Category Archives: Great Finds

A CSA That’s A Cut Above

Posted on by 18 comments

Baia Nicchia's unusual varieties of fall/winter squash.

If your New Year’s resolution includes eating more healthful, you just might want to make good on that by joining a CSA.

For a community supported agriculture program that’s a cut above the rest, look no further than Baia Nicchia’s. Fred Hempel, a geneticist turned farmer who owns the 9 1/2-acre Baia Nicchia Farm in Sunol, provides a weekly box of his fresh fruit, veggies and herbs to you. You pay $30 a week, but end up getting $35 or more worth of produce.

Recently, I had a chance to sample a couple of boxes and what a culinary treasure trove they were. Included was a brilliant rainbow of winter squash — from the deep orange-hued French Potimarron to the dusty peach-colored Kikuza (an heirloom Japanese variety) to the large pale creamsicle Terremoto to the haunting pale blue Australian Triamble that can be stored up to two years. Additionally, there was a bunch of my fave lacinato kale, as well as sweet Scotch Blue kale, peppery Dutch arugula, spigarello (a broccoli rabe relative), baby turnips, sprigs of pungent orange balsam thyme and fragrant yuzu.

Baia Nicchia supplies to top Bay Area restaurants (including Marché in Menlo Park), so Hempel will often include some fun, unusual items in his CSA boxes that he grows primarily for chefs, such as edible chrysanthemum and amazing finger limes. Because he operates a nursery, he sometimes includes seedlings as well, such as mustard greens that you can pot in your backyard and snip all winter long to enhance salads and stir-fry dishes.

Read more

My Fave Eats of 2010

Posted on by 25 comments

I’ve eaten a lot this year. Let’s just get that out of the way at the start.

So, you can imagine my dilemma in coming up with a list of a mere 10 dishes or items that were my ultimate favorites this year. I limited the list to meals I ate out at restaurants, rather than made at home.  They also had to be so great as to have me still longing for a taste even now.

Here, in no particular order, are my top eats of this year:

Read more

A Visit to the Philo Apple Farm

Posted on by 24 comments

Apples grown the old-fashioned way.

You might not know Sally and Don Schmitt by name. But you know of them by their legacy.

They were the original owners of the French Laundry in Yountville. They transformed what was once variously a bar, laundry, brothel, then run-down rooming house into a destination restaurant with a prix fixe menu even back then that attracted wide acclaim and visits from the likes of Julia Child and Marion Cunningham. Opened in 1978, Don was the maitre d’ and Sally was the cook, serving up five French-comfort-style courses that topped out at $46 per person.

Entrepreneurs and pioneers, Sally and Don Schmitt.

In 1994, after a number of restaurateurs eyed the property with interest, the couple decided to take the chance to sell it to a then down-on-his-luck, young chef named Thomas Keller.

As Sally deadpans now, “That turned out pretty well, didn’t it?”

The Schmitts ran the original French Laundry restaurant. Here is their menu on opening night in 1978.

Sally, 79, and Don, 81 have a gift for seeing the potential in things most folks would turn their backs on.

After selling the French Laundry, they went on to refurbish yet another run-down property — a 30-acre swath in Philo in Mendocino County near the Navarro River. They turned what was once a decrepit sharecroppers farm into a thriving biodynamic farm specializing in heirloom apples. The Philo Apple Farm is so picturesque now that it’s a favorite setting for retailer Pottery Barn to do its catalog shoots.

Read more

Sneak Peek: Baume Chocolates

Posted on by 14 comments

Look forward to the day you can try these incredible chocolates at Baume.

Chef Bruno Chemel of Palo Alto’s Baume can be a bit of a mad scientist.

With his molecular gastronomy creations that foam, smoke, fizz and bubble savagely at the dining table, you’d think that any chocolates he would make would be equally jaw-dropping wild.

But instead, they are as timelessly elegant and chic as can be.

Chemel doesn’t make chocolates very often. No time. But on his rare days off from his nearly one- year-old restaurant, which just received a coveted one Michelin star, he likes to pull out molds, temper chocolate and stir ganache. Sometimes, he even enlists the help of his 6-year-old son, Antoine, who is a whiz at piping.

For Chemel, chocolate-making is relaxing — which, he jokes, his pastry chef thinks is preposterous.

Chef Bruno Chemel of Baume.

Next year, Chemel hopes to find the time and a way to incorporate his chocolates into the restaurant. Let’s hope so, because recently, the chef allowed me to try some of the bonbons. They are exquisite.

Read more

One of the Most Fascinating Food Books Ever & Winner of the Gourmet Mushroom Kit

Posted on by 17 comments

Cao Xiaoli, a professional acrobat, balances on one hand with her day's worth of food at Shanghai Circus World in Shanghai, China. (From the book What I Eat: Around the World in 80 Diets.) The caloric value of her day's worth of food on a typical day in June was 1700 kcals. She is 16 years of age; 5 feet, 2 inches tall; and 99 pounds. Cao Xiaoli lives in a room with nine other girls. She started her career as a child, performing with a regional troupe in her home province of Anhui. Now she practices five hours a day, attends school with the other members of her troupe, and performs seven days a week. She says what she likes best about being an acrobat is the crowd’s reaction when she does something seemingly dangerous. MODEL RELEASED.

Celeb chef cookbooks may dazzle on the coffee table and instructive cookbooks may be must-haves on the shelf.

But here’s a food book that is so captivating you’ll be hard-pressed to put it down.

“What I Eat” (Material World/Ten Speed Press) is a fascinating around-the-globe look at what 80 people eat over the course of one day.

The authors are Peter Menzel and Faith D’Aluisio, whose work you already might be familiar with, as they also were behind the James Beard Award-winning, “Hungry Planet” (Material World), which examined what families around the world eat over the span of one week.

In their newest book, the couple, who lives in Napa, spent three years chronicling the diets of these spotlighted individuals, who range the gamut from a sumo wrestler in Japan to an arctic hunter in Greenland to a model in the United States to an astronaut in space.

Each profile is accompanied by stunning photos, as well as every item each person consumed (from supplements to cigarettes), the total calorie count (from as little as 800 to as much as 12,300), and demographic information such as age, height, weight, occupation and activity level.

For instance, the 99-pound, 5-foot-2-inch Chinese acrobat (top photo) buys yogurt, European-style cakes and fruit for breakfast, then has a hefty lunch of deep-fried pork ribs, noodles, tea-cooked egg, stir-fried cucumber, rice and a salty vegetable broth with green onion in the Shanghai Circus World Employee Cafeteria. The 16-year-old doesn’t eat dinner because most days, she’s performing in a nightly show. Typically, she practices five hours a day and performs seven nights a week.  In all, she consumed 1,700 calories that particular day.

Read more

« Older Entries Recent Entries »