Pork on your fork

Do pork and meat really come from little plastic and Styrofoam containers on the butcher’s shelf at your large grocery chain or big box mega store? Didn’t think so either. The so called “swine flu” may or may not be an international pandemic that will bring about world disorder but it does bring up the subject of knowing where your food comes from.
Recently Slow Food Delta Diablo Chapter had the “Pork on Your Fork” event at a farm in Brentwood where a pig and a couple goats were slaughtered with an audience. Shot in the head and throat slit faster than you can say “I’ll have bacon with that” may sound a bit creepy, to me it sounded fascinating, but the event was specifically organized to bring awareness to the subject of how the little piggy gets from rolling in the mud to the Styrofoam.
Once the event was publicized there were a few irate, incredibly insulted vegetarians that contacted us about why and how we could possibly subject humans to this horrific experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I am no lover of pork or pork product unless I am in a small village in Italy because of the way America raises and processes pig meat. Large scale production, 99% of pork production, is cruel and disgusting producing unhealthy, hormone and antibiotic stuffed pork meat for consumption but as always consumers hold the keys to the pig pen by voting with their dollars. Just as the organic foods movement has raced into Americas consciousness so will small scale meat production, if we demand it. Currently you have to put a little effort into finding some decently raised meat to buy and feed yourself and your family. Whole Foods and Prather Ranch Meats are worth looking at on a large scale but do fit into the large grocery category. Also becoming popular are CSA’s for meat. Marin Sun Farms (415.663.8997) has been around for awhile and are getting into chicken meat as well as beef and pork and in Vacaville Natures Bounty Farms ((707) 693-0908) produces all natural hormone and antibiotic meat for sale. They have been raising livestock for 16 years and are actually certified meat inspectors. The Bay Area Meat CSA managed by Berkeley Slow Food joins together community people looking for the best local meat choices and pairs up buying and sharing power with local ranchers and producers. Soul Food Farms ((707) 469-0499) produce chicken meat and eggs for sale. There is always the option of buying meat, fish, eggs etc. at your farmers markets too.
These are just a few examples and options of industrious humans demanding a better grade of food as well as a better grade of life and death for animals raised for consumption. As with pretty much all choices of knowing where our food comes from and purchasing what we see as the best quality for our consumption, it takes a little bit more effort than blindly, robotically pulling so called food off the grocery store shelf to line pockets of faceless billionaires’. That effort is well worth it and beautifully transfers some of that booty to the small family growers and producers that not only have a face and name, but have actual farms to go tramp about on while seeing first hand the animals that may be dinner tonight. People are going to continue to eat meat and events like Pork on Your Fork are meant to raise awareness and educate about how meat should be raised and processed. Sorry if we have insulted anyone, it was not intentional, unless of course you are still participating in the disgusting raising and slaughtering of the styrofoam enclosed piggy.

Are you ready for skin kissy weather?

Fluttering butterfly chrysalis thoughts of spring begin to softly awaken thoughts, paying attention to how it is going to work when mercury rises and clothes need to be, shall we say a bit less shielding than winter coverings. That was a nice way to say yikes!, it’s time to put on shorts and tank tops. Forget about the bikini, although I did sport a bikini one summer when I was 17 and went to Lake Shasta with only my girlfriends and not my family. We were very into making string bikinis at the time. I had to stop eating to get into it, for quite sometime actually. Then it got a bit weird so I figured I would be my curvy self eat healthy stuff to prevent myself from delving even deeper into a pretty salacious disease, ending my bikini experience. We were on our own for about the first time in our lives on a long drive from the Bay Area to Shasta for a week and starting to feel our wild teenager allure around guys our age and then some. It is a pretty clarifying moment when you realize initially what your effect is on the male population as a long haired, long legged 5’ 10’ 140 pound 17 year old sporting a bikini or a halter top and shorts or any type of clothing that shows skin. Throw in being able to bait a hook, set up a tent and ride a dirt bike while gourmet camp cooking and sparks start to fly creating a situation where you never will have to buy your own alcohol again.

My sisters however got my mom’s genes and still wear bikinis in their later years and look great but I digress. I frankly get a little freaked out about the whole thing and am torn because I love spring temperatures, kissing my warming skin, encouraging many smiles and sighs, but it is always interesting when the inevitable clothes shedding starts.

My mom was really ill with a kidney infection and is home now but we are watching what she eats to get her health back. My sister Kathi told me about a diuretic soup to make for her to help shed this amazing amount of water she retained making her legs so big she could hardly lift them. Dandelion greens, chard, celery, parsley, all things green. She told me make it into a broth but I made it by chopping all the greens up and simmering in water to by cover by about 3 inches. After about a 30 minute simmer it is pretty thick with the greens but it really works like a charm for a nice, healthy toxin cleanse from the body without getting into any of the scary concoctions at the health food store. It worked for her to help get rid of all that water. I myself have been drinking stinging nettle tea and broth. It is awesome, meaty and sweet at the same time being the sort of food that you can feel delivering sunshine into your veins as you drink it.

It really boils down to cut out sugar and the second dinner now doesn’t it? I have the exercise thing down, how could you not around here? We have the best hiking. You can get in a nice one or 2 or even 3 hour hike and still get all your stuff done for the day that you need to. We love Briones and know every trail. Mt. Diablo is a different animal altogether. In the winter and spring it is really a lot colder and a bit wilder than Briones but in the summer it is too blazing for me and I tend to skip it until the days get a bit shorter and the birds try to figure out where they are going before they remember that they live in the Bay Area and don’t have to go anywhere. We need to explore Mt. Tam way more than we have but it takes an hour to drive over there so on the back burner it patiently waits. Redwood Regional is great and not quite as far a drive. We like to go in on the Canyon side and walk over to the San Lorenzo res ending up in Oakland. This is perfect weather for hiking and the trails are in perfect shape without too much mud but not slippery and sketchy either.

Just thinking about those skorts hanging in my closet, every once in awhile almost taking one off the hanger to see if it will button but then I chicken out ,allowing my blood pressure to calm down before thinking about trying again. Maybe if I can self tan enough I will work up the nerve. Nothing like bright white flab to make you back out of the closet quietly and deftly before the bomb drops.

Wait a minute...I think I saw a food system change

After years of trying to get food offered for life and nutrition to our students in schools we are finally getting some positive feedback from the people that hold the purse strings and rules that go with the money, the feds. Michelle Obama has dug up the sacred White House lawn to plant a vegetable garden with some school kids, giving credence to all of us that have been planting school gardens for years under suspicious and watchful eyes. She has legitimized kids learning how to plant their own foods while learning science, math, getting exercise and sunshine along with a million other positives of kids growing their own produce.

Her husband has new people trying to figure out a corrupt, inherited USDA in control of the national school lunch program joke. Tom Vilsak, the new secretary of agriculture actually took a jackhammer to a patch of lawn in front of his headquarters to create his own organic community garden. Wow, this is a guy on the team of our future food system shapers, radical, independent and aware that change needs to be made for the health of our country physically as well as metaphorically.

Current systems dictate taxpayers money pay the large, massively unconscious and devastatingly polluting large agri business growers to grow way too much corn and soy. Then we pay their subsidiaries to figure out devious ways of sneaking highly refined corn and soy byproducts into every kind of prepared foods available in a supermarket loaded with enough habit inducing sugar and fat to keep the sheep happy and coming back to the deadly trough until they get educated enough to change their eating and shopping habits to stay alive. The system continues on to pay those same large agri business people more money to put this hideous food into the national school lunch program, oh and yes by the way lets subsidize the whole operation with taxpayers money again. Sounds fishy to me and the old ways are definitely starting to stink up the hood. Perhaps this is all news to you and you thought that it was just cheap, bad food we fed the kids to keep everyone’s costs down. Simply part of the shenanigans my dear. I feel like the Obama administration may curb the dumbing down of America simply by encouraging Americans to take responsibility and become a part of the process of knowing what they are eating and how it got into their pantry.

After years of breaking bread and breaking ground with school age students it is most rewarding for me to be a part of a process that instead of going backwards to promote healthy eating is inching in the forward direction not only talking about supporting, but sustaining as well as growing the number of small family farms creating a food system that is based on local growers and people buying from these “food sheds”. The impact on our environment has the potential to be earth changing literally if the amount of fossil fuels used in transportation internationally of foods is reduced based on local consumption. Amounts of fossil fuel generated fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides may be reduced by the smaller growing model. Conventional smaller farms do not use as much as the large monoculture agri business and the organic growers use fossil fuels to grow their foods In the form of gas for tractors mainly.

Pesticides, herbicides and fertilizers came about after world war two when munitions factories needed to be used as something else. They had already been using the technology to produce mustard gases as well as other weapons for the battlefields and the jump into this new realm of capitalism was not far. Sometimes I wish that I had the mind to come up with that stuff…
Agriculture took a major right turn with the availability of all these new fangled tools and the farm that used to rotate crops year after year no longer had to because of fertilizers. Farms that used animals as part of the growing process for fertilizer, weed control etcetera, no longer had to because it was easier to just buy the chemicals and grow one huge crop year after year. Few knew the outcome would be a fat, lazy polluted country dying from obesity related diseases although some did predict just this outcome.
Demand fresh fruit America! In Northern California our farmers grow year round producing an amazing amount of incredible veggies and fruits. Support these people putting out an incredible effort to bring you fresh food with no government help and little pay in return. Shop at a farmer’s market year round, rain or shine and not only in the summer when the fruit is sexy and luscious. What winter produce lacks in bikini appeal it more than makes up for in a warm, cozy snuggle of the beach campfire.
Better yet, plant your own garden on the new moon becoming a part of your future of food in America.

Have you ever had a pivotal food moment?

Pivotal food moments seldom arrive with warning, always sudden and electrifying, excavating a memory or sensory moment or even a DNA link to a past life spreading clarity as a shattering dream can before deliciously waking out of it. A sudden taste, jolting you into the moment like no yoga pose possibly can, slowing breath, savoring five places on your tongue while your imagination and heart race with possibilities. For my 16th birthday my parents took me to the Hotel Mac in Point Richmond for a special celebration dinner. That is a huge sentence holding untold awe and wonder as I have six siblings and they love to eat don’t get me wrong, I mean if you were not quick at the dinner table it could get ugly, but my parents would no sooner have thought that they would want or appreciate a dinner at the Hotel Mac than a sharp whack with my mother's favorite mode of discipline, the vacuum cleaner hose. We were not ever in the chips too very much and meals out consisted of breakfast at the Nut House where Black Angus is with my granparents when someone had a first communion or maybe the A and W when we went to the drive in movies on Contra Costa, all nine of us in the station wagon for a Saturday hamburger and root beer float before hand. They knew I would though. I had been making soups and stews and lasagna and baked eggs with maple syrup and cakes and cookies since I could reach the stove. The only present I ever wanted for Christmas, year after year, was an EZ Bake Oven, and thanks to the Army Reserve, I always got it, along with some oranges, walnuts in the shell and a popcorn ball in my stocking. I had had moments of taste clarity in the past when I would accidentally put two or three things together and think Mmmmmm, yes that would work, once again the wheels turning but that night at the Hotel Mac, before I had butchered so much cow and pig so as to only be overwhelmed by the stench and stickiness of the blood up to my armpits to steer me clear of meat for fear of retching at the smell or texture in my mouth, oh long before that, I had my very first taste of filet mignon with béarnaise sauce. Oh the haunting acid of the champagne vinegar to cut through the eggs and butter, the reduction so perfectly fine and the tarragon fresh chopped and tossed in at the last second. How the filet, char grilled to a salty crust, melted in my mouth and thrilled my throat no end as the perfectly complex sauce stealthily followed stealing my heart and incurring such longing in my soul that to this day that memory is my finish benchmark having no sauce leave my sight for others to devour without achieving that balance of acid to velvet on the entire surface of my willing tongue. mmmmmmm

Sparkling, beckoning slyly in their sweet little bunches

Probably the best perk of being a self employed food freak would be the countless hours of mandatory research required to compile information (food) that makes one a, well, a fairly respectful self employed food freak I guess. Current crop of evolving seasonal fare requiring shopping and gorging in the name of research includes winter greens of all kinds. Bok Choy, Yo Choy, Gai Lan, Thai Broccoli, Chinese Broccoli, Hmong Broccoli, Red Mustard, Rappini, Italian Broccoli, Chinese Mustard, a plethoric rainbow of chards, spinach, arugula to name a few. There are so many braising types of Asian greens in season at the farmers’ markets it is enough to make your eye lashes longer just looking and most come in compact little bunches costing like a buck making it easy to buy 5 or 6 at a time and prepare them for one or two meals a day. Loaded with calcium and iron they are also powerhouse free radical fighters going to bat for your health and longevity not to mention your sparkling eyes, pink cheeks and sculptured waistline with every brilliant morsel savored. Awesome simply steamed in water, veg stock or chicken stock doused with a bit of lemon oil and cracked sea salt or try adding chopped greens to your favorite soup or stew. Can not beat a nice sauté with olive oil and garlic with soy sauce splashed in at the end. Warm tummy, happy day.

Citrus mania or how to slack a thirst

There is no end of variety bizarre or not and an amazing supply of citrus in California in season now. Blood oranges, Chou Chou tangerines, pommelo, Fairchild tangerine, citron (Budah Hand) kumquats, tangelo, Cara Cara oranges and the list goes on. You can usually find them all and usually at the same time at your local farmers' market. I like to say that before reaching for the juice, eat the whole fruit to slack that devilish thirst.

Blood Oranges
Harking originally from Sicily in the 1500’s, slicing into Blood oranges can be shocking to the virgin taster with crimson shot scarlet flesh and juice. A mutation of sweet oranges, Bloods can be smaller than their cousins lacking nothing in flavor when purchased fresh, locally, at their peak. Less acid along with a weird fruit pigment combine for a winter treat that lingers shortly prompting immediate seek and find maneuvers at farmers markets. Haunting tropical tastes with raspberry nuances, Blood oranges lend their talents smoothly to a plethora of culinary pleasures. Try fresh squeezed juice in champagne blushing the cocktail pink to go with your cheeks. Margaritas crave the addition of the Blood juice as well. Sliced roasted yellow beets blend color and flavor with magenta segments tossed with rice vinegar placed on winter arugula dotted with chevre creating a stellar main or side. Fennel, jicama and Bloods make a stunning salad, brilliantly crisp. Reduce Blood juice with a bit of cream, adding segments at the end, luxuriously thrilling a roasted chicken breast. Toss sharp watercress with Blood segments and juice drizzling lemon oil and cracking salt creating the perfect foil for fresh grilled fish. Three words, fresh, now, aaahhhh.

A Seasonal Fable
When the weather turns cold in California and the peaches and strawberries are a distant, warm memory, the citrus show comes to town.
They tout their wears as the “New Winter Fruit”
Satsuma’s, Blood Oranges, Cara Cara, Minneola, Honey Tangerines, oh the names so exotic you can feel the warmth on your skin.
“But wait”, they say “We are the cool weather crop.

Ahhh, the mercury begins a slow ascent and the light stays longer to the day and a new show comes to hawk their goods to let you know that they alone are the seasons best.
Earliest the Berlat, Black Tartarian, and Tulare. Not to be out shined the more leisurely step up to brag, Bings, Royal Anne and Rainer.
Yes, we think pies, tarts and the luxury of standing in the velvety Northern California spring with asparagus on the grill, cleaned strawberries on the counter and cherry juice dripping down your arm.