These days, it seems like there’s a new burger joint firing up a grill in the Bay Area every month. While there’s three restaurants I consider my personal favorites — Chop Bar‘s at the top of my list, followed by Trueburger and Victory Burger — I recently checked out some of the latest arrivals to see if there were any promising new additions to the East Bay burger scene.

Moxy Beer Garden
3136 Sacramento Street, Berkeley, CA [map]
Phone: 510.547.6699
Facebook: Moxy
Hours: Kitchen: 11:30am – 9:30pm; Bar: 11:30am – 11:30pm; Closed Mondays

Open since late April, Berkeley’s Moxy Beer Garden has transformed the old Casa Vino wine bar into a spacious venue with plenty of seating for groups in their covered outdoor patio or near the main bar.

They offer a wide selection of beers on tap from Drake’s, Black Diamond, Thirsty Bear, 21st Amendment and several other local breweries.

All of their beef is sourced from Pacific Pastures Farm in Hydesville, CA, and bears the requisite imprimatur of quality meat: free-range, 100% grass-fed, hormone and antibiotic-free. Burgers are cooked medium rare unless you ask otherwise (and it’s a nice touch when this is the default method of preparation.) “The Burger” ($9) comes with butter lettuce, ketchup, pickles and red onion on a soft bun with your choice of cheese — I opted for Tillamook cheddar — and it was excellent. Free from any extraneous garnishes and toppings, it was just a simple, juicy burger.

A small order of house-cut garlic fries ($3.50) is plenty for two people and comes with a side of chipotle aioli; these were perfectly crispy and garlicky.

Their Moroccan lamb burger ($10) with pickled red onion & feta mustard aioli was a wonderful combination of savory flavors (and the server assured us the lamb came from sustainable source as well, although I don’t recall seeing it listed on the menu.)

With great service, an appealing menu and equipped with their own private parking lot, I predict this will be a popular spot when summertime rolls around.

The Bureau 510
5800 Hollis Street #150, Emeryville, CA [map]
Phone: 510.595.1000
Facebook: TheBureau510
Hours: Mon – Fri 11am–2:30pm; 4:30pm–10:00pm; Sat 11am–10pm; Sun 11am–3pm

From the same owner of the sleek Summer Summer Thai restaurant located right across Hollis Street in Emeryville, The Bureau 510 began serving its Niman Ranch beef burgers last December. With the menu designed by chef Edward Higgins of Quattro at the Four Seasons, its eclectic dishes reflect a fusion of classic Americana and Asian flavors. There’s the Louisiana-inspired catfish fillet, “The Bayou,” ($9) with creole remoulade; the “Chips n’ Salsa,” ($9.50) with jalapeño, tortilla chips, roasted tomato salsa, cilantro, butter lettuce and nacho cheese on Acme sesame bun; and the “Tempura” ($9.50), a fried rock shrimp patty seasoned with wasabi mayo, seaweed slaw and a ‘bun’ crafted out of pressed fried rice — just to name a few of their offerings.

Their creamy Caesar salad ($7) is topped with marinated anchovies and tossed with a liberal helping of homemade croutons (I’m taking an educated guess here and believe they were made with toasted bits of Acme’s herb slab).

The “Nostalgia” burger ($7.50) is a throwback to the basic burgers of drive-in diner days. Dressed with fresh butter lettuce, tomato, grilled onion and American cheese on an Acme bun, the Nostalgia burgers arrived with a side of housemade dill pickles and a piquant apple-poppy coleslaw. Overall the burgers were good, although there was more a bit more bun than burger; it took me a few bites before I reached the meat itself.

For another $2 you can add a crispy bucket of fries to your order; it’s a generous helping that can easily accomodate 2-3 people and comes with a side of Sriracha mayonnaise. Or you can spring for the more decadent Parmesan fries for $3.50.

With its spacious, modern interior and an outdoor patio for dining in warm weather, it’s a fine spot for casual eats in Emeryville.

Grazzy Burgers
747 San Pablo Avenue, Albany, CA [map]
Phone: 510.526.2999
Facebook: GrazzyBurgers
Hours: Mon – Thurs & Sun: 11am – 10pm; Fri & Sat: 11am – 11pm

Grazzy Burgers debuted this past March and prides itself on using ingredients from Bay Area farms, including “100% grass-fed, corn-free diet, locally-sourced and pasture-raised beef” for their burgers. (You can also order bison, lamb, chicken and salmon as non-red meat options.) So while I was impressed by their earnest mission statement, the food wasn’t nearly as stellar as their intentions. The “Grazzy Classic” ($7.50) made with a 100% grass-fed beef patty, butter leaf lettuce, tomatoes, red onions, housemade pickles and aioli on an Acme bun was a tad dry — even with the addition of Swiss cheese — and not as flavorful as I’d hoped.

The Chicken Katsu Japanese-style breaded chicken breast sandwich ($8.75) was overwhelmed by its Asian slaw, roasted tomato and red onion toppings, although the chicken itself and the Thai basil aioli dressing were delicious.

The hand-cut fries ($3.50, and you can top them with garlic, herbs or parmesan for an additional charge) were tasty, but the server brought them to me well after the burgers arrived. Unfortunately, service was somewhat uneven throughout the night, but hopefully they’ve smoothed out the glitches with their waitstaff since my visit in early April.

Grazzy Burgers is still a notch above your average bar fare and is adjacent to the Albany Tap Room, which has a diverse selection of beers on tap and for sale. You can order your food directly from one of the bar’s servers while enjoying a Belgian blonde ale.

Over the past four months, I’ve developed a new appreciation for pants with stretchy elastic bands. I’ve traded in cute shoes for kitchen clogs. And, I’ve certainly given up on manicures – I’ll consider it a win if my nails are simply clean and don’t smell like onions. Or fish.

I’ve been immersed life at the San Francisco Cooking School, and fat pants and fishy hands aside, I am loving every minute of it.

SF Cooking School came into my life somewhat fortuitously. I had been invited to cover the opening of the school for a preview story and the more I learned about the school, the more I fell in love with school’s philosophy, curriculum, and culture.

A small, intimate class. Hands-on, practical learning. And access to some of the best chefs and resources San Francisco has to offer. Sign me up! I pulled the trigger and so began my adventures in cooking school. It’s impossible to distill everything I’ve learned into a few short paragraphs, but here are a few of the big takeaways:

EFFICIENCY
Perhaps one of the biggest differences between cooking for pleasure at home and cooking with a purpose in a professional setting is the pace at which you are expected and required to work. At school, we are taught from day one to work with a sense of urgency. Whether it is a matter of using the right tool for the job, organizing your mise en place, or even walking with purpose, your goal is to work fast and work smart.

BATCH MOTIONS
Along the same lines of efficiency, you’ll work quickest if you batch together similar motions. For example, if you are forming meatballs, you wouldn’t portion out and roll each meatball one at a time. Instead, you would want to portion out the entire batch, then roll out the meatballs all at once. The work will go twice as fast. Trust me, I learned the hard way. At school, we are taught to pay attention to what are “wasted motions” or wasted effort. If you find that you have to put down and pick up your knife/utensil a lot, or if you find yourself in an awkward position, stop and reevaluate your work flow. Always arrange your work in a way that lets you complete your task with minimal effort.

ON BUTCHERY
One of the most memorable lessons we had was taking down a half hog with 4505 Meats. What a treat to be able to be able to learn about butchery from one of the leading butchers in town.

It’s amazing how similar most animals are structured. If you learn the basics of breaking down a chicken, for example, you can follow the same rules of thumb for breaking down a whole hog. Use your fingers and look for joints and natural breaking points. Follow the bone when you’re trying to remove meat from bone. Let gravity work for you.

Don’t waste anything. We used every bit of that beautiful hog. We made sausage and cured salumi, we used the leaf lard for pie dough, saved the bones for stock, made chicharrones with the skin, and even fried up the ears (PSA: pig ears splatter. A lot.)

TASTE. TASTE. TASTE.
This is probably a no brainer, but of course, one of the most important things about cooking is learning how to taste your food and then having both the know-how and ability to correct it. That second part is where it can get tricky. In order to know how to correct a flavor, you need to have some understanding about how tastes work together (how does salt balance bitterness for example), and what flavors complement one another. You need to develop your library of taste memories and then be able to draw on that information when the time comes.

Within the first week of school, we had a taste workshop with Barb Stuckey. We delved into the science of taste and learned a lot — You can smell through your mouth! Butter has no taste!! (what you perceive as the taste of butter is just aroma and texture) — ultimately, this workshop set the stage for what we were all there to learn: how do you make food taste good?

Over the past few months, we worked on tasting critically and building up our taste library. As we cooked, a tasting spoon was always at the ready. We learned to taste throughout different stages of a dish, and were even blind-tested on scent recognition of spices.

GEEK OUT
At SF Cooking School, we’re taught not just how to follow a recipe, but how to understand how and why it works so that we can fix it if something doesn’t go as planned. Understanding the whys involves a bit of science. What is happening on a molecular level when a mayonnaise breaks? Why does it then make sense to add a bit of warm water to fix it? You can go down a rabbit hole of information on any given topic when it comes to food. What I’ve come away with is to never stop seeking out the “why.”

IT’S NOT ALL SUNSHINE AND RAINBOWS
As lovely and romantic as it sounds, a career in professional cooking has its hard realities. Pep talks from SF Cooking School deans Craig Stoll and Daniel Patterson were half pep, half tell-it-as-it-really-is reality checks. Life in the kitchen is serious physical work. Hours are long. Pay is…sobering. Running a restaurant is a business and being a chef is as much about managing costs as it is about creating delicious food. And, as much as we love our local, organic, responsibly grown goods here, when breaking down a case of artichokes is one of a gazillion things on your prep list for the day, you are not being paid to fondle the produce. Which is not to say there isn’t the utmost respect for the product, there is…just, fondle on your own time.

CALIFORNIA CUISINE
It may not be all sunshine and rainbows, but we still have it pretty darn great here in San Francisco, and SF Cooking School will be the first ones to celebrate that. One of the big draws to the school for me was the focus on making use of the Bay Area as a learning ground. We hit the Monterey Fish Market on a 5 a.m. field trip and learned about sustainable fishing. We went foraging with local foraging legend, Hank Shaw. We pickled and fermented everything we could get our hands on with Courtney Burns from Bar Tartine.

SF Cooking School gave us a strong foundation of classic French techniques. We learned the mother sauces. We consumed more butter and cream in four months than we probably had cumulatively in life to date. We suffered through turning vegetables that were not meant to be perfect little six-sided footballs into perfect little six-sided footballs. But, we also embraced modern California cuisine. We cooked with the season. We feasted on local fruits and vegetables, knew the name of the farmer our hog came from, and made our own sourdough bread (Lil Spence, our starter, was a fantastic class pet).

Our time in the classroom culminated with Restaurant Week, when we transformed the school into a restaurant and served friends and family a menu we developed and prepared. Here’s a peek at what we made:

Over the next two months, I’ll be continuing my education at Locanda where I’m externing! I have no doubt that I will learn a ton from Chef Anthony Strong and his talented team. I have a feeling I will get pretty good at prepping artichokes by the end of my externship. Rest assured, they will remain unmolested on the job.

For your viewing pleasure, here are a few snapshots from a day in my life at San Francisco Cooking School:

Illustrations by Lila Volkas (click on any image to view larger versions and activate slideshow)

Last summer, as my daughter Lila unpacked on her return from another year of college in Canada and a stint WWOOFING on an organic farm, she plucked from her backpack a large Ziplock bag encasing a strange, slimy, dripping pancake and held it up to my face, declaring proudly, “Look at my baby!”

I admit I recoiled with a gasp, as I managed, “What is that thing?”

“Oh, Mom, “ sighed Lila, like it was so obvious, “That’s my Kombucha SCOBY!”

Since I was uninitiated to the delights of the fermented, fizzy drink with a long history and the recent surge in popularity, Lila was eager to share her discovery from the organic farm of how easy (and cheap) it is to make your own kombucha with only water, tea and sugar. As we searched our shelves for a suitable jar and a cotton cloth, she raved about the health benefits (still in dispute) and how drinking some kombucha every day made her feel so good.

After brewing a gallon of tea, adding a cup of sugar and letting it cool completely, I watched Lila pour the sweetened tea into our largest mason jar and gently place the slippery SCOBY (Symbiotic Colony Of Bacteria and Yeast) to float on top of the liquid. She covered the mouth of the jar with a cotton dishcloth and secured with a rubber band. “Now we just have to wait for seven days.” Decanting the bubbling golden brew a week later, I sipped the earthy tang of a zingy, apple cider. Maybe I’m suggestible, but after a small glass, I felt re-energized.

A few weeks later, as Lila was packing for her job as an art instructor at a summer camp in Yosemite, she broke the news, “You’re going to have to take care of my SCOBYs while I’m gone for two months and whatever you do, don’t let them die!” As I surveyed the brood of SCOBYs (which, like rabbits, had multiplied and now occupied all of our glass pitchers) I was suddenly flooded with memories of the traumatic summer when I was nine and volunteered to feed my neighbor’s fish, while they were on vacation. One morning, to my horror, I discovered dead fishies floating atop a tank of black water. I don’t think my neighbors spoke to me again.

Luckily, Lila left me with detailed drawings and instructions and all went well during her absence. Seems my maternal instincts are still intact.

When she returned home, however, I pointed out a few worrisome threads hanging off the bottom of a SCOBY, but Lila reassured me they were a normal part of the yeast and not mold.

Last September, as Lila packed to go back to school, she offered me my own SCOBY, but I declined, because of impending trips away from home. (I know now could have set up a SCOBY hotel)

Meanwhile back at UBC in Vancouver, Lila became active in Sprouts, their volunteer-run, organic café and gave kombucha making workshops to curious Canadians, including lists of do’s and don’ts (e.g., only clean your bottles with hot water, never use soap). She had intentionally expanded her SCOBY family in the intervening months so she could give each of the 30 attendees their own baby SCOBY to take home.

While she was away at school, I missed the bubbly, revitalizing beverage and tried store-bought kombucha but nothing hit the spot like Lila’s brew.

Lila is back for the summer now and our fridge is once more full of her concoctions, this time, flavored with ginger and lemon or blueberries and chia seeds. Soon she’ll be leaving for her summer camp job and I’ll be in charge of the little rascals again. This time, I’m ready. Instead of regarding the jellyfish-like blobs with distaste, I now welcome them as a part of the family who inhabits half our pantry. And I thank my daughter for her willingness to let me mother her “kids.”

Archival photo of Alice Waters at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo courtesy of CUESA

On May 18, CUESA will be celebrating the 20th Birthday Bash of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market, with special events throughout the Saturday morning market.

For $20 a ticket ($10 for children 10 and under), market goers can create their own seasonal fruit shortcakes at stations “curated” with market ingredients prepared by four top local pastry chefs: William Werner of Craftsman & Wolves, Francis Ang of Fifth Floor, Jen Musty of Batter Bakery, and Luis Villavelazquez of Les Elements Patisserie. There will also be coffee, tea, and a juice and mimosa bar filled with fresh-squeezed juices, fresh fruit and vegetable purees (don’t miss the surprisingly refreshing fennel-frond puree), sparkling water and Champagne. The market’s founders will do a presentation at 11am.

Preview of the mimosa bar

The first regular weekly markets, held in front of the Ferry Building, happened in 1993. Do you remember 1993? I do. The scars of 1989′s 6.8 Loma Prieta quake still criss-crossed the city. A post-earthquake, post-financial crash, pre-tech boom recession meant jobs were scarce but rents were cheap. But change was coming, mostly notably along the waterfront. Since 1958, the Embaracadero Freeway had sliced across the northeastern edge of the city, throwing the piers from the Bay Bridge northwards into concrete-shadowed gloom. Ferries still left from the Ferry Building, but to get to them, you scuttled as fast as possible through the building’s dimly lit, grubby passages, no more inviting than a New York City subway tunnel. Then, in 1991, the earthquake-damaged freeway was finally removed, and the City realized it had a civic jewel–the greatly underutilized Ferry Building, suddenly revealed in all its Market Street-anchoring glory–on its hands. It would take another seven years before renovations would begin that would return the Ferry Building to a modernized, food-glorying version of its original 1898 self–but in the bare stretches of concrete out front (remember, those pretty, palm-dotted, skateboard-ready plazas are still at least a decade away), a culinary revolution was getting underway, one head of oak-leaf lettuce at a time.

Aerial view of an early Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market across from the Ferry Building. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

In 1992, a small group of San Franciscans including Sibella Kraus, then a forager and produce-finder for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse, writer, restaurant critic and Hayes Street Grill chef/owner Patricia Unterman, and local developer Tom Sargeant organized themselves into the San Francisco Public Market Collaborative, with the idea of reclaiming the waterfront for a public market that would connect farmers directly with chefs and home cooks–in fact, with any curious city eaters. After endless meetings with representatives from the City and the Port, they got grudging approval for a one-time-only open-air market in Ferry Plaza parking lot on Sept. 12, 1992. At the time, the Alemany Market, located near the freeways at the base of Bernal Heights, was the city’s only regular farmers’ market. If you were a chef, you relied on distributors and vendors from the wholesale produce market near Bayview. If you needed speciality items, you could swing through Chinatown, the Richmond, or the Mission, if you had time, but mostly, you talked to your delivery guys on the phone, and hoped they’d show up with something close to what you’d asked for.

The success of the one-day market took even the optimists of the collaborative by surprise. The group immediately began pressuring the city to give permission for a regular market, bringing farmers and urbanites together on a weekly basis. By 1993, there was already a few months of precedent: the Heart of the City Farmers’ Market had set up in Civic Center in early spring. Starting in May, the market slowly gained momentum, and word spread between interested cooks and farmers alike. Here was the place to come to get stuff fresh, straight from the ground. Farmers were learning, too, that these new customers were curious. They didn’t just want as many bunches for a dollar as they could get; they wanted to sniff and taste and know what it was they were seeing. By the time the summer was over, the farmers didn’t want to leave. They’d found a new outlet for their produce, one that required a lot of more hands-on time, but also could command a better price that wholesaling. And there were relationships forming, between up-at-3-am farmers from Watsonville and Guinda and city customers who were entranced at the idea of farm-fresh corn and just-picked melons showing up just down the hills from their Telegraph Hill doorsteps once a week. After yet more negotiating with the city, and the market became a year-round event.

Eatwell Farm stand in the early years–no crowds! Photo: Courtesy of Eatwell Farms

And from the beginning, the chefs came, too. In those first years, as I was learning my way around the city’s food scene as the weekly restaurant critic for the San Francisco Bay Guardian, every trip to the market was punctuated by running into a half-dozen other food writers, editors, cookbook authors, and chefs. It was a pretty small world, and for a few hours every Saturday morning, it really was a village. (Look, there’s Alice, sniffing the peaches!) The original core group of founders had reorganized into CUESA, the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture–none of which were the food-world buzzwords that they are today. From the beginning, the market’s organizers had a larger vision: to educate minds as well as palates, and to change the way people, both home cooks and chefs, thought about the process of getting food to their tables. Meeting farmers every week, hearing how the weather or gas prices or labor issues were affecting their crops, seeing how their produce was shaped not season by season but week by week, was a living education for everyone shopping at the market. And farmers learned, too: about what they could sell, what flew off the table and what, like puntarelle, minaret-shaped romesco broccoli, padron peppers, or fuzzy-sheathed green almonds, needed a little more nudging to get piled into the chefs’ carts and make it onto menus across the city.

David Winsburg of Happy Quail Farms, who helped create the craze for padron peppers. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

As the renovations of the waterfront and the Ferry Building got underway, the market moved to accommodate the construction, from various parking lots around the building, then north to another parking lot off Green Street near the Embarcadero. It remained for several years, then moved back, now to wrap around the Ferry Building, filling the back parking lot and wrapping around the building. I can still remember one blustery December 31, a vendor calling out, “Free rutabaga with every purchase!” and the delicious rutabaga-potato mash I made on New Year’s Day. Or the blissfully sunny February days, the market stalls glowing with sunshine-colored citrus, everyone outside eating oysters, when I’d come back to visit from self-imposed exile in gray, slushy, freezing New York City and wonder why I’d ever left. (Three years away from San Francisco was all I could stand.)

Autumn market sign. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

There was a brief, unsuccessful attempt at a Sunday morning market; much more popular were the two lunchtime markets for downtown workers and weekday visitors on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Innovations at the market–from the Waste Wise initiative, which brought large-scale composting and recycling to the market, to the ban on plastic shopping bags, later adopted by the city as a whole, has made a small but significant change for the better in the way we shop and eat. Hundreds of schoolchildren come through the market every year, learning where their food comes from, and how it gets from dirt to plate.

Info Booth at Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. Photo: Courtesy of CUESA

Every day, says executive director David Stockdale, he talks with people from all over the world who are interested in learning from the market. Many of the vendors with brick-and-mortar shops inside the Ferry Building–Michael Recchiuti, Frog Hollow Farm, Prather Ranch, and soon Rancho Gordo and Humphrey Slocombe–started out as vendors in one of the three weekly markets. It’s become not just a market but an educational tool, a visitors’ destination, a fun place to go for breakfast or lunch, and a showcase for some of Northern and Central California’s best produce, week in and week out. Happy birthday, CUESA, and thank you for all you’ve done.

Do you have memories of the early days of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market? Please share in the comments section, below.

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the sixth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Check, Please! Bay Area’s sixth episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday May 16 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The sixth episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Hunan Home’s Restaurant (San Francisco), Radius Restaurant and Café (San Francisco) and Guerilla Café (Berkeley).

Fun in the greenroom after taping the sixth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED. Lyrics Born autographs Leslie’s foot. Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine Tips about Santa Barbara County Wines:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

SHED exterior facade

What would a locavore’s paradise in wine country look like? For a certain type of well-heeled agrarian, a whole lot like SHED, Healdsburg’s 21st-century grange, grocery, farm store, cafe, bar and event space.

Healdsburg SHED exterior

At first glance, it looks like the prettiest airplane hanger you’ve ever been in, with its huge, boxy shape and garage-style doors, all metal and glass. Grab the handle of that spade doubling as a door handle, step inside, and the enormous space resolves itself into a luxuriously uncrowded farm-to-table playground.

But first, grab a cappuccino from the coffee bar front and center, because everything looks rosier with a foam heart in hand. Admire the spotless white marble counters, the equally pristine bunches of frilly lettuce, the baskets of fresh-from-the-farm eggs, ecru to aqua.

Tall, pale wooden shelves display crayon-bright Japanese coffee pots and Spanish earthenware casseroles. On a wide slab of salvaged sycamore dubbed the “story table,” massive flower arrangements worthy of a Dutch still life spill their blossoms over an educational display of German-made alternative beehives.

Bee Table at SHED

Afternoon sunshine lights up the Dutch and English gardening tools hanging on the walls, glowing across the copper jam pots and hand-carved wooden tortilla presses. It all feels like a Kinfolk magazine spread come to life and tastefully available for purchase. That soft-as-ricotta, brown-as-molasses yarn? Spun from gentle black sheep. The house-fermented cider vinegar? Tap it from the barrel, if you’ve remembered to bring your own bottle. Nothing is made of plastic; nothing has a plug.

Vinegar barrels at SHED

This is not make-do, duct-tape DIY; everything here, from the beakers of fruit shrubs (sweet-tart, vinegar-based drinks, infused with fresh fruit and fizzed with soda water) and bright-magenta beet kvass at the fermentation bar to the galvanized buckets of peonies and the baskets loaded with chocolate-brown loaves of bread the size of watermelons has been curated with an eye for beauty, taste, and usefulness.

Take butter, for example, so necessary with those huge loaves from M.H. Bread and Butter. (Baker Nathan Yanko used to work with bread star Chad Robertson at Tartine in the Mission, so his loaves are as close as the wine country gets to Robertson’s cult-status levains.) Some half-dozen types of butter–cow, goat, sea salted and packed into ceramic crocks–reside in the dairy case. But is that too easy for you? Then pick up a bottle of organic cream, a hand-cranked German butter-making jar, and a couple of wooden butter paddles for shaping the result into decorative pats. What else could you have to do?

Duck into the cleaning nook nearby and you’ll find all the necessaries for fulfilling those downstairs Downton Abbey fantasies: plumy ostrich-feather dusters with 40-inch handles, perfect for polishing chandeliers; crooked hand-carved broomsticks, possibly too witchy to pass muster with Mrs. Hughes but absolutely Quidditch-ready; wooden scrub brushes of which even Mr. Carson would approve, with nary an electric toaster in sight.

SHED co-owner Cindy Daniel

SHED is the vision of owners Doug and Cindy Daniel, who created it as a celebration of Sonoma’s agricultural heritage, as a place where all kinds of crops are grown and products made, not just the wine that puts in on the map. The Daniels provide much of the vegetables, flowers, fruit, and eggs on display from their own 16 acres in the Dry Creek Valley, which they’ve dubbed HomeFarm, where 11 acres are under mixed organic and biodynamic cultivation, and the other 5 as native riparian habitat. They have Rhone-varietal grapes growing for wine, French olive trees for oil, chickens, sheep, bees, heirloom-variety orchards, including curiosities like medlars, jujubes, and pineapple guavas, plus a market garden for vegetables and cut flowers. “It’s a patchwork of things that are all related,” says Cindy, much like the store she and her husband have created.

Mill at SHED

She’s particularly proud of the milling room, where small batches of locally grown, mostly heirloom strains of wheat and other grains are ground into flour every few days. (Most of the flour is sold in the shop; a portion of it goes to M.H. Butter for use in their breads.) The shop is also a pick-up point for grainshare subscribers to the Mendocino Grain Project, a CSA for locally grown grains, including wheat, oats, rye, and barley. Inspired by Native Seeds’ week-long Seed School workshop, Cindy found herself ever more interested in promoting Sonoma’s foodshed and encouraging self-sufficiency in the face of evolving climate change and energy crises. “There used to be a grain mill in Healdsburg,” she notes, glad to be reviving one of the area’s agricultural traditions, even if just on a home cook’s scale.

Larder at SHED

Nearby, the cool larder is “a room that talks about process,” as Cindy says, where customers can peer through the glass wall at wooden shelves filled with pickles and krauts fermenting, and cheeses and cured meats aging.

Hearth at SHED

It could hardly be a true 21st-century kitchen without a live fire burning somewhere, and so, of course, flames flicker in the hearth behind the open kitchen where chef Niki Ford oversees a daily-changing menu of eclectic breakfast and lunch fare. The heavy lifting of the kitchen gets done upstairs, in an additional production space off the main event room. The designer of Boulette’s Larder in the Ferry Building consulted, and it shows: the spacious, pristine kitchen is lavished with All-Clad saucepans hanging from racks above the counters, while tall woven baskets bristle with whisks as long as shinbones and massive stock pots steam on the stove.

Production Kitchen at SHED

In the morning, locals and visitors alike can perch at one of the blond-wood tables in the open cafe area, waiting for bowls of fiber-rich hot porridge slow-cooked overnight to reach a texture described by Ford as “between gruel and chewy grains,” lavished with butter, sea salt, and damson plum jam. Those that haven’t yet foresworn gluten can treat themselves to a “toast service” of thick slabs of Yanko’s bread, toasted with butter, jam by local “jamstress” Elissa Rubin-Mahon, and housemade chocolate-hazelnut spread, or dig into “Doug’s poached eggs” over toast with oregano, sea salt, and a drizzle of HomeFarm balsamic vinegar and olive oil. A Persian breakfast, inspired by the cooking of an Iranian friend of Ford’s, is a mix-and-match assortment of feta cheese, walnuts, sour cherry jam, herbs, and more of that great bread.

Fermentation Bar at SHED

Coming in at the civilized, city-brunch hour of 1pm, we’re sorry to have missed the 11am cutoff for Ford’s heirloom-grain waffles with quince jam and maple syrup. Instead, glasses of blueberry shrub in hand, we plunge straight into the savory side, with a briny bowl of clams bathed in cilantro and cream. A previous menu offered flatbread topped with nettles, cardoons, preserved lemon and local Highway 1 cheese, but today’s offering is as straightforward as any 5 year old could desire: a pizza with tomato sauce and cheese, on a pleasantly puffy-chewy crust. At the fermentation bar–which pours not only both wine and beer on tap but kefir, kombucha, kvass, and cider–we catch up with Ellen Cavalli and Scott Heath of Tilted Shed Ciderworks, who are lunching with their young son. The bar serves their ciders, and also ferments some of it into cider vinegar, using it as a base for the shrubs and offering it in bulk from a barrel on the other side of the store.

Ford, who shares a Chez Panisse pedigree (and friendship) with Suzanne Drexhange of Bartavelle, also shares a fondness for hand-carved boards laid out with savory deliciousness. Around us, many diners are nibbling the ploughman’s lunch, generous slabs of Fiscalini cheddar from Modesto, rye bread, apples, pickled onions, and chutney, or munching their way through the salads on the mezze plate, served with housemade crackers, feta, and olives. Nettle soup is greener than grass, bold as fresh money. “We want to make a lot of room for grains, legumes, vegetables, roots,” says Ford. “There’s a lot of sophistication in making vegetables.” It’s all part of an appreciation for “what we have in our hands, being thoughtful about the ingredients,” an attitude that Ford hopes the cooks will learn to share even during busy moments on the line, all deepened by the relationships they’re building with the farmers and gardeners supplying the kitchen.

The Daniels have plans for frequent events upstairs; already, they’ve hosted Deborah Madison in conversation with local food writer and author Michele Anna Jordan about Madison’s new book, Vegetable Literacy; sponsored a showing of Queen of the Sun, a documentary about the global bee crisis; and hosted a three-course, family-style Sunday Supper featuring the produce and farmers from Bernier Farms. On May 18, bring your knives and brush up on your Knife Skills with Rian Rinn. On May 26, there will be an all-American family-style Sunday Supper out on the patio with live music. And on June 8, butcher Rinn will be hosting Hog It Up, a hog butchery demo & pop-up dinner with chefs Ian Mullen and Jason Smith of Mullen & Smith.

Information:
Healdsburg SHED
Address: Map
25 North St
Healdsburg, CA 95448
Phone: (707) 431-7433
Hours: Mon-Sun 7am-7pm
Facebook: Healdsburg SHED
Twitter: @healdsburgshed

Vegetables. Photo: Getty Images

Six years ago, Mark Bittman was a full-time omnivore. But then a doctor told him to turn vegan for health reasons, and suddenly Mark found himself facing a world void of meat, dairy, or processed foods. So the New York Times food writer decided to personalize his vegan diet and allow for some cheating. He called it “Vegan Before 6,” or “VB6,” and says it helped him improve his health and focus on cooking at home. Mark Bittman talks about his new book, and how a full-time meat lover adapted to part-time veganism.

Host: Michael Krasny

Guest:

• Mark Bittman, food writer, columnist for The New York Times, and author of books including “VB6: Eating Vegan Before 6,” “Food Matters” and “How to Cook Everything.”

More info:
• Next Meal: Engineering Food : A half-hour documentary from KQED Science
• VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good : amazon.com

Guests and host Leslie Sbrocco tape the fifth episode of Season 8 of Check, Please! Bay Area at KQED.
Photo: Wendy Goodfriend

Check, Please! Bay Area’s fifth episode of Season 8 airs on Thursday May 9 at 7:30pm on KQED 9. View other airtimes and channels.

You can watch individual restaurant segments as well as view the entire episode online. The website provides restaurant information not specified on the show and you are free to share your opinions on the restaurants featured. This season, Leslie Sbrocco will continue to share wine (and spirits) tips with each episode.

The fifth episode of Season 8 features these restaurants: Bocanova (Oakland), Willi’s Wine Bar (Santa Rosa) and The Rotunda of Neiman Marcus (San Francisco).

Watch Leslie Sbrocco share her Wine Tips about Wines of Washington State:

View more Wine Tips at Check, Please! Bay Area.

Tom Llewellyn, a volunteer with the Proposition 37 campaign, chants at a rally in Santa Cruz on Nov. 4, 2012, two days before the election. Prop 37 lost with 49 percent of the vote. Credit: Gabriela Quirós, KQED

Genetically engineered foods, also referred to as genetically modified organisms (GMO), genetically modified foods or biotech foods, has sparked plenty of debate in recent years. Last November, California voters failed to pass Proposition 37, which would have required all genetically engineered foods to be labeled in the state. But Senator Barbara Boxer and Congressman Peter DeFazio are introducing a bill that would require similar labeling by the FDA. Their joint statement says, “According to surveys, more than 90 percent of Americans support the labeling of genetically engineered foods. In fact, many consumers are surprised to learn that GE foods are not already labeled.”

This rice at UC Davis has been genetically engineered to tolerate the droughts that are already becoming more common with climate change. Credit: Gabriela Quirós, KQED

Gabriela Quirós, the producer of a special half-hour documentary, Next Meal: Engineering Food, commented via email about why this subject generates so much discussion with the public.

“Many people are very interested in knowing where their food comes from and how it’s made. In the particular case of genetically engineered crops, in the past 15 years, U.S. farmers have rapidly started growing genetically engineered crops to the point where about 90 percent of all the soybeans, cotton, corn and sugarbeets grown in the United States are now genetically engineered. But the farmers and the seed companies didn’t ask consumers what they thought about genetically engineered food – these seeds were just adopted like any other farming technology. And so I think that some consumers are wary, in part because there wasn’t much of a discussion before the technology was rolled out.”

In the course of producing Next Meal, which explores how genetically engineered crops are made as well as their benefits and drawbacks, Gabriela discovered more facts about a unique tomato: Flavr Savr.

“The Flavr Savr tomato was the first genetically engineered food to be sold to consumers. A company in Davis flipped a tomato gene around so that tomatoes would stay firm on the vine for longer. The idea was for the tomatoes to get flavorful but not become mushy when they were transported. What I didn’t know was that these tomatoes were very popular with consumers when they were first sold, in 1994. What made them disappear wasn’t opposition to the tomatoes; it was a series of bad business decisions by the company that designed them, and the fact that the genetic engineering didn’t quite work — the tomatoes didn’t stay firm for longer on the vine and ended up requiring careful transportation, just like any other tomato.”

The main challenge of working on the special was the enormous scope of the topic. “I would have liked to have more time. The documentary is 30 minutes long. Genetically engineered crops touch on science, of course, but also on environmental, legal and social issues, just to name a few. We didn’t have time to go as in-depth into some aspects of the story. That said, we did cover a lot of ground!”

UC Berkeley biologist Peggy Lemaux is genetically engineering sorghum to make it more easily digestible. Sorghum, a cereal related to corn, is a staple food for 300 million people in Africa. Credit: Arwen Curry, KQED

Gabriela also noted that one of her favorite moments was filming “the process of genetically engineering a cereal called sorghum, at UC Berkeley. I think viewers will enjoy this scene in the film. You see the little sorghum embryos being plucked out of the immature seeds.”

KQED Science on Google+ is hosting a Hangout on Air about genetically engineered food 5/8 at 11am (PST). Gabriela will be joined by UC Berkeley biologist Peggy Lemaux and UC Davis biologist Eduardo Blumwald. RSVP for the online round table discussion.

Watch the archived Google+ Hangout from 5/8/13:

And Next Meal: Engineering Food will premiere tomorrow night (5/8) on KQED Channel 9 at 7:30pm (PST). Starting on May 9, the program airs on PBS stations throughout California. In October, it airs again on KQED and on five PBS stations nationwide in Seattle, Wisconsin, Cleveland, North Carolina and Nebraska.

Watch Next Meal: Engineering Food online:

If they grow it and cook it they will eat it Part One: Students at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. Photo: Matt Tsang

Berkeley’s beloved school gardening and cooking program, where public school children plant peas, cook kale, and chase chickens–all while discovering connections to nature, science, language, math, health, nutrition and other life lessons–is in dire straits due to pending federal funding cuts.

Come October, the Berkeley Unified School District’s (BUSD) edible education efforts will lose $1.9 million of U.S. Department of Agriculture financing (administered through the Network for a Healthy California) for 14 school cooking and garden programs, from the preschool through high school level. Unless replacement income is found, such cuts would essentially gut the district program, considered a model around the country.

“BUSD schools are deeply committed to saving their garden and cooking programs and are working closely with their principals, PTAs, the school district, and the extended community to raise funds for the coming year and beyond,” says Marian Mabel, a parent at Malcolm X Elementary and member of a group called the Berkeley Schools Gardening and Cooking Alliance, which was launched last year when Malcolm X, along with two other schools, looked set to lose their federal funds. (The alliance successfully lobbied the school board for a year of bridge funding, which, ultimately, wasn’t needed when a one-year extension of federal monies was granted.)

Now, district officials, individual schools, and a core of parent volunteers are scrambling to try and save the program, which began as a community effort 15 years ago. And prominent local restaurateurs and chefs have stepped up to show their support too.

The cooking and gardening movement in Berkeley’s schools, documented in a series of short videos under the Lunch Love Community umbrella (featured in a 2011 BAB post), has received federal funds for 12 years. But recent changes in federal funding priorities and state administering of these monies, along with changing demographics in BUSD schools, has lead to a pending shift in the allocation of resources. Despite last year’s one-year reprieve from the feds, no such extension of support is expected for the next school year, given changes to U.S. government guidelines with the passage of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

If they grow it and cook it they will eat it Part Two: Students at Le Conte Elementary School in Berkeley. Photo: Sophie Constantinou

The school district saw the cuts coming. So last November, the superintendent convened an advisory committee on garden and cooking to identify and secure both short-term bridge funding and long-term sustainable funding, through major donor and corporate giving campaigns, public-private partnerships, and other fundraising efforts, all of which are either in the works or being explored. At a school board meeting on Wednesday, committee members will make a case for a commitment of $300,000 a year for two years to help maintain the program, according to Melanie Parker, interim supervisor for the BUSD’s Gardening and Cooking Nutrition Program. (Last year the district pledged up to $350,000 for the three schools facing cuts to their programs for this school year.)

The committee has outlined four tiers of funding options for the immediate future. These range from a fully-funded program costing $2 million a year, to a worst case scenario situation of part-time staff offering limited instruction and charged with keeping the gardens alive at about $250,000 a year. The largest cost of the program, not surprisingly, is salaries and benefits for cooking and gardening teachers and assistants. While most of these employees work part-time, they are paid the full-time equivalent of between $25,000 and $50,000. Many of these instructors, adored by students, parents, and school officials alike, have been working in the schools since the start of this program and the thought of losing their educational experience and institutional wisdom is viewed as a potentially devastating blow to the program.

The BUSD committee is recommending funding at a reduced level, what they’re calling a “tier two scenario” or a 50 percent cut in program costs for a total of $1.04 million a year, which translates into fewer students receiving instruction and reduced staffing hours. “The committee felt it was important to be realistic about how much money we could raise — and raising $4 million over the next two years to maintain our current programs felt incredibly challenging,” says Parker, who noted a recent $100,000 infusion of state funds that has been committed to the cause courtesy of the City of Berkeley’s Public Health Department. Still, she acknowledges, there is a long way to go to secure full funding for next fall.

Fourteen of Berkeley’s 19 schools have gotten federal funding in the past, money designed to benefit schools with significant low-income populations. The programs slated to lose their funding come October include Berkeley High School, Berkeley Technology Academy, Longfellow and Willard middle schools. Seven elementary schools face cuts, including Emerson, John Muir, LeConte, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Thousand Oaks and Washington. Hopkins, Franklin and King preschools will also be impacted by the loss of income.

The community is gearing up to raise funds and awareness on many levels. A Change.org petition is gathering signatures in support of the campaign. Individual schools are writing grant proposals and holding plant sales, movie nights, and fun runs to support cooking and gardening instruction. Meanwhile, a city-wide Dine Out event is slated for May 30, with prominent local food businesses and restaurants in the mix such as the Cheese Board, Comal, Gather, Ippuku, La Note, and Revival Bar + Kitchen, who are all donating a percentage of sales to the classroom campaign.

For some who have signed on in support it’s both a professional and personal cause. “My three kids have benefited from the cooking and gardening programs at BUSD; my oldest daughter says the garden program at Willard was the only thing that got her through middle school,” says Christian Geideman, owner-chef of the critically-acclaimed Ippuku, featuring izakaya-style dining in downtown Berkeley. “And my youngest still talks about Farmer Ben and the chickens at Le Conte Elementary.” Geideman sees the benefits of such programs beyond the school years. “The restaurant industry is a major employer in our area, imagine how much teenagers could learn in four years that could prepare them for culinary careers,” he says. “I know that as a troubled teen I could have benefited from such a program; it should be expanded at Berkeley High, not cut.”

Geideman’s partner in work and life, Erinn Geideman, discovered first hand the positive effects of the program when she worked as an assistant to Washington Elementary’s cooking teacher Carrie Fehr. “At the elementary school age it’s mostly about giving them access to the process: peeling, chopping and handling food,” says Erinn Giedeman. “When you teach a small child how to cut their own food it gives them a real sense of accomplishment. And when they taste what they’ve created it’s exciting and fills the kids with pride.” Many students, Erinn Geideman also noted, mentioned sharing the recipes at home with their families, an important aspect of a program that emphasizes healthy, seasonal eating geared towards fruit, vegetable, and whole grain recipes, designed with obesity and diabetes prevention in mind. The value of such edible education programs are hard to quantify in terms of test scores but one measure in a UC Berkeley study found that young students routinely exposed to fruits and vegetables through cooking and gardening instruction ate 1.5 more servings of produce a day compared with kids with fewer opportunities to dig in the dirt and work the stove at school.

The best known cooking and gardening program in Berkeley schools, King Middle School’s Edible Schoolyard, is not impacted by the cuts, as its programs are paid for by the Edible Schoolyard Project, founded by Chez Panisse owner Alice Waters. But the ESP (formerly the Chez Panisse Foundation) project staff are working with the BUSD community to come up with a financial plan for the future of its imperiled programs. “The loss of federal funding to support BUSD’s garden and cooking programs is a tragedy and ample evidence, if any were needed, that the call for this transformational change–to bring kids in the public schools into a healthy and delicious relationship with food–needs to get still louder,” says Katrina Heron, executive director of ESP.

Kyle Cornforth, director of ESY Berkeley, is on the superintendent’s advisory committee and active in the Berkeley Schools Gardening and Cooking Alliance and the alliance’s Marian Mabel says Cornforth has been instrumental in providing assistance to help strengthen the curriculum components of the BUSD’s cooking and gardening instruction to make the strongest possible case that such programs are indispensable to students. To that end, the committee is re-envisioning the program at a district-wide level (for all schools, including four elementary schools currently ineligible for federal funds) and seek to integrate the program into Common Core State Standards and what’s known as 2020 Vision, Berkeley’s effort to end racial disparities in academic achievement.

If they grow it and cook it they will eat it Part Three: Students at Willard Middle School in Berkeley. Photo: Matt Tsang

Mindful of what is happening across the bay in Berkeley, Education Outside (formerly the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance) is working hard to tie outdoor education in San Francisco public schools to core curriculum such as science, in a program launched three years ago. It’s also trying to keep costs in check, by hiring young, service corps members for $25,000 a year to run these programs, set to be in 21 K-5 schools this fall. “What is happening in Berkeley is instructive, it shows how easily these kinds of programs can be cut or lopped off, that’s why we’re focusing on making them an integral part of every student’s day,” says Arden Bucklin-Sporer, Education Outside’s executive director. “We never use the term ‘gardening’ or ‘cooking,’ which suggest that they’re extra programs not integral to curriculum.”

Back in the East Bay, another relatively new model for providing edible education is coming to Oakland schools this fall, via a national program known as FoodCorps, which places a service member in a school for a year to help tend or build a school garden, improve school cafeteria food, and talk up healthy eating with students. It costs FoodCorps about $32,500 to put a service member in a school, including a $15,000 stipend, a $5,550 Americorps award, and health benefits. FoodCorps has partnered with the Edible Schoolyard Project for a summer academy geared towards FoodCorps fellows, service members with one year of experience, who are training to become peer-mentors at sites around the country.

For now, in Berkeley the focus remains on saving a lauded program many years in the making. “What’s in jeopardy is losing the groundwork from developing a nationally-recognized program,” says Willard Middle School parent Cindy Tsai Schultz, who is on the school’s gardening and cooking committee. “In 1995 at Willard, Matt Tsang, our gardening coordinator, started with two small planter boxes. Today we have a model program with a flourishing garden, six chickens, and gardening and cooking classes that integrate nutrition education with math and science,” she adds. “Our garden produces enough food for cooking classes for over 500 children. The garden also provides a safe and peaceful place and offers students a sense of security. We can’t lose the last 15 years of hard work and kids’ strong connection with the program. We can’t let all that nurturing turn to weeds.”

Donations to the BUSD Garden and Cooking Program can be made through the Berkeley Public Education Foundation, when making a donation through BPEF, specify that the contribution is earmarked for the BUSD Garden and Cooking Program. For information on volunteer opportunities for the Dine Out fundraiser, to offer suggestions for major funders, or to donate email: berkeleyfundraiser@gmail.com.

If they grow it and cook it they will eat it Part Four: Students at Malcolm X Elementary School in Berkeley.
Photo: Rivka Mason

A thriving sanctuary at school. Photo: Rivka Mason