Just a mile from the skyscrapers of downtown Pasadena lies a tiny plot of land that has become the heart of an urban homesteading movement. The raised beds of the Dervaes family farm cover 1/10 of an acre. Imagine the area from a football field's goal line to the very first 10-yard mark, or if you're an average suburban homeowner, scan your backyard. Now, imagine harvesting 3 tons of organic food from this short span of soil every year.

Robert McFall's documentary, Homegrown, is an intimate family portrait that reveals both the visionary inspiration and the resolute dedication required to grow one's own food. For Jules and his adult children, Justin, Anais, and Jordanne, the Dervaes farm began as an experiment to see how much of their own food they could grow. A natural extension of the father's experience during the back-to-the-land heyday of the 60s and 70s, their gardens soon led to living off-the-grid. They catch rainwater and recycle grey water, keep animals for manure and collect oil from nearby restaurants to produce their own biofuel. They order hand-cranked appliances from Amish catalogs. They put up their own green beans and illuminate their home with a self-reliant mix of olive oil lamps, biodiesel lamps, homemade candles, daylighting and the occasional fluorescent bulb.

Jules speaks of how we can save the world by taking care of our six inches of topsoil. Like farming, living off the grid began as a political statement and personal challenge. It has since grown into an integral part of their working farm. His children have absorbed his lessons and, like him, have chosen to make it a way of life.

The film includes the usual scenes of the family picking and eating ripe tomatoes from their garden--a trope of any story remotely related to sustainable agriculture. What distinguishes the kitchen and dining room scenes in Homegrown is the image of the Dervaes repeating this meal day in, day out. In a country where one's teen years are simply an extended, fight-filled countdown to the freedom of flight, it's astonishing to see all three grown children living and working so closely, so contentedly alongside their father. Organic, locally based, and ecologically sound agriculture requires huge amounts of labor. We often forget the "family" half of the equation in family farming. Watching older and younger generations working together is a reminder that there are still deeper cultural changes required for a truly sustainable society.

After a meal at their table, we're invited to sit in on one of the family's operational meetings. Here, the reality of business collides with the purity of the Dervaes' ideals. An extended discussion about accepting advertisements on their website highlights the challenges of making real-world decisions while pursuing deeply philosophical and political goals. With over 4,000 visitors each day, PathToFreedom.com could bring in significant income. The opportunity to make an additional $10,000 a month on a farm that grosses under $40,000 a year cannot be dismissed, and the debate marks a milestone for the family.

Jules fears that once they walk the path of easy money, they'll never return to the hard work of farming. His children, the ones who design, code and maintain the website, believe ads are a minor concession: why shouldn't they benefit financially from the enormous amount of experience gained through their own hard work and offered so long for free? The thought of ads, even for supportive seed companies they favor, visibly pains Jules. The younger generation is respectful enough to allow their father to override, for now, their willingness to take on a bit more of capitalism's gloss as their homestead matures into a profitable business.

It's obvious that there will be many more meetings and delicately balanced debates about the future of the farm. Building their client list, gathering a strong community of supporters, making wise choices, growing their business as purely and sustainably as the delicate lettuces they harvest, and establishing new homesteads in turn for each of the children--it will be a lifetime of growing and learning for the Devaes family. Homegrown is a privileged gaze onto that rare, difficult journey.

UPCOMING SCREENINGS

Mill Valley Film Festival

Sunday, October 11, 1:00 PM
CinéArts at Sequoia
25 Throckmorton Ave.
Mill Valley, CA 94941
Map

Tuesday, October 13, 6:45 PM
Christopher B. Smith Rafael Film Center
1118 Fourth Street
San Rafael, CA 94901
Map

San Francisco Documentary Film Festival

Saturday, October 17, 7:00 PM
Thursday, October 22, 9:15 PM
The Roxie Theater
3117 16th Street
San Francisco, CA
(415)-863-1087
Map

I suppose we can thank Anthony Bourdain for the stereotype of the wild man chef. In Kitchen Confidential, his descriptions of "whacked-out moral degenerates, dope fiends, refugees...and psychopaths" haphazardly gobbling substances and screwing on flour sacks between shifts made cooking in a restaurant kitchen seem like both the worst and best job imaginable. He romanticized the depraved hangover-to-hangover existence of a clock-punching turner-and-burner even as he cast his world in a hyper-realistic light, widely disseminating a broad colorful portrait of the journeyman chef, specifically a male one, that quickly congealed in the public mind. He popularized an archetype young chefs may even aspire to emulate -- like fledgling rock singers copping Jagger's pout and other well-traveled performance tropes.

In July 2009, Lev Grossman wrote of Bourdain in Time:

"It was invisible then. Now we recognize it right away: this is Anthony Bourdain's world...He changed our whole cultural idea of what a kitchen is. Pre-Bourdain, it was a warm, cozy, maternal place. Now it's a profane, brutal, masculine crucible, where human frailty is rendered away like so much tasty bacon fat."

Of course, Kitchen Confidential didn't tell chefs anything they didn't already know. I also doubt the book would have been such a sensation had it not arrived at a time when cooking and eating were becoming popular fodder for entertainment on the Food Network, and chefs were more and more in the public eye. Today, celebrity chefs are brands -- swollen, polished amplifications of the managerial personalities they cultivated actually manning kitchens. I'm not trying to write a college paper here, but I have noticed (as have many others) that nearly all of the high-profile celebrity chefs are men. While female Food Network hosts -- like Rachael, Giada, and the newly minted Melissa-- focus on saving time, shopping frugally, and feeding families -- clear extensions of the domestic arena -- male celebrity chefs focus on the craft itself, food for its own sake, cooking as an endless array of skills to acquire and adventures on which to embark in the carrying on of tradition and technique. They can approach food from an intellectual perspective. You learn about salumi. You study pizza. You get your education one cream-laden sauce at a time. You come of age in a French kitchen helmed by a venomous, insult-spewing maniac. You soak up abuse like a crostini, work awful hours, and get paid little to no money, but it's what you expect -- because you're an apprentice. You have to be man enough to take it. Some day, you'll be an executive chef yourself, and you'll have your own cadre of serfs to kick around. Until then, you mince onions and practice cursing. While women obviously pass through similar rites of passage in kitchens all over the world, in the realm of food entertainment, they're relegated to clipping coupons, dumbing down complicated dishes to satisfy some producer's market-tested vision of the American housewife, and attracting no shortage of she-can't-really-cook mockery from their male counterparts. Older female celebrity chefs -- like Lidia Bastianich, for example -- are motherly and comforting. They learned to cook from their mothers, and that's what they're sharing with you.

Everything on television is deliberately orchestrated, of course, but many of the common signifiers of male chefness -- the cursing, the drinking, the fighting, the screaming, the preoccupation with large pieces of meat -- whether expressed on camera, in memoirs, or reputation via third-person anecdotes -- endow a traditionally feminine role with coarse, conventionally masculine trappings. Producers want men to feel safe watching their shows. They don't want the women to appear shrill, unattractive, bossy, or otherwise threatening, or for the men in aprons to come off as effete. Over the course of six seasons of Bravo's Top Chef, some of the show's most reviled male contestants have been wheedling, effeminate men. Likewise, when Padma Lakshmi, host of Top Chef, did a tour of Spain for the Food Network way back in early 2000s, she was not tripping around, Bourdain-like, shit-faced on sherry, taking bullfighting lessons, making subtle references to gastrointestinal distress. Instead, cameras zoomed in again and again as she slowly lowered strips of fine jamon into her mouth, oohing and cooing, her face bathed in a soft, warm lamp-lit glow. In one segment, she rode a horse, in another, a donkey. She did go to a bullfight, which the bull managed to win against all odds. Relieved, Lakshmi repaired to a nearby restaurant, where she ate the balls of one of the victorious bull's less fortunate comrades.

Men who have become famous cooking and eating in the public eye go out of their way to project a masculine image, and their carefully constructed personalities stud every crevice of the machismo spectrum. Ginger-coiffed Bobby Flay, proprietor of what Grub Street deems the 13th largest chef empire, is a wise-talking Jersey dude. He's richer than an oil tycoon but he has real friends. How do you know? They come over to his modest-seeming house for sausage party cook-outs. Sometimes, when he's smirking his way through a Throwdown episode, he looks like guys I've seen at bars late at night, red-faced, a little sweaty, leering at ladies between shots of Patron. 8th on Grub Street's list, Mario Batali, corpulent, jolly, and orange-clogged, is renowned for Falstaffian excesses. With his Tourettic interjecting of idiotic catch phrases, Emeril Lagasse, locked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and Nobu Matsuhisa for #5 through #7, strikes me as a man who always speaks louder than he has to. With his Stray Cats-meets-Swingers-in-the-back-of-a-Sunglass Hut shtick, Guy Fieri apparently wowed audience members at this year's Great American Food and Music Festival in Mountain View with what Bay Area Bites contributor Stephanie Im called a "highly entertaining blowout performance complete with loud rock n'roll, gratuitous hot chicks on stage, big machinery, power tools, and pyrotechnics." The owner of 27 restaurants around the world, Gordon Ramsey has bounced over some financial ruts lately, but Grub Street still has him in the #1 slot. His shows are crude spectacles of theater Artaud, would find unwatchable. Ramsey berates chefs, spits food on the floor, and picks fights. Off-screen, he's compulsively disrespectful, particularly towards women. Bourdain? Well, he doesn't actually cook much anymore, but he drinks a lot on No Reservations and makes a point of eating anything put in front of him, regardless of how strange or off-putting it may be. When he's not going shooting with Ted Nugent, he's a culturally sensitive daredevil -- an Evel Knievel of antacid-defying degustation. I can eat this gigantic sandwich, these bulbous eyeballs, and this disgusting warthog anus, he seems to say -- could you? When he and Eric Ripert venture back into the Les Halles kitchen to char beef and sauce sole for Season Four's "Into the Fire" episode, they're in the war zone, brothers sloshing through the trenches, dunking freedom fries in spitting oil and hustling out steak au poivre as the foes -- the diners -- descend in overwhelming numbers. Interestingly, Jamie Oliver, who on several occasions has been the target of Bourdain's bullying, was the subject of a 2003 academic article published in the International Journal of Cultural Studies: "Oliver's Twist: Leisure, Labor, and Domestic Masculinity in The Naked Chef". The writer, Joanne Hollows of Nottingham Trent University in England, frames Oliver as a construction of the masculine domestic cook. According to Hollows, in his professional capacity, Oliver avoids associating cooking with labor; instead, it's a fun, leisurely, and "recognizably manly" activity.

You'll never see a man on a cooking show gasping and groaning over the way something tastes -- over-sensualizing their pleasure from food. "Oh that's serious," Bourdain will say, wiping some beastly innards off his face, taking a swig of Heineken. Emeril and Fieri will bark as if they're at a ball game. Batali will explain why something is good, rather than simply express how happy he is to eat it. Some kinds of cooking -- grilling, artisanal curing, brawny offal-centric preparations -- tend to have hyper-masculine devotees. Molecular gastronomy -- food science, art, and fantasy in a delicious jumble -- is safe too -- because it's so dramatically removed from the drudgery of home-cooking. Every now and then, you see a gentle man cooking on television, and the effect is jarring. In March, celebrated Manresa chef David Kinch schooled Bobby Flay on Iron Chef. Even though his restaurant is a destination, the soft-spoken and terroir-enthused Kinch will never have product tie-ins -- commercial mayonnaise, kitchen gear, spice rubs, etc -- on Flay's level -- even in the unlikely event he wanted to in the first place. He'd rather build "tide-pools" of fresh shellfish and sea beans languishing in dashi-laced green tomato broth and go surfing in his spare time. One of my favorite cooking shows was Charlie Trotter's original Kitchen Sessions on PBS in the late 1990s. Amid a loose jazz soundtrack, Trotter very softly presented his thesis: cooking is a cycle of improvisations where time-tested techniques meet endlessly changing circumstances and opportunities for adjustment. The food was high-concept, challenging but within reach. As a host, he was a soothing presence -- murmuring vaguely poetic asides, often looking away from the camera, frequently indulging in tangential digressions appropriate to his show's statement of purpose. Trotter has been very successful, but his show, at least in that incarnation, didn't last more than a year or two. Ironically, Trotter actually made a cameo in the 1997 movie My Best Friend's Wedding, in which he convincingly played the stereotype of a blustery chef, bellowing at an assistant: "I will kill your whole family if you don't get this right!" It's a better joke now, twelve years later.

BlogHer Food '09 Keynote with Ree Drummond, David Lebovitz and Elise Bauer

Founded in 2005, BlogHer's mission is to create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community and economic empowerment. Today, it reaches more than 15 million women each month via a Web hub with a listing of over 22,000 blogs by women (ranging from topics on politics, news, and technology, to food, health and family), a publishing network of more than 2500 blog affiliates, and annual conferences like the inaugural BlogHer Food '09 which took place Saturday, September 26th.

I felt giddy as a school girl as I ran my finger down the list of speakers lined up:

David Lebovitz, David Lebovitz: Living the Sweet Life in Paris
Diane Cu and Todd Porter, White on Rice Couple
Elise Bauer, Simply Recipes
Heidi Swanson, 101 Cookbooks
Helen Dujardin, Tartelette
Jaden Hair, Steamy Kitchen
Matt Armendariz, Matt Bites
Pim Techamuanvivit, Chez Pim/Menu for Hope
Ree Drummond, The Pioneer Woman Cooks
...among others.

These are the blogs I turned to for inspiration and guidance when I first decided to create my own. These are the people I looked to and thought, yes, that is what I want to do! To carve out a little space of my own, building my own story with each scrap of experience, word, or crumb I shared with the world.

As I sat amongst 300 fellow food writers/bloggers, rapt with attention as our blog crushes talked about the trials and tribulations, joys and inspirations of food blogging, I felt a wonderful sense of community. Regardless of where we were from, what we liked to write about, how long we've been at it, we had at least one thing in common...food. And the inexplicable need to talk about it.

And talk we did.

The day was divided into three tracks: Visual, Vocation, and Values, with speakers represented from diverse backgrounds and perspectives.

"Developing Your Visual Voice" -- Matt Armendariz and Heidi Swanson

The Visual Track focused on food photography -- developing your visual voice, basic principles and techniques, and how to take your photography to a new level.

"Your blog is great...now what?" -- Jaden Hair, Helen Dujardin and Amy Sherman

The Vocation Track delved into best practices on building a better blog, blogging as a profession, developing business relationships online and offline, and protecting yourself and your work. Bay Area Bites' very own, Amy Sherman from Cooking with Amy moderated a panel in this track all about letting your blog lead the way to new opportunities.

BAB also represented on the Values Track, with Jen Maiser, the woman behind the Eat Local Challenge, leading a discussion on "The Politics of Food...and Food Blogs" -- the very deliberate movement to change minds within and about the food industry. This track also explored "How Food Blogs Can Save the World," with discussions on how bloggers can support issues they care about, and how to take that action offline as a volunteer or activist.

And, of course, there was food.

Rocco and the lunching ladies

While overcooked pasta for lunch left much to be desired for, it appeared that Rocco DiSpirito did some damage control with his amped up charm, flying from table to table (dizzying as it may have been).

TuttiFoodie and Scharffen Berger hit the sweet spot with its Chocolate Adventure Contest demo with Elizabeth Falkner, Executive Chef of Citizen Cake and Orson.

The concept of the Chocolate Adventure Contest is to create an inventive recipe using Scharffen Berger chocolate and least one of their 17 listed "adventure ingredients." Chef Faulkner demonstrated her confectionary prowess by using 11 of them in her Chocolate Adventure Box, layering all sorts of goodies like homemade pandan-flavored marshmallow, peanut butter, cumin, and corn nuts, among other things.

Chef Elizabeth Falkner gets sticky

Chocolate Adventure Box

Now for the fun part…

Dive in! (Gudrun from Kitchen Gadget Girl goes fishing)

Yeaup, really get in there (Photo credit: Amy Wilson, Streaming Gourmet)

After we were sufficiently sugar-high, the Closing Keynote treated us to an open discussion with Elise Bauer, Ree Drummond and David Lebovitz -- three accomplished bloggers who have been at this a while. With very different styles and approaches to blogging, it was interesting to hear how they responded to similar challenges of sustaining momentum and avoiding burnout. It was also reassuring to hear that 1 post typically takes them anywhere from 4-6 hours to complete...and that it doesn't always come easy to them.

Party time: Todd Porter, Diane Cu and David Lebovitz

BlogHer Food '09 was very much about community, support, and growth. More coverage on the conference can be found in the live-blogging forums, but for a quick recap, here are my 5 take-aways from the sessions:

• Create opportunities -- Put yourself out there. Talk to people. Network. Step away from the computer.

• Come from a place of authenticity -- Sincerity goes a long way.

• If a business is what you want, treat it like a business -- Have a plan, make goals, create a vision that will keep you inspired.

• Share more than just the sugar and the flour -- People want a person and a life behind the blog. Don’t be afraid to share your story.

• Writer's block and burn out -- Happens to the best. Remind yourself of what you want. Do what makes you happy.

At the end of the day though, the highlight was getting to meet so many kindred souls. The weird and beautiful thing about blogging is how well you get to know someone from a distance. It was a real pleasure meeting many bloggers I've been following for months, and in the end, I guess that's what it's really about. Human connection (over something good to eat).

Joy, Gourmeted

I started working with preschoolers a few years ago, not long after I quit my office job. These days, I help out in a pre-k classroom at a school downtown, close to Rincon Center. The boys are obsessed with Star Wars, even the original movies, and the girls sport headbands like Lynda Carter-era Wonder Women. Some of their families call San Francisco home; many live in Marin, south of San Francisco, or in the suburbs of Oakland. A lot of them eat catered school lunches; others lug boxes and bags inevitably embellished with culturally significant images -- Yoda, Tinkerbell, Dora -- and stocked with kid-friendly things: string cheese sticks, raisins, fruit, lunch meat, hummus, and miniature yogurt cups and juice boxes from Trader Joe's and Costco.

Our relationships with food begin when we're very young. We're shaped by what our parents give us. We like what we learn to like. Foods in fun packages -- like pigs-in-a-blanket and eggs-in-a-basket -- are universally appealing. Foods we associate with good times -- like Popsicles -- are as well. Childhood memories are powerful things, our therapists tell us. Chefs know this too. That's why Grant Achatz of the esteemed Alinea in Chicago served, on his restaurant's opening night, a whimsical riff on an American lunch-box staple: one peeled grape, warmed, still on its stem, dipped in a peanut puree and wrapped in brioche -- the mad scientist's peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich.

Every Tuesday morning, the class visits the Ferry Building. We teachers gently prod our shifty little charges into the loose winding semblance of a line and lead them, meandering along the sidewalks, dashing through crosswalks. "Smells gross," a boy once sniffed as we passed Yank Sing, the damp, slightly acrid scent of vapor hissing from steamers inside. "That's only the best dim sum in San Francisco," I almost blurted out incredulously. I remembered, of course, that I was walking with under-sized humans who still cried for their mommies and wet their pants on occasion. They'd never pecked a tiny hole in the soft translucent skin of a perfect Shanghai dumpling and slurped -- with greedy, Dracula-like precision -- the sweet, concentrated broth within. Divorced from that experience, the smell was, in fact, a little icky. An iron grate covers a patch of pavement directly outside of Boulevard, on the Mission St. side. The kids like to jump on it as they pass because it clangs noisily. A waiter inside polishing glasses -- readying for the lunch hour rush -- inevitably chuckles. Their small heads bob just barely into view with every leap.

I wonder if marching into the Ferry Building farmer's market flanked by a posse of adorable 4-year-olds isn't a bit like rolling into a club with a bunch of professional basketball players. You receive a lot of attention but it's all purely by association. Beaming retirees and fanny-pack-toting tourists -- this scene's coterie of doting fans and relentless paparazzi -- hover, stare, cluck, and coo. When cameras come out, teachers act swiftly, more like security personnel than hangers-on. "No photos, please," we say firmly. "They're minors." Once, a very old woman wheeling her husband -- a man in much less robust health -- sidled up to me winking, her face as round, wrinkled, and fuzzy as an over-ripe apricot: "Do any of them need a Jewish grandma?" she practically pleaded. "Yes," I responded. "Doesn't everyone?"

"Potato," by Reese, age 4. She drew a potato and started to scrawl the word, but decided to write "green bean" instead.

For the kids, a Tuesday trip to the Ferry Building is an overwhelming assault of sensory delights. They grab at anything within reach. They swivel their heads as they walk, twirling constantly to see what's happening behind them, mindful that they're always missing something. Things fall apart; the line cannot hold. The other day, we were leaving the farmer's market, heading for the lobster tanks inside, when a girl prone to dawdling dawdled. I asked her to catch up. She stared up at me and offered a retort for which I had no rote teacher-ly rejoinder "I'm just looking at the world." At that moment, Incanto chef, Boccalone owner, and Food Network presence Chris Cosentino glided by, pushing a produce-stacked cart. A small blond boy sat on top of the cart, giggling. "Weeeee," said the kid. I thought of Old Mcdonald's Farm -- the mooing cows, quacking ducks, and oinking pigs, and what Chris Cosentino would do with them if he had the chance.

This week, we checked out the mushroom mini-farms at Far West Fungi. "Eeek, blech," said a girl, scrunching her eyes and nose, tilting her head to properly appraise the craggy shitake caps poking out from what looked like a wizened loaf of pumpernickel. "You don't like mushrooms?" I asked. "I like mushrooms, but not ones with yucky shells," she explained, cackling, waving her hands at me as if I were a dunce and she was making perfect sense. She noticed a poster of wild mushrooms hanging outside the store. "I like this one," she said, pointing to a particular 'shroom. "That is a shitake," I said. "It's just like the ones on the log you said were yucky." Three hours later, she woke up from a nap and grabbed my leg as I walked past her mat. "Actually, I only like two kinds of mushrooms," she said, as if to clear up a misunderstanding. "I like the big ones and the little round ones." "Okay," I responded. 'The rest are yucky," she added, sighing conclusively as she rolled over to fall back asleep.

As part of the weekly ritual, we pick out vegetables and fruits for the kids to enjoy for a pre-playground snack after nap. The kids make choices, which is good for them to do. We try to present attractive options: produce to provoke curiosity and wonder -- like lemon cucumbers, sweet gnarled bell peppers sporting psychedelic hues, little damson plums, and baby carrots in leafy bunches etc. At snack-time, they're excited but picky -- especially when it comes to vegetables which, unlike most fruits, aren't usually sweet and, on some level, candy-like.

"Green Bean," by Stella, age 4. She drew a green bean and then turned it into an airplane.

I am reminded of a story my mother once told me. She had a nasty 3rd grade teacher with a favorite adage -- "you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink" -- and she took pleasure in invoking it whenever students dozed, doodled, or clowned through her class. The saying has drifted through my mind at snack-time, though in this case, it expresses patience, not exasperation. To rope in another livestock platitude, the vegetables kids adamantly refuse -- no matter how sustainable, delicious, and healthy they may be -- are not pearls cast before proverbial swine. You can't force much with kids and food. You can lead them to water, and while you can't make them drink, you can drink yourself, in front of them, and tell them how good it is. If you're funny and sincere enough, sooner or later, they'll get thirsty. Breathlessly extolling their virtues between bites, I practically wore out my molars chomping purple peppers before a boy took pity on me, kind of shaking his head as he reached out a small pudgy paw for his own sliver.

4-year-olds don't know that much yet. They also have a pretty limited vocabulary. Yet they're -- like George -- endlessly curious, and constantly -- unlike George -- growing and honing new tools for comprehension and conversation. As a result, they're very good at asking obvious, simple questions that actually require difficult, complex answers. On Tuesday, halfway through the afternoon, two children, a boy and a girl, argued. The boy yelped imperiously, "Did you know that if dinosaurs were alive now, they would eat us?" The girl guffawed in disbelief. "Eat us?" she snorted, probably, for once, not on purpose. "No way! Why would they eat us? We're not food." The boy nodded solemnly, closing his eyes as his head swung up and down. "They would. Do you know why? Because we have meat in our bodies." The girl started to say something, then paused, her eyes wandering down to the arms hanging at her sides. She lifted her left arm with her right hand and let it flop down, limp. She picked it up again and squeezed it slowly and deliberately, feeling bone and muscle, her fingers crawling all the way up to her tiny shoulder. You could tell her brain was working hard. She was thinking about meat -- what she knew of it, where she thought it came from, what it looked like, what it tasted like. Grilled chicken. Pepperoni on pizza. Ham sandwiches. Shrimp. She yelled at me from halfway across the room: "Do we have meat in our bodies for real?"

I tried to pretend I hadn't heard. She yelled again. I took a deep breath. I walked over and knelt down on the carpet. I didn't mind talking about it; I just wasn't sure where to begin.

Skordalia. Skor-dahl-YA. Please say it with me, because it is a word one should know, use, and use often. It is from the Greek skordalia, in case you were wondering.

Made from potatoes, olive oil, garlic, and more garlic, skordalia is a purée that may be served as a dip for bread or, even better, as an accompaniment to fried fish or roasted beets. To me, it pretty much sums up the Greeks' love of soft food, which may or may not have derived from earlier times of poverty, when, as a subject nation to the Ottomans, good dental care was difficult to come by.

That is just a theory, however, and completely my own.

Okay, I Make You Some!

A couple of years ago, while sailing through the Cyclades, seven friends, our game-for-anything Kiwi sea captain, and I dropped anchor in a little port town on the island of Iraklia. After a full, hard day of sailing and gin-and-tonic drinking, we found ourselves extremely hungry, but without many dining options, thanks to our arriving very late in the season. By late September, a lot of Greek islanders tend to pack up their things and head for Athens to ride out the boredom of Winter.

Near the top of a little hill above the harbor, we found a pleasant, brightly lit taverna, half-filled with what was left of the tourist trade and what was left of the locals. Perfect, we thought, and enough room to pull together a table for nine. As we looked over the menu posted in front of the entrance, my friend Gary noticed something in the distance.

He pointed to a bit of curling smoke that was coming from behind the scrubby, parched bushes several yards up the hill. I was intrigued, too. In my hunger-fueled imagination, those curls of smoke reached out to us with long, wispy cartoon fingers and pulled three of us by the nostrils further up the hill.

What we found was another taverna-- dimly lit and much less crowded, unless one counts the two dozen or so cats roaming about, aggressively begging for food. We were greeted both by the smell of a whole lamb roasting-- unmanned-- over an open fire, and the shrill yell of a very tan, very blonde Greek woman. Her ire was cast in the direction of a very tan, very not-blond Greek boy. She pointed to the lamb as she yelled. He withered, made his way over to the rotisserie, and started to slowly turn the crank; sulking and looking at the lamb as though he felt it had fully deserved its death, but angered by the fact that he was the one chosen to carry out the disposal of its remains.

"Oh, God. We have to eat here," was what one of us said. It doesn't matter which of us, because it's what we were all thinking.

Slow-roasted lamb and drama. It had all the delicious possibility of a dinner theatre specializing in Greek tragedy. We headed back to the other taverna to share our discovery. The rest of our crew were already seated and drinking, therefore unmoveable. They saw no reason on earth that they should pull themselves away from their beers and their sunset view, even if the sun might have been setting over the other side of the island. Their loss, I thought, as Gary, Bill, and I walked back to the cat-infested place.

Apart from having to throw the occasional cat off the table, our dinner was marvelous. We dined off of the slow, grudgingly-roasted fruits of Greek child labor served over roasted potatoes with lemon and lamb drippings, grilled local octopus, and platter of little fried fish called athirina, which nearly infested the harbor's waters.

It was the fried fish that caught my attention. Where I work, we do the same thing with smelt-- dredging them in chickpea flour and frying them until crisp. Tossed with fresh lemon juice, salt, and parsley, we place a big pile of them on a blue plate (shaped like a fish, appropriately enough) and serve them with a big dollop of skordalia through which one might drag their little fried heads. When the blonde, big-lunged proprietress brought the fish to our table, they were accompanied solely by two wedges of lemon. leading to a profound sense of disappointment on my end. I had just assumed that they would come with that sharply garlicky dip.

"No skordalia?" I asked. I wanted to sound disappointed-- as though I had traveled 7,000 miles to come to this particular island, to sit among these particular semi-feral cats, to eat of this particular woman's famous garlic dip.

"No, no skordalia," she said. "The people," she gesticulated with a sweep of her bronzed arms as though to suggest the other diners, both real and imagined, "they do not like so much the garlic." I wondered if she was specifically referring to the older German couple we had earlier mistaken for an ancient sea captain and his long-suffering wife. I inwardly cast them as garlic-haters.

"Well, I do. I love skordalia," I said.

"You do?" Her eyes widened, she hunched over a bit in my direction, and with a big smile on her face said, "Okay, I make you some!" She punched an index finger upwards as she said it, which added a nice visual exclamation mark to the end of that particular sentence.

From our table, she dashed off into the kitchen, yelling something again to her child as she went. A couple minutes later, we could hear the whirring of a blender. We occupied ourselves in the meantime by elbowing cats from the table and off our laps. Shortly thereafter, the woman reappeared at our table with a bowl of fresh skordalia. "Kalisas orexi!" she said rather formally, wishing us good eating. And on that note, she turned on her heel and headed back inside with a noticeably lighter step and an audibly more gentle calling out to her child/slave. Or so it seemed to me.

We were left with enough skordalia to drag a whole harbor's worth of fried fish through. I was worried that, if we didn't finish the whole thing, we might offend our hostess. No matter, really. I was delighted, she was delighted and, most of all, I think, those cats were delighted when we coated what was left of that pile of fish in gobs of skordalia and threw bits into the shrubbery for them to fight over when no one was looking. Everybody was happy.

And now, I make you some.

Skordalia with Roasted Beets

Serves 2 to 4 people, 20 to 40 cats.

Since I was too lazy to trawl San Francisco Bay for small, edible fish, I did the next best thing, which was trawl the Tuesday farmer's market for small, edible beets, which are conveniently in season and-- even more conveniently-- traditionally served with skordalia.

For the skordalia:

About 1 pound of Russet potatoes, well scrubbed

1 tablespoon kosher or sea salt, plus a scant handful for the potato water

8 to 10 cloves of garlic, minced

1 cup blanched almonds, whole or slivers

1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil. Use Greek to keep in theme. Other nations' oils will do just fine, too, but the Greeks, you know, invented olive oil, just like they invented everything.

1/2 cup water (I use the water from the potato boiling pot.)

The juice of one lemon

4 to 5 tablespoons white wine vinegar

Freshly ground pepper, to taste

For the beets:

1 pound of beets, scrubbed clean and the ends trimmed. I have used chioggia and golden beets in this particular case, because they are delightful-- namely for their reluctance to stain my hands red.

About 2 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil.

A good pinch of kosher salt

A slightly less-good pinch of cinnamon

Preparation:

1. On a foil-lined baking sheet, toss beets in oil, salt, and cinnamon, making sure they are all well-coated. Place beets on the middle rack of an oven that has been pre-heated to 350 F. Roast until tender, which will depend upon the size of your beets. These took about 35 minutes.

2. While beets are roasting, place potatoes is a large pot of generously salted water and bring to a boil. Cook until tender (when a knife blade slips easily into the center of one).

3. While the beets are roasting and the potatoes boiling, combine garlic and almonds in a food processor, slowly adding 1/2 cup of olive oil as you go. Since one is not making an emulsion, one need not worry about pouring to quickly or too slowly. Just blend until a smooth consistency is achieved. Set aside.

4. Reserving 1/2 cup of the potato water, drain the potatoes. Let cool for a few moments, then rubs them free of their jackets in a clean towel. Roughly chop the potatoes and press them through a potato ricer or mash them manually. Do not, however, try to blend them in your food processor or they will get all gummy. Rice them into a large, clean bowl.

5. Add the garlic/almond mixture to the potatoes while the potatoes are still warm and combine; adding the lemon juice, potato water, salt, and vinegar as you go. Add pepper and more salt, if necessary, to taste.

Congratulations-- you now have your very own skordalia.

7. Remove beets from the oven when tender. Let stand a few minutes to cool slightly, then peel and cut to whatever size you desire them to be. Return the beets to the olive oil/salt/cinnamon-dirtied sheet pan and coat them once again in that particular goop. Add a touch more salt and cinnamon, if desired.

8. To serve, spoon a heaping tablespoon or so of skordalia onto a small plate or other serving dish, using to back of the spoon to then "frost" the plate with a layer of the stuff. Place beets (best if slightly warm, but just swell in a cooler state) over the top. Garnish if you wish, yell at a small child if one is in the vicinity, and serve.

For years I searched for the ideal fish and chips. Journeying 45 minutes away to a restaurant a friend of a friend swore by, or hanging out in a shop decorated with sticky vinyl chairs and soggy fries, I was on a mission. My hunt for the ideal fish and chips -- crispy on the outside, steaming hot and tender inside -- became increasingly elusive. Sure, I would occasionally stumble upon a place with decent and sometimes quite good platters of fish, but these were far and few between and hardly ever in the Bay Area. The sad truth is that there is more awful fish and chips out there than not.

Now I suppose I should explain that when I want fried fish I'm looking for the beer-battered variety. The type you would find in a first-rate British pub (although I've eaten bad fish and chips in the UK as well, so the problem isn't just here). I want my teeth to bite into a perfectly crunchy coating that gives way to a delicate flaky center. I want to taste the beer in the batter and I don't want my mouth to feel like an oil slick. Bread crumbs are not an option and curses on whoever tries to pawn off breaded fish with potatoes as fish and chips. Here is an example of the horrors that lie in wait.

So a few years ago -- after being served the soggiest bread-crumby fish I had ever encountered (and paying close to $15 for it) -- I decided to make my own fish and chips. I was happily surprised to find that making truly decent battered fish is both incredibly easy and straightforward. And, as is the case with all home cooking, you can control the results: want it really crispy, fry a little longer; interested in smaller pieces, cut them up; in the mood for a hearty batter, use dark beer.

Another benefit to making your own fish and chips is that you can easily batter and fry up some lemon slices to go with it. These are a heavenly way to garnish the dish and after trying them at your own fish fry, you'll never want to eat fish and chips without them again.

If you are lucky enough to live near a restaurant with wonderful fish and chips, I am happy for you. But if you're like me and you don't, I am here to tell you that you can make homemade fish and chips that will taste better than almost anything you can buy in a restaurant or pub, and cost a fraction of the price.

The recipe I use is tried and true. I've made it more times than I can count, and it has never failed me. Before you start, however, there are a few basic tenets to consider concerning frying the fish and also making and eating it.

Basic frying rules to get under your belt:

1. If you don't have a fryer (which includes most of us), use a non-reactive deep pan that can hold enough oil to submerge at least half the fish. I use my trusty large cast iron pan and it works great.
2. Use an oil with a high burn rate. I like to use canola oil. Don't use olive oil as it will scorch and flavor the fish.
3. Do not overheat your oil or it will burn the batter. I usually start the pan on medium high and slowly work my way down to medium and then medium low as the pan continues to heat the longer you fry.
4. Do not underheat your oil. Frying your fish in underheated oil leads to the batter sliding off the fish. Not a pretty sight. I'm not sure what the actual temperature of the oil should be, as I don't have a thermometer, but you can test the oil by placing a small teaspoon of batter in the oil. If it doesn't sink to the bottom of the pan and sizzles nicely, you should be good to go.
5. Use a fry screen if you have one as it will help reduce splatter and keep your stove from becoming a complete mess.
6. Be sure to gently lay the fish into the oil so you don't spatter it onto your hand (which really hurts!).
If you follow these rules, you should be in good frying shape.

General rules for making and eating fish and chips:

1. Dark beer gives the dish a more complex flavor while lighter beers are more subtle. Choose whichever you prefer.
2. Look for meaty white fish. Please don’'t use Atlantic cod as it's endangered and, according to the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch list, we're "fishing the last 10% of this population." Other great choices are Alaskan Pacific Cod and Pacific Halibut. I've also made it with catfish, which worked well.
3. Try to use fresh fish instead of thawed frozen, which tends to taste dry.
4. Pat the fish dry with a paper towel before seasoning and dipping in the batter.
5. Serve with malt vinegar, which perfectly accents the beer batter. If you don't have any, try fresh lemon juice.
6. Consider making your own tartar sauce by mixing good mayonnaise, chopped up sweet pickles, and a little horseradish.

As for the chips, I bake them. Yes... you heard me. I bake them. They come out crispy and seasoned perfectly. Best of all, my potatoes are not reduced to the sad fate of sogginess which often happens with home fried fries. Here's my recipe.

Homemade Beer Battered Fish

Serves: 4 people

Ingredients:

6 - 8 medium-sized pieces of white fish
1 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup beer
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
Enough oil to fill half a large non-reactive pan (about 1 cup)

Preparation:

1. Pat fish dry and lay on a plate. Season with salt and pepper.
2. Heat oil in pan.
3. While oil is heating, mix flour, beer, salt, pepper and thyme in a large bowl. Whisk until everything is fully incorporated. The mixture should reach the consistency of pancake batter. Add more beer if necessary.
4. When oil is hot (test using method #4 in the frying rules section above), coat two pieces of fish in batter and then gently lie them in the oil. Be sure to fully coat the fish and be careful not to splash oil on yourself.
5. Cook fish until it is crispy and a rich brown color. Pick up each piece of fish with a fork and gently turn them over. Cook on the other side until done.
6. Drain fish on a plate lined with paper towels and fry the remaining fish pieces.
7. Serve hot with malt vinegar and battered lemon slices (recipe below).

Beer Battered Lemon Slices

Makes: 6 slices

Ingredients:

1 lemon cut into 1/4-inch slices (not including the ends)
Leftover batter and oil from your beer battered fish

Preparation:

1. Remove seeds from lemon slices.
2. Coat slices with batter.
3. Lay lemon slices in the hot cooking oil and brown on each side.
4. Remove from pan and serve with fish.

Poggio: dining al fresco

The last rays of sun warmed my shoulders as I drank in the waterfront views, sailboats bobbing happily beneath a hillside of pretty pastel homes, and made my way to a charming trattoria spilling out onto the sidewalk. A leisurely seafood supper awaited me, complete with crisp white wine, homemade pasta, and hospitality as warm as the balmy breezes floating in from the wide-flung doors. Was I in Capri? Positano? Close. Sausalito.

Located below Sausalito's landmark Casa Madrona, Italian trattoria Poggio seems like the perfect place to milk the remnants of an Indian summer.

Marinated Monterey Sardines with soft cooked egg, pancetta and lovage (an herb with a flavor similar to celery)

I was invited to do just that at last week's Festa del Pesce, a celebration of local seafood during the last days of summer. On the menu was a selection of mostly local and sustainable fish served raw, cured, marinated, oak grilled, wood fire roasted and fried.

Fritto of local Surf Smelt with lemon aioli (aka "Fries with Eyes")

I appreciate the tip of the hat that Poggio gives to each season. For example, coming up in November (11/10-11/15) will be their annual Festa del Tartuffo, celebrating the white truffle harvest (yes, Chef Peter McNee travels to Italy to hunt for truffles himself; and yes, this is one party not to miss). The Bollito Misto Festa takes its turn in the early winter with an abundance of simmered meats and sauces served tableside. The Spiedo Misto della Pasqua celebrates the arrival of spring and highlights meats cooked on the spit. And then before you know it, it will be time for seafood and long summer nights again.

Speaking of which, the pesce at hand.

The evening's special menu consisted of five Crudo (raw/marinated/cured) and five Cotto (grilled/braised/fried) seafood antipasti, along with two whole-fish preparations -- oak grilled Branzino with cherry tomato confit and broccoli rabe; Snapper baked in sea salt, with lemon, arugula and young green beans -- and a Risotto ai Frutti di Mare with scallop, shrimp, mussels, clams, saffron and tomato.

Stuffed Monterey Calamari braised in its own ink with local butter beans

For me, the most special dish was the stuffed Monterey Calamari braised in its own ink. The flavor was so unique -- rich and earthy (in a sea-faring kind of way). There was something...visceral about eating this dish. But, don't disturb yourself by getting too psychoanalytic here. Just dig in and enjoy the utter deliciousness.

Also of note was the wood-grilled local Swordfish Spiedini (skewers) served over slightly charred, tender radicchio. The swordfish was screamingly fresh, tender, almost buttery, and the accompanying bagna cauda was perfectly garlicky and anchovy-y.

Cozze al cartoccio mussels cooked in paper with white wine, tomato and chili

The Mussels cooked in paper were like a magic trick, as the translucent package was cut open tableside. Inside, we were rewarded with succulent gem-like mussels, sweet as could be.

Bruschetta with pickled Monterey Anchovies, avocado and heirloom tomato gazpacho

On the crudo end, Chef Peter did a phenomenal job highlighting two very under-appreciated fish: sardines and anchovies. Our table decided the poor things just needed some good PR, because oooh they are tasty! Anyone have a new sexy name we can instate?

Spaghetti alla Carbonara, made with house-made guanciale, egg, pecorino romano, and pepper

We veered off our pescetarian diet to indulge in some of the prized house-made guanciale (cured pork cheeks). The perfect vehicle to highlight that deeply porcine flavor? Spaghetti alla Carbonara, naturally. Not for the faint of heart, this dish is a serious calorie bomb. It left a little too much lard flavor and mouthfeel for my taste, but I could appreciate the craftsmanship that went into making it. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much the aroma reminded me of Chinese lap cheung (cured sausage) when the dish was set in front of me.

Prosecco Moscato, Carpene Malvolti

Just the thing to refresh my taste buds before dessert, a sparkling glass of this delightful Prosecco Moscato from Carpene Malvolti. Our sommelier was jazzed about sharing this beauty, and at the first sip, I understood why. A perfect harmony is struck here between the light fruitiness of the Prosecco and the flowery notes of the Moscato. Flavors of apricot and orange blossom danced in my mouth as I savored each bubble.

Lemon Mousse topped with Meringues and Pistachios

You'd think we'd be stuffed to the brim after such a feast, but there is always room for dessert. This Lemon Mousse was just what I wanted after this big meal, with its citrus punch and light-as-air texture. And the homemade meringues and toasted pistachios on top were the perfect touch. I love the flavor combination of lemon and pistachios. It is pure Italian sunshine to me.

Lucky us, Chef Peter McNee was kind enough to share his recipe! Perfect for dinner parties too because you can make all the components ahead of time. Buon appetito!

Lemon Mousse with Meringues and Pistachios
Recipe courtesy of Peter McNee, Executive Chef of Poggio

Serves: 4

Lemon Curd
7 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
Zest of 1-2 lemons
3 oz. fresh squeezed lemon juice
1 oz. lime juice
3 eggs
2 egg yolks
5 tablespoons butter

Combine all the ingredients, except the butter, in a mixing bowl. Place over a pot of boiling water (making sure the bottom of the bowl doesn’t touch the water) and whisk until curd sets up thick. Whip constantly so that your eggs don't curdle. Remove from heat.

Add butter, continue mixing. Pass through a fine mesh strainer or sieve. Pour into a container, placing a sheet of plastic wrap over the curd to prevent a skin from forming. Chill overnight. The lemon curd will stay fresh refrigerated for up to 5 days.

Meringue
1/4 cup egg whites
1/4 cup granulated white sugar
1/4 cup powdered sugar
1/4 teaspoon cream of tartar

Preheat oven to 100 degrees F. Whip egg whites with a mixer. Before soft peaks form, add the sugar and cream of tartar. Continue to whip until stiff peaks form. Using a pastry bag, pipe the meringue into .5 inch diameter lines, onto a wax paper-lined cookie sheet. Bake the meringues for 3 hours, or until they are crispy and without any color.

Can be made a few days ahead of time, but must be wrapped airtight once cooled to prevent them from being soggy.

Lemon Mousse (assembly)
Chilled lemon curd
1 cup whipping cream
1/4 cup pistachios
4 serving glasses, approximately 6 oz each

Lightly toast and chop pistachios. Whip cream to stiff peaks. Combine the lemon curd and whipped cream, folding the two together until homogeneous. Place one half tablespoon of pistachios into each of the glasses. Using a star tipped pastry bag, pipe the lemon mousse into each of the glasses. At this point the mousse may be refrigerated up to 3 days once covered. Before serving, garnish each with the remaining pistachios and broken pieces of crispy meringue.

Poggio Trattoria
777 Bridgeway
Sausalito, CA 94965
Map
(415) 332-7771

Being a writer, I've worked a lot of retail over the years. I've sold flown-from-Switzerland chocolates to San Francisco socialites who spent more on three boxes of truffles than I made in a week. I've peddled Pez and Camel Lights from a tray slung around my neck, squeezed ladies (and gents) into latex dresses and leather corsets, frothed lattes for bond traders, boxed up cookies and talked tourists into overpriced art on Union Square.

In my personal life, I'm not a shopper, but I can see what people get out of good service, besides just new shoes and credit-card debt. You tell a dumpy guy with a thing for latex that he looks great in that $500 catsuit and you mean it, because he's so happy wearing it that just for that moment, he's Jon Hamm. You know you've made his day, along with a little bit of commission.

But what I realized last Sunday is how much more fun it is when you can just give the stuff away. Especially when the goods in question are beautiful organic fruits and vegetables, things everyone needs: yellow tomatoes and Japanese eggplants, kale and collards, curvy neon-bright summer squash, sticky green figs and late-season peaches.

Set up every Sunday from 1-3pm at the Parque Niños Unidos at 23rd and Treat Streets in the Mission, the Free Farm Stand is a joyful place. Anyone can come, and all different people do: determined grandmothers and families pushing strollers, clusters of groovy, effusively grateful British girls in tiny halter tops and oversized sunglasses, eco-hipster Mission couples in vintage dresses and ironic t-shirts, gray hair and glasses meeting bedhead and glasses.

By 2 o'clock, a steady stream of people has been flowing past the table for an hour. Jeremy, a frequent volunteer, starts tootling away on a wooden flute. Inspired by the giveaway, a man named Steve has set up a agua fresca stand nearby, quenching the sunny Sunday afternoon thirsts with free glasses of melony coolness. There's a separate table stacked with loaves of bread donated by Acme Bread, another full of free thumb-sized lettuce plants for home gardeners.

Only one guy grumbles about the line not moving fast enough for his taste. No one can take him seriously, though; it's a sunny Sunday in the park and the tomatoes are free. If you can't chill out here, you're way too tense, man.

It's set up like any farmers' market stand: a white tent overhead for shade, colorful tablecloths stacked with bowls and baskets overflowing with vegetables, herbs, and fruit. Volunteers pull out more tomatoes, more artichokes from boxes stacked beneath the tables, answer questions and offer recipes. There are plastic and paper bags on hand, but never enough; smart shoppers bring not only their own totes but their own recycled plastic bags for separating out the basil from the peppers, or the bean sprouts from the squashy figs.

One table is stocked with farmers' market giveaways, donated produce left over at the end of the day from Ferry Plaza and other top-notch Saturday markets. I recognize bundles of herbs from Marin Roots Farm, fat red tomatoes from Phil Foster's 200-acre organic ranch in Hollister, perfect-looking Brussels sprouts and box after box of red Russian kale and yellow-flowering Chinese broccoli.

Another table is the super-local table, filled with urban produce grown or gleaned all around the city, shared from backyards, parks, and community gardens. Regulars show up with baggies of lemon verbena, boxes of apples, bags of zucchini and butternut squash.

This is how the Free Farm Stand started, when Tree, a community gardener and longtime social-justice activist who works at the St Martin de Porres soup kitchen, decided that his gardens' extra communal produce shouldn't go to waste.

The goal was to make locally grown, organic produce available to all, especially those with low incomes or limited budgets, creating garden-to-table food security right on the street. With this in mind, Tree set up a card table inside the Treat Commons garden at 23rd and Treat Sts in April of last year, offering a little bit of whatever was growing around the Mission and Potrero Hill.

Slowly, word of mouth (and blog) spread about this sweet neighborhood thing happening on Sunday afternoons. Other gardeners started sharing their bounty. Tree formed connections with growers selling at local farmers markets and began picking up their extras after the markets ended. The farmstand moved out in front of the garden, into the park, and turned into two tables, then three, with a line that could stretch out of the park and down the block when the harvest was in full swing and there were sweet treats like peaches and figs on offer.

But the crowds don't come just for the free lettuce, or even the free tomatoes. Everyone has a question:

What are these? Baby artichokes--clip off the pointy leaf tips and steam or boil them whole.

Is this salad mix? No, it's braising mix, a little too tough for eating raw, better for sauteing.

Is this cilantro? No, smell it, it's parsley; cilantro's over there.

What is this? This is red mustard, very good for you, strong-tasting and good sauteed, stir-fried or put in soup.

Can I eat the leaves? Yes, beet greens are delicious, cook them like spinach. You can cook radish greens too, if they're green and not yellowed or wilted. And this is curly kale, this is lacinato kale, what the Italians call cavalo nero and what American supermarkets call dino kale, because it's so bumpy and puckered, see, like dinosaur skin, and these are collards, this is chard. They're all in the brassica family along with cauliflower and broccoli, what used to be called the crucifers because of their cross-shaped stems.

OK, so maybe I get a little carried away giving out information. But I'm not the only one. Gloria, who works at a detox center in the city, is sharing her recipe for roasted kale (rub with olive oil, salt and pepper, bake at 375F for 20 minutes, better than potato chips, leave them in the turned-off oven under the pilot light for a day if you want them really crispy). Lisa's got a new favorite salad, radishes dressed with mustard, olive oil, fresh ginger, a little sucanat, garlic, salt and pepper, orange juice and chopped parsley. People are chatting with tote bags full of leeks and beets over their arms, eating burritos on the grass, talking compost and chayote squash in the garden while their kids splash the strawberries with a hose.

That it's all free seems to bring out the best in the crowd. No one grabs, no one hoards. Take what you can use or share, we say from behind the tables, and people carefully separate out a few sprigs of cilantro if that's all they want, pour half a box of cherry tomatoes into their bags and replace the rest. The feeling is one of abundance shared, not charity bestowed. Everyone takes home a slightly different mix, an urban stone soup cooked up by a community of growers from the Bay Area and beyond.

By 3 o'clock, the boxes are flattened and Christina, a regular volunteer, is sweeping up crumpled leaves and squashed tomatoes with a broom. The day's bounty has been reduced to some mixed greens and a few bundles of thyme and oregano. The baskets are stacked, the tent pulled down. We share chunks of homemade apple cake baked by Clara, another volunteer who gardens nearby.

I pick up my own box of veggies, thank Tree and head home over the hill, slurping a cold watermelon agua fresca from La Taqueria on the way. I've promised a friend in Oakland that I'll hang out with her two young boys today. The figs and tomatoes will come with me, I decide. There's always enough to share.

This swine diagram in the Oliveto back office pretty much sums it up.

Next to his desk in the Oliveto back office, Chef Paul Canales has taped a diagram that captures the restaurant's reverence for pork.

The diagram shows a hog divided into sections, such as the shoulder and the leg. All of these sections are labeled "Good," except for the belly. It is labeled "Real Good."

Pork is a constant at Oliveto. The menu revolves around it. On any given day, prep chefs can be seen breaking down a hog into various cuts -- shoulder, loin, leg -- and then processing them into porchetta, pancetta, scallopine, sausage or salumi.

For an uninitiated guest to the kitchen, it can be startling to see a pig's head simmering in a stock pot or a chef hefting a hand saw on one half of a 200-pound carcass.

Oliveto Chef Paul Canales seasons pork cutlets while Sous Chef Kelsey Bergstrom cuts into a pork leg with a hand saw.

Yet if you want restaurants to be respectful of the meat they serve, extracting every ounce of flavor and using all parts of the animal, then these scenes shouldn't shock you. Many chefs run a far tidier kitchen by relying on industrial meat processors to do their butchery, delivering meat cuts that are shrink-wrapped and ready to cook.

Oliveto's experiments with whole-hog cookery started more than a decade ago, when the restaurant, under owner Bob Klein and former Executive Chef Paul Bertolli, developed a relationship with Paul Willis and Bill Niman, founders of the Niman Ranch meat company.

Willis, a hog farmer from Iowa, met Niman in the mid-1990s, as industrial hog farming was transforming the landscape of the Midwest and North Carolina. Farmers such as Willis were trying to stay in business by marketing the quality and benefits of the pork that was raised without hormones and antibiotics, with the pigs allowed to range freely. That led to a partnership with Niman and the birth of Niman Ranch.

Paul Watson, seen left, heads a network of 500 small farmers who supply pork to Niman Ranch.

Today, Willis supervises a network of 500 farmers who produce pork for more than 1,200 restaurants, ranging from chains such as Chipotle Mexican Grill to high-end restaurants such as Oliveto. His success has inspired many other farmers, including some here in California, to grow their own pigs and market them directly to restaurants.

Every Tuesday at Oliveto, a truck pulls up in the garage of the building, delivering a split carcass pig, usually from Willis. For the last several months it has been my job, along with Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito, to heft and these split carcasses (100 pounds) into the basement meat locker.

Hanging meat from hooks can be dangerous, as former Oliveto Sous Chef Curtis Di Fede demonstrates.

This can be a dangerous job. Pigs are slippery and tricky to hoist. Usually Tigre would lift from the bottom, using a small meat hook to grab hold of the carcass. My job was to grab the hind leg, attach a meat hook to the trotter, and hang the hooked carcass on the meat locker rod while Tigre hefted it from the bottom.

The first time we attempted this together, I inadvertently left my pinkie finger in between the hook and rod. My finger was nearly crushed as the full weight of the carcass came down on the rod. Luckily, I pulled my pinkie out at the last split second.

Once the pigs are in the locker, the chefs assemble a game plan for breaking them down and preparing dishes. That plan changes weekly, depending on the whims of the chefs and what dishes they haven't recently prepared.

"Technically, you want to use the loins and legs first, since those are most subject to spoilage," says Canales, who replaced Bertolli as executive chef in 2004. "The shoulders will last the longest."

Why do the shoulders last longer? As Canales notes, shoulders and other heavily used muscles tend to have high levels of myoglobin, a protein that causes the red color in meat. Birds such as ducks and pigeons have high levels of myoglobin, because they fly such long distances. As a result, ducks and pigeons resist spoilage in a refrigerator longer than chickens do.

After a hog is delivered, Tigre tends to get the assignment of breaking down the hog into its component pieces. He also can be regularly seen trimming up the loin for one of the restaurant's prized dishes, the spit-roasted porchetta.

Oliveto butcher Pablo "Tigre" Mendoza Gavito prepares sausage in the back kitchen.

Porchetta is pork rolled with spices and salt into a log and then set on a rotisserie. As it roasts over hot coals, the fat renders out of the meat and keeps it juicy and savory. Slices of this log are then served with an accompaniment, such as a diavolo sauce made with chili peppers.

By contrast, Oliveto generally takes cuts from the leg and turns them into scallopine or salami. Scraps from the leg are ground in a meat grinder and used in a ragu, a pasta sauce. The shoulders, meanwhile, are generally reserved for sausage.

As you can imagine, all this cutting and trimming results in numerous scraps that some butchers might be tempted to throw away. At Oliveto, all these scraps are further trimmed to separate meat from fat. The meat pieces are cooked down into sugo, a heavily reduced pork stock, similar to a demi-glace. The rest might be used for a ciccioli, an intensely rich concoction that is made by cooking down fatty pieces of pork, compressing them and drying them.

Outside of the pigs it breaks down, Oliveto also receives special orders of pork, particularly pork bellies for pancetta. These bellies arrive every other week from Heritage Foods USA, which originated as the online marketing arm for the Slow Food movement. Now a private company, it sells meat from small farmers who are raising and preserving heritage breeds of pigs, turkeys and other animals.

"I try to support them, because they are trying to do the right thing, by these animal and the small farmers," says Canales. "These guys have no outlet. Either they find a niche market, or they get forced out by Tyson or the big outfits."

The author trims fat off of a pork belly for pancetta.

While apprenticing at Oliveto, I had a privilege to trim and cure pancetta a few times. It is not terribly hard, as Michael Ruhlman demonstrates in this post. The slabs of pork are seasoned with salt, curing salt and peppercorns, and then hung in cold storage for a week or so.

By the time it is dried, thin sliced and then served, it is belly, belly good. (Sorry, I couldn't resist.)

For Oliveto, the true test of its pork obsession comes in February, with the annual Whole Hog dinners. The menu offers nearly every part of the animal, from the brains down to the trotters. Last year's menu(pdf) featured a wild boar scaloppine alla Milanese, a spaghetti with pork cracklings and a spit-roasted pork belly with Sicilian chestnut honey.

A basic summer dish at Oliveto - cured coppa and melon.

Preparations for these dinners are an all-year affair, since some types of meats - such as prosciutto and coppa - take many months to cure and dry.

I missed this year's Whole Hog Dinner, but plan to be there in February. After six months of trimming, slicing, browning, simmering and curing pork, I feel a closer connection to this noble animal, along with an awareness of how much more there is to learn.

Stuart Leavenworth has concluded his apprenticeship at Oliveto, and this is his final post for Bay Area Bites. On Monday, he starts a new job as The Sacramento Bee's editorial page editor. You can contact him at sleavenworth@sacbee.com.

Honestly, does anyone really like honeycake? I mean the old-fashioned kind, brown and frumpy, made with honey and coffee and served in damp slices after the roast chicken and brisket, or with tea and paper cups of Manischevitz after Rosh Hashanah services? It's traditional, sure. Honey is, after all, as important on the table for the Jewish new year as hoppin' john and greens are on New Year's Day down south, one promising sweetness, the other prosperity. Every newspaper food section trots out a recipe at this time of year, all promising moistness! nostalgia! as good as Bubbe's!

And yet I've never met anyone who really likes it. I love honey enough to have written a whole book about it, but even the recipe in my own book didn't thrill me. It wasn't until I started my own tradition of Rosh Hashanah dinners that I realized, with great liberation, that as an adult with her own kitchen I never had to serve, or eat, honey cake again. Instead, good honey would be enjoyed as a appetizer at my table, slathered on homemade challah or scooped up with slices of apple.

But still, it seemed necessary to end the meal with something sweet and spicy, with the festivity that only cake can provide. Not chocolate, not cheesecake (that's for Shavuot, when dairy foods are mandated). Something autumnal with apples would be nice, or pears, even poached quinces. For the cake itself, well, what could be better than gingerbread? Now that's something that everybody likes, and rarely gets anymore, muscled out of the homemade-dessert pantheon by the hegemony of brownies and oatmeal cookies. For a dark, strong gingerbread, use molasses; for a lighter one, use a full-flavored dark honey or cane or sorghum syrup.

The idea for turning the gingerbread upside-down over a caramelly topping of brown-sugared apples came from a wonderful cooking class up at The Apple Farm in Philo, halfway to Mendocino in the Anderson Valley. A nicer way to spend a weekend, especially in the fall when all their organic apples are ripe and ready for picking, I can't imagine, and I still use many of the recipes that Sally Schmidt taught us over those 3 days. I've tinkered with the original recipe since then, but the concept is hers, and I never make it without thinking of walking through the orchards or watching the ducks pick their splay-footed way through the herb garden. Sweet abundance, rich harvest: what better to invoke at the beginning of a new year? L'shanah Tovah!

(Better than Honeycake) Upside Down Apple Gingerbread

Using a one-two-three punch of ginger gives this cake complexity and depth. But it will still be delicious with just the powdered spices, as long as your spices are fresh and flavorful. If the same jars have been sitting over the stove since last Rosh Hashanah, chuck them. Or even better, empty the jars, wash them out, and refill them with bulk spices from Rainbow Grocery or Bombay Bazaar. Store them in a cool, dry, dark place, like a pantry or kitchen drawer.

Topping
2 tbsp butter
1/4 cup brown sugar, packed
2-3 apples or pears, peeled, cored, and sliced

Cake
1/2 cup boiling water
1 tsp. baking soda
1 1/4 cup flour
1 tsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp freshly ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. baking powder
4 tbsp butter
1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
1/3 cup molasses or dark, full-flavored honey, such as buckwheat
2 tsp grated fresh ginger (optional)
1 tbsp chopped candied ginger (optional)
1 egg, lightly beaten

1. Preheat oven to 350F. Grease a 9” cake pan or 8 x 8 baking dish. In a small saucepan over low heat, melt butter and brown sugar together, stirring until smooth and gooey. Pour into greased pan. Arrange apple slices in concentric rings over sugar mixture, squeezing them together closely since they will shrink during baking. Set aside.

2. In a small bowl, combine boiling water and baking soda; set aside. Sift or whisk together dry ingredients; set aside.

3. In a large bowl, cream butter until soft. Add brown sugar and beat until fluffy. Beat in molasses and fresh and candied ginger, if using. Beat in egg. Gently fold in flour mixture. Stir in baking soda and water.

4. Pour batter over apple slices in prepared pan. Bake 25-30 minutes, until toothpick inserted into center comes out clean.

5. Let cool on wire rack for 10-15 minutes, then run a knife along the sides to loosen. Invert on a large plate. (It’s a good idea to invert it while still warm, otherwise the caramel hardens and it can be hard to get out of the pan). Serve with whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.