The fig tree in my neighbor's yard--the one with lots of branches hanging temptingly over the sidewalk--is just starting to ripen its fall crop. According to California law, fruit growing in public space (hanging on a branch over a city sidewalk, for example) is public fruit, and free for the taking, as long as the picker leaves what's on the other side of the fence (or property line) alone. Going out to get yogurt and a newspaper on a Saturday morning, I'd arrive home with a foraged breakfast centerpiece of ripe sweet figs.

But clearly, I've barely cracked the spine on Foraging for Dummies. At least compared to Seattlite Langdon Cook, author of Fat of the Land: Adventures of a 21st Century Forager for whom a daily forage might involve digging for razor clams at dusk in December, or setting up a spotlight for late-night squid jigging in January. Spearfishing for lingcod within the city limits, hand-grabbing Dungeness crab out of the Sound, dodging homeless guys to harvest choice young dandelion greens near the I-5 on-ramp. . . if you sum it up like that, Cook sounds like a pretty wild and crazy guy.

Except that he's almost always eclipsed in his own narrative by the buddies who show him the ropes. With nicknames like Trouthead and Warpo, these dudes are guy's guys, passionate, risk-loving, obsessive hunter-gatherers who let Cook tag along as they head into their element: to the bank of the Columbia at dawn for shad, into a beat-up canoe on the Hood Canal for shrimp, tramping a burnt-out section of the Okanogan National Forest for morels.

Cook walks the walk, and dives the dive, but hard as he tries, he never quite transcends. Throughout, he remains a game but nerdy writer, less on the hunt for shrimp and sturgeon (the toothy, prehistoric-looking fish that Cook's friend Beedle describes admiringly as "one tough hombre") than for a certain manly authenticity that remains always a little out of his reach, no matter how many times he grabs for his pen to scribble down a colorful phrase.

"What can be said about this river that hasn't already been said?" he notes from the banks of the surging Columbia River, looking up at the power lines swooping overhead. "I try to put myself in a dugout canoe circa 1805, but the wires keep getting in the way."

The book is organized in a way familiar to readers of Mark Kurlansky or Michael Pollan: first an action narrative, then a loop through biology and ecology, a dash through the stinging nettles of climate change and ever-encroaching environmental destruction, a quick end run through socio-cultural history, then a wind-up of the narrative and a triumphant meal and recipe.

The reader tags along after Cook, skimming along through his magazine-ready adventures (it's no surprise to find out that he writes frequently for publications like Outside and The Stranger), learning some nifty stuff about, say, the fruiting cycles of the morel mushroom, or why hunting for Dungeness crabs during their mating season is like shooting fish in a barrel. But, just like those lurking lingcod, the truly captivating stories stay in the shadows.

What does fishing mean for the Asian grandmothers who come down night after night to fish for squid off the municipal pier where Cook shows up one evening, nervous of his status as Anglo newbie amid the bantering regulars from Cambodia and Nicaragua? Or the morel-hunting locals on the edges of a remote mountain town who saw their forest go up in smoke around them during a recent wildfire? Cook can't quite shake the knowledge that what's fun (or at least fodder for a book contract) for him is necessity for others, and neither can the reader.

Still, it's an intriguing read, and a way to take a fresh look at the edible abundance available for the (slightly stealthy) taking even in the heart of a sprawling American city.

And if you're not quite ready to free-dive for abalone yet, you can join interdisciplinary artist Julie Kahn (currently working at the Headlands Center for the Arts) for a feast of wild game and foraged foods in Marin on November 15th. It's a benefit for Swamp Cabbage, which Kahn and her fellow filmmaker Hayley Downs call a "dark and sweaty" documentary in progress tracing their personal connections to the fast-disappearing backwoods traditions of rural Florida. The multi-course menu includes chicharrones from Ryan Farr's 4505 Meats, swamp cabbage pickles, gator bites, locally hunted wild boar from Mendocino, local abalone, acorn bread, truly wild mushroom pizza, persimmon gelato foraged and made by Liana and Michael Orlandi of Mill Valley's Gelateria Ceci, and more.

I'll be baking foraged fruit turnovers for the spread, too--which means I better get up early and start stalking those succulent figs around the corner.

This is a tale of three girls: an early girl, a dirty girl and a lazy girl. The early girl definitely did not get the worm. She is a luscious ripe tomato with the perfect balance of sweetness and acidity. The dirty girl is often hot and has her own natural beauty...she's Dirty Girl Produce, an organic farm located near Santa Cruz and the grower of those beautiful tomatoes. And the lazy girl? Well, that would be me, but that's a longer story...

Now I'm a girl who loves home-canned foods. Bell jars that have been meticulously sterilized and then lovingly filled with someone's recipe for apricot jam, apple butter, and raspberry jelly make my heart go pitter pat. When someone shows up at my house with a gift of handmade preserves, my esteem for them grows and like the Grinch, my heart grows 10 sizes, bursting with appreciation for their efforts.

I have also been known to do some canning of my own. For years, an old and decrepit apricot tree sat in my backyard, looking scragglier by the year, but producing the sweetest apricots with just a hint of tartness. By far the best apricots I've ever eaten that produced the best jam I've ever made. Thick and sweet, it lay perfectly on freshly toasted challah or in a tart pan. We had so many apricots I made two to three dozen jars of jam each year in addition to making numerous tarts and simply eating tons fresh. We gave away apricot jam at Christmas to family members and neighbors and then had more to keep for ourselves. But then about three years ago, spring arrived and hardly any buds bloomed and the branches lay half naked in summer. We got 5 apricots that year. The next year, the craggy limbs lay bare -- our apricot tree was dead. I've since searched for apricots worthy of canning, but haven't yet found them.

But our apple tree survives, albeit in an even craggier state than the apricot tree seemed to have ever been. Poor tree has fire blight and although I keep saying I need to cut it down, I can't bring myself to actually do it (or, rather, ask my husband to do it). So this year, I am grateful to still have my usual bags of apples ready to be turned into apple butter, waiting in the basement.

What does any of this have to do with the lazy girl? Everything. After years of canning apricots and apples, I'm tired: tired of peeling, tired of sticking produce in a food mill, tired of hot water baths, and tired of sterilizing jars. I love the results, but not the work. So when I bought a 20 lb box of Early Girl tomatoes from Dirty Girl Produce this last weekend, I knew I couldn't bear to can them when I would just have to break out the canning equipment next weekend all over again to turn those apples into apple butter.

So what do you do with 20 lbs of tomatoes and a can-not attitude? What do you do when you have no desire to stand over a boiling pot of tomatoes in 90 degree weather? You roast and freeze. That's right. I let my oven do most of the work and then after that, I'm letting my freezer do the rest.

The roasting idea came from an amazing plate of roasted tomato risotto Kim Laidlaw recently made for me (from her own box of Dirty Girl Produce Early Girl tomatoes). Roasting had given the tomatoes a caramelized intense sweetness that I wanted to replicate. So, after seeding and then roasting most of my tomato haul with some olive oil and freshly minced oregano, the tomatoes were concentrated down into their essence. Each tomato was bursting with a deep summer tomato flavor and the kitchen was filled with a sweet heady aroma. I added in the cooked juices from the seeds and stirred to create a deep red sauce. After it cooled, I ladled equal amounts into Ziplock bags and then set the lot in the freezer. The perfume of summer and sunshine now stored and ready to be used in sauces and stews this winter, accomplished without me burning myself on a hot jar or pressing even one tin lid.

Next week, I'll can; but this week, I'm happy to be lazy.

How to make frozen roasted tomato preserves
1. Wash and dry your tomatoes.
2. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees if using a convection oven and 400 degrees if not.
3. Set up a work area with the following:

• Your washed and cleaned tomatoes
• Pans lined with aluminum foil that have been greased on the top side with olive oil
• A fine-mesh colander set atop a large bowl
• A cutting board
• A knife

4. Remove any blemishes or bruises from the tomatoes and then cut each one in half.

5. Gently squeeze the tomato halves into the colander so the seeds fall inside.
6. Set the tomato halves on the lined baking sheets, cut side up.
7. Sprinkle extra virgin olive oil, kosher or sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and freshly minced or dried oregano or basil onto your tomatoes.
8. Bake for 50 minutes if using a convection oven or 1 hour if not (or until the tomatoes are cooked through, being careful not to burn them).
9. When the tomatoes have only ten minutes to go, place the juice from the bowl into a pot and slowly boil with some salt and pepper for about five minutes.
10. Remove the pans from the oven and scrape the tomatoes into a small pile using a wooden spatula and then spoon them into a large bowl.

11. Add in the cooked tomato juices and stir.
12. Let cool until room temperature and then ladle into quart-sized freezer bags that have been labeled with the date and contents.

13. Set bags in the freezer until ready to use.

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.

If there is one fruit that stands out in my mind as the poster child for late summer, it is the tomato. It bursts upon the scene in July, crowding farmers markets and restaurant menus.

With the possible exception of my sister, people I know can't seem to get enough of tomatoes. We slice them, dice them, pickle them, stew them, can them, stuff them, and do just about everything decent and indecent one can think of to them. The Spanish are so overwhelmed by them that the strip down and throw them at each other in what is possibly the largest single-item, annual food fight in the world.

Then suddenly, like all good things, their season comes to an end. The Spaniards clean up their mess, the marketeers start pimping other fruit like persimmons (which, to the extremely myopic, might look like anemic tomatoes), the rest of us move on to the next ripe thing that catches our eye, and summer just goes away.

For most people, anyhow.

I seem to know a lot of folks who are doing their damnedest to bottle up enough summer to warm themselves and their loved ones in the upcoming colder months. For example, the gentlemen over at Hedonia recently processed 200 pounds of tomatoes and have offered their services to help friends do the same. And there are others. Thanks to the connective powers of Facebook, I was recently re-acquainted with a fellow named Kevin West, who is not only saving his tomatoes, but seemingly anything and everything that can be pickled, jammed, or otherwise preserved in a burst of worker ant hyper-activity.

After reading West's blog, I had to admit to myself that preserves and other "put-up" items are an enormous weakness of mine, in terms of both affection and, sadly, experience. Why have I never preserved anything beyond cherries for my winter Manhattans? I decided I must do something about both my inexperience and my bad habit of playing Aesop's grasshopper, while my worker ant friends toiled away with an eye toward winter. I decided to stop fiddling around and roll up my sleeves.

I gave my début into the society of preservationists some thought. I was going to bottle up my own bit of summer as brightly as a child collecting fireflies in a Mason jar. Noting that I owned a few empty Mason jars, but that fireflies are rather difficult to come by in San Francisco, I opted for tomatoes instead. Yes, I would create something that I thought best captured the essence of the tomato's warm, summer ripeness.

Ketchup.

Why I chose ketchup is rather hard to say. I may have thought a lot about it, but I never said that my thinking wasn't fundamentally flawed.

While discussing this condiment that the Reagan administration legally defined as a vegetable with my friend Jay, I was wondering aloud about how it was made. "Well, Mikey, ketchup doesn't just happen, you know," implying that somebody has to make it. I decided to become that somebody who happens to make ketchup.

I bought the loveliest tomatoes I could find and waited for them to ripen. I pored over dozens of ketchup recipes, selectively hybridizing them the way growers create new strains of corn or pumpkins. I even added my own, secret touches to add depth. I would start small and see what became of my creation.

Three pounds of beautiful tomatoes, ripe and bursting with juice, sat on my cutting board. I saluted them and told them how lucky they were to be giving their lives for such a time-honored experiment in preservation before hacking them to pieces and throwing them into my dutch oven.

I added the shallots, the vinegar, and the spices neatly tied up in cheese cloth. I let them all stew, stirred them with care, puréed them, and sieved the sauce according to direction. Everything was perfect. I reduced it and then I reduced it some more. I added sugar and salt.

I took a bit of the sauce and spooned it onto a cold plate. Not as thick as the Heinz variety, not nearly as runny as soup. It had both the color and viscosity of arterial blood, which seemed to me the perfect metaphor of essence-- a sort of tomato life force. Three pounds of gorgeous tomatoes reduced to slightly more than half a cup of sauce.

And then I tasted it.

It tasted exactly like ketchup. Of course, that's what it was supposed to taste like. It just didn't taste much like summer. More correctly, it tasted as much of summer as the yellow mustard that typically sits next to the ketchup at an outdoor barbecue. I had taken those three pounds of tomatoes and turned them into next-to-nothingness. The concentration of tomato flavor was there, but it was obscured by the twelve or so other ingredients it shared space with. It was as though someone had taken their grandmother's ashes and dumped them into a giant ashtray. You know she's there but, unless she was known as a heavy smoker, her true essence has been lost in a mix of menthols and ultra-lights.

The experiment was not a total disaster, since I actually learned how to make ketchup-- mediocre ketchup, to be sure, but ketchup, nevertheless. Spending $30.00 to make a half cup of passable ketch, however, is not exactly cost-effective. In the future, I shall stick to my beloved Muir Glen brand and let them do all the work.

This doesn't mean I'm giving up on the canning and preserving idea. Quite the opposite, in fact. If anything, I have learned that I have a lot to learn about technique, subtlety, and, above all, patience.

In the meantime I will move on to other fruits that are ripe for experiment. I'll leave tomatoes alone, save to occasionally slice one and decorate it with a drizzle of olive oil and a sprinkle of sea salt until I have had my fill of them for the season. Then, when it's colder, I will beg my more productive friends for a jar or two of their efforts to tide me over until next year. That is, if they take pity upon a poor grasshopper like me.