Running Water

The Metro has a very positive article on South Bay urban farms: Full Circle in Sunnyvale, Happy Quail in East Palo Alto, and, of course, our own Veggielution.

Tomorrow I’m off to Fremont to the Olive Festival to buy oil and brined olives to serve at the Bounty of Heart’s Delight. Look for a full report.

Tomorrow is also the Prusch Park Harvest Festival. Veggielution will have a booth, so check it out if you’re in the neighborhood.

Today we have:(clockwise from the bottom) a largre, heirloom tomato, eggplants, beets, peppers (in the bag) radishes, eggs, lettuce, basil, collards, spinach (hidden in a bag) tomatoes, apples, and then potatoes, carrots and a melon in the center.

The eggplants and peppers are roasting as I type (along with last week’s, which got ignored in the fridge for a week.) The big tomato and melon are tonight’s dinner (with fresh mozzarella, basil and prosciutto.) The carrots are in their own bag! Imagine the convenience. I have last week’s collards, which will join their brethren, along with sausage and potatoes, in a soup. Apple pie this week, I imagine, and a big salad. Easy pie!

I got a phone call today from Coterie Cellars, who will donate a case of wine to the dinner and offered to give us the proceeds of a day of winetasting, too! Yay!

I met with Mike Borkenhagen of Eulipia this afternoon; we talked about recipes for the dinner, serving logistics and food prep. I said hello to the pears in the walk-in cooler; they look fine. It’s such a pleasure to work with someone so generous and cheerful, although he protests that he’s not actually doing anything.

I signed up for winter and summer shares for the Live Earth Farm CSA just now. They’ve started working with a software startup called Farmigo, which has written a CSA management system. It looks as though it can be used by multiple farms that want to join together to offer a range of products. From a consumer point of view, it sounds great. I imagine, however, that the challenge will be signing up farms, given that only 60% of farms have internet access.

LEF is one of the largest CSA programs around, though, so their making it work should be good for them and Farmigo.

Via the magic of Twitter, I bring you two links: Rebecca Thistlethwaite and Jim Dunlop are hot farmers, and FarmsReach is connecting farms and restaurants, although I want to see use by larger institutional customers.

I realized as I was driving away from the farm this afternoon that I hadn’t taken a single photograph, however underwater-looking, to document the work day. I wandered through the winter squash planting, where we have many pumpkins getting huge and orange. I picked a couple of small ones to try frying them. They were as tasty as anything edible is when it’s fried in olive oil and dusted with salt and pepper, but lacked the caramelized sweetness I was looking for in winter squash. I participated in the actual work of the farm, making up seed block mix. I saw the lovely flyers for our dinner that Amie had printed up, then left behind the small stack I had set aside to take home. I ate homemade bread, vegetarian chili and guacamole. And then I put stuff away.

But you’re going to have to take my word for it.

Elephant seals don’t eat when they’re on shore, but I made up for their abstemious habits today, picking up a whole aged sheep cheese and almost five pounds of feta from Rebecca King at the Westside farmers market, and then 20 lbs of freshly ground flour and 10 lbs of soft wheat berries from Pie Ranch. I saw several lizards and a bunny at Año Nuevo, but the only thing I got a photo of was a praying mantis.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in the wild, and here it was, sitting in the middle of the trail.

The juvenile seals were frisky and vocal this afternoon, then we three docents and the last of the guests watched as a researcher from Sonoma State looked for a particular animal on the beach (out of maybe 100 seals) from markings she’d left on it several weeks before, then tranquilized it, kept it from charging back into the water (not a good idea under sedation) and took a blood sample. Ah, graduate school.

Vamos a ver… We have, clockwise from top right: carrots, zucchini, apples, eggplant, melon, peppers, tomatoes, spinach, basil, collards, and eggs and red onions in the mush pot. The carrots have started a new bag, the apples have joined the reactor core, which is reaching criticality. The zukes are dehydrating, peppers and eggplants for roasting. You know the drill.

Last week, I had friends over to eat kohlrabi, beets and collards, although not all in the same dish (well, some of the kohlrabi and the collards were in a dish together with potatoes.) They did a great job, which means I’m starting with pretty much a clean slate this week. Well, except for lettuce. And the cake that Ms. J brought over to share.

Today, I cooked red cabbage, apples and sausage, in honor of the “official” beginning of autumn (despite my opinion that using the solstices and equinoxes as endpoints for the seasons is silly.) I’ll serve it with polenta. This past week, I also made a dish with many weeks’ worth of dehydrated zucchini, some roasted tomatoes, and spinach, over which I served some Dover sole fillets which had been sauteed in butter.

So what do you guys think? Should I go deeper into the descriptions of what I actually cook with these things? Or do you just like to see the photo with the pretty colors?

And while I’m thinking about cooking, I have a menu for the Bounty of Heart’s Delight. It looks like a real menu!

Moonflower aged sheep cheese, from Garden Variety Cheese in Watsonville

Wine Poached Pear with Creme Anglaise and Wild Fennel Biscotti, featuring Santa Cruz Mountain pears, courtesy of Village Harvest

Sounds yummy, no? Make sure you buy your ticket!

It was Henry, keeping a barrier against infection between himself and the world.

We picked about 750 lbs of good apples today, with probably another 250 lbs of culls. Not a good year for apples, it seems, which is strange since it was such a banner year for pears.

I finished Farm City today, it being Novella Carpenter’s tale of her squatter’s farm on a cement-covered vacant lot in the part of Oakland that doesn’t have a Sur la Table store. It was a very enjoyable book, but it really got me thinking how even the most fact-based memoir is a story, constructed to convey what’s desired. For example, at one point, she talks about a building at UC Berkeley, “where I was taking some classes,” but the author bio on the flyleaf proudly proclaims, “After moving to California, she attended UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism.” Not that it makes what she does write about any less true. But ever since I ran for governor in the recall election in 2003, I’ve been very sensitive to the stories that the facts are used to tell.

And it also struck me with renewed force how tiresome I find it when people impose weird dietary restrictions on themselves, and then complain about them. Carpenter resolves to eat for the month of July (of an unspecified year) just from her farm, but ends up with an odd list of rules.

1. Only food from the garden and the farm animals.
2. Foraged fruit from neighborhood trees OK.
3. No food from Dumpsters (except to feed the animals.)
4. Items previously grown and preserved allowed.
5. Bartering allowed, but only for crops grown by other farmers.

She relates how she was so desperate for carbohydrates that she uses an antique coffee grinder to make meal from the multicolored corn she has decorating her mantel, and growls at her boyfriend when he wants to eat the food presented by friends at a party.

But really, that’s a small quibble, albeit one about something that seems all too common in the literature. The beautiful word portrait of Chris Lee at Eccolo is made almost unbearably poignant by the knowledge that Eccolo has since closed. And the love for her two pigs, Big Guy and Little Girl, and her anguish when she realizes that she’s sent them off to die alone, come shining through.

Well, I waited until tonight to post, because I was planning to report on Councilmember Pierluigi Oliverio’s showing of Flow: The Film And then our Veggielution dinner planning meeting went on too long, and I didn’t end up going. That makes me sad, since it looks like a good movie. I’ll try to catch it elsewhere.

It was a good meeting, though. We decided whom we’re going to comp, and took a stab at firming up the menu a bit more.

And Amie has asked me to be on the Veggielution board of directors. I’m honored to accept.

Apples at Sky Ranch tomorrow. Hope for cooler weather.

Todd and I really laid on the food today at the Veggielution workday, especially Todd, with his penne with pesto, homemade bread, and stuffed zucchini blossoms redux. I made a soup with the shelly beans that had been growing up one of the huge cornstalks in the original plot. I told Amie she should include a menu with her emailed exhortations inviting people to the workdays.

Today’s big drama was the revelation that Chloë might be a boy.

Of course, that was just the opinion of someone who had already gone through the heartbreak of finding that her own chicken wasn’t going to be laying any eggs. Ever. At least Monica Lisa got to take another chick home, ambiguously named Caligula by the rangers. (No photo, sorry.)

And I came across a link I just have to share today. Evidently, the nitrogen and phosphorus left after Calgary’s four-stage water treatment makes the Bow River into perfect (introduced) trout habitat.

The infusion of nutrients into the Bow’s clean, cold water from Calgary’s two wastewater treatment plants — Fish Creek and Bonnybrook — are most responsible for elevating the river to blue-ribbon status. The inflow, from car-wash leftovers to bathroom water, goes through a four-stage treatment process. The effluent that is released back into the river is quite clean, although it has just enough phosphorous and nitrogen to foster a rich aquatic ecosystem. Wastewater spurs on plant growth, which encourages insect growth, which in turn feeds trout.

Gives you another reason to push for streamflow augmentation with recycled water, doesn’t it?