StanSherman

We like Plouf on Belden Place. You can eat outside or in. The do mussles 7 ways and their fries are very good. Le Charm does a nice 3 course dinner for $30.

Lat year some Amish women gave us a tip. Use Pomona's Pectin. It gels with calcium rather than sugar. You can use very ripe fruit and get a truer flavor.

Yes, many are raised on pasture. Not all, but they are well suited for it. We have one raised every year from a farmer we know. I use pastured rather than free-range. Free-range like in poultry is BS. These animals are raised outdoors and moved to new areas when appropriate.

The breed is very well suited for pasture growth. The farmers who grow them like the animals and their demeanor. Generally the farms that raise Berkshires do so for quality.

What do you think about doing some cold smoke to the meat after the marinade?

We made Sabzi last night. We have some marinating tonight as we process 25 pints for the pantry. It's 107 right now so we have to wait until about 9pm to go harvest more.

A couple of months age we spent a week in San Francisco as “tourists” We usually spend about 30 nights a year there but it’s usually on business. Had a great week of dining, Canteen, Kiss, bushi-tei, Harris’, Mijita and Incanto. What I crave is Dennis Leary’s (Canteen) Parker House rolls. I don’t do that much baking and was wondering if making them at that level can be achieved with a reasonable amount of practice.

Barbara, We are going to try your recipe tomorrow. I'll give you feedback.

Everyone wanted to try this tonight. We had some farm cured bacon, local honey, and Goldfield beans. Nice, really nice. If we were a fine dining establishment we'd be proud to serve what we had tonight.

Care to share a recipe? We have 6 requests.

We have these starting today: * Golden Lake Wax * Burpee's Golden * Goldfield * mantra * Purple Podded * William's Family Alabama Cutshort * Anellino Stortino Trento * Caseknife Pole * Mennonite Purple Stripe * Williams River * Kentucky Wonder 191 * Uncle Steve's It. Pinto * Fordhook Standard filet We have a decent size crew with a huge community garden. One of my duties is to assist in menus. By keeping logs we can better tune the bounty and make life easier. Thanks for any help you wish to provide. Fresh green bean recipes, We are flooded with beans now. I flubbed the title and don't know how to fix it.

We were in LA a couple weeks ago. The Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers' Market is one of the best in the country. I'm pretty sure at the NW corner of 2nd and Arizona will be Fitzgerald's Fruit. He has some of the best stone fruit in the state. The market is large and great.

If you are going up 5, Denny's is the closest thing there is to a diner. There is no rich farm/ranch tradition of stopping at the diner along that route. Highway 5 is only 35 years old. When it opened there was one gas station and that was Harris Ranch. If you think its a boring route now you should have seen it then. I'm on my way south tomorrow, so I feel your pain. It still puzzles me that no one has put in a diner somewhere along that route.

Wine? Last month we overheard a waiter describing a wine pairing as "A bold Pinot from the Russian River section of Napa." bla bla bla. He was pouring basically two buck Chuck with a mock kobe beef dish.

I would enjoy a discussion that most consumers are unaware of. The USDA NAIS program or as I like to call it "No Chicken left behind". Where would be an appropriate place to put it?

Charles, We currently live just north of the Napa Valley. We are moving so we are not formally farming now. We are growing for family and friends. Besides a dozen hens and 100 meat birds we keep about ½ acre in vegetables and about 50 fruit trees. I don’t believe we’ll save the world through Farmers’ Markets, but they have made some impact. I doubt garden centers would have nearly the variety of tomatoes like brandywine available if people had not been exposed to them at the markets. Look what has happened to hogs in the past few years. Companies like Niman have come along and featured cuts of meat with great flavor. Ten years ago I knew nobody who ordered whole hogs except for a luau. Now, in an emergency, I could probably round up a couple thousand pounds of premium pork within the neighborhood.

The article pointed out that a farm had sold-out 60 dozen eggs at $8. $480 gross. Their cost delivered to the Ferry Building is surely over $4 so gross profit is somewhere less than $240, with the cost of the person to deal with the customers. If a hairdresser in San Francisco goes to work on a Saturday and bills $500 for the day, and shares half the revenue with the salon, would any of us be discussing how much money that hairdresser was pulling in? My point is; $8/dozen for farm bug-fed eggs is an appropriate price. It is a just price. I can get you the same quality eggs for $1, only you may need to drive a bit further, like to Iowa. There they are hand-collected and washed by adorable Amish school girls who make Golden Retriever puppies seem evil. If we could get these girls to the Ferry Plaza with their eggs you could be seeing $20/dozen.

Thin shells are usually a calcium deficiency. Around here we use an oyster shell supplement while they are laying.

No I wasn't. The cost involved with small scale production really changes by locale. Northern California is about the worst. A typical small scale producer has fewer than 1000 hens. We looked at buying two different Amish poultry operations last year. The larger (Indiana) one had a few thousand hens, but all his labor was under 14 years old. They have 10 kids and live in less than 1000 square feet. The eggs need to be gathered, washed sorted and packaged. If we replaced his child labor with people who are paid a fair wage the $1/dozen eggs become much more expensive real fast. Some people think that buying a fattening dinner with a bottle of rotten fruit for hundreds of dollars and paying someone to observe you exercising the ill effects off the next day a tad absurd. BTW Most people aren't aware that hens on pasture only produce about half as many eggs as production ones during their useful life. They need to be raised and cared for for six months before they start laying.

Thanks for the broken record Carolyn. We're going to LA next week and my 92 yo Mom likes to go out every night. Since she like to eat at 5:00 Versailles will be a breeze. Andrew, There is an abundance of ethnic and diverse food around USC. It was good when I went there 30 years ago. Cheese is easy, great fish is available and farmers' markets are some of the best in the country. The Southern California growing season is practically non-stop.

Rancho, you are so right about people talking about the price of eggs. At least with the peach they can eat it on the spot and make a big, sloppy, drooly mess and enjoy it. Eggs, when purchased at the market, become a burden until they get home. The only thing worse than eggs is whole chickens. We’ve done both. Whole chickens become radioactive once a new customer gets their hands on one. Somehow they believe they spoil faster in anything less than a Whole Foods bag. We’ve had the question more than once “Do I need to put it into the refrigerator now or will it keep until we get home?” If they only knew how long they should age the meat before cooking, they would poop! It is interesting, even on this forum, how many people have not had true farm eggs or poultry. It’s the egg is an egg mentality. You surely know what it’s like to sell a premium product for a premium price when it’s just a bean.

I was looking at some BBQ sites and woodyssmokeshack.com say they will be on the RAGBRAI route. I guess there will be a fair amount of BBQ rigs.

I have bought those $8 eggs when they were $6 eggs. They are real farm eggs! With the feed cost increases, and extra transportation costs for the Yoga instructors, it’s no wonder they sell out at such a bargain price! Good thing we only have a flock just for the family right now, or those Marin egg whores would have us out of business by now, selling that cheap.

A farm with a “hot” body… Searching for a small-scale farm. Here in Northern California, 20 acres can be a sizable organic produce farm. When we first started looking for a farm in Iowa, once people heard we raised chickens, they immediately steered us towards “chicken operations”. Places with buildings to house 60-90 thousand birds in each one. We raise a breed that is very similar to a Bresse chicken. Truly small flock, outdoors on pasture, milk-finished, and locally hand-processed. We still want a few acres of crops and animal feed for family use, plus room for a small orchard of heirloom fruit trees and garden, but the “farm enterprise” would be the chickens. We want to be in an area with a bit of isolation because we do heirloom seed saving - we currently have 15 beans and 15 tomatoes, to name a few, that we offer through Seed Savers.

I’m not sure we can be of any help, but who knows. We will be spending the first 2 weeks of July traveling the Northern half of Iowa on our rural-focused farmette hunt. We have a very loose itinerary and are going to wander around exploring wherever we feel like going. We may run into some interesting food or drink finds along the way that we can alert you to. We will be going through much of the area in which the first few days of the race is being run, since we haven’t been through that section of Iowa, yet. I suspect you are already familiar with the available interesting foods closer to the finish.