Out to Pasture: Slow Food Nation 2008

Wow!
Slow Food Nation was lovely - and we only experienced parts of it. Tomorrow I'll upload the photos and start the posts on individual topics; but tonight there's just a lot to digest. From the Civic Center Plaza, some of the highlights for me were:

• Being car-free in the City all day
• The whole Victory Garden
• The use of straw for walls and benches in public space
• Best use of a portable storage unit (as the information booth)
• Tasty bites for sale and as free samples in the Market
• Window-shopping all the Slow-Food related books I must someday soon read, and perhaps even own
• The Gravensteins just picked, and the farmers who sold them
• The nearby farmers' market, overall
• A divine bite of Harley Farm goat ricotta
• My first taste of raw milk
• The valet bike parking corral
• The compost display
• Great use of the 3-bin system (landfill, compostable, recycling) for a waste-free event; and the scant litter from a huge public event
• Being in the midst of so many diverse folk celebrating Slow Food

Post-note: where was the music? [The spendy concerts were at Fort Mason, yes; but I'm used to a small bit of live music at farmers' markets. Perhaps the organizers wanted to minimize conflict with the Soap Box speakers, a nice eclectic mix of short presenters in the Garden.]

Deep-Fried Fuel

I am saved from watching too many cooking shows mainly by my lack of cable service. So I have not seen very many episodes of "Organic Living with the Hippy Gourmet." Mostly they have seemed to be more travelogue than culinary art; but the rerun I caught this weekend was an exception.

In addition to the usual guest chef, this episode featured a guest host, with the two linked thematically and geographically. The chef from Kitchen on Fire prepared solely deep-fried foods: tortilla chips, wonton strips, tempura vegetables, and banana fritters. The guest host kept up a nice, witty patter, showed enthusiasm for the fry oil's use as a diesel car fuel, and hauled off the used oil to do just that. Two of San Francisco's homegrown sustainability champions - KOF and Veg Rev - got positive exposure; and I worked up a mean jones for some fried snacks.

Lunchbox Envy

Every time I bring my lunch to work in my Laptop Lunchbox, another co-worker wants to know where to get one. Designed much like a bento box, this lunchbox comes with a User's Guide. The authors provide impressive facts on the trash generated by school lunchrooms, mainly from kids' food packed in single-serving disposable containers (67 lbs per child, per year). They also discuss nutrition, shopping tips, and instructions for preparing foods to pack in the lunchbox. For those wishing to transition from processed foods with lots of waste to fresh foods with nothing left behind but compost, the box and book combo makes a great resource.

For an adult with a larger appetite (bigger servings or frequent grazing, like me), the smallish compartments can be challenging. On the plus side, the short, flat profile fits better in a shared office refrigerator than most tall lunch bags.

I use mine a couple times a week, sometimes alone and sometimes with another container on the side. When I run low on inspiration, I consult the User's Guide; and suddenly I want sliced apples to snack on, or a veggie stir fry, or one of the many other good ideas offered.

Back deck Caprese

As Sunset's One Block Diet experimenters point out this summer, eating locally doesn't get much more adventurous or satisfying than home-grown. On their grounds, the equivalent of one city block, they have room for some edible landscaping, a beehive, garden patches with an abundance of produce, and even a coop and yard full of happy laying hens.

My space for a victory garden is limited to some containers and a small shared patch on land. But from these, we are celebrating summer with caprese salads several times a week. The basil is thriving in a pot on the sunrise-side deck, planted there after I found organic basil sold with intact roots at the San Carlos farmers market. And the tomatoes are happily growing upside down, hanging in special planting bags from posts off the side of the house. There they enjoy plenty of light, shelter from afternoon winds, and radiated warmth from the house in the late afternoon.

What's missing from the local list is home-made mozzarella. After learning from Barbara Kingsolver about "the Cheese Queen" and buying a copy of Ricki Carroll's Home Cheesemaking, I'm just dying to try my hand at 30-minute mozzarella. When the supplies arrive by mail (even the artisanal cheesemakers here order from Ricki, it seems), I'll pop out to the store for some Clover milk, made from honest-to-gosh pasture-roaming cows that live up the coast from me. And then we'll party like it's 1899.

Armenian Striped Cucumbers

When would you find a treasure like Armenian striped cucumbers in a grocery store?

They are the sort of vegetable you dream of growing while poring over seed catalogs in the dark of winter.

I found these at the farmers market, brought across the Bay from Modesto by Payne Farm, a family farm with organic certification. Apparently they are too busy farming to put up a website; but the California Department of Agriculture shows them as planning to grow two tons of these beauties, on a mere quarter acre.

The cukes are just one of many produce types on the summer harvest list for the farm; and the quantities of the varied produce really demonstrate how abundant bio-diverse small-scale agriculture can be. And if I decide in the dark of winter that I want to try them in my own yard, you can bet the Paynes will share their growing tips with me.