ARTICLE FOR WHOLE PERSON

Let Them Eat Kale: A Tale of Unintentional Community

I am a farmer. My wife Olivia is a cook.  When our dating turned more serious, she said: “ Well, so its going to be the “farmer and the cook”. Later we decided to start a “store”, where we would sell my produce and some prepared food. We call it The Farmer and The Cook. It’s a really good branding idea, and so obvious. Olivia actually wanted to just have a fancy candy company. She had a very clear concept and had done enough research to be convincing. She took me over to a derelict building her mother owned in Meiners Oaks, a neighborhood near Ojai. Olivia said we could rent one of the back rooms to make candy in because the tenant was eight months in arrears. I kicked the tenant out and took half the building because I wanted to sell produce. Then I started to fix the building. “ Delayed Maintenance” is the operational euphemism here. You could see the stars at night through the holes in the roof.

Maybe we should have just focused on that candy business idea.  Slowly we piled on the products. First we made bread and soup. Then a magnanimous grocer in West Los Angeles gave us a salad bar when one of his stores was being liquidated to make room for a PETSMART. Then the salad bar cook started making chocolate chip cookies. They went over big because we use maple syrup as a secret ingredient. Now there are twenty-seven kinds of cookies, nut balls and fruity bars-no hyperbole intended.  We made muffins and empanadas. Then we piled on the groceries and personal care yada. Then it was lunch specials like Nut Loaf, Fresh Corn Tamales and Pizza. Then people wanted it all for dinner so we started staying open later.

I think it’s important to note the implications of the last sentence. “ People wanted” quite a few things, and lacking an ironclad business plan, and having been trained to please, we gave them what they wanted. Smoothies, fresh kale juice, bulk shampoo, bootleg almonds that have not been steamed. We made organic, raw, vegan nut lasagna for months even after we realized it was impossible to break even. Whatever. Now when people ask me a question that begins “ I wonder if…” I stop them in their tracks and say something like “ You are under the impression that this is MY store, when indeed, this is your store. It is here for you, not me.”

Of course we always purchased local produce first, and a lot of it came from locally overburdened souls with severe wasted-fruit guilt. We gave people spelt bread, not wheat, because so many did not want wheat and we had grown weary of the Wheat Question. We also eliminated dairy because of the many vacaphobes who sought us like pilgrims, and canola oil because far too many people believed erroneously that canola oil was “invented” to replace hydraulic fluid.  Mustard oil is the ubiquitous oil of choice throughout India, but I could make no headway against such a brutal urban myth. Yes, we went with olive oil, virgin, organic, of course.

At some point I need to make it clear that the Farmer and The Cook is an all-organic, vegetarian kitchen. Much of what we create is de facto vegan. This program sounds insane because it is, but we were so certain of our convictions at the time, and later when we realized the folly of our plan it was too late. Hypocrisy was not on the menu. We sell frozen meat to “people who want it”, and have on rare occasion supplemented conventional beer for organic beer when I forgot to order organic beer. We also sinned with the conventional Parmesan, only once, when the price of organic Parmesan seemed outrageous. We gave ourselves a pass at the time because Italy does not allow bovine growth hormones in dairy production, but the cheese kept us awake at night, so we went back to the pricy Italian. It really does not matter. We overslept as a result, and felt no guilt.

You should also know that The Farmer and The Cook is not some place you drop by, unless you are on your way to Taft or New Cuyama on California Highway 33.  Even Huell Howser has not seen Taft, so don’t feel deprived. We launched our idea well aware that Rodeo Drive was not just one block west of us. Spanish is not the second language in our neighborhood. Cilantro and chile peppers are popular and make us a profit. We grow so much Mexican food and work with so many Mexicans we changed to a Mexican Café. Intuition has naturally never been our strongest trait, but we felt this was something we felt we could trust. Lucky for us, many Anglos love chipotle and rellenos.

Intelligent people apt to eat organic food live in the Ojai Valley, to be sure, but many of them are so smart they grow their own food. It may come as a shocker, but many actually cook meals for themselves in their own homes. We have always sought out the boondocks, because one has a better chance of finding cleaner air and water, and here on El Roblar Drive, there is nothing but boondocks all around us. Nothing stands between us and Bakersfield but the nearly impassable ridges that cut the Los Padres National Forest. To be fair, the people who swing by the store are in Ojai because of the environment. Eating clean is like breathing clean.

Because birds of a feather tend to roost here, there have been hundreds of friendships found and numerous hookups made, many of them long lasting, and some having yielded numerous offspring. However it is far from the sort of drive-by-dating scene one might mistake for the produce aisles at Gelsons or Whole Foods. We use to have a rule that we never hired mates, legal or not, but love in-house made that unrealistic.  One wedding planned for next spring took nine years to be arranged, when once untenable circumstances were finally resolved. The story could be made into a major motion picture starring some of the actors who slide in to The Farmer and the Cook on occasion because they know we will do our best to ignore their celebrity.

The store is a noted hang. But it’s far from a scene. Our beer and wine menu is like a state secret. An elite few call it “ Rainbow’s End”, not to make fun of the fancy, orderly, well lit, uncomplicated natural food store across town called Rainbow Bridge, but because there is fool’s gold in the pot over here at the F and C. This is where the rainbow chasers and bead vendors come to recharge.  We are on the Mystery map to those who travel the uncertain road between Sedona and Bolinas in the Jerry Garcia nation, seeking figs and mulberries and those bootlegged almonds. This is where some of the world’s best oranges get juiced, the pita bread is homemade and the humus it accompanies was scratch-made onsite, just like everything else. The salad dressings do not come on a truck from Pacoima.  If we fixed the parking lot, people with notable, low-slung imported units might pull in, but the holes are better suited to pickup trucks and VW vans that have already been thrashed. Folks with money come here; it’s just that we have never gotten around to making things safer for their cars. It’s also wise to wear boots, or sandals, but not heels. More than one pair of Manolos has been ruined in the cracks here.

We have been at it now for nearly ten years. Nearing sixty years of age, one might be inclined to sell out. I can still surf and walk without much pain, so it seemed wise to bust out early while I could still stand up without a walker. Moving on has occurred to us more and more frequently, but the idea of selling the store has already been used as a major April Fools Joke-twice. Once I claimed in our weekly newsletter that we had been bought by Whole Foods (as if!). This fable was so good it caused loud wailing and even anger. The next week, I wrote that there had been a grave error. We had been bought instead by Trader Joe, not Whole Foods. Not everyone got the joke even the second time.

We have been approached from time to time by parties interested in buying our business, but we are too honest to sell the shell. . If my wife wasn’t here to throw out soup that was rank or fine-tune the scones and brownies, things would not be the same and we know it. She is pretty funny to watch in the kitchen when some food product has gone south. She will doctor it up with lemon juice or sugar or wave a magic wand and if its no good she doesn’t care how much organic half and half is in it, it’s going into the compost buckets! Bloosh!

The store would be nothing without the farm and all the free produce it provides as well as the fresh cachet and organic halo. If we charged according to real world costs, our price point would really be Rodeo Drive. It was such a silly idea. I gave up on making a real profit out of produce a long time ago. There is no way the store can use or sell ten acres of vegetables. I have a sixty member CSA ( weekly produce buying club) and we go to the farmers market to make a living.

We may have finally given up on the idea of selling the store. Maybe we will just travel more and let the kids run the asylum. The teens are pretty good at it. For many it is their first job, they strive to do well, do not have too much extracurricular drama and are not jaded or disillusioned by the world yet. Happiness tends to be their natural state.  Besides, if we did not have the Farmer and the Cook, what would we do? Who would we be? We are defined increasingly by all the people we know and serve.

How might all this have been planned? We have had over 300 employees and I have only fired seven of them. And a few of them I have hired back-one three times! People think they are getting love out of us, but it’s more like loyalty, or tradition. Its definitely not infatuation. That ended the first time I had to tell somebody to leave and never come back.

This mushroom that popped up in Meiners Oaks was not intentionally meant to be the basis of community, but that is the result. We know everybody in town a little bit. If I have seen them routinely of late I will probably remember their name is Joanne, not Judy. If not sure, I know I can get away with mumbling. The same guy has been coming here at 8:30 AM for an apple, a yogurt and a cup of tea for nine years.  We don’t have the makeup to charge poor seekers who want to preach their yoga and bliss protocols in the café late at night on a Wednesday.  People will buy a cookie, right? Our sense of ownership is fuzzy. We don’t serve meat because of a handful of local vegetarians who are ahead of the curve. Then because of that decision, people come here from miles away, like Toronto, because it’s a meatless vegetarian kitchen. Our people don’t know it but I am always counting their votes, polling their opinions, listening to their hearts. If this practice were intentional, if we had committees and were a formal cooperative as has been suggested, things would be different and maybe not better. It might not fail because most good co-ops succeed because they have benevolent dictators like us. Strangers come into the store and they say “ Gee, this place reminds me of the 70s” or “I was a member of a co-op like this in Austin.”

They have no idea how proud that makes us.

forager October 21 2009

FFFFOOORRRAAAGGGEEERRR

YEAH, I WAS HOPING FOR A FREEWAY SERIES

YOU THINK I WANT TO WATCH THE YANKEES BUY ANOTHER CHAMPIONSHIP?

Let ’em play Philadelphia in the snow!

21 October 2009

Many of you are so very not interested in baseball, so I will spare you more puerile dysfunction. Instead, let me tell you to eat your beet greens first. Cook them with the chard and eat them warm. Chop them fine after cooking and sprinkel over your salad when cool for a little exotic flavor. Chard same as beet greens! Soy sauce! Butter! Olive Oil and garlic. All One World United by The Green! You can cook the beets themselves tomorrow or next week and then slice over salad, but let not thy greens decay in yon reefer! Perishables abound, so just put the thought of slamming a burrito at Jim and Rob’s out of your mind for a while.  You have collards and kale to deal with. They rhyme with raw. If you were one of the lucky shoppers who bargained with Olivia for a VitaMix or have a spiffed juicer, then the sight of all that verdure will not intimidate ye. But check it out and move on those leaves quickly. One of the key attributes of the CSA is the fresh. This ain’t no farmers market set up. Hardly nobody picks and sells the same day as a market, so grab the exquisite vitamins and phytonutrients while fresh.

I can eat a kale stem a day after it was picked and I can already test the carbohydrates.  You try eating it while picking, then you’ll know. One of the benefits of having a big garden like I do is getting to munch all the raw stuff out there. I ate 400% more corn raw than cooked this year. Sounds gross, I know. Erudition and comedy are no smokescreen for my cromagnonesque qualities. Hope you didn’t get any ears with a big bite taken out of it. Its happened, but only to a dear friend. And it’s the last of the corn. It was either CSA or farmers market, and Olivia said   “CSA!”

You have a friend in the kitchen, campers.

Hey. News Bulletin! Farmer Hit With Huge Property Tax Bill. Dateline: Meiners Oaks, California.  Steve Sprinkel, a local organic farmer, was recently presented a bill for over $7,000 for two years of property tax on property he does not own. The owner, The County of Ventura, is also the agency billing Sprinkel.

“ Like, I tried to get that property tax deal out of the lease before I signed it, but they insisted, and I really wanted to farm there, so I signed it anyway. They said at the time there was a chance I would never get billed anyway.”

As it turns out, Sprinkel was wrong. When asked what he would do, he replied “ Grow more vegetables I guess. Maybe get a second job working nights at the Farmer and The Cook. I hear they are hiring. Oh, heck what am I saying? I already work there. Here. Whatever.”

More news from inside the box: The Meyer lemons are from Seven Oaks Ranch. Greg Prinz, local surfing champion, is working there now and he picked them for us. Greg and Emilie, wife and salad bar cook at the F and C, also provide us the best eggs in the region, available  exclusively at The Farmer and The Cook, which was recently voted Ojai Number One Best Produce Department by readers of the Ojai Valley News! Better than Starr, Rainbow or Westridge? It’s a stretch but we’ll take it. You know why? Maybe because the people voted on the basis of local and organic. Starr has got the beauty and endless aisles of variety. Rainbow does organic fairly well and has papayas and plantains to boot!  In any case, we are grateful for the accolade and will reinvest our energy so we might be better deserving of this high honor.

Boxing Update! You also got yourself another winter squash. You might be saying “ What gives with all the winter squash?” But get used to it. I have five tons of it and its mostly all yours. That is five Dodge 350 trucks full, hun-bun. You’ll be happier during the holidays when you can make pie out some of it. Its real food. Not some measly head of butter lettuce or a bunch of arugula. Maybe President Obama thinks that is a meal, but he doesn’t have to kill weeds all afternoon. Give me the hardcore alimentary power of hard squash! You may survive on such things as Chirimen, Kabocha or Butternut because they have substance, and vitamins, like A and C. Half as much A as a sweet potato! And it’s got more protein than a turnip, I can tell you that.

Next week we will be providing a carefully vetted Winter Squash Cook Booklet. You can wait until then if you want because the squash will be good for months. But BEST when eaten fresh! Once something is off the vine, its all downhill from there.

forager August 27 2009

F  O  R  A  G   E    R

Tales of Swindlers and Dupes, Chicanery, Chicory, and Fraud with Spoons

27 August 2009

Fridge that melon. We hope they are all good. Its not exactly pig-in-a-poke selection, but we are new to the science. If your melon is not at all good (and some may be mediocre while others spectacular) feel free to come by and get another one off the shelf at The Farmer and The Cook. We planted fall leaf vegetables this week. Tomatoes are going down early. More corn to come.  Four current members still have not paid as of the last week in August. Can you beat that?

Over time Julia Child continued to purchase items from my stand at the Santa Barbara Farmers market into the late 1980s and some of those leaves no doubt continued to appear on her cooking program and her magnum opus, The Way To Cook.  During that time I was drawn into a rather dark affair involving Julia Child, Robert Huttenback, the Chancellor of the University of California at Santa Barbara and the infamous Adnan Kashoggi, international arms dealer, Iran-Contra figure, and, at the time, one of the dirtiest men in the world next to Idi Amin and Hnery Kissinger. Julia Child and Huttenback were friends, and ran in the same rarified circles as Kashoggi, aka Spoons*.  When Huttenback proposed that a Wine and Food Institute be created at the UC Santa Barbara campus, with Julia Child as its creative genius, I was sought out as a potential gardener extraordinaire, to fill the grounds of the former Devereaux mansion at the far west end of the campus with all the spiffy gourmet items I had gained such glorious acclaim for producing.  I felt from the beginning a portent of foulness, in that, while with Julia Child and a number of forgotten characters, I strolled the abandoned grounds behind the mansion, decrepit with overgrown landscape, pathways askew. I was burdened with misgivings. Was this right,  to use public funds from an egalitarian institution like he UC to foment wine parties and enliven them with fondue infused with green garlic fresh from my hand? My friends from the university art department

forager August 17 2009

F O U R R A G E

LE JOURNAL SEMENAL DU CLUB MANGE “ FERMIER ET CUISTOT”

17 AUGUST 2009

I kinda made up that French stuff, but as I say, somebody has to make up words or all we would do is point and grunt. Not to be too critical of grunting though. Tomato Bulletin: We have tomatoes and we will have tomatoes but we will not have a lot of tomatoes in the future. Disease is on a rampage. We have had blight, fusarium, perhaps alternaria. Fungus and bacteria. Not the kind that harm humans, just those that kill plants. At this point the culprit is not materially important. From far off Maryland Pierre Constanz reminded me that I might have applied neem, the juice of  azideracta Indica, a tree that is native to India, as a preventative when we had those lingering fogs in June.   I estimate that seventy percent of our tomatoes have succumbed to whatever is apparently affecting tomatoes from coast to coast. Allegedly the tomatoes on the East Coast are toast.  Its no consolation that I am not alone with my problem.  These are the perils of planting and similarly of CSA box fare. And that’s why diversity is nifty. Below I continue my Julia Child saga. In the previous episode, we were drinking beer in her kitchen.

The next time I met Julia Child, I was selling vegetables at the farmers market in Santa Barbara. It was in the mid 1980s. One morning, I saw her strolling down the aisle, somewhat incognito. Nobody was going ape with the doyenne gastronomique in the hood. She had just moved to town.  Julia Child walked up to my table and said: “ These look like nice carrots.”

They were nice carrots. I had made an effort to grow carrots because no one at the time grew them as a practice. They were French carrots too, Nantes carrots. It was my punitive niche. The carrots, as my fellow farmers perhaps learned later, were a good draw. People usually don’t just buy one thing from the table. They may gather lettuce and radishes, even gamble on something exotic like Painted Pony beans, even thought there is a slim chance they will ever cook them. It’s the carrots they really want though.

As she was rummaging around on my table, I said: “ You may not remember that I once had lunch in your kitchen on Cape Cod.”

She stood up and cocked her head to one side, observing me carefully. “ No, I am afraid I don’t. What was the occasion?”

It was a logical answer. My hair was a lot longer then.

“ I came down from Harvard with Gordon Smith. You served us some Beef Stroganoff.”

“ Oh Gordon! Do you hear from him? What is he doing these days?”

“ I lost track of him.”

“ Hmm. That’s a shame. Did you grow this radicchio?”

Over time, Julia Child visited my table frequently at the farmers market. I had already started growing more exotic products, chiefly from France and Italy, in order to steer clear of the tomato panics. I was then in Carpinteria, where one may plant lettuce seed on the 20^th of December or the 20^th of July. I determined to grow salads. I also had a light smattering of herbs. All of this was done much before the market place was overwhelmed with competition. Now if you drive through Watsonville you may see radicchio on fifteen acres, which is an avalanche and a panic in its own right. Mexican basil stomps the shipping market year round. They can have it at a buck-fifty a pound.

Julia Child eventually began to request certain things and I would grow them. She sent her personal assistant to the farm on days when they were going to film one of her television shows and we would wander around picking this or that, especially flowering herbs or particularly beautiful summer squash or tomatoes. Julia Child came once to the farm, but though the variety was impressive I think she was underwhelmed with my scale of production. I was growing on three acres at the time.  Eventually the trip out to Carpinteria became a drag so they discontinued their visits. But once upon a time my arugula and red oak lettuce was National. I never saw the shows though.

forager July 29 2009

F   O   R   A   G    E    R

GETTIN’ THROUGH THE SUMMER AND WAITIN’ ON THE CUKES
BUT COOK YOUR CORN TODAY-IT’S THE TAILENDER

29 JULY 2009

I once had a farm on Oahu, in a canyon above a temple. It was quite a long time ago. I grew cucumbers there, and tomatoes and pole green beans. You could see the waves breaking off Goat Island from the top of the hill. Montoya helped me get the land. His partner Kamiya had already taught me how to do it. Kamiya said I had to spray. “ You gotta spray, I’m telling ya,” Ken said.

So I sprayed. I sprayed malathion, and kelthane and diazinon. I sprayed dieldrin, guthion and even a bit of paraquat. This went against all my earlier practical training as well as Redwood  Morning ethics. But Kamiya was a pro. This was no chard patch. Kamiya warned me that I would fail if I didn’t spray. He sprayed, and he was successful. I was working with my mother’s money, so I could not finesse it. And I had seen what the bugs can do. The leafminers were the strangest pest. They are small, like gnats. They lay small eggs on the leaves of beans and cucumbers. The eggs hatch and larvae motor around within the leaves, leaving empty lines behind them. In the tropics, leafminers live year-round. They will kill a crop before it fruits.

“ The leafminer will bring you down, so you gotta use the systemics,” Kamiya had warned.

Systemics are the chemical pesticides that are used early in crop production to bring long-term protection from insects. They are used widely, and usually carefully, because the authorities test food crops specifically for the presence of systemics. On the bottle or bag of poison, one notes that the material can be used within 7, 14, or 21 days of harvest. You can imagine how lethal a toxin must be if the government will allow it only if used 21 days before harvest. The poison is applied and then it remains in the system.  THE PLANT SYSTEM.  That’s a long time for a chemical to sit out there in the sun and wind and rain without being volatized.

It’s a double caution because the government has been in collusion with the chemical companies despite laws created to safeguard the public health. The chemical companies even park their executives in positions of power at EPA and the FDA in broad daylight. That’s why organic was invented. And because government and business are involved in organic now, protecting organic integrity has become more difficult.

The problem with insect pests is nothing compared to dealing with vertebrates, from my point of view. I have rarely been overwhelmed by bugs. Disease, like what is happening to our tomato crop with blight, is  more troublesome. I had to quit growing carrots once because of alternaria. Then I started growing lettuce instead and made more money.

I eventually adopted a strategy for dealing with the worst pest in Hawaii, the Mediterranean fruit fly. The fly stings all the fruit and lays an egg that rots the fruit as the buglet thrives within. It’s a tragedy. I stopped spraying all those poisons fairly soon after I started.  Instead of spraying the crop I put the poison in a big bottle filled with molasses and the flies went in there and never came out.

Potato in hand, you may wonder what other produce may be in your future. We can announce the presence of melons and green beans in the field. But are there bees to pollinate the melons? Will the squirrel leave us alone? We replanted corn twice. We have beans and basil, and still do plant tomatoes. But where are those cucumbers anyway? What is it going to take? First it was the mice. Then the squirrel. Squirrels have eaten nearly half the plants again, even while we nab them and lay them out for the coyote at dusk. Cukes are what I produced the most of in Hawaii. I used to make 2000 dollars a week in 1977 money growing cucumbers.  Hawaii imports 90% of everything that is eaten there, which is why I made so much money.  Everyone else in Hawaii works for the state or a hotel.

When saints start talking about money I know it can sound like sacrilege, and being pure is a burden, I can tell you. But money is just a tool like a hammer, a measuring stick that tells you if you can buy more gas at the next town. So I think nothing of it, since I have nothing to brag about except my niche in heaven.

In Laie, I would harvest three times a week, surf or no surf. My calvinism disurbed my surf-buddies tremendously, and more than once I sent them away so I could pack out. Fred Ishikawa would send his truck all the way to Laie to pick up my cucumbers and leave me more wire-bound boxes for the next shipment. The only competition at the time was usually Texas or Arizona, before NAFTA and the movement of Mexican produce into the United States on a major scale.

I also grew many other vegetables at sea level, despite the dire predictions of the armchair agronomists who don’t really know much about the subject other than what the chemical companies teach them. I found it easy to grow spinach even. It was huge and made the specialists squirm to see it. But there was no use in scoffing. Still, to this day, such farming is not found much in Hawaii. But it can be done.

F  O  R  A  G  E  R

WE’LL TRY TO KEEP IT SERIOUS, BUT YOU KNOW HOW IT IS

THE NEWSLETTER FOR THE COUMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE PROGRAM OF
THE FARMER AND THE COOK
WHOSE MARKETING PROGRAM IS SO FAR AHEAD OF THE CURVE THEY CAN’T EVEN SEE THEMSELVES
8 JULY 2009

THE POTATO HARVESTING PARTY WAS YESTERDAY, WEDNESDAY, 8 JULY, NOT TODAY. WE ARE VERY SORRY FOR THAT ERROR, BUT WE HAD TOO MANY CONFLICTS WITH THURSDAY. WE HOPED TO SEE YOU THERE. IT WAS A POT-LUCK FEATURING WHATEVER YOU  MADE FROM THE CSA SHARE, OR PRODUCTS PURCHASED ELSEWHERE. WE HAD THE POTATO SALAD COVERED. WE SET UP AT THE FAR SOUTH END OF THE FARM BY THE LITTLE GREEN AND WHITE BUILDING ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CORN. IT WAS A GOOD GIG, A LITTLE UNDERATTENDED, WHICH IS NORMAL AND MORE SO BECAUSE OF OUR COMMUNICATIONS ERRORS. WE WILL HAVE MORE PARTIES THERE IN THE FUTURE. IT WAS FUN ENOUGH.

That’s quite enough bold, italicized capital letters, thank you. We obtained some fruit from Sonny, Bruce, Jim and Dave. Jim Churchill’s MacArthur avocados are a light alternative to the ubiquitous Hass avocado. He grows them with Lisa Breneis. Dave Rydell grew some peaches up in San Luis Obispo. Bruce is this other guy that has a nice mixed orchard here locally. I think he is retired from some more cerebrally challenging occupation, and now cares for his fruit. I bought Asian pears from him quite frequently, and other odds and ends, like those greenish cling peaches-good flavor and locally grown. I run around the farmers market making deals with people who have produce left over because it is a shame to let it rot and I have a big cooler. Those MacArthur  avocados, like their compadres the Pinkerton, the Bacon, the Fuerte, the Reed and the Rincon have all been vanquished by the oily Hass. The Hass, it tastes better I guess, but its not right to depend on one variety. Many avocados flower at different times and ripen at different times.  Last year all the Hass avocado flowers burned up in a heat wave in April, so we didn’t get any fruit. But the also-rans produced. This year the weather has been abnormally perfect for fruit-set, so all the avocado trees are laden with the coming crop, and it looks like a real branch-breaker.

Sonny brought us the Green Gage Plums. The Gage is a rare variety. Sonny started selling fruit with his mom nine years ago. Sonny is rare boy. They live in Carpinteria. Now Sonny is 16 and he is the official farmer of the family. He calls me on his cell phone and sells cherimoyas, plums, avocados, passion fruit and guavas. Its fun to have observed him grow up and take charge of the trees.  We want him to succeed so I bought a hundred pounds of those Green Gage plums. I know it’s a hard sell, right in the middle of the fruit panic, so I bought ‘em all. Sure, load ‘em up! Don’t think I am such a nice guy though. Part of the reason why I buy his oddball fruit is that I want him to call me first when he has the passion fruit and the guavas.  That’s the way things get done in the produce world. You gotta buy the zucchini if our want the red bell peppers later on, capiche?

You want to know what happened to your chard, don’t you? Well, we are throwing it a life preserver filled with water just as these words flow from my stubby fingers. We will not let it die. We need it, you need it, the world needs its chard. We are making up a list of good things to grow. We have never been very good with the sugar snap peas or the green beans, and we now officially repent. We do a fair job on the broccoli, but there is more to life than broccoli, though it is in the top five all vegetables consumed by humans in North America. And we know its not really a fabulous day when you open up your CSA box and it has way, way too much curly endive ( frisee) in it again.  But onions? Can you ever have too many? And, for the first time in my entire career, thanks to Olivia Chase, we will have a decent chance of having a Brussels Sprout Thanksgiving.  Variety, that’s our new motto.

What?   Why start talking about November when we haven’t had a summer yet? Because you have to live life three months in advance if you plant plants for a living. You just can’t go out and plant a tomato plant in September because its still hot. And you can’t plant lettuce just because its been foggy for a few days in June. Roasted is what you are going to get, no matter what the Madden-Julian Oscillation Syndrome indicates.  Sun flares and Jupiterian wobbles, butterfly die-offs and a steady stream of angels jumping ship as it swings by the planet have as much to do with droughts and deluges, most likely.  I just hope there is water in my pipe when I turn the handle. Don’t sell your rubber boots in the garage sale, hun-bun. We are so due.

I am glad people still get hungry. Your hunger may turn my ambition to genius, once all the potatoes have been consumed. It’s a bit lucky, Maybe I had the smarts to listen to the muse muttering onions-potatoes-onions-potatoes, last winter, because they are some of the few things our major pest, Spermophilus beecheyi, the ground squirrel, ignores in its quest to destroy the farm. So far they have decimated around $4,000 in crops we would have enjoyed, including all the pumpkins, much of the winter squash, and a nice portion of the carrot and zucchini crop. My long standing enmity with them goes back years now, so if they have surfaced to havoc upon me once again its my own fault for not being better prepared. I have promised Mr. Tirado that I will eliminate them from the farm. Its sometimes better to make promises to others in order to fulfill one’s desires. In this case, I feel sorrier for Francisco even though he will get paid no matter what happens because he cares so much for every single plant. Everything, he says, has a heart.

So far, so good.

15 April Forager

F  O  R  A  G  E  R
The Weekly Newsletter of Mano-Gozo CSA
Where Beet Greens Are Reputed To Be As Good As Or Better Than Chard
April 15 2009

Greetings, once again, from the Command Center of the Gozo Galaxy. We will only mention the Wind in passing because the stiff breeze out of the north is such a vexingly dry nuisance to those of us who really care about the tender leaves of plants. There.

Now to business we can do something about. We need to reiterate the produce handling protocol, as is our practice from time to time, so bear with us if we bore you. Wednesdays and Thursdays should be appraised as Mid-Week days of Feasting and mini-Thanksgiving, for those are the days when you pick up your CSA box and consume the Freshness of the Field. On Tuesday, after listening up a little Bach or Arcade Fire, you wistfully begin to peruse the tattered pages of the old FORAGERS you have faithfully kept safe, or a Vegetarian tome written by Molly Katzen, Deborah Madison or Olivia Chase.

You know you are getting something green to cook unless it says August on your calendar. And for months you have benefited from carrots, reputedly some of the best carrots available in the greater Ojai area. Let not the carrot wither and slime! Begin grating them on your salad immediately. They are so good because they are so fresh! Pre-cook them in bitelet cubes for inclusion in that frittata or quiche you are dying to make with chard and beet greens. Fry up some of the Torpedo onions first, and use as much of the handle as you can. Nothing is true garbage in your box but the carrot tops, unless a tiny bunny is part of your family.

Generally speaking, the best way to utilize the contents of your CSA share is to Do It Now. Boil up them beets while you are eating dinner on Wednesday/Thursday and have them cold the next day. Whip out an unusual slaw recipe for the cabbage and grate carrots into that as well. Don’t let that fennel scare you! Clean and sliver-cut the root end and get to grating this feathery friend into your salads. Its also an ingredient for the quiche, mais oui!

For some time now, your shares have been redundant. We know. We eat this way too. But there is no respite from the dictates of the season, nay, from the vagaries of nature. Gone are the Asian Greens! Gone the arugula, the turnip, and the now the kale! It is said that CSA membership educates the consumer in the nuances of farm production, and we are happy to invoke here for you a CERTIFICATE OF KNOWLEDGE, because you have learned well that tomatoes do not rhyme with January, nor will lettuce easily appear during the searing days of summer. But soon the repetitions will cease and cucumbers will be here, and the squash, corn and beans that you so richly deserve.

We enjoy working for you. The CSA is a sane effort. We do not use a lot of one-way-trip packing materials. You receive perfectly edible products that might not otherwise be acceptable to the rigorous oversight of Quality Control freaks lurking in dark warehouses. Which reminds me: You may observe some tiny green balls in or on your cabbage. These are the, ahem, residues of the cabbage looper who earlier had been enjoying a nice snack at our expense. We meant to wash them off, but were unavoidably distracted while the boxes were being filled and stacked. So I must instead advise you that such, ahem, deposits, are nothing to fear and yet proof of the natural environment which the cabbage, and you now by extension have enjoyed. I understand that an emerging new food cult involves the shepherding of insect larvae which have consumed and then condensed the food value of their favorite plant, thus providing to faithful nutrition-minded consumers an opportunity to maximize their intake of magnesium, Vitamin A and the all-important phytonutrients and omega-alpha-epsilon anti-oxidants which have become so popular in the west, but of course in Asia have long

9 April 2009

F O R A G E R

 

Providing A Glimpse Into What It Takes

To Make Up A Nice Little Box of Food

 

Wan, that April, with his shores sooth, The garotte of March,

hat perched to the rote, And bathed every venue in swish liquor

 

 

Yeah we wish we had some swish liquors bathing our roots. So to speak. Read between Chaucer’s lines at ye peril. We begrudged nary a drop, scant as they were, which did bathe the blustered dust and gladdened some needy leaves, and we now await another round of promise, which is all that remains as the season is wrung out at less than thirteen inches of rain. But I have seen the rain come torrentially at the end of April, so hope seems not so terribly vain.

 

The dry caught us with our pipes scattered and a roll of drip tape was but a glint in the farmer’s eye, so short on agua were we. But, repenting of our ill preparation we have smartened ourselves up with some brand new plastic which we have set a-dripping. Now to guard against the meddlesome crows and feisty coyote, who both love to peck and chew upon our flimsy lines. Its easy though, as you may know, to distract them from their vandalism, just draw them a shallow tub of water for their personal slaking.

 

And Keep It Full.

 

Now to business: In your CSA box today you will discover Pixie Tangerines from Jim Churchill and some Yukon Gold potatoes we overbought in expectation that we could plant them, but 4000 feet of potatoes is enough! Indeed the potatoes have eyes sprouting on them a wee bit, but its merely a sign of Spring as well evidence that they have not been bathed in Sprout-Nip. Sprout Nip is a wonderful chemical (3-Chlorophenyl) carbamic acid, 1-methylethyl ester ) that is used to impede the sprouting of the potato-eyes, thus availing to retailers everywhere a much broader window in which to sell the conventional spuds. Enjoy its residues wherever French fries are sold. Apparently Sprout Nip is used as a swift herbicide prior to planting spinach. What a Joy!

 

There is nothing wrong and everything right in eating a potato that has modest sprouts on it, just crush them off or cut them and be done with it.

 

We also deliver fennel, carrots, cilantro and gold beets, spinach, baby Romaine, and wonderful collard greens, one last time, in lieu of kale.

 

The corn is six inches tall, but the squash got burned in the last bout of freezing. So late, so disheartening! The fickle tickle of Jack Frost put a bit of a scorch on the tips of yonder potatoes in the Land of Ainsworth, which we count on for its temperate clime. But the frost was way short of disaster, happy to say, and Mr. Tirado has hilled them up nicely. The big planting of potatoes, which we accomplished over the past few weeks, was watered neither by the sky nor our pipes, thus they were delayed from breaking through the earth, thankfully, because in the interim we did have cold temperatures on the Plains of Gozo.

 

 

 

 

 

Article for Edible Ojai Spring 2009

In Season

For Edible Ojai

By Steve Sprinkel and Olivia Chase

IN THE WEEDS

I did not need to have the phrase in the weeds explained when a client so described the temporary chaos in his kitchen. I am frequently up to my waist in weedy challenges on the farm. I was delivering lettuce and snap peas to Reggie, the head chef at the old Ojai Brewery Company, who first uttered for me that inimitable metaphor for being totally overwhelmed. Food celebrity Anthony Bourdain has since made the phrase common in the lexicon. Reggie usually made time to ask about the farm and get a handle on what might be coming up, but that afternoon he was hammered, swamped, in the weeds. Reggie had a private party for eighty coming up in less than two hours, his sous was AWOL and the owners could be of no help because it was a surprise party for one of them. I asked if I could help. It was just Reggie and the dishwasher and the dishwasher was not tasking up very sprightly. But at least he had come to work.

“ Can you cook? ”

“ I can’t make a wine reduction from scratch but I can follow orders.”

“ Ok, chop and wash all that salad you brought and spin it in that orange spinner up there. Wash the sink out with detergent and everything first.”

“ Here’s a baster. Baste that lamb roast.”

“ Chop this rosemary up fine and mix it with the potatoes in that oven.”

It went like that for awhile until Reggie seemed caught up and calmer. He’s a professional, but cooking for the boss’s party probably would engender a special sense of strain, sous or no sous. Not a good time to be in the weeds.

At the farm, when we are in the weeds, the trouble is just as dire but we probably owe it to sloth or inattention rather than the sudden advent of confusing, hurried circumstance in a commercial kitchen. Reggie was shorthanded; we can be shortsighted. Since we own both farm and restaurant, we often are in the weeds no matter where we go, but somehow can make things work out even if overwhelmed. The key is in knowing that sanity can be discovered at ground level and to not lose your knife in the malva and foxtail grass or on a cluttered cutting board.

In the spring, we know the weeds are coming and we are going to be in them unless we kill them when they are small. If your timing is right, you can kill six hundred linear feet of weeds with a stirrup hoe in less than an hour. But if you ignore them for too long the hours lengthen and are compounded by tedium. What might have taken just a few minutes in February now absorbs half a day in March. No matter how tangled and overgrown though, we will wade in with clippers and serrated bread knives if need be, because that is our kale and collards in there, and we want it back.

What’s the big deal about weeds? They take up space, fertility and water meant for intended crops. Something about native or naturalized plants gives them an edge. Why lush weeds thrive next to puny broccoli is a major mystery. Malva, an old world native which grows seven feet tall, has adapted well enough here to be considered a significant agricultural pest plant.

Its interesting that the enemy subspecies is known as neglecta, because if you neglect it the plant seems to grow a foot a week. Some people call malva “cheeseweed” because the seed-pod is shaped like a squat wheel of parmesan. You may eat both seed and young plants. Remember that when the Federal Reserve runs out of paper.

A visiting Israeli agronomist marveled last fall at the lush production of malva we had neglected on the edges of our farm. In the Middle East, it’s a salad staple, but here its no friend of fennel and garlic. The only benefits are that you can hide a box of wilting arugula in the shade of tall malva, and as some folks claim, when always on the hunt for a cloud’s sliver lining, that malva will bring up esoteric micronutrients with its deep tap roots. We would prefer to not let things get that out of hand though, and we have plenty of molybdenum anyway. But whatever you intend, do it now, or soon you will be in the weeds.

forager february 11, 2009

F O R A G E R

BREAKING THROUGH THE ICE

AND HOPING FOR THE BEST

11 February 2009

At least we have carrots. Dinner during wartime may have been somewhat like eating from our frozen farm these days. But you will miss that kale when your’re swimmin’in the tomato sauces of August. Sure you will. That’s why Olivia has taken to drying Lacinato Kale and making chips with it that taste as good as nori. With a tad sprinkle of the chipotle, its as grand as it gets.

At ground level what’s recently planted will not perform until it warms up and what lingers must suffer the expansion/contraction rigors of warming up only to cool way down. Cool, as in the upper 20s cool. And then the cells, of the plants, the poor plants, oh. I can’t go on.

And when the wind blow down from Wheeler Gorge then you feel as fine as you were back in Bozeman when the tires of the trucks stuck to the cement and the coffee froze to slush on the way out of the pot. Jack London cold, if you know what I mean.

We wander around in the icy morning hacking weeds to stay warm or roving from gopher-throw to gopher-throw, digging a nice, well formed hole in which to place our traps. We usually obtain fifty to seventy-five percent success against the gopher, and one must diligently dig and trap daily in order to stay ahead of the industrious little beast. She can have four litters a year if she feels like there be food sufficient for her creatures. Their main runs can be deep as three meters, and such energy and building acumen does give us reason to honor the beasts, for they are like us, building homes, looking for food, trying to stay out of trouble, and then, in the end, enter a dark, black box with no fairy tale inside. Is there a gopher heaven? A crowded ethereal space filled with every fly that lived, every sardine that swam? Believers have to ask tough questions too between big dice rolls with faith.

Many are new to the CSA. So we need to make a few suggestions. One, is that you should consume the entire contents of your box before Sunday. Then you can reload at the Farmers Market. Why else Sunday? Because what you receive is of paramount freshness, bursting with the good nutrition that today holds and tomorrow can only whisper about. Today yields flavor, health and a good that will fade so soon you would have trouble recognizing it once you have beheld the carrot in all its gleaming glory, fresh from the soil, with a crunch that bagged carrots, so far removed from the land that once held them, can only vaguely represent.

These are the kinds of vegetables that may someday lead you, too, to write sentences so bizarre and unfettered by consensus like these dancing their way across the ephemeral page. These are unconventional vegetables that lead to the cracking of jokes and impressive visions, the sudden weightlessness of glee that arrives unbidden and nonetheless can remain if you can only maintain supply for another bite. Some call it medicine, the crass call it feed, but what we truly know is, its something we really need.

( The oranges are from Nancy’s, the apples from Washington State and the spuds from Bakersfield)