Farmers Market

I had a little bit of time to check out the new farmers market today and I was pretty pleased with it. It was mostly strawberries and root vegetables for sale, which makes sense for the season in California. There were some stands with prepared food and vendors selling tea, olives, bags, handmade soaps, and the like.

I didn't get any strawberries because they're 99 cents a package at Suvianda right now, but I will definitely be trying the organic strawberries next week. I bought some spinach but I'd like to see some mixed greens and tomatoes in the future. For the first day and the hot weather, I think it had a good turn out and was really well organized. I'm looking forward to more variety in the weeks ahead. The organizers were cleaning up when I got off of work tonight and they did a great job, you'd never know they were there.

I hope the San Jose State community takes advantage of this. In my ethnographic methods class last semester we had to interview students and faculty about their health and it was a recurring theme that people wanted fresh and local produce options. It's hard to get the word out though so I'm wondering what's being done. I haven't seen or heard anything on campus yet.

right out the front door...

-The San Pedro Square farmers market will be back next Friday.
-The corrected press release follows:

City Hall Farmer's Market 3-7:30pm Starts Tues 4/21/09

The Tuesday Market provides a full-city sustainable marketplace that uses Earth Day as a jumping off point to promote greener lifestyle messages like living/working/buying local, eating organic, building/using renewable resources, and supporting green businesses.

Partners include City of San Jose Environmental Services Department, Metro Newspapers, San Jose State University, the San Jose Downtown Association, the San Jose Downtown Residents Association and other stakeholders

This is an opportunity to adopt new practices and improve the quality of our environment for a sustainable San Jose. We encourage you to walk, take convenient VTA Public Transit, or ride your bike to our free bike-parking area. If you must drive, we have two-hour parking validation for shoppers only.

The Tuesday Market is a "ZERO WASTE" event. Please bring your own reusable shopping bag or basket.

Tuesday Market is located on 5th St. between San Fernando Street and City Hall Plaza, and will be held every Tuesday from 3 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. beginning April 21, 2009.

9 - week pilot program through June 16

full 20 - week program through September 1

Nap(a)

As in, I needed a three hour nap after a day in Napa. Today's field trip can be described many ways, but I'll just go with "interesting." Overall, it was a fun day, but 95 degree weather, bus rides, loud/bad music, and wine drinking is a disastrous mix.

The many stories from between and after the vineyards, i.e., the bus rides, shouldn't be repeated in a food blog. Let's just say I was really glad that I had Roxy on the trip, a fellow anthropology student and co-worker. I think we felt like the only students who were going to make it back to San Jose with any shred of dignity.

Nevertheless, there were many highlights to my day. The itinerary was pretty straightforward. The wine class met at 7:45. As a reward for getting the highest grade on the midterm I got a mimosa on the bus ride out of San Jose...at 8:30 in the morning...after 2 hours of sleep. It took about two hours by bus to get to our first winery, Mumm Napa. After Mumm, we headed to Bell Wine Cellars, where we had lunch delivered from a local grocery store/deli. Then, we finished our day at Rutherford Hill.

Mumm was okay, they specialize in sparkling wine and Carlos Santana has a wine with them. I thought it was funny that they sell Carlos Santana stuff in the winery store, so if you need some Santana bongos...



Bell was the really impressive part of the day. Owner and hands-on winemaker Anthony Bell gave our group a thorough tour of the place, from the vines to the barreling process. Originally from South Africa, Bell grew up on a vineyard and had also made wine in Europe before he moved to America. He was really passionate and honest about his work and I probably learned more from listening to him speak than I've learned in class all semester. So, if you see some Bell on a shelf or a menu, you can feel good that there's a humble and hardworking guy behind the label.



At Bell we also got to go into the wine bottling truck. This is not how I imagined that wine is bottled. This truck is like the equivalent of a blood mobile or a book mobile, it pulls up and does it's business for the day. They fill the bottles, cork them, and label them right in this fairly small truck right in front of the building.

Our last stop, Rutherford Hill, was most impressive for it's caves. That's where we did most of the tasting. They do a great port and chocolate covered blueberry combo during their tasting.

Napa was actually not what I expected, but I would definitely like to go back someday. I think I always imagined it to have vineyards sort of hidden in the hills but in reality the wineries are right next to each other, Opus One and Mondavi are right across the street from each other. It's just like neighborhoods upon neighborhoods of grapes, I even saw some homes that opted for grapes instead of grass.

A couple of final thoughts, 1) I think all of the money is in growing your own oak forests for barrels rather than in wine-making, and 2) I think I should get an A in this class for making it through this bus ride, which can be briefly sampled here:

Burgundy, France

One of my classes this semester is Wine Appreciation in the Hospitality and Recreation Management department. It's got to be one of the funner classes in the CSU system (besides surfing and the one where you camp in national parks) and I've actually learned quite a bit about wine. We do blind tastings on 2-3 new wines every week and learn how to describe what we're smelling and tasting.

We had to do a group project about geographic locations and the wines they produce. I was in the Burgundy group and I was hoping to include a photo of Ron Burgundy in the PowerPoint but it didn't work out. I did learn a lot about burgundy though.

One of the more challenging aspects of the project was pairing food with the burgundy. We chose to do vegetarian pairings and that made it more difficult. With the white burgundy (Chardonnay) we did mushroom quiche and with the red burgundy (Pinot Noir) we did French pasta salad as the food was supposed to match the region. I made the pasta salad before class and it was kind of nerve-racking. It consisted of rotini pasta, french shallots, french baby green beans, french goat cheese (see the theme?), roasted bell peppers, toasted hazelnuts, and a dijon vinaigrette.

I chose this salad mainly because I thought the goat cheese would be complementary and because Dijon is the capital of Burgundy, hence the vinaigrette. I thought it tasted awesome but I don't think our sommelier-lecturer was much of a fan, although I think he's just a meat-guy and wasn't into the idea of vegetarian wine pairing. Tomorrow the class is going to Napa Valley for a day-long field trip so it will probably be back-to-back wine entries.

I thought this was kind of cool, I accidentally dropped the remote on my wine glass this weekend and it broke in the perfect spot (and showed me that I need to vacuum between the chairs.)

The Real Dirt on Farmer John

I finally got around to watching The Real Dirt on Farmer John a couple of weeks ago, which I've been meaning to do since about 2005. It seems to be the documentary of choice among organic foodies. It's about a man in Northern Illinois who attempts to run the family farm after his father dies. Farmer John differs from his father because he goes to college and meets some freethinkers in the '70s, which sparks his interest in community based agriculture and organic farming. He goes into debt like most Midwestern farmers during the farm crisis of the '80s and quits farming a couple of times throughout the film. It's interesting that so much of his life is recorded. His mom started taping when he was young and he kept it up which led to a pretty complete story.

The essence of the film is that Farmer John lives a double life. He's a dedicated farmer who runs one of the most successful community supported agriculture (CSA) programs in America, but he also writes, films, acts, supports artists, and apparently likes to play dress up.



This definitely separates him from his more conservative farmer neighbors who think he is a satan-worshipper. Overall, the film is more of an homage to his awesome mother than anything. It provides a good introduction to how CSA works and I guess the moral is that it's okay to be different, although that sounds really cheesy. (Organic cheesy.)

Belated Easter, Continued

In order to kill two birds (quails?) with one stone, I decided to throw some new food into the mix for our Easter brunch turned dinner. I've been eyeing these quail eggs at the store for awhile so we made a kind of Eggs Florentine dish with quail eggs, spinach, bread crumbs, and Hollandaise sauce. This was also my first experience making Hollandaise sauce and I was curious as to whether it's named after Holland. The answer is "probably," it's a French sauce that mimics a Dutch sauce. I think the quail eggs taste just like regular eggs. They worked really well in this dish because we halved the ingredients and were using a small casserole dish so the size was perfect.

We also learned how to make bacon. It's pretty easy but I probably won't be making much bacon in the future. John is proud of his new skill.



Today, we finished our week-late Easter with some fruit salad, toast, and deviled eggs. I tried an Alton Brown recipe this year that called for caper juice and extra cracked pepper. Pretty good--worth the wait!

Spotted in Downtown San Jose

Caterers or just Simon and Garfunkel fans?

Belated Easter Foods

I had to postpone Easter for a week because of midterms last Monday, but we're making up for it with some good food this weekend.

I wanted to try dyeing Easter eggs with natural colors rather than the coloring tablets that I've always used. I didn't read the instructions beforehand though and hard boiled the eggs ahead of time. I was supposed to boil the eggs with the natural coloring and vinegar. I decided to try it anyway, using food I had around the house for color. For orange/yellow I used cumin, orange peels, and chamomile tea.



For pink, I used a couple of tablespoons of red wine, 3 smashed blueberries, leftover tomato pieces, and red onion skins. I probably looked like a weirdo at the grocery store putting skins in the bag with the onion. oh well..



For yellow/green, I just boiled some spinach.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be working. I hope it's just because of my own error-not boiling the eggs with the coloring. The eggs are still in the fridge right now soaking in their dyes, but they seem to be just accumulating a colored film, rather than being dyed. I'm glad I tried though, I'll attempt again the next time I boil some eggs.

Here's the link I used with suggestions on dyeing eggs naturally.

http://chemistry.about.com/od/holidayhowtos/a/eastereggdyes.htm