The Quirky Gourmet

Farming Heroes

2012-05-18T12:01:00.000-07:00

Farming is backbreaking work. You get up before the sunrise, and you often work until after sundown, tying up loose ends, tinkering with equipment, and taking care of paperwork. You’re at the mercy of weather systems and price fluctuations which can bankrupt you even when you make good choices and dedicate every waking hour to your harvest.

The state of farming in this country is a mixed bag. On the one hand, big companies have spent the past hundred and fifty years—or longer—getting as much land as possible into the hands of a few big players. At the turn of the twentieth century, forty eight percent of American families made a living from agriculture. A hundred years later, that number was closer to two percent.

Many of the families who were farming at the beginning of the last century but not at the end didn’t want to give up their land; they were forced to move because of bad harvests or unfavorable market conditions. You could say that small scale agriculture is dying, as families who have farmed for generations find that they can’t compete with the massive investments that their corporate competitors make to grow corn, wheat, and soy on an industrial scale.

Despite this bad news about family farms, there are more than ten times as many farmers’ markets in the United States today as there were forty years ago. Free-thinking farmers are somehow finding ways to start working small pieces of land, selling their produce directly to free-thinking customers. Farmers’ markets are so hot that even large mainstream corporations are aping them in tacky promotions.

Wherever you find an economy where small-scale farmers thrive, you find a system of government where individuals are willing and able to speak out. This has been the case since ancient times. When a small minority gains control of most of the land or resources, government grows corrupt, workers are exploited, and the average person doesn’t have much of a say.

Ancient Babylon (present day Iraq) lay between two mighty rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Their water was rich in minerals, and when the rivers flooded their banks, the silt that was left behind created fertile and productive plots. At some point a proactive priest or engineer discovered that he could make the land even more bountiful by channeling river water into irrigation systems. As large scale irrigation projects grew successful, the folks who were organizing the effort grew rich and powerful, and came to own most of the land.

There’s a tablet bearing ancient Babylonian laws that turned up about a hundred years ago in what was once Persia. One of these laws states that when someone works land that another person owns, he is entitled to keep one third of the produce he grows there. One third. Think about it. That’s sharecropping. And yet some lawmaker took the trouble to pass a law and inscribe a tablet to protect the tenants’ right to keep that one third. It must have been even worse for many renters.

Nearby, in ancient Israel, folks followed a custom known as the Jubilee Year. According to this tradition, every fiftieth year all debts were forgiven, and all land that had changed hands due to unfortunate circumstances was returned to its original owner. In other words, if you lost the family farm, when the Jubilee Year came around, you’d get it back.

If a Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the dustbowl years, thousands of Great Plains farmers wouldn’t have lost their land and trekked out to California to become migrant workers. If the Jubilee Year law had been in effect during the recent mortgage and foreclosure crisis, we wouldn’t be facing the current level of homelessness and poverty. Homes excavated from the ruins of ancient Israel tend to be relatively uniform in size. That culture didn’t have the kind of wealth disparity that you found nearby in Babylon, where people who lost their land during tough times were unlikely to ever get it back.

In early Greece, most of the good land was grabbed early on by the military elite, and regular folks were left with rocky hillsides which they had to nurture patiently in order to get anything to grow. They planted olives and grapes, crops that the richer landowners didn’t bother with because they took too much time and patience. But olives and grapes were the right crops to grow on rocky hillsides, which weren’t much good for the wheat and barley which the wealthier landowners grew on the better lands, delegating the labor to their slaves.

Unlike wheat or barley, which grow easily and are replanted every year, olive trees and grape vines can take generations to get established. Folks who grow them can make secondary items—olive oil and wine—which are much more valuable than the basic produce, especially if you learn your craft and put out a great product. Once you put in the time it takes to get a grape vine or olive tree to bear fruit, you feel proud of your work and you want to keep that vine or tree in your family.
These early Greek farmers developed pride and independence, and before long they had started history’s first democracy. It wasn’t perfect—slaves couldn’t vote, and even wealthy landowners were shut out at first—but it was a start.

After the fall of Rome, warlords again grabbed all of the good land in Europe, just as the military elite had done in ancient Greece. They used the feudal system to offer contracts to poor peasants, who farmed land they did not own under disadvantageous terms. But around the end of the first millennium, Europeans began inventing better agricultural technologies and becoming more successful farmers.

Land ownership arrangements changed. The wealthy land owners found that it was now more profitable to hire labor and harvest their own crops than to offer long term leases to peasants. Poor people struck out on their own, and began clearing marginal hillsides of trees and shrubs. Like the ancient Greek olive farmers, they didn’t have the kind of resources that large scale land owners enjoyed, but the process of taking a piece of land, making it their own, and getting crops to grow there transformed them from peasants into free thinking citizens. They passed laws that recognized the rights of individuals, and began challenging authority.

There’s been a similar dynamic in the United States, reaching back hundreds of years. Like the warlords of ancient Greece and medieval Europe, cattle and railroad barons grabbed up much of the land as quickly and ruthlessly as they could. At the same time, this country was founded by people who were trying to get out from under oppressive governments. Forward thinking legislators and radical farmers have always challenged the efforts of cutthroat entrepreneurs to buy up as much land as possible.

Thomas Jefferson wrote prolifically about the importance of broad based prosperity and land ownership. He was a wealthy landowner and slave owner himself, but he did have some good ideas, and he helped to create an ethic and an ideal. During the following century, the federal government encouraged the settlement of the western part of the country by offering one hundred and sixty acre parcels to homesteaders who could demonstrate that they were capable of working the land.
Despite the fact that the railroad companies were awarded half of the land--and grabbed much of the other half by sponsoring sham claims--this policy on some level was intended to foster equality, once you factor out the fact that it displaced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans from areas where they had lived for centuries.

After the Civil War, the government launched a similar program aimed at helping freed slaves to get back on their feet by offering them forty acres and a mule. Like the movement to settle the west, the reality of these land grants hardly lived up to the ideal. Many freed slaves ended up as sharecroppers, rather than landowners. Despite these failings, it was a good idea, and if it had been seriously implemented, it’s hard to imagine that we’d have the kind of social and economic disparity on the basis of race that we see today.

Once most of the land out west had been settled late in the nineteenth century, big railroad companies began getting into the food business. Food was an ideal product to transport on the new railroads because the demand for it was ongoing, and there was plenty of room out west to raise food for the densely populated Eastern cities, which were growing more densely populated every day.

The railroad companies got involved in food production in the west, raising cattle and growing lettuce. They also formed alliances with the giant meat packing companies, when they weren’t competing with them for their own share of a very profitable business. Cutthroat entrepreneurs grabbed up as much western land as possible. Their agricultural production technologies grew more expensive and efficient, as they bought bigger tractors to work bigger parcels of land.

The family farmers who had managed to get their hands on homesteaded plots had a hard time competing. They were often growing the same wheat and corn as the large-scale landowners, but they didn’t have the acreage and the equipment to achieve economies of scale, so they couldn’t put out the large enough quantities to succeed, and they couldn’t keep their small operations viable with the low prices that their industrial competitors were able to charge.

As these independent farmers found themselves unable to pay their bills and cover the cost of their seeds, they began mortgaging their land and borrowing against their equipment. The situation didn’t improve. Many were never able to pay back their loans, and eventually they lost their land. They left their livelihoods behind and went off in search of wage labor, often with young families in tow.

Big agriculture got bigger, and before long folks living in cities and even in rural towns were buying most of their food through grocery chains that did most of their business with the food conglomerates that managed most of the food chain. The big food companies built strong lobbies that shaped a political system where corporations had a disproportionately large voice, and individuals struggled to be heard.

Today we’re used to hearing about a monster food system that has so much political clout that it keeps many Americans unhealthy by offering products that are profitable but lethal, but this is hardly a new story. In the early years of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair published a muckraking novel about the industrial slaughterhouses in Chicago, exposing the filthy food processing operations and hazardous conditions for workers.

The public outrage that the novel stirred made it obvious that the government had to take some action. Unfortunately, rather than taking the opportunity to pass laws that would really make folks safer, government officials worked with industry representatives to create the illusion that they were making the food supply safer, when they were mostly just managing their own images.

The Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 was certainly an improvement over the earlier regulatory environment. It put a cursory inspection system into place, and made it illegal to mislabel products. But the legislation was also a tragic missed opportunity to actually reform the food system by creating serious standards for regulation and food safety.

There’s a similar situation today, as monstrous factory farms breed diseases nobody could even have imagined a hundred years ago, diseases caused by overcrowding, indiscriminate use of hormones and antibiotics, and crazy practices like feeding byproducts from cow slaughterhouses back to cows, and byproducts from chicken slaughterhouses back to chickens.

We hear nearly every week about a new food safety scare linked directly to industrial farming practices. Pathogens that make their way into the industrial food supply ruin millions of pounds of meat, and outbreaks from food borne illnesses sicken thousands of people. And yet it’s tough to pass regulation that might actually improve the situation because large food companies fund such powerful lobbies, and contribute heavily to the campaigns of elected officials.

The consolidation of the food industry undermines democracy because the political influence that the large corporations enjoy ensures that fewer people have a real say in crafting laws and policies. However, the small-scale farmers who are driving the farmers’ market movement do manage to make some noise, and the more they prosper and find ways to sell their food and share their ideals, the less powerful corporate agriculture will ultimately become.

If it hadn’t been for the strong voices of independent farmers and the customers who support them, federal organic standards would allow genetically modified foods to be labeled as organic. These free thinking producers have been the force between today’s sustainable food movement, which has forced the government to overhaul nutritional recommendations, re-evaluate the school lunch program, and fund vouchers to help low income shoppers buy produce at farmers’ markets.

We’ve got a long way to go, when it comes to building a sensible, fair food system, and there’s certainly no shortage of bad news, from e coli and salmonella outbreaks, to epidemics of type 2 diabetes and heart disease. But the flashes of good news are more than just isolated incidents. Instead, they’re the work of a grassroots movement that gets stronger every day, and has the potential to change not only the way we eat, but also the way we live.

Food Ghostwriting

2012-03-27T10:53:00.003-07:00

A couple of weeks ago Julia Moskin wrote a New York Times article exposing the fact that (gasp) not all chefs write their own cookbooks. Cookbook authors such as Rachael Ray and Gwyneth Paltrow were quick to point out that they did, in fact, compose their own material, and they felt maligned by the suggestion that they didn't. The controversy has led to plenty of earnest discussion about the role of ghostwriters in creating and producing cookbooks, with plenty of focus--as usual--on high profile celebrities with big names and big egos.

This past winter I've been doing a bit of cookbook ghostwriting myself. I'm finding I really enjoy the process of helping other people to channel their food knowledge into written form. I love writing but I can't really market my way out of a paper bag, so ghostwriting feels like a perfect fit: I get to focus on the part that I do well, and another person has the job of promoting the material. I started out as a fiction writer, and ghostwriting also enables me to go back to chameleon mode, learning and imitating someone else's voice.

I've been working for peanuts so far, thinking of the process as an internship of sorts. If I get some experience, then down the line I may be able to work on more lucrative projects because, after all, a girl's got to earn a living. But reading Moskin's account of the treatment she received from some of the big names she worked with has given me a new appreciation of the type of work I've been doing.

I've mostly been helping non-native speakers express their food knowledge in ways that will be accessible to an American audience. I edited a cookbook for a Russian guy with a thick accent who had been working with voice recognition software: this became clear when I came across the phrase "feel the pastry shells." I worked with a Greek food personality who wants to teach American cooks about the food lessons that he and his compatriots have learned as a result of their country's economic turmoil.

I'm finding this work fascinating. In addition to learning a lot about unfamiliar cuisines, it's gotten me thinking about the role of food writing in the digital age. We all want to promote who we are and what we know. We create platforms, project personalities, and build audiences. But the people with the deepest, broadest food knowledge aren't necessarily the ones who have the writing skills or the tech savvy to communicate what they know.

There's been a lot of talk lately about the ways that new information technologies have been lowering the qualty of food writing and diluting the brands of folks who immerse themselves in the craft and the business of creating food books and magazines. But digital media and the recent innovations in self-publishing have also created a field that is potentially quite egalitarian and food is, after all, a deeply egalitarian medium.

By the way, if you're ever looking for a ghostwriter, I hope you'll keep me in mind...

Roasted Sunchokes

2012-03-13T09:33:00.005-07:00

I used to scoff at sunchokes. Walking around the winter markets, it always seemed like everybody was selling them but nobody was buying them. I once even asked a farmer whether there was actually a demand for them, or whether farmers just offered them for sale because they were easy to grow. I'm not much of a gardener, but I've heard that they are, in fact, very easy to grow.

Sunchokes used to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" until a bunch of marketing folks got together and tried to figure out why nobody was buying them. Someone suggested rebranding them as "sunchokes", which wasn't as big of a stretch as it sounds because they are, in fact, part of the sunflower family.

Nobody knows why they came to be known as "Jerusalem artichokes" in the first place. They're definitely not part of the artichoke family, although they do have a distinctly artichoke-like flavor. They're indigenous to this hemisphere, and one theory is that whoever first came up with the name was referring to the New World's one-time reputation as the New Jerusalem. Another theory as that the "Jerusalem" in the name is a bastardization of "girasole", which is a flower that bends towards the sun, like its sunflower cousins.

In any case, they're quite good for you. They're reminiscent of potatoes, but have almost no starch and plenty of fiber. They're also bountiful at a time of year when there isn't much other local produce available.

Up until the past few weeks, I never had much luck cooking sunchokes. For some reason I thought that you absolutely had to peel them, and they're knobby and small, and it seemed like a lot of work for not very much food. I also didn't seem to digest them well.

I brought some home a few weeks ago because a farmer had a big box of them left over at the end of a market and offered them to me for free. I said I didn't have the patience to peel them, and she said she never bothered. It was a revelation.

So here's how I've been preparing them. It's so simple that it seems silly to use a recipe format. Slice them thinly. Aim for the thinness of potato chips, although--if you're anything like me-- most of them won't end up quite that thin. Toss the slices with olive oil. Use your hands, so you can actually coat them without using an insane amount of oil. Sprinkle them with salt and pepper, and roast them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for about 20 minutes.

It's that simple. The thicker ones will be tender and satisfying. The thinner ones will be almost crispy, like artichokey potato chips. It makes me think of the amazing possibilities for someone with a big budget and plenty of marketing savvy: Sun choke chips!!

The Farmers' Market Apostrophe

2012-02-23T10:38:00.004-08:00

This winter I've been studying editing, taking online courses in an effort to become a better writer and also to improve my skillset as a freelancer. The other day I came across a disturbing piece of news in my course materials: the apostrophe I've been using in the phrase "farmers' market" may not actually belong there.

At the risk of sounding like a language nerd, I love that apostrophe. It says that the market belongs to the farmers. The instructor's rationale was that in this particular phrase, "farmers" functions as an adjective rather than a noun, therefore it shouldn't take the possessive form.

I've used the possesive form throughout this blog, even in the header. When I was working on my cookbook Local Bounty, the editor suggested that we drop the apostrophe. I suspect she used the adjective argument, but it was a while ago and I don't fully remember. I indicated that I felt strongly about it and she let me have my way.

In addition to the thorny intricacies of grammar, my coursework has also dealt with the interpersonal complexities of marking up someone else's work. I realize now that this editor exercised discretion and flexibility in a way that probably ran counter to her sensibilities, because it was apparent that this particular apostrophe mattered to me.

That's the kind of editor I want to be. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep right on using that apostrophe, consistently and defensibly.

Cooking is Subversive

2012-01-02T20:44:00.001-08:00

I've been working a bit with the Occupy Wall Street folks in New York, who are putting together a cookbook, and it's gotten me thinking about the subversive nature of simply picking up a knife and preparing your own dinner.

When you cook for yourself instead of reheating processed convenience food, you opt out of the garbage that the mainstream food industry wants you to eat. Cooking for yourself is a way of thinking for yourself, choosing not to believe all of the advertisements telling you that it’s too hard, or takes too much time, or you’ll never make it taste as good as the celebrity chef who’s got his name on the package.

Don’t believe it. Don’t let any celebrity chef ever convince you that you don’t know the right way to hold a knife, chop an onion, or bone a chicken. There are as many ways to hold a knife as there are people handling knives. You may be able to learn some tricks that will make you more efficient, or make your cooking look more professional. But in the end, as long as you cook something reasonably tasty, don’t hurt yourself, and don’t make anyone sick, then you’ve done something right, regardless of how you’re holding your knife or slicing your onion.

Cooking is a subversive act because it involves taking back the power to choose every ingredient in your meal, making the decision to buy from folks who give a damn about the people who work for them and about the soil, air, and water. When you buy ingredients from small farmers, you support individuals and families who have chosen to make a living outside of the mainstream food system. They’re usually kinder to to their land than industrial operations, and they make their own calls about what they’re going to grow, and where they’re going to sell it.

Shopping at a farmers’ market is a subversive act. When you choose heirloom fruits and vegetables rather than tasteless, industrial varieties, you do your part to preserve ancient plant knowledge and species diversity. At a farmers’ market you have the chance to buy ingredients from farmers who use age-old seeds and knowledge to produce tasty, healthy food, rather than squeezing as much low quality produce as they can out of land that’s already tired.

Shopping at a farmers’ market or joining a community supported agriculture program is a subversive act because you’re doing your part to help build on alternative economy, one that doesn’t rely on multinational corporations or transnational trucking firms. You’re paying for the fruits and vegetables that you actually get, rather than spending extra money for the services of middlemen who jack up the price of your groceries without giving back anything of value.

When you cook for yourself and plan your meals around fresh, local ingredients, you buy from people who keep your money close to home, as they turn around and support other local businesses instead of extracting profits that ultimately go to a corporate office in a distant city. When independent businesses can generate their own livelihood, fewer people are at the mercy of low paying jobs with companies that charge obscenely low prices for products made by people who work for even lower wages in developing nations.

Cooking is a subversive act because it is a magnet that brings people together to work collectively, gathering and prepping ingredients, and then sitting down and enjoying the results, taking time to exchange thoughts and ideas, visiting face to face instead of through a computer screen. Cooking creates connections, providing a meeting place with cooperation at its root. Cooking with a community involves sharing skills, and building something bigger than the work of lonely individuals. Cooking and sitting down to meals is time that you don’t spend working, shopping, or watching television.

Cooking is a subversive act because it brings different cultures together to enjoy each other’s food, creating connections instead of going to war. Strangers are less strange once you have tasted their recipes and sat at their tables. Each individual act of connecting to someone who is unlike yourself, someone the media teaches you to fear, helps to defang the myth that the world is a hostile place, and weapons are the only solution.

Cooking is a subversive act because it gives you control over your health. The better you eat, the more likely you are to are to get up and do something rather than sitting on the couch. The better you eat, the less you need to support the mainstream medical industry, and the less you rely on highly profitable pharmaceutical drugs and an insurance industry that doesn’t insure much. Using your own judgment and developing your own knowledge base about the way for you to eat makes you less vulnerable to bogus claims on food labels telling you that a product will help your heart, boost your energy level, or keep you regular.

Cooking for yourself is a process of getting to know your own needs and your own mind. The more you produce your own food, the more your food choices depend on what you really want and need, rather than what the food industry wants you to buy so they’ll make more money. Choosing your own ingredients allows you to tune into the ways that different foods affect your well being and your metabolism, and choose combinations that help you thrive.

Learning about your own food allergies and sensitivities gives you the knowledge and power to heal yourself, and stay alert and engaged. Cooking for yourself allows you to choose your own portion size, figuring out how much food you really need, and it allows you to choose the right amount of salt for your meals, rather than consuming all of the extra sodium that convenience food manufacturers add to their products so they’ll last long on supermarket shelves while they’re sitting and waiting for you to buy them.

Cooking is easy, once you get past the idea that you have to make something complicated and dazzling. Use good, fresh ingredients, and prepare them simply. Practice and build your skills. Learn from the folks around you, and share your own knowledge. Cooking is power. Cooking is wealth. Cooking is subversive.

Reawakening

2011-11-17T12:53:00.000-08:00

I own a business that makes the same food week after week, month after month, and year after year. The ingredients change seasonally, but the menu basically stays the same. So it's a big deal when we introduce a new menu item.

This past fall we started selling beef tamales. We'd been selling only vegetarian tamales for years, in fact, our entire menu had been completely vegetarian until we introduced a beef chili in an effort to limit competition at the Jubilee Farm pumpkin patch event. (They were talking about bringing in a burger vendor for the omnivores.) The chili was really tasty, but it was more work than we'd anticipated and it just didn't sell well.

The beef tamales however, were an instant hit. Once we introduced them at all of our markets, we quickly began selling more of them than of both of the vegetarian varieties combined. There were a couple of pissed off vegans, but not nearly as many as we'd expected. Ironic as it may sound, I felt like it was a step in the right direction as far as my big picture objective of encouraging folks to eat less meat. There's an ounce of beef in a beef tamale. If someone chooses to eat one along with a big pile of locally grown vegetables on the side instead of eating a burger or a hot dog, I feel like I'm making a difference.

We began buying our meat from Crown S Ranch, in Winthrop. My household has been enjoying their fine products for years, and they gave us a great deal on some overstocked meat that had been shaped into hamburger patties. We did some mutually beneficial cross marketing.

I drove out to visit the farm in late October. As the author of two vegan cookbooks, I wanted to be able to tell customers that I'd visited the farm that was raising the animals that went into my tamales, and I felt good about using their products.

It was a magical place. Jennifer and Louis, the owners, are both engineers and they've designed a wealth of technologies and systems --some simple, some complex--to make the most of natural cycles and synergies, and raise tasty, healthy animals. At one point Jennifer was showing me around and explaining some of the systems, and she stopped in mid-sentence, gestured at a nearby cow, and said, "Let's move away a bit. I'm talking too loud, and I'm stressing her out."

By the end of the visit, we'd brainstormed all kinds of ways we could collaborate. To start with, I agreed to make tamales using their beef and pork, for them to sell in their farm store and distribute to their wholesale accounts. They'd provide the meat, and I'd charge them a wholesale price that didn't include marking up the most expensive ingredient.

She ordered more than 700 tamales, and I made them and froze them for a pick-up in a couple of weeks. A week later, she sent me an email regarding a much smaller batch of tamales I'd brought to the farm store when I visited. Customers were asking whether I was using GMO corn and she was curious about the answer.

The GMO issue has always been a tricky one for me. On the one hand, I want good, clean food as much as the next person. On the other hand, I have a great working relationship with the Mexican distributor who suppliers my masa and corn husks, and their products make wonderful tamales. I could get a non-GMO masa from the behemoth natural foods distributor, but I have to drive far to get it, and they don't treat me like they value my business. I'm also not as happy with the way the tamales come out when I use that masa.

And yet Jennifer's email was so friendly and non-judgemental that I found myself revisiting the issue. I researched prices, tried thinking outside the box, and made a sample batch. I found myself liking them more.

But I still had more than 700 tamales in the freezer made with the GMO corn. I offered her an out. I'd been using this masa for many years, and I knew I'd be able to sell these tamales. If she wanted to wait until I could use all non-GMO ingredients, that wasn't a problem for me: I'd simply pay for the meat that she'd provided.

She bought them anyway, saying that she'd just treat them as a transitional batch. In the meantime, I went ahead placed an order with the behemoth natural foods distributor for quite a bit of the non-GMO masa. I've even found parchment paper "corn husks" that have the look and feel of the real thing.

Once I got started, I began revisiting all of my other ingredients as well. I've always been comfortable with ambiguity and contradiction, and I believe that incremental change can be as effective as all-or-nothing dogmatism. I use plenty of clean, local, organic ingredients, but I also use GMO masa and cheap, industrial cheese. I've never set out to provide an absolutely wholesome product. Instead, I've aimed to create a reasonably wholesome product that's a great value.

For the most part, the few customers who have called me out about these inferior ingredients over the years have seemed smug and self-righteous, and that kind of attitude makes me want to dig in more than it makes me want to change. But Jennifer's attitude about the tamales was sensible and easygoing, and it really got me thinking.

Media Storm

2011-09-24T10:16:00.001-07:00

There's been quite the media storm lately about food safety at Seattle farmers' markets. The PI ran an article citing a report that the health department found 252 violations in 265 routine inspections this year, including 189 that were considered critical. National sites such as Barfblog and Epicurious promptly ran articles parroting the same information.

As a long time farmers' market vendor, I've experienced hundreds of on site health inspections. Some have involved red "critical" violations. Once I hadn't prepared a bleach bucket, though I did have bleach, water, and a container for bleach water on hand. Several times I've been cited for having handwashing water that was a few degrees cooler than the 100 degrees that the health department requires.

The most common violation found on my company's health inspection reports lately involves a regulation called the four hour rule. The health department allows you to hold potentially hazardous foods in the danger zone (40 degrees F to 140 degrees F) for up to four hours as long as you discard them at the end of this time. In order to use this rule and be in full compliance, you must write down the time that you took the product in question out of your cooler, as well as the time (four hours later) that you plan to discard it.

Most of the markets where my business vends are only four hours long. If we take our cheese out of the cooler at the beginning of the market and discard it at the end of the market, we are complying with the spirit of this rule. But if the health department shows up and we haven't written down that we took the cheese out at, say, 10AM when the market started, they write it down as a red, critical violation.

I'm not downplaying the importance of genuine food safety, especially at farmers' markets. Food should be kept sufficiently cold or hot, surfaces should be kept clean, and folks handling food should never have bare hand contact with ready to eat foods. In addition, food should be handled conscientiously at every stage in the process, from the time we purchase ingredients, to the time we prepare it in our kitchen, to the time we serve it at the markets. But lumping together this failure to record the time we took the cheese out of the cooler with genuinely serious violations like failure to wash hands after using the bathroom does a disservice to vendors, customers, market administrators, and even health inspectors.

Although there have been articles in recent years claiming that health regulation at farmers' markets is particularly lax, farmers' market booths are actually more meticulously regulated than any other food service establishment I've ever known. Market administrators enter into an agreement with the health department requiring them to provide proxy inspections of booths handling potentially hazardous foods on every single market day.

This is the equivalent of having a restaurant inspected every single day that it is open to the public. (Most restaurants are inspected only once or twice a year.) The inspections certainly aren't as thorough as the ones the health department performs. For example, a market manager probably wouldn't notice if my hand washing water was a few degrees cooler than it should be. But the market managers rightfully take this responsibility very seriously, because all of our livelihoods and reputations depend on not making the public sick.

So why the media hype? I think it stems partly from the fact that farmers' market booths are so out in the open and transparent. You rarely see a restaurant kitchen as exposed as a market booth, and this leaves market vendors open to a higher level of scrutiny and judgement. If the cook at your favorite restaurant drops your food on the floor, he can pick it up and plate it and you'll never know. (Ever hear of the three second rule?) That could never happen at a farmers' market because someone would inevitably see and report the incident to a market manager, resulting in an earnest talk about how the reputations of all vendors are on the line when a single vendor puts customers at risk.

It also doesn't help that many smug, self satisfied market patrons play down the importance of food safety at farmers' markets, claiming that farmers' market food is inherently safer than mainstream industrial food. Artisan food producers do tend to care more about the food they produce, there is some evidence that grassfed beef does tend to have lower levels of e coli than factory farmed beef, and a foodborne illness from a farmers' market product is much easier to trace and address than one caused by a huge outfit that distributes product in many states, under multiple brand names. But that's no reason to be complacent, and food mishandled by small producers is just as likely to make you sick as food mishandled by industrial behemoths.

Last weekend a reporter from KUOW showed up at the Ballard Farmers' Market with a health inspector who works closely with local farmers' markets. The inspector performed a couple of inspections, including one of my booth, explaining about the regulations and checking temperatures and handwashing stations. As far as I know, the story hasn't aired yet, but it struck me as an effort to show another side of the story, about the hard work that we actually do put into keeping our booths and our product safe.

I'm assuming the reporter felt okay about what she saw and heard, because she swung back around after the interview and bought a quesadilla.

Food Knowledge

2011-09-14T09:50:00.001-07:00

I've been teaching cooking classes regularly lately, and I keep bumping up against a paradox: people come to cooking classes to learn something they didn't previously know, from someone who has culinary skill and experience. Yet I'm convinced that most of my students know more than they think they know, and my objective is to help them build enough confidence to experiment, and to draw on their existing knowledge.

Food knowledge belongs to all of us. Folks were choosing foods, and preparing and eating them long before anyone ever wrote a cookbook or started a cooking school. Even people who don't really cook nearly always manage to feed themselves day to day, and folks who sign up for cooking classes most likely have at least a bare minimum of curiosity and familiarity with foods, knives, and cutting boards.

The way I see it, if you prepare a meal that tastes reasonably good, and you don't cut or burn yourself and nobody gets sick, you've done something right. Some of my favorite meals are incredibly simple, and incredibly tasty. The other night I sauteed some lovely peppers with garlic and olive oil, tossed it with fresh pasta, and ate it with grated cheese, and it was one of the best things I'd ever tasted. Sure, it helped to start with good ingredients, but sometimes I feel that, as a cooking instructor, the most important thing I can do is give students permission to keep it simple.

There's no glory in this, and I really don't dazzle anyone. Once a student wrote on a feedback form that I didn't have enough of a "backstory." But I like to think that when folks leave my cooking classes, they'll actually go home and cook. And that's what it's all about.

This Summer

2011-09-05T23:49:00.000-07:00

In a way it's hard to believe that summer is almost over, especially here in Seattle where it only got going in earnest a few weeks ago. I turned 50 this summer, and I started feeling tired right afterwards. I think I mostly just gave myself permission to feel tired, after more than 20 years of pushing myself through the long days and small, everyday crises involved in running a small business on a shoestring.

So I've been pushing myself less this summer, working to define my role in the business. I do the purchasing, because it involves keeping track of so many details and prices. I keep an eye on the big picture, and I figure out ways to communicate big picture insights to the crew. I try to keep them motivated, challenged and engaged. And I crank out quesadillas during the busiest times: special events, the Ballard Market, and the dinner rush at Columbia City.

Because of the terrible weather earlier this summer, the farmers' markets got a slow start this year. There was hardly anything except greens available until nearly July. We didn't really see chiles or corn until nearly the middle of August. There were plenty of cold, damp and dreary market days, when produce wouldn't have sold even if it was available. Things have picked up for the farmers the past few weeks, but for much of the summer they largely seemed stressed and broke.

As a prepared food vendor, I've actually benefited in some way from their struggles. Spring tends to be the busiest time of year for my business, at least when the weather cooperates. Folks are excited that the markets are starting up, but there isn't that much to buy so they buy dinner. Once the heirloom tomatoes and the flats of berries show up, customers have a lot less money leftover for discretionary purchases like prepared food.

I'm thrilled that my business has done well this summer, but I'm also fully aware that farmers' markets are about farmers, and something is very wrong when the farmers are struggling and the quesadilla vendor is thriving. I try to give back every way I can, by buying ingredients from my market neighbors and prioritizing their needs when they're hungry.

I also like to think that maybe the farmers benefitted in a roundabout way from my spring sales: customers who came to the market early in the season and didn't find much produce to buy may have enjoyed the dinner they bought at one of the prepared food stands and felt like the excursion wasn't a total loss, so they kept up the habit of coming to the market until the selection became more bountiful.

Hot Sauce

2011-09-03T09:10:00.001-07:00

This time of year, I tend to be up to my elbows in tomatoes and chiles. It's a wonderful problem to have: What am I going to do with all these beautiful ingredients?

Here's a new hot sauce recipe that I've been making the past few weeks. I can't get enough of it. I eat it with chips, with tamales, on fried eggs. I find myself planning my meals looking for opportunities to use it.

Hot Sauce (makes 2 cups)

2 ripe happy tomatoes
6 serrano chiles
1/2 teaspoon olive oil
1/4 cup red wine vinegar
1/2 teaspoon salt

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Arrange the tomatoes on a baking sheet. Rub the serrano chiles with olive oil and arrange them on the baking sheet as well.

Roast the tomatoes and chiles for about 40 minutes, until the tomatoes are a bit droopy and the serranos start to brown.

When the tomatoes and chiles are cool enough to handle, remove the cores from the tomatoes and the stems from the serranos. Puree the tomatoes and chiles in a blender until the mixture is smooth. Add the vinegar and salt, and puree a minute longer.

Choice

2011-08-25T11:16:00.001-07:00

There's a scene in the movie Shakespeare in Love in which a character wanders through a marketplace where a waiter for an outdoor eating venue is reciting daily specials. I've heard that moviemakers making historical films employ historians as fact checkers, but in this case someone wasn't doing his job. The practice of giving diners a choice of what to eat actually evolved hundreds of years after Shakespeare's time, in Paris around the time of the French Revolution.

Innkeepers had sold meals to hungry, paying guests for millenia, but choices were limited to what that innkeeper happened to be offering on that particular day. Eating establishments in Paris before modern restaurants came into vogue were usually locations where a proprietor served the same thing to all of his guests, at designated times rather than whenever they happened to wander in the door.

The tradition of a "restaurant," where diners come on their own schedules and order off of a list of choices, caught on in Paris around the same time that the Industrial Revolution was getting into gear across the channel in England. Rural homesteaders forced off their land began moving to the cities, taking jobs in factories, and working for wages. They became the earliest modern consumers, spending their hard-earned income on afforable luxuries that helped them unwind after long, grueling work days.

Today we take for granted the act of visiting a store and choosing from hundreds or thousands of options. We craft identities based on whether we choose organic or exotic food products, or whether we're partial to high end chocolate. We tend to think of ourselves as individuals first, and then members of a tribe, country, or community and, for better or worse, much of our identity as individuals is tied up in what we buy and how we eat.

As a business owner, I struggle with this. Vending at farmers' markets, my livelihood depends on feeding as many customers as possible as quickly as possible. The more choices you offer, the longer it takes folks to make up their minds. Limiting the number of options also cuts way down on waste. I'm aware that I sometimes lose customers because I don't offer the option of choosing different types of tortillas or different types of cheese, but this business model mostly works for me so I stick with it.

As I was serving this month's Humble Feast Dinner, it occurred to me that this type of dining event is actually more like the pre-industrial common table than a modern restaurant setup. There's a buffet with multiple courses, but they're the same offerings for everyone, and we serve at a set time. This month we came up with a novel approach: we set up a taco bar. Rice, beans, beef, seitan, salsa, hot sauce, cheese, marinated cabbage, pickled carrots and jalapenos. I doubt any two tacos were the same.

Social Media

2011-08-10T11:23:00.001-07:00

I often find pictures of my hands and my quesadillas on market shoppers' blogs when I idly surf the internet, procrastinating from more urgent tasks. I've even found recipes and calorie counts. Or I'll learn on Twitter that a seasonal vegetable has finally shown up at the farmers' market. Sometimes I'll find the answer to a perplexing question like how to cook cardoons by typing into a search engine.

Today it's easier than ever to access basic culinary information over the internet. But this trend of blogs, websites, and social media is really just the most recent chapter in a story about food and communication technologies that goes back at least as far as the invention of writing.

The earliest written recipes were inscribed on ancient Babylonian tablets. They contain instructions for preparing different types of broths and meats. Cooks and scribes set down this information at a time when it was new and exciting to store learning in a format that could be deciphered by anyone with access to the code. These cooks and scribes must have belonged to the cultural elite, those who knew how to read and write.

The English sociologist Jack Goody wrote a great book called Cooking, Cuisine, and Class, in which he ruminated on the differences between cultures that have a haute cuisine, or a more complex and varied eating style for the upper classes, versus cultures where ordinary folk and their richer compatriots eat basically the same foods, only the wealthy eat more of them. He concluded that cultures with haute cuisines tend to have written traditions while cultures with simpler food systems are more likely to communicate general and culinary knowledge orally.

Ancient Babylonian had perhaps the earliest haute cuisine, that is, it included a body of knowledge that was the province of sophisticated professionals. The ability to preserve information in writing to share with fellow experts and future generations gave the craft of cooking a platform and a reference point, a medium to store and accumulate nuggets of knowledge.

Down the line, the invention of the printing press eventually turned cookbooks into household items. Naturally, the first cookbooks were written by rich folks for rich folks, but eventually more cookbooks were written, and they became more widely available. By the time a few centuries had passed, a typical housewife could get her hands on a basic cookbook geared specifically for a typical household.

Despite the staggering amount of information that we now have available about food via the internet, we really don't have any idea of how this technology will ultimately affect the way we cook. On the one hand, we're able to watch videos about simple things like how to peel a carrot, while we can also learn obscure arts such as how to make tempeh or recreate medieval trenchers.

At its worst, this vast storehouse of food knowledge has the potential to be confusing and unduly complicated, discouraging would-be cooks seeking simple, accessible information. At its best, it can be a powerful tool for healthier, happier eating. Time will tell where it's all heading. In the meantime, I'm going to go peck around for some ideas on how to use those donut peaches I just picked up at the market.

It's a Book!

2011-08-02T10:27:00.001-07:00

It's called Cavemen, Monks and Slow Food: A History of Eating Well, and it's about our ever changing relationship with the food we eat. I was talking to someone at some point during the writing process, and she said that she'd never been particularly interested in history because it was all about wars. I disagreed. Personally, I grew interested in history when I realized that it was actually all about food.

We first became human when changes to our teeth and legs enabled us to hunt, gather and eat a more interesting diet than our simian ancestors had enjoyed. Civilization and farming evolved hand in hand, and more recently the industrial and technological revolutions both hinged on having an ample food supply.

As a farmers' market vendor, I was especially fascinated to learn about the many important social and political developments that occurred when small-scale agriculture managed to thrive. Ancient Greek democracy emerged among independent olive and grape growers, and the bleak years of medieval feudalism drew to a close when enterprising farmers began clearing and claiming marginal land, and striking out on their own.

But there are already plenty of terrific food history books out there telling you how we came to eat what we eat. I was more interested in exploring how we came to enjoy the foods that we prefer, and how longstanding attitudes and feelings about food tie into today's issues and debates, such as organic foods, local eating, vegetarianism, and whether foodies are inevitably snobbish.

Copies are available on Amazon, and I'm working hard to get it into bookstores and libraries. In the meantime, I'll be blogging more regularly about the long view. Thanks for listening.

Dilly Beans!

2011-07-28T10:43:00.001-07:00

We expanded our Humble Feast dinners this month, adding a second location at the Salmon Bay Eagles' Lodge, and moving the Capital Hill event to the larger, lovely Montlake Community Center. The new venues present challenges and opportunities, and I especially enjoyed making the same meal 2 weeks in a row, and being able to learn and fine tune the recipes.

By popular demand, here's the recipe for the Dilly Beans that we made this month. It actually comes from my Local Bounty cookbook, and it's basically a pickled green bean, only it's eaten fresh rather than canned.

Dilly Beans (makes 4 servings)

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 onion, cut in rings
4 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 cup chopped fresh dill
1/2 cup white or red wine vinegar
1/2 cup water
1 lb. green beans, rinsed and trimmed

Heat the olive oil in a medium-size saucepan. Add the onion, garlic, salt and dill. Cook for about 5 minutes, until the onion is soft and transluscent. Add the vinegar and water, and bring the mixture to a boil.

Add the green beans. Cook for about 15 minutes, stirring often so all of the green beans come into contact with the liquid.

Serve chilled, or at room temperature.

Bare Hand Contact with Ready-to-Eat Food

2011-07-22T15:07:00.001-07:00

Anyone who works in the food service industry these days is all too familiar with the regulation that requires food service workers to avoid bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food. Many years ago, when I started my first business, we were told to minimize bare hand contact with ready-to-eat food; now we're told to avoid it altogether.

It's okay to touch the food you're preparing if it will be cooked in between the time you touch it and the time it will be served to a customer. For example, you can use bare hands to chop onions that will be cooked as part of a tomato sauce. It's not okay to touch food with bare hands after it's been cooked, or to touch food that isn't going to be cooked at all, such as salad.

You can avoid bare hand contact with ready to eat food by wearing gloves, or by handling food with utensils such as tongs, or materials such as bakery paper, those tissue paper squares that servers use when handling pastries.

Patty Pan's menu processes don't involve any bare hand contact with ready to eat food, unless we accidentally touch an item after it has been cooked, for example in the process of transferring it from the grill to the plate. Still, we cook in a public setting where customers can see every move we make. Folks reprimand us regularly if we're not wearing gloves, even though we're touching food that's going to be fully cooked, such as cheese and tortillas.

We've started wearing gloves and using tongs when we handle cheese, because the perception is at least as important as the reality. A health inspector once told me that she'd received a complaint call from a customer who saw me touching vegetables as I transferred them from the bucket to the grill. She responded, "There's no health code violation there. If you don't like it, don't eat there. But FYI, I eat there."

Things get more complicated when there's only one person working in the booth. Unless you put on a new pair of gloves for every single order, you'll probably at some point touch money and then touch food. Granted, it's food that's going to be cooked rather than ready-to-eat food, but it's still potentially dicey. Using tongs to handle the cheese alleviates some of the problem, but it's more awkward to use tongs for the tortillas.

At the Lake City market last week, a customer reprimanded my employee who was alone in the booth, telling him that he shouldn't be wearing gloves when taking money, and then touching food with those same gloves. He told her that he didn't technically have to wear gloves because he wasn't handling any ready to eat food; he was only wearing them because he was allergic to wheat, and he had a reaction when he touched the tortillas.

The customer complained to the market manager, and she and I had a chat about it. I felt that his reasoning was possibly sound, but he should have treated the customer's complaint more seriously. I called the customer and apologized, and I also worked the market myself this week, to evaluate the situation and do some damage control.

I was careful to use gloves whenever I handled cheese, and I even experimented a bit with using tongs to handle the tortillas. Coincidentally, the health inspector showed up. She told me right away that a customer had approached her on the way to the booth, and complained that I was handling tortillas after handling money. Apparently the same customer who had complained last week had been lurking and observing.

The health inspector told me she'd told the customer that she was familiar with my operation, and it was okay for me to touch the tortillas because they would be cooked before I served the quesadillas. I told her that I always wondered about the propriety of handling food after handling money, even if that food was going to be cooked. She responded that folks always worry about the germs on money because it passes through so many hands, but money is actually made out of a type of paper that barely harbors germs. I hadn't known this, but was relieved to hear it.

Apparently the customer had been observing a number of vendors, and had a long list of complaints. Both the health inspector and the market manager felt that she was out of line, but I think the situation goes deeper than just one out of control customers.

Folks place their trust in us when we handle their food, and it's our responsibility to take their seriously. At the same time, perceptions about food safety can be quite subjective. Customers reprimand my male employees more than they reprimand female employees doing the same things and, as the business owner, they reprimand me least of all. They also reprimand my teenage employees more often than they reprimand the adults. Touching cheese with bare hands has been an ongoing source of friction but, until this week, nobody ever had a problem with us touching tortillas with bare hands.

We'll keep trying to do the best we can to comply with health department regulations, and to keep our customers safe. But we also need to take customer perceptions seriously, even when they seem silly because, for better or for worse, they're the ones buying the food and spreading the word.

Farm to Fork Dinner and Halibut-Potato Patties

2011-07-17T21:15:00.001-07:00

I catered a lovely dinner last night at Whispering Winds Farm in Stanwood. It was my very first farm dinner, as well as a first for the hosts, Charlene and Doug. We were all quite pleased, and we all felt that we'd learned some valuable lessons to make the event even more successful next time.

It was clear to Charlene and Doug that they should have held the event later in the season, with more produce to choose from, and we shouldn't have committed to a specific menu months ago, when we had no idea how fickle the weather would be. I learned that I should have brought many more bowls, more utensils, and a larger griddle.

Most of the recipes came from my friend Debra's wonderful collection, The Northwest Vegetarian Cookbook. We were going to make Romanesco with Northwest Berry Vinegar, and Charlene planted romanesco specifically for the occasion, but the weather didn't cooperate. We used broccoli instead, from Willie Greens Farm, which was a great stand in. We also made a salad with a variety of gorgeous lettuces from Let Us Farm, and Carrots with Fennel Seeds and Hazelnuts, using a mix of yellow and orange carrots from various farms.

For the protein, we made Halibut and Potato Patties (my recipe, developed for the occasion) using some spectacular halibut from Wilson Fish, along with potatoes from Alvarez Farms, and herbs from Whispering Winds.

Here's the recipe, scaled down for home use:

1 lb. filleted halibut
olive oil, salt, and pepper

1 lb. yellow or red potatoes, cut into bite-size pieces
handful of chopped, fresh parsley
handful of chopped, fresh chives
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 teaspoon salt
black pepper to taste

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Brush the halibut with olive oil, sprinkle it with salt and pepper, and bake for about 20 minute, until it's flaky in the middle.

Meanwhile, boil the potatoes for about 10 minutes, until they're very soft.

Drain the potatoes, and mash them. Crumble the halibut. Mixed the crumbled halibut with the mashed potatoes, and add the parsley, chives, olive oil, salt and pepper. Shape the mixture into patties, and brown them for a few minutes on each size in s skillet or on a griddle. Alternately, arrange the patties on a baking sheet, brush them with oil, and bake them at 375 degrees until they just start to brown.

For the yogurt sauce:

1 tablespoon olive oil
1 clove garlic, minced
1 cup whole milk yogurt
1 tablespoon olive oil
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
1/2 teaspoon salt
black pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil gently in a medium-size saucepan. Add the garlic and cook for about a minute, until you can smell it. Mix the sauteed garlic with the remaining ingredients. Serve the yogurt sauce spooned on top of the halibut patties.

Humble Feast Update (and Braised Baby Turnip Recipe)

2011-06-30T21:52:00.001-07:00

These are servings of strawberry shortcake stacked on the espresso machine at the defunct Patty Pan Cafe during this past Monday's Humble Feast dinner. We were at close to capacity for both seatings and a bit tight on counter space as well, which is why we were stacking the strawberry shortcakes on the espresso machine.

After some rough spring months where ingredients were hard to come by, Monday's dinner finally felt bountiful. We bartered for many of the ingredients, and even made some additions to the menu simply in order to use some of the items that we acquired during the course of our market adventures. This was my original vision, and it was exciting to see it coming to fruition.

Next month we're expanding to two dinners: the Ballard Eagles' Lodge on Monday July 18th, and the Mountlake Community Center on Monday July 25th. It'll be the same menu for both events. I'm thinking Mediterranean food because we should be getting into tomato and cucumber season by then.

Here's a recipe for braised baby turnips from Monday's dinner:

Braised Baby Turnips (makes 4 servings)

2 tablespoons olive oil

4 spring onions, finely sliced

1 fennel bulb, finely chopped

2 tablespoons chopped garlic

1 teaspoon salt

1 pound baby turnips, trimmed and quartered (Save the greens for another recipe.)

1/4 cup balsamic vinegar

1/2 cup orange juice

Black pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a medium-size saucepan. Add the onions, fennel, garlic and salt, and cook for about 5 minutes on medium-low heat, stirring often, until the onion is soft and transluscent.

Add the turnips, balsamic vinegar, and orange juice. Bring the mixture to a boil, and then lower the heat, cover the pan, and cook for about 10 minutes on low heat, until the turnips are tender.

Grill Xpress

2011-06-24T20:11:00.001-07:00

After three and a half years and 521 blog posts, I'm now going to write my first restaurant review. The reason I've never written about a restaurant before is that, as a sometimes restauranteur, I'm not a big fan of this culture of grassroots criticism and digital Marxism, where anyone who has had a restaurant experience that didn't meet expectations can go online and spew vitriol.

Most restaurant reviews assume that restaurants should exist, first and foremost, to meet the needs of their customers. I'm fully aware that no restaurant can stay in business long unless it meets its customers' needs, but restaurants also fundamentally exist to express the vision of their proprietors, and to provide these hardworking folks with a livelihood. No single eating establishment can please everyone. Restaurants that survive are able to find a critical mass of customers' who appreciate their offerings enough to support them over time.

The process of setting up a restaurant involves making difficult choices. Most likely you won't be able to do everything just the way you originally envisioned because even basic building blocks like ventilation and plumbing can cost tens of thousands of dollars. You'll find a space that seems like it can work, and you'll most likely sign an extended lease before you figure out how all of the pieces are going to fit together because if you wait until you work out all of the details, someone else will jump at the opportunity if it's a space worth having.

There's a little Mediterranean place in a strip mall by my house where I often go for takeout, especially after very long market days. It has a definite strip mall feeling, with flourescent lights and strip mall tables. But the food has heart and the proprietor clearly works very, very hard.

I actually wasn't thrilled with the food the first time I ate there. I ordered falafel, and the garlic didn't taste right and there was far too much of it. But it was an interesting sandwich, one that had clearly been conceptualized by someone who was paying attention to detail. And there were so many other things on the menu that I wanted to try.

I regularly order the tabouli, which always comes with far more parsley than bulgur. I appreciate that. I also get a lentils and rice dish that's subtly flavored with cinnamon, and topped with chopped tomatoes and cucumbers, as well as a tahini sauce. It fills me up and makes me happy. I also order the hummus and the foul medamas, a rich fava bean dip. They all come with pita that's been warmed and tucked in ziplocs.

The spot is open long hours, and the owner has been there personally every single time I've been there. Of all the fast food places close to home that I frequent, it's the only one where I haven't ever shown up ten minutes before closing, tired and hungry, only to discover that it's closed early. I've been there on days when it's snowing and sleeting, and Easter Sunday and Superbowl Sunday, when business is clearly very, very slow.

As a sometimes restauranteur, I fully understand the impulse to close early when you haven't seen a customer for hours. I'm grateful for this guy's dependability, and he's earned my profound respect. It's a tough business, and he does a great job.

Loading Out

2011-06-20T19:53:00.001-07:00

The process of loading out at the end of a market day is a bit like I would imagine the dismantling of a gypsy caravan, but members of a caravan tend to all be headed in the same direction while market vendors are headed to different places. If you're all headed out together, then one slow link in the chain delays the entire process. But if you're each headed your own way, then it's everyone for themselves.

Some vendors rush to get their vehicles at the earliest possible moment. Technically you're supposed to break everything down before you get your van so each vehicle spends as little time as possible on the street and things move along relatively smoothly. But few people follow the rules. At one market there's a line of vehicles waiting to come in as soon as the market ends. One guy consistently falls asleep in his truck while he's waiting, so someone has to gently nudge him awake when it's time to move.

We all tend to be friendlier and more patient on busy days than on slow ones. After a rainy day you feel soggy and poor, and you just want to go home. After a busy day you feel affluent and magnanimous, and it just doesn't matter as much if your day is 15 minutes longer.

I've seen vendors get into fights during the process of loading out. Someone sneaks into a spot that someone else has staked out. Everyone's tired, and it gets ugly. I tend to take my time packing up my stuff, to stay out of the fray and be able to pull my vehicle up right next to the booth.

Phinney Farmers' Market 2011

2011-06-17T20:46:00.001-07:00

I'm pleased to report that the Phinney Farmers' Market is much improved this year, at least during the three weeks that it's been up and running.

This year the market moved from the lower parking lot at the Phinney Neighborhood Center to the upper parking lot. The new location is much more visible from the street, which is always good for business. The old location was "L" shaped, with prepared food vendors like myself tucked in the corner that bent away from most of the other vendors. At the new location we're integrated much more gracefully with the rest of the market. We're even next to the music, which always helps. Folks linger to listen and while they're there, they buy food.

Another important change has been the fact that they now allow dogs. At some point in the past, the administration had made the decision to make this a dog-free market. Some dog owners stopped coming specifically because they disapproved of the decision while others simply found it inconvenient to leave their dogs home during a Friday evening jaunt.

I'm always surprised at the good behavior of most of the dogs I see at farmers' markets. But I remind myself that I'm seeing a preselected sample: bad dogs don't get to come to the market. One farmer friend has a theory that days when you see a lot of big dogs at the market tend to correlate with high sales, while days when you see a lot of small dogs tend to correlate with lower sales. I'm not sure how you could objectively verify that theory, but it does intrigue me.

The Wallingford Market's New Location

2011-06-13T20:06:00.001-07:00

This month the Wallingford Farmers' Market moved from its old home at the Wallingford Center to a new home at the Good Shepherd Center. I'm usually slinging quesadillas at the Columbia City Market on Wednesday afternoons, but I managed to sneak away last week to peek at the new venue.

It feels expansive and pastoral. This is a welcome change after the space the market occupied in the Wallingford Center parking lot was cut practically in half last season. That felt stressful and cramped. It's also wonderful to stand on grass rather than asphalt. You feel a lot less beaten up at the end of the day when you stand on a softer surface.

The challenge at the new location is to let people know that there's a market going on, even though it's hidden from view. The old location was right off of a main drag. The advantage of the new location is that it's a pleasant place to linger. It's also the home of Seattle Tilth, ground zero for urban agriculture, and I can't think of a better setting for a farmers' market.

There's a chef's only market between 3 and 3:30, for the purpose of allowing the pros to get in and out quickly. That's a worthy idea, though it doesn't make much sense for those of us who are selling finished products rather than primary ingredients. Fortunately, the rule isn't strictly enforced and the first half hour at an afternoon market tends to be the slowest time of day for my operation anyway. In any case, our sales so far have blown last year out of the water, so I'm certainly not complaining about this minor inconvenience.

Zola's "Belly of Paris"

2011-06-07T22:47:00.001-07:00

I knew I was going to enjoy this book from the very first page, as Zola describes the wagons pulling into the Les Halles market one morning during the mid 1800s. Vendors are paying for stall space, quibbling over placement, and getting in each other's way. One of my favorite things about my own market experience is the connection I feel to the countless farmers and vendors who have parked their wares in public places since the very beginning of civilization.

My attention began to wander during one of the early scenes as the protagonist Florent takes off to explore the market with his new friend Claude, who is based on the painter Paul Cezanne. Through a long, drawn out section, Claude repeatedly exclaims about the colors of the light on the vegetables as the sun rises over the market. Though the account probably should have been about half as long, it did call to mind the folks with cameras who I see daily at Seattle markets, angling to catch the produce in the best possible light.

Later in the book, I grasped what Zola was trying to accomplish in that too long section, as he waxes poetic describing cheeses and fruits:

"There, next to the one-pound stacks of butter, a gigantic Cantal was spread on leaves of white beet, as though split by blows from an axe; then came a golden Chesire cheese, a Gruyere like a wheel fallen from some barbarian chariot, some Dutch cheese suggesting decapitated heads smeared in dried blood...a parmesan adding its aromatic tang to the thick, dull smell of the others."

And:

"The cherries, arranged in rows, were like the lips of Chinese girls drawn into a tight smile: the Montmerencies suggesting the fleshy lips of fat women; the English ones, much longer and more serious; the common black ones, which looked as if they had been bruised by kisses; the bigaroons, speckled with pink and white, which seemed to be smiling with a mixture of merriment and anger."

Like Claude the painter, Zola was painting his market with words. He clearly knew the venue as intimately as any modern day vendor, describing the subterranean caverns dense with livestock and the vats of culturing milk, the vendor rivalries and the neighborhood gossip who showed up late each day trying to get something for nothing. I know each of these characters, or at least modern day versions of them.

Zola's genius as a writer lies in his profound understanding of working people. He manages to paint them with an eye that is at once sympathetic and critical. I can't think of a more fitting subject for his talents than a bustling market with its day to day dramas. This is certainly a gloomy book, focusing on the dark side of interpersonal relationships. And yet the story unfolds amidst the heart and soul of one of the most vibrant food cultures the world has ever known. If only for that reason, I found it strangely uplifting.

Goodbye Meadowbrook

2011-06-02T22:45:00.000-07:00

The Meadowbrook Farmers' Market announced this week that it had cancelled its 2011 season. There simply weren't enough vendors to make it happen this year. I have to admit, I was one of the vendors who hadn't planned to return.

I'd always thought of the Meadowbrook Market as a beautiful experiment. The managers were enthusiastic and committed, and it was perhaps the only market in the city that had a completely secure location because it was held in the parking lot of the school that founded it. Other local markets such as Ballard and Queen Anne have to apply for street use permits year after year, while markets hosted at venues such as the University Heights Center or the Phinney Neighborhood Center also need to renegotiate the terms of their locations every year.

The Meadowbrook market grew out of a tight Waldorf School community. The very first day in 2009 was amazing; in fact, one vendor I spoke to recently said that it was the best day he'd ever had at any market. But it tanked pretty fast. I've heard folks speculate that the problem was a location off the beaten path and, in retrospect, I think it may have been the only market I've ever seen that was located on a side street rather than a main drag (except maybe the first few years of the Queen Anne Market.) In any case, I think it's possible that the school's community could have supported the market, but school season is fall, winter and spring, while market season is summer.

I'm sure that folks are going to read all kinds of assumptions and conclusions into the Meadowbrook Market's cancellation this year: they'll say it was one too many markets in the city or that the lousy economy killed it. New markets succeed and fail for many reasons, and every market and every season is unique. Personally, I hope folks will continue to start new markets, bringing new ideas and new vendors into the mix. There's still so much potential, and so many ideas we haven't even tried.

Roasted Veggie "Pate"

2011-05-26T09:54:00.001-07:00

I made this wonderful roasted vegetable spread for the Humble Feast dinner the other night. I'd listed it on the menu as "Roasted Vegetable Pate" because I've been trying to come up with more pretentious names for my menu items. Folks seem to respond to that.

In any case, I'd had this vision on roasting some veggies and pureeing them, along with some homemade bread. When I scouted around at the market last Sunday, though, the only veggies I could find worth roasting were yams, parsnips, leeks and shallots. The leeks and shallots would add depth, but the yams and parsnips were both sweet so I wanted something to balance them. I thought of sorrel, than wonderful, tart spring green.

It's a humble pate, and a very tasty one.

2 parsnips, cut in chunks
2 small yams, or 1 medium-size yam, peeled and cut in chunks
3 shallots, peeled and cut in half
1 leek, cleaned and cut in 2-inch lengths
1 to 2 tablespoons olive oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch of black pepper
1 tablespoon miso
4 sorrel leaves

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Toss the parsnips, yams, shallots and leeks with the olive oil, salt and pepper. Spread them on a baking sheet and roast them for about 40 minutes, until the yams and parsnips are soft.

When the veggies are cool enough to handle, puree them along with the miso and sorrel leaves. Serve with crackers or wonderful bread.

Opening Day at Georgetown 2011

2011-05-24T15:50:00.000-07:00

Saturday was opening day at the Georgetown Farmers' Market. It was an overcast day, which wouldn't have been particularly noteworthy except that it followed the best stretch of weather we'd had all year. Three sunny days in a row! And we finally hit 70 degrees! After that teaser it seemed that nobody was particularly excited about being outdoors on a typical chilly gray day. Still, Patty Pan was lucky to be the only prepared food vendor there, at least on opening day so our sales were off the charts, at least compared with most of last year.

Georgetown is an interesting market. Some market purists argue that it's not actually a farmers' market at all because there are as many flea market vendors as farmers. But I'm not a purist and I think that the more different kinds of farmers' markets we see, the more options there will be for farm fresh food.

This market has everything going for it except customers. Georgetown is an increasingly trendy neighborhood with few grocery stores. The market has a great venue, with old brick, train tracks and a defunct brewery in the background. There's also plenty of space, in fact, there's enough space to configure the stalls so that every vendor has a corner, at least at this point in the season. Corner stalls allow vendors twice as much selling frontage, so they're usually in high demand and you often have to have seniority or an amazing product to get one.

So we'll just have to wait an see whether the Georgetown market will realize its potential. It may just depend on whether we can all stick it out long enough.