Posts from — November 2009

We were driving through Ontario the other weekend, past car dealerships and strip malls and concrete dividers and I got this image in my mind of the Inland Empire way before the orange groves, before the Mormon settlements, before the Spanish settlers when the Serranos and Cahullia Indian tribes lived in the San Bernadino valley. It must have been beautiful.

Our family friend, John told me about being out in the area and taking biking trips out to wineries through the backs of fields back in the 70s. Apparently not all the freeways were around back then and you could get from place to place without your Suburban (or in our case, Honda) .

I went digging a bit and turned up this map from the California Dept of conservation on land-use change in Chino from 1984 to 2008. How fascinating.

Check out the way the green turns pink. Within the image area, more than 12,500 acres were removed from agricultural uses, and urban land increased by more than 17,000 acres.

Farmland Mapping and Monitoring Program
1984 to 2008 TIME SERIES

Some family friends invited me and my parents out for a wine picnic last weekend. Napa and Sonoma are known as wine kings today, but in the past, the Southland (and San Bernadino in particular) boasted acres of vineyards and a number of well known vintners.

As you can see by the bottle sagging with the weight of its medals, some products like Rancho de Philo’s Triple Cream Sherry can still hold their own.

Our first stop was at Rancho de Philo in Alta Loma. Each year, the winery opens up for just one week for sales to the public. We munched on snacks and tasted the different vintages, while other from our party stood in line to pick up their year’s supply.  The wine’s made from mission grapes brought over way-back-when by the Spanish missionaries. The founder, Philo Blaine learned his sherry-making techniques back in Spain and then passed them on to his daughter Janine who runs the place now with her husband, Alan.

Janine was standing outside and handed me this sample as she talked about her childhood, growing up and learning the grapes.

Later, we headed over to Galleano winery in Mira Loma, not too far away. We drove down the freeway, through some suburbs and a couple of car dealerships and ended up at a driveway turn-in that looked a little like the entrance to a corporate park.

Instead of manicured lawns and tortured palms, we were greeted by a beautiful oasis of rural calm. We pulled out our picnic gear, and went to coo over the donkeys and guinea pigs before settling down to our meal.

I brought buttermilk lavash crackers and rosemary-meyer lemon bean dip.

And arugula and cherry tomato pasta salad with fresh herb sauce (everything from the garden!)

It was a seriously impressive spread — just the kind of thing to fill your stomach before wine tasting!

Mini pickles, quiche, black beans, corn & red pepper salad, wild rice salad, crudites, and fresh mozzarella & tomatoes on lettuce.

Another wonderful place to add to the Good Food Map:

Other articles about Rancho de Philo, Galleano, and San Bernadino Wine Country

• Rancho de Philo in Inland Living Magazine
• Rancho de Philo in the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
• Wine history in the Inland Empire’s Sun
• Galleano’s website

I’ve never really liked pumpkin pie. Sacrilegious, I know. I prefer a yummy spiced persimmon cake or traditional Dutch Apple. But even I know that Thanksgiving just isn’t Thanksgiving without that creamy, cinnamonny, burnt orange treat to top off the feasting.

That’s why the news of Nestle’s canned pumpkin shortage is so very sad. Nestle apparently controls 85% of the pumpkin canning crop concentrated in 5,000 acres of pumpkin fields in Morton, Illinois. An already small harvest of Sweet Dickenson pumpkins has been pummeled by heavy rains, which have waterlogged the squash to the point that they’re no longer suitable for processing.

The impact won’t hit this year in most cases since many stores are stocked from last year’s harvest, but come Turkey Day 2010, we may be feeling the effects of this year.

I guess that’s one of the drawbacks of putting all your eggs in one basket (or in this case, pumpkins in one midwest town).

Anyway, if you’re one to think ahead, maybe this year is the year to start practicing your fresh pumpkin pie making skillz. It’s certainly more work than opening up a can of Libby’s, but it’s also a fun project.

A roundup of puree recipes around the web yields the following basic advice (pictures to follow shortly once I get ’round to picking up my own pie pumpkin):

1) Choose a small pumpkin and look for a sugar pumpkin rather than the decoration variety. Smaller pumpkins will likely have less water and will be less fibrous which will result in a smoother, more consistent finished product. You can also substitute hubbard, butternut, or acorn squash OR sweet potatoes especially if you’re making puree for a pie.

2) Chop your pumpkin in half or into four manageable pieces. Remove the seeds and fiber with a spoon. You can save the seeds for roasting or for planting your own pumpkins next year!

3) You can bake or steam the pumpkin. To steam, place pumpkin in a steaming basket with 2 inches of water and cook for approximately 30 minutes, or until the pumpkin is totally tender.  To bake, preheat your oven to 350 degrees, line a baking sheet with foil, and place your pumpkin pieces flesh-side down. Bake for about 60 minutes, or until the pumpkin can be scooped with a spoon.

4) Let cool, remove the skin and chop into pieces. Puree the pieces in a food processor or blender.

5) At this point, you’ll want to check out your product. Is it smooth? Stringy? Watery? For most recipes, you’ll want the puree to have the consistency of baby food. If your product is too watery, you can cook it down in a pan over medium-low heat with a little bit of butter or you can strain it through a cheesecloth for a few hours. If too stringy, try mashing through a sieve.

October’s come and gone, but I had to post this picture of me in the pumpkin patch at Tanaka Farms in Irvine. This is a two-part post, so if you have no patience and just came from the food, then click here to skip ahead to the recipe for pumpkin gnocchi.

I dragged Christina down to South County to get my farm fix. It was a wonderland of tiny adorable children and rows and rows and rows of perfect organic glowing orange pumpkins. Tanaka opens up a you-pick pumpkin patch every year and families flock from miles around (they’ve also got Strawberry tours in late spring and watermelon tours in the summertime).

Many kids already know the farm because it hosts field trips during the week and also sponsors an awesome CSA program that doubles as a fundraiser for local schools, business, and churches. It’s brilliant. Tanaka packs and delivers the boxes to the schools, but the schools handle all the subscriptions and collections. Subscribers pay $25 per week. The farm pockets $20 per box, and the PTA gets to keep $5. They’ve got a great list of participating schools and examples of what goes into their boxes on their website.

We were a little late in the game, just a week or so before Halloween, but there were still plenty of gems to be had. The pumpkins were already cut and the vines had died back, so there was minimal pricking and poking as we selected our prizes.

Yes, that is an LA Fitness tent you see in that third picture. Not so good for the ambiance. Would you like a spin class with that kabocha squash? Oh, the subtle joys of Orange County!

Afterwards, Mr. Pumpkin sat on my counter for a couple of weeks. I meant to carve him, but he was on the small side and I was on the lazy side so it just never got done. Afterwards, though, I was grateful because I got to turn Mr. Pumpkin into not one, but two delicious dishes for the Good Food Potluck: Pumpkin & White Bean Chili (a la April McGreger of Grist) and pumpkin gnocchi, inspired by the beautiful and talented Jaden of Steamy Kitchen.

The gnocchi was a huge hit. Soon after the party, my mum got an email from a family friend asking for the recipe for “those yummy little nugget things.” Score!

That’s me, serving up the gnocchi. Funny faces behind belong to my “Uncle” Chuck (left) and Dad (right).

That’s what it looks like when it’s in the frying pan — aren’t they a pretty golden color? For some really gorgeous photos of this recipe, check out Steamy Kitchen.

Pumpkin Patch Gnocchi

Adapted from Pan-fried Pumpkin Gnocchi from Steamy Kitchen
Serves 6-8

I made a couple of changes to the recipe, in particular, adding the steps to cook down the fresh pumpkin. Ideally, you’d use a sweet pumpkin or squash, but ornamental Mr. Pumpkin actually did just fine. You’ll only need part of the pumpkin, so you can save the rest of the raw pumpkin for a curry or chili, or cook it all down in the next step so you’ll have pumpkin puree for pie or ravioli. Be sure to keep a light hand when mixing, or your yummy little nuggets will turn into yucky little chewies. This means in the mixing step, just turn over the dough a few times until combined, then stop!

1 cup skim milk ricotta
1/4 medium sized pumpkin, about 1 1/2 pounds, or 1 cup pumpkin puree
1 cup freshly grated parmegiano reggiano, plus more for serving
2 eggs
2 teaspoons lemon zest
2 teaspoons kosher salt
1 3/4 cups all purpose flour, sifted and more for dusting
5 tablespoons butter, and possibly more for frying
2 tablespoons olive oil
4 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
10 fresh sage leaves

Preheat oven to 300F

1. If you’re dealing with a whole pumpkin, carefully cut it in half, then in quarters. Scrape out the insides with a spoon, saving the seeds for roasting later! You’ll use about 1/4 of a medium pumpkin or 1 1/2 lbs. Cut this piece into 4 chunks, leaving the skin on.

2. Put the chunks in a steaming basket in a pot and add 2 inches of water. Steam for about 20 minutes on medium heat until the pumpkin is tender and begins to be transluscent. Drain the water and let cool for 5-10 minutes. Peel the skin from the pumpkin and chop into 1-inch cubes.

3. At this point, if you have a ricer, you can rice the pumpkin for an even more fluffy gnocchi. I only had a blender, so I put the cubes in my blender until the lumps were gone.

4. Add two tablespoons of butter to a large saucepan on medium-low heat. Add pumpkin puree to the pan and cook for about 10 minutes, until the pumpkin has reduced by about half and the color has deepened to a golden brown.

5. Combine ricotta, pumpkin, parmagiano, yolk, zest and salt in large bowl. Mix well. Sprinkle half of the flour on the mixture, gently turn with spatula a few times to incorporate. Dump mixture on clean, lightly floured countertop or you can still do this in the bowl. Sprinkle remaining flour on top of the mixture. Gently knead with your fingertips, just bringing together the mixture until flour is incorporated through. This only should take a minute or two. Any longer and you will be over-kneading.

6. Dust a clean, dry surface with a generous sprinkling of flour. Divide dough into 2 parts. Working with one part, press into a rectangle 1/2-inch thick. With a pastry cutter, or sharp knife, cut the rectangle into strips 1/2-inch wide, then cut each strip into “nuggets” about 3/4” long. At this point, you can do fancy things to the gnocchi like rolling them on a gnocchi board, but I think they’re pretty cute as is.

7. Heat a large frying pan or saute pan with 1 tablespoon of the butter and 1 tablespoon of olive oil. When hot, add a few gnocchi – enough to cover surface but not touch each other. Fry on medium heat for 1-2 minutes, turn and fry for another 1-2 minutes. Remove gnocchi, place on large baking sheet to put into oven to keep warm. Repeat with rest of gnocchi, add butter and oil to the pan as necessary.

8. When all gnocchi is finished, discard butter/oil in pan and clean pan with paper towel. Heat pan on medium heat and when hot, add the remaining 2 tablespoons butter and the remaining tablespoon of olive oil. When hot, add the fresh sage. Let the sage brown and sizzle (but not burn) for a couple of minutes until very fragrant. Remove the sage and discard. To the pan, add the balsamic vinegar and whisk. Let simmer on low for 1 minute and pour over the gnocchi.

Other delicious sweet and savory things to do with pumpkin:

There’s nothing like a celestial event to put things into perspective.The annual leonid (shooting star) shower happened Tuesday night and I organized a little camping adventure.

Tuesday at 7pm, friends Christina and Mark, my mum and I piled into a car laden with sleeping bags, lanterns, blankets, binoculars, firewood and cocoa and headed up the 5 freeway towards the Santa Lucia Mountains. A few minutes prior, friends Steve, Brandon and Katherine left from Palo Alto driving south to meet us.

Mark said the last hour of driving was like the Indiana Jones ride at Disneyland sans giant cobra. It was a bumpy, narrow dirt road in the stygian night. We passed one campground (the wrong one) but otherwise couldn’t see any signs of the campsite where we were supposed to meet. No cell reception (obviously) and no markers. Google Maps + the GPS = failure.

Eventually, we turned back, planning to camp at the one campsite we had noticed. I turned off the road down the marked path to head towards Navajo campground, but then decided to retrace a little farther on the main road before giving up on the other half of our party. As we came up on an unmarked path, HEADLIGHTS! Hooray!

By that time, it was nearly midnight and cold. We started a fire and unloaded the car and sat around snacking and drinking warm things. Eventually, around 2:30am we headed up a small hill where we unrolled our sleeping bags and gear side by side like individually wrapped sardines and stared up at the sky. Our whoops and hollers at the bright projectiles soon turned into murmurs of appreciation, then some of us dropped off to sleep and it was quiet.

Around 4, we woke up, a few feet down the hill from where we started. The slick sleeping bags had no chance against gravity. We started the fire back up, warmed our numbed toes and soon after, started to pack up to head home.

Me and Christina straining towards the heavens.

Mum, fire-tender extraordinaire.

Christina like an adorable cartoon warming herself in front of the fire.

The crew (I’m taking the picture)

Yes. Looks like the same picture, but wait… who’s that in the middle?

Dawn on the drive home.

My first article in the Fullerton Observer was about gleaning: gathering leftover crops (or forlorn backyard fruit) to reduce waste and feed ourselves. After my granddad Tom read the article, he sent me a short note of grandpa praise and mentioned that gleaning was a biblical term and the act of gleaning was something that came up more than once in that Good Book. I was raised a Catholic, and Catholics don’t read the bible, so this was news to me. Upon further investigation, I found this passage:

Leviticus 23:22:

And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not make clean riddance of the corners of thy field when thou reapest, neither shalt thou gather any gleaning of thy harvest: thou shalt leave them unto the poor, and to the stranger.

Pretty straightforward, eh? If you’ve got a lot, you can spare a little for those who have less.

I separate gleaning into a couple of categories: the large-ish organized operation that rescues otherwise wasted food and distributes it to those who need it (more biblical), and the self-serving, recreational kind (more hedonistic). Thus far, I’ve mostly participated in the latter.

I gathered some fruit on the island — figs and plums and blackberries and such. I love the treasure-hunt-ish-ness of it all. Seeking out the perfect berry patch or serendipitously falling on a pear tree and coming back week-to-week to check on its progress. One might think that Orange County isn’t the place for such things, but in fact, there’s a surprising bounty of delicious fruits just crying out to be picked. Just here in my neighborhood, there are avocados, grapes, all kinds of citrus, plums, apricots, apples, figs, guavas, pomegranates, and persimmons.

A friend, Rory, passed on a map he started of some good picking sites in Fullerton. You can visit his version here. Or, I’ve added his entries to some of my own on the Good Food OC map.

Yesterday was my first time foraging in the suburban jungle. A family friend, Lynne, who’s well-apprised of my crazy food tendencies, invited me and my mum to go pick a friend’s Meyer Lemon tree. We got more than 50 lbs and left plenty of ripe and ripening fruit. It was fun.

My pretty mom picking lemons.

Lynne putting a few into the basket, and the haul, back at home.

Later, mum squeezed a bunch for lemonade. Then we made a batch of ridiculously delicious lemon marmalade. The entire house smelled like lemon drops for the rest of the day.

It’s a wonderful recipe from Elise at Simply Recipes. You can get her step-by-step instructions here. All it takes is lemons, water, and sugar in a 1:1:1 ratio.

It’s a two-step cooking process, and then there’s the canning… in all, it took us about 2.5 hours to make 10 jars 8oz jars of jam.

First you prep the lemons…

Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum!

Sites to check out about gleaning:

• Neighborhood Fruit — A site to help find and share fruit locally on public and private land — over 10,000 trees registered.
• Fallen Fruit — An activist art project dedicated to public fruit gleaning and sharing. They do exhibits, public action and mapping public fruit in the LA area.
• Second Harvest Food Bank Gleaning Volunteers — Orange County Food Bank that grows food on donated land and uses volunteers to help harvest; also does gleaning of commercial operations, though it’s more rare since there aren’t so many local farms anymore.
• How-to Guide to Setting up a Gleaning Project from Relocalize.net
• Society of St. Andrew – Huge church-based gleaning network that distributed over 12 million pounds of fresh produce in 2008.

Tomorrow my third column in our local city paper hits the news stands. The Fullerton Observer is a wonderful not-for-profit pub run basically as a one-woman show by a local Fullertonian, Sharon Kennedy.

I called Sharon up one day a week or so after I got back to the OC to ask if I could write a Good Food Happy Planet column. “Well a lot of people want to write columns,” she said. “What did you have in mind?” I explained about the whole farm bit and gave a little pitch. “I just think the people in Fullerton might be interested in reading about where their food comes from. It’s a timely issue, plus good food’s trendy,” I ventured. Sharon agreed, and the column was born.

Week one, I wrote about gleaning. Week two, the Fullerton Farmers Market. And this past time, I wrote about processing ten of our backyard chickens. I left out most of the more specific details — still not sure what level of information is TMI versus just right for the Fullerton audience.

I know it’s a small step, but it’s fun to be writing for a different sort of crowd — not necessarily just my friends and fellow foodies, but folks who just happened to pick up a copy in the local coffee shop or at Ralphs. It forces me to be accessible, and also not take anything for granted.

Sharon came to the potluck on Wednesday and while we were waiting in line for the spread, she told me that I received my first mini fan note for the column! Woohoo!

Here’s the article from this time ’round… or you can download the PDF for the full experience:

Chickens

Down the slope away from our house, underneath a couple of huge eucalyptus trees, sits my dad’s chicken coop. There’s a structure with nest boxes that opens our onto the pecking yard which is enclosed with chicken wire to keep our the coyotes and our little terrier Duncan. The coop houses a dozen or so proud hens: some black and white Barred Rock beauties, Araucanas that lay little turquoise eggs, the regal Polish Crested with their big fluffed white hairdos, and some unidentified buff-colored girls.

This summer on the farm, I learned a lot about chickens. We kept around 60 laying hens — all Rhode Island Reds — and around 120 Cornish Cross broiler chickens which we raised for meat. Prior to the farm, I hadn’t ever thought about the difference between laying hens and meat chickens, but it turns out they’re very different creatures. Broilers are bred to grow larger, faster and to have a greater breast-to-body ratio than other breeds. They only take about 12 weeks to grow to a marketable size. Layers on the other hand take about 6 months to start laying, and continue to lay eggs at a constant rate until they are around 2 years old.

On the farm, I learned all about feeding and taking care of hens, protecting them from predators, collecting, washing and packing eggs, and finally about processing the chickens for meat.

My mum with 10 of the chickens we processed last weekend.

Processing chickens is hard, smelly work. I’m not squeamish; I participated in every part of the process: the killing, dunking in hot water, plucking feathers, eviscerating and cleaning. I grew up eating meat and intend to keep eating meat, but now that I’ve participated in the full process, from chick to chicken enchilada, I have so much more appreciation for the energy and care it takes to bring meat to the table. It’s so easy to forget, when I’m buying a clean plastic-wrapped package of pre-cut chicken tenders, or picking up a chicken burrito at Chipotle, that this was once a living, breathing animal. It’s easy to take for granted the resources it took to hatch and feed and raise a chicken for my table.

This weekend, we processed ten of my dad’s hens in the backyard. They were getting older and were no longer laying, and we needed to make way for a new batch of chicks. Between me, my parents, my aunt and a friend, I was the only one who had done this before, so I organized the different stations and showed everyone the ropes. It didn’t take more than a few hours, but afterwards, I crashed on the couch in front of the TV for the rest of the day, totally drained.

Now, the chickens are curing in our refrigerator, and I’m contemplating what to cook. Needless to say, whatever it is, I will savor it to the last bite.

*sniff* I’ve said goodbye to Jess’s Many Mini Adventures in order to fully embrace the new, lovely oh-so-complex wordpress world of goodfoodhappyplanet.

I’ll flatter myself and pretend you noticed that I haven’t written much lately. I could explain it by saying that I’ve been hard at work on my graduate school applications, but in part, it’s because I got this crazy idea that I NEEDED Wordpress and that I NEEDED to teach myself a bunch of CSS to customize templates and put sidebars where I want them.

Plus, the name — good food happy planet. It got in my brain and it stuck. It’s the essence of everything I’m about these days. I couldn’t shake it. So here I am. And I’ve made a pledge to certain folks that I’m going to start writing for real again instead of fiddling with php and installing plugins that I’ll probably never use.

Things to look forward to in the coming weeks:

• A long overdue post on the Island Growers Coop & mobile slaughter unit on the islands
• Another long-overdue on the amazing wonderland that is the Bullocks Permaculture Homestead.
• Updates on the grad program landscape in sustainable ag
• Escapades in the local newspaper
• Panegyric on a 70-year-old olive can labeling machine (yes, I just took the GRE)

But first, for the sake of closure, here’s the goodbye letter I posted at my old home. Don’t forget to update your bookmarks!

Wednesday night the Daniel Family hosted our first Real Good Food Potluck. It was a smashing success — over 50 folks made it out, the living room was full to the brim with family, friends, and many new faces.

Mum and I spent the day shuttling to the farmer’s market on the scooter and cooking up a storm. We made chicken enchiladas from a couple of our backyard chickens (more on the processing soon!), pumpkin gnocchi from the Halloween pumpkin I picked with Christina (I owe a post on this too!), a couple of persimmon cakes, and pumpkin & white bean chili. Very seasonal. Very delicious.

It was especially awesome to have a couple of people there who I’d never met (Jessie, Sharon, Carolyn, Gabe, Tod), folks I hadn’t seen in forever (Derek,  a few new friends (Jorge, Janet) who I’d just met the previous week.

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Pumpkin gnocchi in the pan -- 5 minutes to showtime!

As the night kicked off, I was a smiling dervish, pulling hot lasagna from the oven and jumping at the doorbell, and digging up serving implements, and hugging my Godparents as they walked in. People just kept coming and coming with amazing food. There were beets and beet greens and slaw and paella and spinach ricotta pasta and homemade tomato pasta; teriyaki chicken and shepherd’s pie and grilled veggies and crudites and baguettes and guac and salsa. Not to mention the glorious desserts. At one point, I ran out to the garage to grab another folding table to hold the bounty.

A little after 7, we screened Food Inc. Only 2 folks other than my family had seen the movie before. Everyone gasped and “wow”-ed and a number of folks came up to me afterwards and mentioned how much it moved them. I’ve now watched the movie 7 times with about 60 different people and I have to say it’s a pretty darn effective tool for getting people to start thinking about what they eat.

I was especially happy because at least 3 people visited the Fullerton Farmers Market after I suggested making a visit to get potluck supplies. Of those, at least two said they’d definitely be making the trip weekly from now on. Hooray!

I got a few questions afterwards of the “well, now-what” variety. People were moved by the film, but were wondering what to do next. I mentioned eating local, seasonal, and organic foods, talked about buying “whole” foods and shared some of the places we shop.

But people’s questions really got me thinking again about how important it is to have a combination of consumer education driving demand and values-based businesses supplying alternatives to the everyday obvious options. Here in Fullerton for example, we really only have one truly organic cafe option and only one big natural food store, not that close to many neighborhoods. The farmers market is wonderful, but not huge. In general, it’s not that easy to get organics or local produce. The markets — Stater Bros, Albertsons, Ralphs — don’t carry any sustainably raised meats; Stater Bros doesn’t appear to carry any organics at all. A shopper really has to go out of his or her way to do things differently.

But for those of us who want to try, here are some great resources for North Orange County:

• Directory of Orange County Farmers Markets
• Ecology Center – educational organization dedicated to teaching and learning about sustainable agriculture located near South Coast Farms in San Juan Capistrano
• Fullerton Arboretum ‐‐ often hosts classes on growing your own food, also provides community plots for a small annual fee
• Fullerton Certified Farmers Market
• Henry’s Farmers Market ‐‐ Grocery store (1447 S. Harbor) sells a wide variety of natural & organic products
• OC Abundance Organics ‐‐ Cooperative buying club for organic produce, located in Fullerton
• OC Organics – Farm and Community Supported Agriculture program, delivers in OC
• OC Slow Food – Orange County Chapter of the Slow Food organization, lists of recommended restaurants and some events open to non‐members
• South Coast Farms – Farm and Community Supported Agriculture program, delivers in OC
• Tanaka Farms – Farm and Community Supported Agriculture program, delivers in OC