San Francisco Food Blog

simpologist/Flickr

Stuffing saver: A porcino growing wild.

​If you're dreaming of experiencing wild edibles 'round the table this Thanksgiving (a little extra oomph for your stuffing or risotto, per chance?), then ForageSF has an enticing bounty for sale. The wild and foraged foods gatherer is selling local mushroom boxes for the holiday, but you have to order by 1 p.m. today. Boxes cost $50 or $100 and include porcini and chanterelles that have been picked locally and identified by experts (for safety). Pick them up yourself tomorrow -- home delivery is also possible within a certain radius of San Francisco. To check out Andrew Simmons's writeup of other CSF treats ForageSF offers, read this. To place an order for wild mushrooms, click here.

handsongourmet/Flickr

Frog Hollow founder Al Courchesne

​Frog Hollow Farm has more than preserves, peaches, pears, and cherries to offer. In the past few years, the Brentwood farm has been pressing extra-virgin oil from its own olives. Taste the results at Sunday's harvest party at the East Bay farm, 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at 11435 Brentwood Boulevard (at TK), Brentwood. Tickets are $30-$65, and include lunch (with wine from Brentwood's Bloomfield Vineyards), as well as the chance to win an orchard tour with Frog Hollow founder, farmer Al Courchesne. You could also score face time with both legendary purveyor Darrell Corti of Corti Brothers, and KCBS food and wine editor Narsai David. And if you feel like loading up on olives, you can even do a little U-pick. Advance tickets required.

Craigslist

Get 'em before dogs and hawks poach the best layers.

​K and F Chicken Farm's hard-charging Craigslist ads -- all capital letters, lots of exclamation points, and an overwhelmingly frantic tone -- are as funny as they are informative. Read one and you'll find out that the Oroville-based farm delivers nearly 75 dozen brown chicken eggs to Bay Area homes every Saturday. You'll also learn that the farmers' children have named each and every one of their 300 chickens and turkeys and that they know the name ("K & F CHICKEN FARM (KFC) HA! HA! HA!") is amazing.

The price -- $5 per dozen -- is fair, considering the quality and convenience. And collecting eggs from pastured chickens is work, which K and F likes to point out: "MAY COST A LITTLE MORE BUT WHY? WE HAVE TO HUNT FOR THE EGGS, WASH THE EGGS, CHANGE & CLEAN WATER EVERY DAY, CLEAN THE CHICKEN COOP THIS IS DONE EVERYDAY and lost chicken due to dogs, hawks etc."

Call or write soon if you're interested in getting a delivery on the 14th. After all, chickens, as we're reminded in the ad, only lay one egg per day -- and given the recent rise in business, supplies are accordingly limited.

britta and rebecca/Flickr

DIY salad for landless urbanites.

​A few weeks ago, Weird Vegetables, the Bay Area's wittiest purveyors of vegetable-related mystery and magic, dropped the proverbial dime on a new trend leafing out from galleries and apartments in New York City. We have mixed feelings about that big splashy know-it-all city-state our friends pick up and move to every few years, but thankfully, the next big thing is not a didgeridoo virtuoso signed to a major label on the strength of one scratchy GarageBand recording. Bay Area residents, meet the future: vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens that also happen to look very nice.

The brainchild of Rebecca Bray and Britta Riley, the Window Farms project has a few primary goals: to sow the seeds for a citywide craze, encouraging New Yorkers and other beleaguered urbanites (that could mean us too, right?) to grow their own food, and spark further research and development collaborations.

There's a huge Window Farm hanging at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center in Chelsea. Check the pictures and take notes.

joyofkeepingchickens.com

Backyard fowl is a modern essential.

​As she cheerfully reports, Tablehopper is in Jerez this week -- swilling sherry, noshing on jamon, perhaps celebrating the completion of the manuscript for her upcoming book. While Tuesday's bulletin was understandably dosa-thin, she did not fail to ferry along something worth reading: a book recommendation, more specifically, a first-person testimonial from Peter Mulvihill of Green Apple Books. The text in question -- Jennifer Megyesi's The Joy of Keeping Chickens: The Ultimate Guide to Raising Poultry for Fun or Profit -- might prove useful to readers enamored enough with urban homesteading to start their own little house on the Haight.

Amazon calls this book "the most comprehensive full-color chicken book ever," which is about as good a blurb as a book about anything at all could ask for. Buoyed by Megyesi's advice, Mulvihill recounts his foray into fowl-rearing with delight, describing how his family's "picky-eater preschoolers" provided plenty of scraps for the growing flock, how he had to slaughter, pluck, cook, and eat "Tillie" when she turned out to be, not an egg-layer, but a small, strutting rooster with an ever-growing comb and an ear-splitting cockle-doodle-doo. He shares some good information as well. In San Francisco, you can keep up to four chickens -- or any legal animal for that matter. Hens are hardy; you can leave them unattended for days on end, providing someone -- a neighbor, a friend -- regularly harvests the eggs. It might be easier than you think. If you're curious, read the bulletin, buy the book, and keep checking Craigslist for coops.

Gene Lee/forageSF

Philosophically potent: A forage box.

​About a year ago, ambling through an exceptional meal at La Ciccia, we could not help but overhear a wine-soaked windbag over at the next table brag to his dining companions about his superior eating habits. "Why, I eat as my ancestors did," the man said proudly, throwing his voice theatrically around the small packed restaurant. "I've done the research!" His companions nodded generously, and he'd leaned back in his chair, folding his arms cockily, a strand of tuna heart pasta clinging gamely to gray-brown whiskers protruding from under his chin.

Okay, so that last bit was invented. All the same, the dude was annoying. Besides, U.S. News and World Report, among dozens of other media entities and scientists, had emphatically made his point already: Modern diets don't jive so well with our genetic requirements, and we'd be less vulnerable to heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and the like if we literally ate more like cavemen -- a change in habit that would also bring us perhaps spiritually closer to our Paleolithic predecessors.

The less trumpeted wild foods movement takes a slightly different tack, pushing local, sustainably foraged edibles as a natural complement or alternative to even the most noble of farmed foods -- environmentally sound, nutrient-rich, and, perhaps most importantly, philosophically potent. In a fairly unprecedented move, Iso Rabins, founder of forageSF, is now offering community supported forage (CSF) in monthly boxes ranging in size. Start with the $20 "baby" box for a little taste, or go with the $80 pesca-fungitarian, a cornucopia of revolving seasonal delights, including wild mushrooms such as chanterelles, black trumpets, and morels, nettles, miners lettuce, fresh local halibut, sea beans, fresh fruit, and cattail rhizomes, as well as prepared wild foods like sea bean pickles, acorn bread, and nettle pesto.

Soul Food Farm

Thirty acres of pasture burned.

​Fans of pasture-raised chicken and eggs from the North Bay's Soul Food Farm were no doubt saddened to learn about last Thursday's devastating fire. There were some great things in the works on the farm. As we noted last month, Soul Food was readying up a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program for chickens and eggs. Now, The Ethicurean blog reports, "not only is the CSA on hold, but ... the farm itself may be too crippled to survive." Soul Food's Alexis Koefoed described the fire's damage in grim terms, noting, "We lost 1,000 baby chicks. Trapped. Our old 1880s barn burned .... Thirty acres of pasture for the meat birds is gone." Tragic. Soul Food's customers included Coi, Quince, and Chez Panisse.

There are ways you can help, either by contributing to a PayPal fund to help the farm recover, or by mailing donations directly to Soul Food Farm, 6046 Pleasants Valley Road, Vacaville, CA 95688. A benefit dinner put on by 18 Reasons is also in the works. SFoodie will post more updates as they come in.

Mariquita Farm

Get a little of this action for yourself.

​Every year you tell yourself you're going to go all Jamie at Home, doing stuff like curing your own olives, or managing to cook a whole lamb, including preserving the dodgy bits. But, well, it's damn near September and you've got nothing to show from the summer season's bounty except a sticky jar of apricot preserves in the fridge. Preserves a friend made, no less.

Well, now's your chance to atone for your slacker-in-the-kitchen ways. Earlier this month, SFoodie blogger Tamara Palmer reported on Mariquita Farm's Ladybug Truck Buying Club. This week, the Watsonville boutique grower rumbles into Dogpatch again with a flatbed full of deliciousness, only this time it's of the tomato variety.

This Saturday, September 5, at Piccino (801 22nd St. at Tennessee), Mariquita Farm will be dispensing surplus tomatoes, a whole seed catalog of heirloom varieties, in fact. Score San Marzanos (20 pounds for $23 -- perfect for preserving whole), locally beloved hybrid Early Girls (same price), Beefsteaks (10 pounds for $15), and a whole lot of various heirlooms (10 pounds for $16). You can also buy Indian corn, the padron peppers that make Palmer so drooly, as well as red and gold bells (ideal for grilling, peeling, and canning).

Here's the rub: You have to reserve from Mariquita in advance, and you must buy in bulk - no one tomato here, one pepper there (there's a $15 minimum on pre-orders). Get on Mariquita's mailing list pronto (ladybugbuyingclub@gmail.com), and beg for tomatoes.

Pickup at Piccino is Saturday from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Take our advice: Start clearing out the pantry and hording canning jars from Rainbow.

Find a hand job. Or a truckload of Zinfandel grapes.

​Nearly 70 years ago, Albert Camus ruminated on the isolation of city life: As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.

If only he'd lived to know Craigslist. We're no longer petals on Pound's black, wet bough, filing out of buses and trains in lines, anonymous faces in the crowd arranged in purely natural forms, images unaware of shared voices or relationships beyond position in place and time. Today, as a well-known 2004 documentary made clear, Craigslist is almost atmospheric in its presence, a hub around which life revolves, a wellspring of intertwined human stories. San Franciscans use it to share ideas, ditch unwanted furniture, meet lovers, and, on occasion, from time to time, find employment. The site is so expansive that one could explore it daily and discover something new on each expedition.

For example, you can buy food on Craigslist -- in the form of produce and livestock for sale in the farm and garden classifieds. For anyone who has ever fantasized about strolling through Dolores Park with an adorable pot-bellied piglet tucked under arm, or contemplated the marketable possibilities of home-cured mini-coppa, this section will provide plenty of fodder for your imagination. Check out a few gems from the past 24 hours:

There's a chicken starter kit for sale in Santa Rosa. This includes coop, feeder, bedding, and water and feed tray -- chicks not included. The price tag? $99.

Someone in Sonoma County is hawking nearly eight tons of Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, Dry Creek Valley Syrah, and old-vine Zinfandel in, at minimum, quarter-ton lots, at the cost of $2000/ton, $1800/ton, and $2500/ton, respectively.

A herdsman in Morgan Hill has "GOATS ALL SIZES."

Up in Healdsburg, there are farm-fresh eggs selling for $5/dozen or $7/18-pack. That's cheaper than Budweiser, folks.

Seedlings of Egyptian Walking Onions, a sprawling, hardy heirloom variety
of Allium cepa, live in Berkeley, desperately looking for a home. They're delicious and, as the poster notes, a real "dialogue-starter."

Soul Food Farm

Soul Food Farm's chickens get to walk around and eat stuff.

​Starting in October, you might be able to score monthly pickups of the same chickens and eggs that the restaurants Coi, Quince, and Chez Panisse serve up.

Alexis Koefoed of Soul Food Farm in Vacaville told SFoodie she's trying to organize a CSA for chickens and eggs. Koefoed -- whose pastured chickens are in fierce demand by four-star chefs -- said she's hoping to make monthly dropoffs to Davis, the East Bay, and the Mission District. If it turns out there's enough demand in the city, the Mission might end up with two deliveries a month. Currently, city residents can buy Soul Food Farm chickens and eggs at Avedano's Meats, Prather Ranch Meat Co. in the Ferry Building, and Bi-Rite.

"It's been an idea of mine for quite some time, but I just hadn't put it together," Koefoed said. "It seemed like a good opportunity to do it now, since I have an opportunity to raise more chickens." The authentically free-range broiler chickens, which subsist on a diet of bugs and worms supplemented by a grain-based feed, will weigh in at between 3 and 4 pounds, with heads and feet attached, at a cost of $6.50 per pound. Eggs will be $6.50 a dozen. CSA subscribers will be able to order as many chickens as they like; eggs will be limited to three dozen at a time.

Subscribers will prepay an amount Koefoed has yet to determine, then make purchases against it, giving them the ability to skip deliveries. Local writer and editor Bonnie Powell, who helped Clark Summit Farm in West Marin organize its meat CSA last year, is aiding with the startup. Koefoed said she's looking for additional volunteers to help with distribution. Check out Soul Food Farm's Web site for more details or to sign up.

mariquita.com

​SFoodie likes to balance out our intake of meat, fat, and sugar with regular deliveries from Mariquita Farm, a specialty produce grower near Watsonville that supplies the finest restaurants in the area, from A16 to Zuni. While the farm's "Mystery Thursdays" (bountiful wild-card boxes for $25) is currently closed to new customers, Mariquita will be making additional trips to S.F. throughout the rest of the summer in order to make special sales of items of which they're particularly abundant in what they're calling the Ladybug "Truck Farm" Buying Club. This Saturday, August 8, the Mariquita truck will park in front of Piccino (801 22nd at Tennessee) from 2-6 p.m. to sell bi-color sweet corn (nine ears for $3) and padron peppers (1/2 pound for $6 or one pound for $9). Make pre-orders here to guarantee your stash, or you can take your chances (less advisable).

We've recently become addicted to the padron peppers, which have been a part of the last two Mystery Thursdays. Simply fry them in hot oil in a covered pan until they appear charred; drain and season with salt and pepper. They're amazing in omelets, soups, stir-frys, or just by themselves.

Cameo Wood, the proprietor of the adorable new shop Her Majesty's Secret Beekeeper (3520C 20th St. at Mission), told SFoodie today that San Francisco is a fertile area for beekeeping. She estimated that there are 300-400 practicing beekeepers within city limits. And while many of them do not sell their wares, preferring to give them away to friends or, in one local case Wood knows of, homeless shelters, there's an eye-opening variety of local honey (as well as books, soap, candles, and beekeeping aids) in her store. She will also soon offer classes ranging from making mead (honey wine) to beekeeping 101.

Wood explained that, after being laid off from her tech job last fall, she took up some leftfield hobbies including beekeeping and quickly learned of the local void for a honey-centric retail space.

"No one was doing it, so I decided to!" she said.

Today, she kindly set up an impromptu tasting of honey from the Sunset, Glen Park, Alemany, Castro, and Mission. She's even got a waiting list for one in the latter district called Liberty Hill Honey, and has sold a couple hundred jars of it in the last couple of weeks. Pictures of some of this awesome hood honey is after the jump.

ladyJake/Flickr

El Huarache Loco must file for a contract from the city's Real Estate Division.

Food vendors at the Alemany farmers' market who avoided the axe last week have an opportunity to operate under city contract for as long as three years.

Yesterday, Chron's Chuck Nevius reported that the city's Real Estate Division was allowing the vendors to stay, but only for a year, followed by an uncertain future. But John Updike, the Division's assistant director, told SFoodie that food sellers will be able to file for a two-year extension when the original contracts expire next summer.

The vendor controversy surrounding the Saturday and Sunday Alemany markets erupted two weeks ago, when the Real Estate Division released results of its Request for Proposal (RFP). Last week, Eater SF described the RFP's system for scoring prepared food vendors. According to Updike, the RFP's impetus was a mandate from the state's Department of Agriculture a year ago stipulating that, for health reasons, cooked-food vendors couldn't be situated among produce vendors as in the past, but were required to move to an area previously reserved for parking. But because parking was already scarce at the popular Saturday food market, the city decided to cut the number of vendors from nearly two dozen down to approximately 15.

Hedy Macferran

If the enticing piles of produce at your local farmers' market lead to fantasies about doing your own canning, a Bay Area organization is ready to help. Yes We Can Food is a community canning project housed at La Cocina (2948 Folsom at 25th St.). It offers hands-on participation for those interested in preserving, and, for the rest of us, the ability to buy the results. Yes We Can cooks on Sundays, then hosts evening pick-up parties the following Wednesdays: You can buy the fruits (and vegetables!) of the canners' labor while snacking on samples. At the apricot party last week, Yes We Can's Anya Fernald supplied not only apricot tarts, but the recipe for the buttery crust.

Work shares to Yes We Can's three inaugural events (apricot jam in June, cucumber pickles in July, and tomatoes in September) are sold out, but you can still sign up for a box of goodies, attend the parties, and meet and greet the cooks. We walked away with two jars of apricot jam made from difficult-to-find, supersweet Blenheims, and two jars of Helena apricots in cardamom-flavored syrup, all for $20. (Eight jars would have run us $35 -- after spreading some of the jam on a hot English muffin, we were kicking ourselves for not buying more.)

More photos after the jump.

Seeking foodie glamour

With plans to roll out a daily farmers' market, the struggling Westfield Metreon may be counting on catching a glint of the Ferry Building 1:PlaceType>'s foodie glamour to stir up buzz. A kickoff event planned for next Friday, May 15, is set to launch the Island Earth Farmers Market, a collection of some 50 vendors who'll be peddling produce, wines, baked goods, and prepared foods like organic dim sum, empanadas, and pastries. Free curbside service will let office workers shop during lunch, then have their swag loaded into their cars on the way home

Organizer Mark Brett told SFoodie the market will sprawl over two rooms on the ground floor along the Metreon's Mission side, once home to the Discovery Channel store. Vendors include Catalan Family Farm, Alive! raw foods, Panorama Baking, Phoenix Pasticceria, and biodynamic Frey Vineyards. There'll be crafts, too, including glass and jewelry

In fact, Brett may feel more at home with nonfood vendors - he's never actually run a farmers' market, but has managed mall kiosks as well as road and trade shows. We get the feeling the folks at CUESA (organizers of the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market), aren't exactly worried about the looming competition.

elraigon.com

Spring is here, and the city's farmers markets are brimming with fecund, fragrant, Technicolor abondanza: needle-thin asparagus fresh from the Delta; stalks of Pescadero rhubarb and Half Moon Bay snap peas; a dazzling array of Watsonville basil; loquats and fava beans and haricots vert from the Central Valley; the cantaloupe, avocados and Valencia oranges of the south; Sebastopol currants and Santa Rosa zucchini fresh as a Wine Country sunrise.

So what does one do with all this sustainably farmed opulence? Start things off with a couple of avocados that give just a little when you press into their skins. Mash them up with a seeded, chopped up tomato, half a chopped onion, two canned green chilies (also chopped up), the juice of half a lime, some minced cilantro and salt to your taste for the best guacamole around. Serve with chips and cerveza on the fire escape just about the time the sun disappears behind the treetops.

El Raigon, the Argentine steak house in North Beach, serves the tastiest asparagus in town. The kitchen procures the greenest, slenderest A. officianalis available, bastes the stalks with a subtly tangy marinade and grills them over the same glowing wood and charcoal that enhances their bife de chorizo. The result is a glistening pyramid of crisp, lightly charred flora sweet and fragrant with woodsmoke and its own uniquely pungent essence. Prepare them yourself on the barbecue with a simple olive oil-based marinade that won't detract from the vegetable's fresh, pure flavor.

Last year, I did a tasteoff among various local free-range, organic eggs, including those from Trader Joe's, Judy's Farm, and Marin Sun Farms. The easy winner were the ones from Soul Food Farm: the eggs stood up higher, the yolks were brighter-colored, and, most important, tasted the best. They're a pricey treat--$5 at the farm or $7-8 at retailers such as Prather Ranch Co. and Avedanos--so perhaps best appreciated simply soft-boiled or poached.

I always wonder how free-range chickens so billed really are, so I dropped by the farm to see for myself. As you can see in the video below, at Soul Food--where they prefer the term "pastured"--the chickens are literally free to do what they like, wandering around open fields eating plants or bugs, or back into their roomy coop to eat feed, lay eggs (gathered five times a day), or get away from the dark. The farm also has a couple of llamas to scare predators off from one breed that prefers to spend the night outside. The birds are regularly moved around to greener pastures, while their manure naturally fertilizes new growth in the old ones. It's easy to see why these eggs taste so good: the hens are well-fed and happy.

Community-supported agriculture ("CSA") is a system in which a farm delivers its produce directly to consumers, typically through a once-a-week delivery of a box of whatever is currently in season, prepaid on a quarterly or yearly basis. This no-middleman arrangement gives the farm a steady source of income independent of fluctuations in market prices, reduces costs, ensures maximum freshness, and can provide a captive market for items with limited commercial appeal, such as lambsquarter (a delicious green generally treated as a weed) or cosmetically challenged fruit.

I recently rejoined Full Belly Farm's CSA program. This 200-acre Capay Valley organic farm delivers to the East Bay, South Bay, and San Rafael. I paid for three months in advance, and pick up my box at a drop-off point, so the cost is $16.50 a week. Paying yearly would drop the cost by 50 cents; having the box delivered to my house would add $7.

This week's box contained:

After reading an item about a local produce wheel in the San Francisco MenuPages blog, but not wanting to shell out the $12.95 to actually purchase one, we have the fortune to learn what exactly is in season here in San Francisco right now straight from the weekly e-newsletter of CUESA. In their words:

Returning, plentiful and/or at their peak this month:

Based near Watsonville, Mariquita Farm supplies organic vegetables and herbs to acclaimed Bay Area restaurants. Its partial client list includes A16 (2355 Chestnut), Absinthe (398 Hayes), Boulevard (1 Mission), Chez Panisse (1517 Shattuck, Berkeley), Coi (373 Broadway), Delfina (3621 18th St.), Incanto (1550 Church), Kokkari Estiatorio (200 Jackson) and Zuni Cafe (1658 Market).

For the past couple of years, Mariquita has hosted Mysterious Thursdays in San Francisco every other week for those who can't afford or commit to its regular weekly CSA deliveries (or eat at that caliber of restaurant all the time). $25 cash buys a wild card box of beautiful produce, along with suggestions and recipes on what do do with it all (and when to do it). Last week's box, for example, consisted of Austrian crescent potatoes, cauliflower, baby carrots, lettuces, parsnips, watermelon radishes, white carrots, Castelfranco radicchio, sorrel, radishes (purple or French breakfast), mizuna, Swiss chard, cutting celery and rapini.

All you have to do to reserve one is check the schedule on the site and email to ask about availability for a given week. Pickup locations vary, but are always at a relatively easy to park restaurant with whom they work in San Francisco. After looking at the farm's Web site a few times over the past and noting with minor frustration that Mysterious Thursdays often sell out quickly, I lucked out a few days ago and was able to reserve what was perhaps the last spot for today.

It should be exciting not only to eat locally-grown food but to experiment with some of the same tools of the trade as the professionals have for a home game of Iron Chef. I'm going to pick up the box at the end of the day, and will report back the solution to this mystery (as well as the evidence) this evening.  -- Tamara Palmer

No, those aren't clementines, persimmons, or miniature pumpkins. At the Lucero stand at the farmers market the other week, I saw these new-to-me orange "Turkish" eggplants and had to try them. When I cut them open I was surprised to see some of the flesh was translucent, like citrus fruit (click for a larger image).