Harley Goat Farm Dairy

We toured and had dinner at the only working dairy in San Mateo County tonight, Harley Goat Farm in Pescadero, on the coast 30ish minutes south of San Francisco.

I didn't bring my camera, but I had my iPhone...







There's a wonderful story about how the woman who founded it got into this business without ever planning to. This property was a semi-cooperative cattle dairy until, I've already forgotten, the 1950s?, when it went bankrupt after the arrival of factory milk farming in California in the 1930s. (The buildings are over 100 years old.) A couple bought the disused property to raise a family, later met some woman from the Santa Cruz mountains with a herd of goats that needed pasture. One thing led to another and now Harley is an award-winning cheese-maker. They've garnered foodie accolades and lots of attention and plan a major expansion next year. See? Life can be wonderful! ;)

We learned a lot about goat husbandry too, and got a very frank presentation about the realities of farm life. A couple factoids: If you keep goats in a small area, they will eat vegetation to the ground. But if you pasture them in a big area, they just nibble foliage tips. The pasture was only seeded once, 20 years ago.

Some pictures.







The goats loved Guy. Well, they're very social and enjoy human contact.



We wore funny hats to tour the dairy.





Curds and whey.



The goats are milked twice daily, each yielding half a gallon each time. Apparently, the milking is a relief to them and they look forward to it eagerly. They queue up for it once the gates to the milking palace are opened. We had to get out of their way.








The goats have llama guards. Dolly Llama and Fernando Llama.



Dinner is served upstairs, in the former barn.



We had four-course hors d'oeuvres plus soup before sitting down to fish, ravioli, and duck (all sourced locally, of course), and it topped off with a fresh warm ricotta dessert. Bring your own wine. We drank the sparkling water they provided and enjoyed conversation with couples from the Mission, San Jose, and Palo Alto.



Strangely, I was less interested in taking pictures once the food came out.



It's hard to get a spot at the dinner table. They do one dinner a month and fill up immediately. But I gather you can take tour easily enough. I highly recommend it.

Alrie Middlebrook, on "Edible California Natives"

I am not a foodie by any means, but I enjoyed this talk at last night's CalHort meeting very much. My notes below are cribbed from Middlebrook's talk and her slide presentation, somewhat reorganized for a blog post. I cannot vouch for any of her claims or statistics. If these things intrigue you, it is for you to do further research.

Based in San Jose, Alrie Middlebrook designs gardens with California-native plants, 400 of them so far, and wrote an excellent book on that subject with her mentor, Glenn Keator. They taught the garden design class Natives in Style at the San Francisco Botanical Garden together for 12 years. More important than designing a garden she said, is stewarding it. I loved her immediately.

Middlebrook came to gardening with a background in art. She considered herself "an artist who was interested in plants." Keator ignited her passion for natives after she'd passed through other phases in gardening--tropical, Mediterranean, et cetera. She learned about plants in the natural landscape on botanizing excursions with Keator, who learned from Wayne Roderick, who learned from Lester Rowntree.

Middlebrook believes you can teach people to love native flora by teaching about it as food. California has 6000 native plants. 1500 are garden-worthy and 1000 are edible. Middlebrook says, "If you garden, you have to get involved with food at some point."

She called the native edible food movement the next big thing, citing the examples of leading restaurants like Copenhagen's Noma, which was recently voted the world's best restaurant. Noma, in the words of the award committee, "is an homage to soil and sea, a reminder of the source of our food."

"Take [chef Rene’s] starter of crunchy baby carrots from the fertile Lammefjorden region of Denmark, served with edible 'soil' made from malt, hazelnuts and beer, with a cream herb emulsion beneath – you are literally eating the earth!

Great restaurants are a blend of sophisticated cooking, imaginative ideas and respect for ingredients. Noma is more than this. It’s a experience that reminds you why some restaurants deserve to be revered."

Middlebrook and her colleagues work with chefs at acclaimed local eateries like Greens, Manresa, and even the Google cafeteria to develop recipes that emphasize native ingredients. The California Native Garden Foundation offers examples of these recipes here.

Many people have written about the unsustainability of our current system of food production--the reliance on petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers, the risks of monoculture, chemical and mechanical destruction of soil tilth imposed by the large-scale cultivation of annuals. Middlebrook wants to find ways to augment our current system with native ingredients. She wants to apply modern food development and preparation technology to the edible plants that already grow naturally without any human assistance. She encouraged us to consider the potential benefits of replacing just 10% of our gluten-based flour supply with acorn flour. Oak trees grow without any additional water, fertilizer, pesticides, or tilling. In fact, using any of those things around an oak tree may kill it.

Key factors to consider when developing native plants for food : nutrient value, adaptability to modern tastes, the potential to grow plants as agricultural food crops that can be easily, and profitably, integrated into mainstream California cuisine.

Without pretending that we can feed 37 million Californians the way the Indians ate, native Californians may nonetheless serve as a template or starting point for consideration. Middlebrook referred extensively to Kat Anderson's popular book Tending the Wild: Native American Knowledge and the Management of California's Natural Resources (which I still haven't gotten around to reading since I first heard about it over 2 years ago).

California's abundance sustained native populations estimated to range between 375,000-700,000 (some estimates as high as 2M) over a period of 12,000 years. California had the largest population of Indians anywhere in the Americas, due to the abundance and diversity of food. (Note: I think we also have to give props to the human-friendly weather. Where else would people choose to live without furnaces or air conditioners?)

Native Californians and the Spanish explorers had the same life expectancy when the two met --about 35 years. But the natives apparently had healthier teeth and skin!

The native diet consisted of 1000 different foods, 60-70% which was plant-based. (In comparison, Americans today eat about 40 plants.) They relied heavily on acorns and pine nuts and used fire extensively to manage fertile grasslands of the Central Valley to produce abundant edible seeds and bulbs. Because they burned instead of tilled, European settlers viewed the Indians as lazy.

There were 100 tribes in California, each with its own language. They traded amongst themselves. For example, coastal Indians traded fish for agave sugars from the Indians in the desert.

California can be divided into five ecologies with the edible plants that grow in them.

Desert: agave, opuntia, mesquite, chia, pine nuts

Mesquite makes a sweet-tasting flour that is 20% protein, low in carbohydrates and fat. Mesquite seed pods are 40% protein and high in minerals. A mesquite stand produces as much food as a wheat field, without irrigation, cultivation, or chemical support.

A handful of chia seeds (Salvia columbariae) abates hunger for several hours. Chia is widely available in health food stores now.

America gets its pine nuts from Korea and China. Not even Italy! Meanwhile, we have pine trees everywhere.

Agave syrup is already in popular use. We import it from Mexico although agaves grow freely here.

Opuntia paddles and flowers are both sweet and high in vitamin C. Roast the flowers.

Riparian: nettles, currants, elderberry, watercress (naturalized from Europe)

Nettles are 10% protein, more than any vegetable, also high in minerals and vitamins B and C. They substitute for any green. I know I've seen nettles on the menus of many restaurants in the last few years. And I'm a huge fan of this American woman and travel/food writer/journalist from Los Angeles who lives in rural France now with her husband and daughter and posts updates on Flickr as These Days in French Life about her "slow life" endeavor. They grow their own food or find it growing in the countryside, salvage and/or barter for almost everything they need to live with. Anyway, she's forever wild-collecting nettles for dinner and doing interesting things with nettles, including making nettle lasagna.

Elderberry is an ancient plant, the flowers and berries of which Europeans have been eating in different ways for millennia.

Ribes aureum has the best flavor the California currants.

Redwood: huckleberry, salal, bracken fern, mushrooms

Mushrooms can be grown year round in northern California. Some people are looking at ways to replace meat protein with more nutritive mushroom protein. MykoWeb has recipes.

Oak woodland: acorn, mushroom, miner's lettuce, gray pines

Acorns provide more food for more animals than any other tree, ever. The oak is the universal "tree of life". Literally millions of oak trees already grow all over California, many on public land. Public lands are grazed, mined, and logged. Why not harvested for acorns? Possible uses: flour, starch, butter. (Butters from all kinds of nuts are popular right now.)

Miner's lettuce is Claytonia perfoliata, eaten by the 49ers during the Gold Rush. Seeds sprout easily. I've grown it in my garden. I haven't gotten it to naturalize yet because of my constant "editing". 37% protein, 42% carbohydrates, 13% fiber. High in calcium.

Grassland: amaranth, bulbs, grains, seeds.

Amaranth was a huge component of native diet, until Spanish colonialists banned it because the Indians used in their spiritual rites and had associations with idolatry. (Who asked them?!)

I like the idea of eating more vegetables, nuts and seeds...but I'm not big on mushrooms, yet. Middlebrook grew up in Michigan, where her mom maintained a half-acre vegetable garden. Growing up, it was common to have 5 or 6 vegetables at the dinner table.

Another organization/website she mentioned was the Ecological Farming Association (meets at Asilomar every year).

Again, this is all about finding ways to take some of the burden off the unsustainable ways we grow food now. And it's about getting started and doing experiments in the garden, and in the kitchen.

Middlebrook's colleague John Farris (spelling?) brought chia cookies for us. They were tasty (but some chocolate chips would've been welcome). I ate two. (Note: that is not my scary old man hand.)

My first Magda

I picked my first little Magda squash today.



I sliced it up, drizzled it w/ olive oil, added a little S&P and broiled it on high for 2 minutes.



YUM!

"San Francisco was brilliantly sunny, diamond-clear, cool, and green."

Said Julia Child, about the California leg of her 1961 book tour for that opus magnum, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. I finished reading her autobiography My Life in France last night this morning at 1 a.m.. I am slowly coming back down to earth.

Do you ever hear a suggestion for something that you immediately recognize as missing from your life? So it was for me when I read Elizabeth's recent GR post about MLiF. I heard a little bell ring.

Child's saucy, buttery French food went out of fashion a long time ago among my foodier friends, and yours too, I imagine. But even if the food is not your style--trout stuffed with minnows? pressed duck? well, more on that later--there is still much to admire about the woman's life and work. And in the end, it's not really about the food--it's about the cooking.

I saw something of my own life in the quick, consuming passion for French cooking that overtook Julia Child. She went to France with her husband for the first time in her late 30s, not knowing the language, not knowing the food, not knowing how to cook. In short order, she was a changed woman. Well, believe it or not, I didn't know a thing about gardening as recently as 2005 when I hit my mid-thirties. (Yeah, some of us have more to show for our consuming passions than others...so what!)

I could on and tell you how this book is very well written, includes vital, vivid details of a life writ large that gives color to a lost world, an era gone by... but what makes this biography really memorable and fun is the food and the cooking. I found the food and the cooking astonishing.

Here is Julia cooking for a farewell party:

"The pièce de résistance for the evening was a mammoth galantine de volaille, which took me three days to create and had been adopted from a recipe in Larousse Gastronomique. First you make a superb bouillon--from veal leg, feet, and bones--for poaching. Then you debone a nice plump four-pound chicken, and marinate the meat with finely ground pork and veal strips in Cognac and truffles. Then you re-form the chicken, stuffing it with a nice row of truffles wrapped in farce and a fresh strip of pork fat, which you hope ends up in the center. You tie up this bundle and poach it in the delicious bouillon. Once it is cooked, you let it cool and then decorate it--I used green swirls of blanched leeks, red dots of pimiento, brown-black accents of sliced truffle and yellow splashes of butter. The whole was then covered with beautiful clarified-bouillon jelly."

It's intriguing to note that eating this food daily made Julia herself feel ill on numerous occasions. The word she used is bilious. It was all about portion control.

I also have to quote the part about pressed duck. I found this fascinating.

The duck itself is a special strain bred from a domestic female "covered" by a wild male, which produces handsome dark-feathered birds that are full-breasted and toothsome. They are killed by being smothered, so as to keep the blood inside the body (an example of the lengths the French will go to for a special meal). [The chef] roasted two of these ducks on a spit for us, all the while basting them with a wonderful duck-blood sauce he'd prepared at a side table. The birds became mouth-wateringly brown on the outside and roasted very rare on the inside. When they are done, he deftly carved off the ducks' legs and wings, rolled them in mustard and crumbs, and sent them back to the kitchen to be grilled.

He very carefully peeled the skin away from the breast, and carved the meat into thin slices, which he sprinkled with finely minced shallots. These would be poached in their juices, a little wine, and delicate seasoning, in order to point up the natural flavor. Next the chef wheeled a great silver duck press up to our table. It looked a bit like a silver fire extinguisher with a round crank-handle on top. He cut up the carcass, put it into the canister of the press and turned the big handle on top. As the pressing plate descended slowly inside the canister, we could hear the cracking of bones, and a stream of red juices dribbled out of the spout into a saucepan. Adding a dollop of red Burgundy wine to the press, the chef turned the crank again, to squeeze some more. He continued like this until the carcass had finally rendered its all. It was a fabulous ritual to watch...Finally, it was time to eat..."

Whoa!

Let's end with Julia doing something less...fabulously gruesome. Here she is making an omelette.

Watch and learn, people.

Terrible news.

From Tablehopper:

Some very sad news on Bernal Hill: many are mourning the loss of Cathie Guntli, the owner of ~LIBERTY CAFÉ~, who recently passed away after a battle with cancer. She was as sweet as her banana cream pies. Condolences to everyone who knew her and loved her. As for the fate of the space, in the still-unconfirmed department, I heard a rumor that the restaurant and bakery have been sold, and that Hard Knox Café might be opening a third location there.

I can't believe this. This is terrible news for Bernal Heights. I'm speechless. Save the Liberty!

Backyard fruit orchards

in the New York Times:

Even more than other kinds of gardens, orchards require significant investments of time and energy, as fruit trees need to be pruned regularly and are susceptible to fungus and insect attacks. Mr. Grunsfeld is often in his yard from dawn to dusk on spring and summer Sundays, planting, pruning, spraying, composting and inspecting his trees.* Even so, he has not managed to prevent his peach tree from getting leaf curl, or to fend off an even bigger problem: squirrels, who have stolen every single peach and nectarine.

"I've tried everything—traps, fox urine," Mr. Grunsfeld said. "If I could strike a deal with them I would. I’d tell them, ‘Look, I’ll give you 80 percent.'"

Dude, where's my bird netting?

*Wow--what a lot of work! Some people like to make life so hard! He can't be having any fun! Poor guy!

Seriously tho'... if he wants to enjoy his harvest he should stop "composting...his trees." Heh.

Maybe you have to spend more time monitoring your fruit trees in New York than you do in California. When I was a kid we had apple, two kinds of plum, and an unusual loquat. None of them got a gardener's attention. We wouldn't have known what to do!


And yet year after year, fruit.