Have You Ever Been Waylaid By A Farmer?

How — and where — might this happen, you ask? Well, imagine yourself walking down a fairly empty street in a city after dark, searching for a wine bar that’s hosting an event that you’re intrigued by — so intrigued that you’re attending this event all by yourself on a Wednesday night. You’ve never been to this bar, so you don’t know where it is, and after you pass an oil change shop and a laundromat but no signs of a lively affair, you feel a slight thread of anxiety weaving its way into your mind as you wonder, “What am I getting myself into?”

But then you see a giant portable pizza oven set up on the sidewalk, spitting out what looks like gourmet thin-crust pizza, and some hipster-y looking folks milling about with paper cups of what you soon discover is Four Barrel coffee, and someone pulling up on a Vespa. You suddenly recognize that you’re in the right place.

You walk into the bar, the room bathed in warm light and the walls lined with hundreds of bottles of European wine. You push your way through a huge crowd of people sipping wine and sampling the goodies offered by eight artisan food producers that are there for the evening — everything from vanilla pear butter that has an unexpected but lovely savory quality, to a whiskey chocolate truffle, to lacy florentine cookies, to spicy dry salami.

You feel a bit unmoored, being there alone in a crowd of people who have all clearly brought a friend — or five. You’re nibbling on another chocolate truffle — this one with fresh raspberry jam inside — and you’re wondering if you should go home, even though you’ve only been there for 10 minutes.

Then, suddenly, you notice a celebrity of sorts, commanding presence in the room. He stands out in this room of hipsters and young professionals. He’s a tall guy in overalls, silver streaks in his hair, and tanned skin that crinkles at his eyes when he flashes his electric grin, which he seems to do often. People seem eager to talk to him. The chocolate producer goes a bit agog when this guy comes over to nab a sweet, telling him that he visits his stand every Saturday at the farmers’ market.

You have absolutely no idea who this guy is. So, you decide to eat another whiskey chocolate truffle. When a soft moan escapes your mouth because it’s so darned good, and you ask the chocolate producer if he makes those with bourbon, and you get into a spirited dialogue about where to get the best bourbons*, you sense that the guy in overalls is smiling at you. Perhaps he’s amused that someone he doesn’t expect to loves bourbon.

Well, this is how I got waylaid by a farmer. Farmer Al of Frog Hollow Farm.

Those of you who frequent the Ferry Building in S.F. know this place — they have a shop in the building that sells their jams, pastries, coffee and some fruit, and a farmstand out back on Saturdays that sells 25 varieties of peaches, nectarines, cherries, apricots, pluots, plums, Asian and European pears and table grapes grown on a 133-acre organic farm on the Sacramento River Delta.

For whatever reason, Farmer Al and I got to talking. He brought me over to his table, where I sampled Flavor King pluots and Emerald Beaut plums, peaches and cherry tomatoes (those pluots and plums were out of this world!). He told me his life story: how he grew up in Berkeley, started out teaching in Hawaii, then realized he wanted to go back to the land before anyone was doing that. How he didn’t know a thing about farming until he started doing it by planting his first peach tree in 1976. How he didn’t think he wanted kids until he married a woman who wanted them, and how it’s transformed his life into an even better existence. About his nephew, named Khyber, after the pass. About how much he loves his life.

His passion for growing the best fruit out there, and for doing it sustainably, was infectious**. To play on a theme I wrote about earlier this week, here was a man who was clearly following his bliss.

I think we ended up talking for 40 minutes. Not that I was keeping track; I was having too much fun. And not that I had a plan for that night with which this conversation interfered.

In fact, one thing I’ve discovered this year is that often, the best things happen when you have no plan. They happen when you allow yourself to go with what feels good and right, when you are fully present in the moment, when you keep yourself open to whatever might seem intriguing.

*If you, like me, love bourbon, try Pican in Oakland, which has an impressive bourbon tasting menu (BIG thanks to our friends Andy & Georgie who introduced us to it). The San Francisco Wine Trading Company also has a killer selection.

**So infectious that I asked Farmer Al if he’d take me on a tour of his farm. He said yes! So I’ll share that story with you once it happens. UPDATE: Here’s the link to the post about my visit.

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So, what exactly is this event I went to, you might be asking?

It was an event celebrating the launch of a book called Food Heroes by Georgia Pellegrini at a wine bar, Terroir. Food Heroes tells the stories and recipes of 16 culinary artisans across the world. Georgia’s own story is fascinating: she started at Lehman Brothers but decided that analyzing spreadsheets for 16 hours a day wasn’t her thing, at which point she enrolled at the French Culinary Institute and landed jobs at renowned farm-to-table restaurants (Gramercy Tavern and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York and La Chassagnette in France) before publishing this book. She has another, Girl Hunter, on the way, along with a TV show.

Click here to see photos of the event and descriptions of the artisan food producers who were there, and to learn more about Georgia.

Click here to learn more about the book, Food Heroes.

I’m going to read the book over the next couple of months. If you want to read it with me, let me know. I’d love to have some like-minded locavores to read and discuss it with.

And if you enjoyed this post, please share it with someone else you think would be tickled by it.

Strawberry Fortress Is Up

Yesterday I went to the hardware store, determined to come home with supplies to defend my ripening strawberries against further critter attacks. I intended to get stakes and netting, or maybe wire, to build a cage to keep the critters out.

At the hardware store, I met a lovely store employee named Esther, who agreed with my hunch that the critters are raccoons. Esther advised me to try encasing my plants in plastic milk jugs — cut off the bottoms, sink them into the dirt and leave the cap off to let the berries get light. She said it’d be cheaper and easier than building a cage, it would have the added benefit of providing a mini-hothouse for the berries to ripen quicker and it would enable me to test whether the raccoons still came around with added barriers in place.

Because running into this would NOT be fun

Interesting idea. Only problem is, we don’t buy milk in plastic jugs; we buy it in skinnier glass ones which would never fit around the plants. And I wasn’t about to go out and buy a bunch of milk in plastic jugs for this project.

Luckily, I have a habit of keeping jars. Every time we finish a jar of jam or olives or whatever, I wash out and keep the jar. I have an entire cabinet full of ’em. I had no idea what I would do with all of these jars, I just figured they’d come in handy someday.

Well, that day has arrived.

I decided that instead of trying to encase the entire strawberry plant, I’d encase each ripening berry (or pair of berries) in a small glass jar, secure the jar in a shallow trench in the dirt so it doesn’t roll around, and then strategically place pointy bamboo skewers around the jar.

It’s a good thing I only have 12 strawberry plants.

Another strawberry fortress

For good measure, I also went outside late last night a few times and shined a flashlight around. I wanted to see if there were any critters lurking in the shadows, but thankfully, I didn’t have a midnight encounter with a raccoon. However, I think an unintended side effect may have been that they stayed away from the strawberry patch, because this morning, for once, there were no signs of critter attacks.

When my husband saw my contraptions and heard about my flashlight escapade, he immediately started searching online for good air pistols to buy.

Keep your fingers crossed for me that the strawberry fortresses work!

One Small Step Toward Becoming a Lady Hunter

Not me -- yet

In the spirit of living life to the fullest while you’re able, I keep a bucket list of sorts. Many of the items on the list have to do with living a more locavore life: making cheese, canning food, butchering a lamb or a pig (or heck, while we’re at it, why not both), figuring out how to milk a goat. Another item on the list is learning to shoot a gun.

If you’re going to eat meat, then I figure it’s good to experience, at least once in your life, what it requires to put that meat on the table. Although I don’t know if I’ll ever hunt my own food (slaughtering a chicken or a rabbit seems likelier to me at this point, but one thing I’ve learned is that you never really know), I like the idea that I could if I wanted to — or I suppose, if I ever had to. My dad hunts game birds and my father-in-law hunts deer and was a collegiate target shooter, so I’ve recently become enamored of the idea of joining their ranks and learning to shoot.

Today in Lana’i, a 144 square mile island that’s part of Hawaii, I took my first step toward fulfilling this wish. I have never in my life held, let alone, shot a gun, so this was a big deal. I was excited but also nervous that I might shoot someone…or my own foot.

A cheerful guy named Sid, a native of Oahu who is somehow a 49ers fan and loves to hunt the mouflon bighorn sheep and axis deer on Lana’i, was our guide on this adventure. He drove us up to Lana’i Pine Sporting Clays, a 14-station course where sporting clays are launched to simulate all manner of birds and even rabbits getting away from you as fast as possible. He had my husband and me don vests with deep pockets to hold the shells, strapped to a golf cart a 12-gauge shotgun for my husband and a 28-gauge for me, and drove us to station 1.

Shotgun parts

Once there, Sid showed me how to handle the shotgun properly. He advised me to always “open the action” (break open the barrel from the rest of the gun so I couldn’t accidentally shoot myself or others) before carrying the gun, and to carry it with the barrel pointed to the ground (much like we were all told to carry scissors pointy-end down in kindergarten). He showed me how to load the shells into the magazine, close the gun, wedge the stock against my cheek and shoulder, hold the barrel and unlock the safety, all while keeping my finger off the trigger. And then, with just those six and a half minutes of instruction under my belt, he told me to go ahead and shoot, and he launched a clay target into the air.

Umm…okay.

Suffice it to say, I missed the first one. I also didn’t realize I should be holding the gun rather firmly against my cheek and shoulder, so the recoil caused the gun’s stock to hit me in the face, and the recoil pad jammed me hard in the shoulder (six hours later as I write this, my cheek and shoulder hurt like hell). But, despite all that, it was fun.

Me, happy with shotgun in hand

Apparently the “introductory course” only entails the six and a half minutes I described above, because after watching my husband and me shoot a few rounds, Sid told us to have a good time and bade us goodbye. Sid obviously has a pretty awesome job.

My husband grew up shooting with his dad, so he did really well, hitting most of the clay targets (even one that shot out of a hut like a running rabbit). I only hit 5 out of 50, though I’m pretty psyched that I hit one of the tougher targets — mimicking a bird zooming away from you at top speed — dead on. (Yeah, yeah, bad pun — but I have to say that I get these gun-related sayings a lot more now — “smoking gun”, “lock, stock and barrel”…)

So, clearly I’m not going to feed the family with my hunting prowess anytime soon. But at least I’ve now shot a gun, and I also know how to hold the darned thing so that it doesn’t smack me in the face. I can’t wait to try out a shooting range I heard about in the Bay Area with a girlfriend who also wants to learn how to shoot guns, and get what I’m 100% certain will be a vastly better shooting lesson from my father-in-law this fall.

And who knows what’s next? Maybe I’ll go up to Sonoma and shoot one of those wild turkeys we saw running around.

Wild turkeys on the lam

I’d love to hear about your fun shooting experiences…and what you think about my first one!

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