decay, use up so much oxygen that fish can no longer breathe. Both articles highlight this danger, but the Chron is much more pessimistic, with its headline dourly proclaiming “A Clear and Present Danger: S.F. Bay’s slide in mud worries scientists.” The Merc is a bit more upbeat, saying that more phytoplankton can increase the total amount of life in the Bay, that the need for dredging navigational channels could be reduced, and that more sunlight might hasten the breakdown of methylmercury to its elemental form.

The online responses to article in the Chron seem to take issue with the dire warnings, mostly following along the same lines as this one

Why is the bay getting closer to its “natural” state a bad thing. Everyone is trying to keep the status quo.
Nature will adapt again, please butt out an[d] quit pretending we can stop evolution.

But I had to read both articles to put the bigger story together. A certain level of sediment is “natural,” and necessary for some species, such as the poor Delta smelt, which uses it as camouflage. Yet this natural sediment is no longer making past the dams that lie between the Sierra and the Bay (reported by the Chron.) And the conditions that would encourage proliferation of phytoplankton have as much to do with increased sunlight as with excessive nutrients, provided by own sewage treatment plants. Recall the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico, caused by fertilizer runoff into the Mississippi. This was reported by the Merc, but left out of the other piece.

And why 1999? The Chron also reported the fact that the huge plume of fresh water dumped into the Bay during that El Niño winter finally pushed out the remains of sediment that had been hanging around since the 1850′s; the Merc simply noted that it took a few years for scientists to believe that the drop was real, and not a fluctuation in measurement.

As you might expect, reading the report itself is a different experience altogether. The report spends a great deal of space discussion dredging, and how a reduction in dredging has impacts far beyond the cost savings. (It also used the phrase “the dredging community,” which made me LOL.) Dredged sediments are what’s used in wetland restoration, so there’s a place where fewer dredged sediments is not necessarily a good thing. There is also a much more complete discussion of the sediment flows in the Bay; the Bay is now a net loser of sediment, which changes its underwater geography. More recent understanding of this sediment flow and mixing seems to allay fears that older, more mercury and other pollutant-laden sediment is not as much of a a time bomb, waiting to explode once its covering layers are peeled away by erosion. Evidently, the layers have been mixing more than was thought, so the older sediments have already been diluted. And, in a discussion about mercury pollution, there is one of those pictures that are worth a thousand words.

This is from page 37 of the report. It shows how much of the mercury that’s found lying around comes from sources outside of the US, and the huge red plume covering the western US is smoke from coal-fired Chinese power plants. Or, as the caption says

An estimated 70-90% of the atmospheric deposition of mercury in the Bay Area originates from outside of the U.S., especially from China. … The greater precipitation and larger number of sources in the eastern U.S. result in a higher fraction of mercury deposition being attributable to domestic sources.

It’s also a beautiful report, a real pleasure to read. As the saying goes, it’s the sort of thing you’d like if you like that sort of thing. So of course I’m happy that it’s covered in the local press; I wouldn’t have seen it otherwise. But there’s no substitute for reading it in the original.

I gathered fennel seeds along Los Gatos Creek Trail this morning.

I’m going to use the seeds to flavor the biscotti I’m serving for dessert at The Bounty of Heart’s Delight. I’ll be doing the test baking for that and the crackers tomorrow, I think.

Then it was off to the farm, where I arrived to find corn clearing in full swing.

This is in the original plot, where the stalks were easily 14 feet tall. We gathered the dried ears.

and made a big pile of stalks, that later got hauled away to the compost area, to await chipping, should a chipper grace us with its presence.

In other useful work, I helped make more seed starting blocks, and planted onion seeds. The greenhouse is filled with baby plants getting ready for the winter fields.

Note the lovely handmade redwood trays, made for us by a volunteer. They smell nice, too.

I didn’t cook today, but collaborated with Todd to make strawberry ice cream. Todd was very concerned that the rock salt to ice ratio be correct, and wanted to pack the ice cream with more salty ice after the motor of the ice cream maker stopped, so that it would firm up a bit. I had a better reading of the intended audience, and we just all snarfed down a gallon of soft, fluffy ice cream, served with watermelon and brownies. Sean said it was the best lunch ever.

Afterward, Pete thought about backpacking around Europe with the EZ-Open canopy, which has finally reappeared at the farm, saving us easily 45 minutes of setup and takedown time.

Today I went to beautiful Mission San José, which is, inexplicably, in Fremont, for the Olive Festival. It was very cute, in a small town festival way. (And Fremont is not a small town.) There were cheesy jewelry booths and odd, animal-shaped purses, but what there really was, was olive oil.

Lots and lots of olive oil, all from California, but not from all over California. Most was from the Central Valley north of Sacramento, although there was oil from Livermore and Visalia and the Sierra foothills as well. I tasted all of the oils from each booth, and got a gallon of late harvest Manzanillo oil from Joëlle Olive Oil in Yolo County.

I also got some olives for appetizers. Well, rather a lot, really,

especially since there are two pint tubs in the fridge, too.

Then I went to the Harvest Festival at Prusch to help at the Veggielution booth. We helped kids make little newspaper pots and plant seeds to take home. Stella the dog was another big draw at the booth. Amie told me that our youth program is already running, and we talked about what the kids could cook on Thursday afternoon, harvesting it from the farm and cooking it all on the Coleman stove.

And then I had to drive up to the hilly part of Redwood City, and what should I see at Cañada College but a poster for, yes, an Arts and Olive Festival tomorrow. I won’t be attending, although I imagine the vendors from Fremont will be staying the night in the Bay Area and crossing the Dumbarton Bridge tomorrow.

Now, for a complete change of tone, here is an article from the NY Times about ground beef safety. I could post food safety articles all the live long day, but other people already do it better (like Marion Nestle, Jill Richardson and the folks at The Ethicurean, if you’re interested.) But this one I found especially horrifying, even though I haven’t had hamburger in probably 20 years. The money quote:

Dr. Kenneth Petersen, an assistant administrator with the [USDA]’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, said that the department could mandate testing, but that it needed to consider the impact on companies as well as consumers. “I have to look at the entire industry, not just what is best for public health,” Dr. Petersen said.