Wine Lands 2011.
All Photos: Wendy Goodfriend

In the hit song, "California One," indie rock band, "The Decemberists," pay homage to the grape with the line, "Take a long drown with me of California wine." The fact that the band appreciates a good bottle of wine makes sense once you find out every member carries a Zagat iPhone app for culinary guidance on long road trips. This band appears right at home at a festival like Outside Lands where food and wine vendors seem to share top billing with the music line up.

Decemberists at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Outside Lands gourmet fare is a far cry from rock concerts of yesteryear where the best one could hope for was a warm draft beer and a lousy hot dog. Beer might have a history with young people and big, outdoor events but this weekend micro-brews took a back seat to local, small lot wineries. By late Saturday afternoon the line was more than fifteen people deep as I waited for a taste of 2009 Mendocino Pinot Noir from Navarro. As usual, Navarro did not disappoint. While in line I overheard the following conversation, "That is such a butterball, you should really check out Wind Gap, their wines are so balanced." Am I at a rock concert?

Wind Gap wine booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

The idea of Wine Lands, which has now grown to thirty artisanal wineries and one hundred wines all under one big open-air tent, is the brainchild of Peter Eastlake. Eastlake is co-owner of Vintage Berkeley, a wine shop that focuses on small production wines -- most under twenty five dollars. Eastlake believes that wine and, well, nearly everything go together. He even had some favorite pairings for this year’s music line up.

Peter Eastlake. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Phish:

For Phish, give me something lunar, hippie and refreshing for all that spinning, scooping and dumping. Bonny Doon's biodynamic spaceship adorned 2010 Vin Gris de Cigare all the way.

Erykah Badu:

When Erykah Badu sings, people listen. She’s a strong woman with a vocal range that can howl, scream, screech and make you cry. There is one wine for her show, and it rhymes with pink bubbles, Gloria Ferrer Blanc De Noirs.

The Roots:

These Philly boys are so versatile, funky and flat out likeable. Our man in Sebastopol, bass player Les Claypool, is pouring his spicy GSM blend called Purple Pachyderm.

Phish at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Oh, let's not forget the other star of the show, the food. This year's Outside Lands included more than fifty local restaurants and food trucks and asked Eastlake for a couple of suggestions for pairings. For the Mac and Cheese from Oakland's Homeroom, Eastlake recommends a California Chardonnay like Hess Collection, Hirsch Estate for a special treat or Lioco's 2010 Sonoma County on tap.

I thought I was going to stump him when I asked about the very popular Fabulous Frickle Brothers fried pickles. Without blinking, Eastlake said, "It's a little known fact that deep fried pickled gherkins are only found in two places in the world -- Tennessee and Germany's Mosel River. Summer of Riesling. If you don't like Riesling, try the Riesling."

Fabulous Frickle Brothers' Frickles. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Paul Grieco, owner of Terroir wine bar in New York, is on tour. He is traveling around the country in a Winnebago preaching the gospel of Riesling. Grieco wants people to know Riesling is lots of things including, not always sweet. Says Grieco, who even has a Riesling tattoo along his forearm, "Riesling is the best grape in the world." I tried the 2009 Toni Jost and liked it a lot.

Press Conference at Outside Lands 2011. Damien Kulash of OK Go, Thomas McNaughton - Salumeria by flour + water, Sommelier Paul Grieco - Summer of Riesling tour. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend.

Although Eastlake curated all of the wines under the tent, star sommelier Rajat Parr picked a few for the VIP tents including: Kermit Lynch's Bandol Rose, Qupe's Syrah and Navarro's Pinot Noir. Parr was also pouring his own brand at Wine Lands.

Sandhi wine booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Sandhi Wines is a boutique winery focusing on the grapes of Santa Barbara. Parr makes a Chardonnay and a Pinot Noir. The Pinot is elegant, complex and superb. Parr uses only native yeasts in his wines, part of a trend toward a more natural way of making wines. Taking this effort several steps further is Natural Process Alliance which also had a booth at Wine Lands.

NPA is minimalist winemaking which, briefly, includes: Sustainable vineyard management, organic grapes, native yeasts and very little to no added sulfur. NPA delivers natural wine in reusable stainless steel canisters to restaurants and wine bars within a one hundred mile radius of their Santa Rosa cellar. Like kegs, NPA stays clear of corks and heavy glass bottles. I tried the 2010 Chalk Hill Pinot Gris. It was not my favorite but I appreciated the unique, flavorful taste.

Kermit Lynch booth at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

I thought it was kind of cool to see legendary importer Kermit Lynch hosting a booth at Wine Lands. This was their first foray into the world of big outdoor events and would probably do it again in an effort to attract a new generation of drinkers. My favorite Kermit Lynch Wine that day was a 2010 Bandol Terebrune Rose. I found it spicy and herbaceous.

Chris Hall, VP & GM of Long Meadow Ranch at Wine Lands. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

The big winner for me at Wine Lands this year was wine on tap from Long Meadow Ranch. Besides, being eco-friendly and less pricy, the wine tastes just as good as if it was in a bottle. I tried Long Meadow’s 2010 Sauvignon Blanc, poured through a stainless steel tap. It was vibrant and crisp with a little of what seemed like effervescence. I thought it must be the keg but, no, that’s their Sauvignon Blanc. Delicious. Personally, I think the keg is a winner but winemakers are still trying to decouple it from the image of frat parties. Maybe hip, rock musicians can help lead the way. Rumor has it band members from MGMT were seen hanging out at the Long Meadow booth sipping on a 2009 draft Cabernet blend.

MGMT at Outside Lands 2011. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Related posts:
• Outside Lands: A First Timer's Take on an Eco-Friendly Gourmet Music Festival
• Outside Lands Recap 2011 at KQED Arts
• Guide to Outside Lands 2011 at KQED Arts

Jessica and Joshua Applestone's story is, by now, a familiar one. Vegetarian/vegan couple gets interested in sustainability, organics, and the implications of ethical eating. They start reading and going to farms and farmers' markets, realize that the staff (and signage) at most big food retailers--even the ones that tout their eco-friendliness--are uninformed and unreliable. Who to believe? How to make a difference? What to make for dinner?

This is where the Applestones' story veers off from the typical hipster vegan-turned-ethical omnivore trajectory. They didn't just find a meat CSA and fill their freezer with grass-fed hangar steak and pork belly destined for homemade ramen or home-cured bacon. That's what might happen now, in 2011, here in San Francisco. But this was 2004, only a couple of years after Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation had been published. Michael Pollan's New York Times Magazine article, Power Steer, which followed the short, unhappy life of one young, burger-destined steer in a Kansas feedlot, had just made millions of beef-eating Americans realize that most of the corn- and soy-stuffed animals they were buying had never come near a blade of grass. Grass-fed meat, what little there was of it, was hard to find, and usually available only shipped frozen from the Midwest. So what did they do? They started a butcher shop in New York's Hudson Valley selling only pasture-raised meats, a butcher shop that bought only whole animals from small farmers and ranchers they knew. Joshua, still vegan at the time they started the business, learned the butchery side, a trade plied by both his grandfather and great-grandfather. They called the shop Fleisher's Grass-Fed Organic Meats, from Joshua's family name. They got advice from dozens of retired butchers, almost all of whom told them that they were crazy, that they'd be out of business and worse, divorced, in a matter of months.

Now, some 7 years later, their business (and their marriage) is not just intact, but thriving. This fall, they're opening their second shop, in Brooklyn's Park Slope neighborhood, with a third one planned for the Upper West Side. (Take that, Zabar's!) The food culture has caught up with them, and "grass-fed" and "pasture-raised" have entered the common dialogue of more than just a few provenance-obsessed food folks. This week, Joshua and Jessica made the trek West for a series of events promoting their new book, The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More. I caught up with them at an after-party at Bernal Heights butcher shop Avedano's, following their book-signing at nearby Omnivore Books and their on-air appearance on KQED's Forum with Avedano's butcher and co-owner Tia Harrison. (Harrison is also the chef at Sociale and a co-founder of the Butchers' Guild.)

Like a lot of New Yorkers, Jessica has a San Francisco connection; while she was raised in Long Island, her father grew up here, and she lived in the city from 1989-1991, working at the San Francisco Bay Guardian and Mercury Press before moving to Tokyo and New York City. "I miss the real foodie culture here, the diversity of ethnicities. And the Mexican food!" she said as we stood near a candlelit platter of ham. She and her husband have dubbed Kingston, NY, where they have their shop, "Park Slope North" for the number of Brooklynites from that Berkeley-ish neighborhood who spend their weekends up in their locale. Woodstock (yes, that Woodstock) is close by, as is New Paltz, a busy college town whose young mayor made headlines in 2004 for issuing marriage licenses and performing civic weddings for 25 same-sex couples, six years before gay marriage was legalized in New York. Without customers from these bourgeois-bohemian enclaves, she admits, much of their painstakingly sourced, meticulously cut meat wouldn't get bought, week after week. Although their learning curve was steep (says Jessica, "We didn't have a learning curve; it just went straight up from the minute we started"), their butcher shop has become, amazingly, something almost exactly what they envisioned: a source not just of meat but of community, a place where the butchers know their customers by name, and where people chat and ask questions, take classes, share recipes and swap neighborhood gossip, and in the process, use their food dollars to support a whole network of local farmers, ranchers, slaughterhouses, and more.

Their book is an unintimidating, user-friendly guide for the home cook, one who's curious about this whole whole-beast thing but doesn't yet have the chops, or the knowledge, to get busy with a boning knife. It's a primer on primals, the "big cuts" that well-trained butchers break down into the more familiar chops, ribs, sirloins and roasts. This is no encyclopedia of meats; the type is big, there are lots of chatty sidebars and plenty of weekday-dinner recipes. Even if you never follow their instructions for butterflying a leg of lamb or frenching a crown roast, you can still learn a lot of useful basics to make you feel much more at home in front of a meat case. Particularly useful are the pages championing their favorite lesser-known butcher's cuts, like lamb sirloin (one of my favorites, and frequently on hand at Avedano's), the cuts that a butcher knows but rarely sells.

Jessica and Joshua Applestone. Photo by Jennifer May

While Joshua cuts the meat, Jessica talks to the customers, explaining everything from how grass-fed meat is a seasonal product to the best way to cook bacon (the details are in the book, but suffice it to say that you're probably doing it wrong. Low and slow, that's the ticket). You've probably seen the dotted-line cow or pig in a dozen cookbooks, segmented and labeled to show where the shank, loin, chuck roast or top round come from. Jessica discovered a faster way to teach customers why some cuts are tender, others tough: the dotted-line human. Just imagine yourself down on all fours, and you can feel where your tougher, working muscles are (like the shoulders, neck, and legs) and what's placid and fatty, like the belly, the back and the meat around the ribs. "I fought hard to get the human in the book!" she laughs, and while it's off-putting at first sight, it does the job. You're not likely to forget where a tenderloin comes from once you've seen it labeled right over a navel like your own.

Hard-core wanna-be butchers may find the book a little too basic for their cleaver-and-chain-mail tastes. For them, there's Ryan Farr's Whole Beast Butchery slated for publication later this fall. Farr, a butcher's butcher who started 4505 Meats, the man who made putting (artisanal) chicharrones on a (handmade) hot dog seem like the ultimate in porky deliciousness, will be offering more step-by-step photographs and specialized instruction, with no stinting on the tongues, ears, and brains. But as an introduction to being a thoughtful carnivore in the kitchen, The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat makes a fine argument for knowing your meats and knowing your butcher.

Joshua and Jessica Applestone will be participating in the Cochon 555's Heritage Fire event at Charles Krug Winery in Napa on Saturday, Aug 13. Tickets $100-$200.

Sustainable Meat and the Art of Butchery
In recent years, more chefs and consumers are demanding local, sustainable meats, driving some to raise and butcher their own livestock. KQED's Forum gets into the gristle with three butchers and talk all about meat, from what consumers should be asking at the counter to how to cook a whole pig in the backyard.

Original Broadcast: Wed, Aug 10, 2011 -- 10:00 AM

Host: Sydnie Kohara

Guests:
• Jessica Applestone, co-author of "The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat" and co-owner of Fleisher's Grass-fed & Organic Meats in New York
• Joshua Applestone, co-author of "The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat" and co-owner of Fleisher's Grass-fed & Organic Meats in New York
• Tia Harrison, co-owner of Avendano's Holly Park Market, executive chef and co-owner of Sociale restaurant and co-founder of The Butcher's Guild

Related Articles:
• A Tell-All Guide to Artisanal Butchery By Adriana Velez (Civil Eats)
• Events: Former Vegan and Vegetarian Write the Book on Sustainable Meat By Mollie McWilliams (SFoodie)

Gleaning with Farm to Pantry. Photo: The Perennial Plate

The Perennial Plate: Adventurous and Sustainable Eating - Episode 64: California Gleaning
Northern California is a bountiful area. So bountiful that there are often leftovers. This is usually the case with most farms. In order to make way for bad yields, bad weather, and unexpected disasters, (or just to make sure they have enough to satisfy their customers), most farms will end up with more than they can sell. What happens to all that extra produce? In the case of Healdsburg California, an organization called Farm to Pantry picks it, packs it up and delivers it to various locations "in need." It’s selfless, necessary and wonderful. Watch this video to follow the food from harvest to rehab center.

This past spring I traveled with fellow KQED QUEST producer Gabriela Quirós to the Sacramento area to film at Sterling Caviar, one of two Californian companies currently producing this delicacy.

This company raises white sturgeon, one of two native species to California (the other is green sturgeon). They originally obtained their stock from the Sacramento River. Once they were able to create their own brood stock for the next generation, they no longer needed to harvest fish from the river.

Learn more about sustainable caviar production in the video, "Green Eggs By The Gram: Sustainable Caviar."

Related Story and Slideshow on QUEST:
Science on the SPOT: Green Eggs By The Gram – Sustainable Caviar

Tartine Afterhours menu from The Perennial Plate dinner. Photo: The Perennial Plate

Daniel Klein, creator of The Perennial Plate, an online weekly documentary series dedicated to socially responsible and adventurous eating, shares some thoughts about his new Bay Area episode. Under the guidance of Chef Samin Nostrat they visited three local farms, gathered stories, harvested food and then created a Tartine Afterhours dinner at the Tartine Bakery in San Francisco. Watch the episode about the farm visits and event.

From your experience traveling across country what qualities are unique to the Bay Area with regard to food awareness and food community?

The first part of our trip was in the South where local food appears to be more along the lines of "the way things are" -- unless, of course, there is nothing -- food deserts are also often the case down south. But in the Bay Area it is a way of life in the sense that people are passionate about it -- where food comes from is important. And beyond that, California is where so much food is grown. In other parts of the country we say "oh that's from California" -- but here, well, it's all from California.

When you were putting this episode together what were the key points you wanted to communicate to your audience:

...about sustainable eating in the Bay Area?

I didn't really want to convey a message about sustainable eating, I wanted to share the story of our dinner at Tartine and the farmers that let us visit and harvest their crops. There isn't an intended message, more a hope that people will enjoy the spirit of the dinner and days proceeding.

...about the Bay Area farms you visited?

Riverdog Farm -- What an incredible farm. It seems they have held on to their ideals while expanding into a large and very professional operation. In my limited experience it seems to be a great example of what a slightly larger organic farm can be. Diverse and with incredibly pristine product. Really refreshing -- so many farms we visit are small, so it was cool to have the perspective of Riverdog (by industrial ag standards, its still tiny of course). We wanted to convey that it was larger, but also the spirit of its founder Tim Mueller.

Sunny Slope Orchard -- Bill is passionate about his stone fruit. He farms for the joy of it. But more than the farm, I wanted to share how delicious his fruit was. That plum and those apricots were like nothing I've ever had before. Truly eye opening/mouth opening? experiences.

Pluck and Feather Farm -- We were rushed at Pluck and Feather, the dinner was approaching and we needed herbs. Esperanza was there for us. We wanted to get something from an urban garden, and this place was perfect, especially with the giant McDonalds sign looming overhead.

...about the process of creating a pop-up dinner experience?

I wanted to convey that we didn't know the menu until the day of, that it was collaborative and just really fun. We chose some over the top music to drive home the culmination of two serious days of traveling, harvesting and cooking.

Preparing the Perennial Plate dinner in the Tartine Bakery kitchen. Photo: The Perennial Plate

How did you decide on the menu for the Tartine dinner?

We decided the day of based on what we had. Samin and I just shot ideas at each other and came up with simple but delicious food. Samin had made pasta a few days earlier, so we knew that was going to happen, other than that, it was just trying things out.

Cherry Tomatoes with Pluck and Feather Farm Oregano. Photo: The Perennial Plate

I know you worked together with Tartine Afterhours chef Samin Nosrat on this dinner. How did you connect with her to make this all happen?

We connected through our mutual friend Alex of 4SP Films, he suggested Samin as a story and then through a phone conversation we decided that doing a dinner together would be awesome. I could tell it would work as Samin is so lighthearted and fun.

What went into making this event a reality?

I had come out to SF for a meeting and I met with Samin. We hit it off, although I think she hits it off with everyone she meets. It was really just a matter of arranging a date. Samin in turn decided on which farms to visit. I think these were places that she really wanted to check out, so it was win win.

Trio of Daniel's Salads: New Potato, Roasted Beets and Shaved Summer Squash. Photo: The Perennial Plate

Were you able to make money from the event to help fund your project?

No, we look at the event as an opportunity to share our food and stories, not to make money. A lot of the work was on the staff, Samin and Tartine, so we were just happy to be a part of it.

I know you enjoyed a meal at Gather in Berkeley. What else did you and Mirra experience in the Bay Area that was memorable?

We went to Ubuntu in Napa which is similar to Gather in that it makes use of vegetables in unique ways. I don't know if Manresa is considered the Bay Area, but we ate there as well. All three of these restaurants represent a new wave of cooking that loves the vegetable as much as the protein, I think it's the future of cooking, so it was fun to try these three restaurants -- each has a very different take but I think a similar spirit in their dishes.

Sunny Slope Orchard's apricots al cartoccio. Photo: The Perennial Plate

Up until a couple of recent events, I'd almost given up consuming seafood in this country, saving my shellfish and finfish feasts for my annual visits back home to Australia, where eating sea creatures seems somehow less loaded and certainly more local.

Then in May I was fortunate to attend the Cooking for Solutions Sustainable Foods Institute, a media powwow hosted by the Monterey Bay Aquarium (creator of the Seafood Watch pocket guide). At the event everyone from fired up media mogul turned bison farmer Ted Turner and actor-activist Isabelle Rossellini to chef Cindy Pawlcyn and author Paul Greenberg -- along with Seafood Watch scientists and sustainable fishing advocates -- schooled me in the latest research and thinking on eating fish.

That two-day sustainable seafood cram session was followed by a visit to Omnivore Books in June to hear Seattle-based seafood chef-writer Becky Selengut joke about how she caught crabs on assignment for a magazine and, more seriously, dish out advice on how to buy and cook local seafood in her new cookbook, good fish.

Seafood consumers and home cooks should consider this post a companion piece to my Bay Area Bites colleague Denise Santoro Lincoln's sustainable fish primer from February, which is full of good tips and reliable resources on this very subject. Check that post out and then come back here. I'll wait.

Okay, let's get the bad stuff out of the way, shall we? Buying fish is confusing and challenging because you're concerned about species extinction, pollution problems, bycatch issues, and health concerns, right? And you should be. While seafood is an excellent source of lean protein and heart- and brain-friendly omega-3s, it can also be laden with mercury, which can do a nasty number on the brain and nervous systems of vulnerable populations (think nursing women, children, and the unborn). Add to that persistent organic pollutants (also known as POPS) which, despite the cute acronym, are hormone-disrupting neurotoxins that can wreak havoc on humans, and it's a wonder you're not hungry for a slab of farmed salmon or wild tuna cooked quickly on the grill.

Then, of course, for the ethical environmentalists among us, there's the sad realization that we're coming to the end of the line seafood-species wise. We've done a good job globally of depleting fish stocks to worrisomely low levels, with Atlantic cod and bluefin tuna on a fast track towards extinction. Throw in the real problems with certain farmed fish businesses (think waste-disease-pollution) and the anxiety around GMO-salmon and the dreaded Frankenfish, and it's enough to make a seafood lover switch to some other protein source.

Enough with the horror stories from the open seas. There are still ways to get a seafood fix, it just takes a little education, thought and planning. But if you've read this far you're probably willing to go the extra mile for mussels or work a bit harder for halibut. Chances are, you've likely already done that as far as fruit and vegetables are concerned (local, organic, seasonal) and meat (grass-fed, humanely-raised, thoughtfully slaughtered).

Some suggestions for making healthier, more sustainable seafood choices, gleaned from the experts above:

• Think small: Americans are conditioned to thinking bigger is better. Not necessarily so when it comes to fish. Sardines and anchovies, those little, oily bottom feeders of the sea, revered in other parts of the world, are delicious, nutritious, and affordable, and carry a lower risk for toxins than big fish like tuna.
• Buy seasonally and diversify: Would you expect to buy great tasting, local, organic tomatoes in January? Apply the same sensibility to your seafood shopping and pick shellfish and finfish during their peak time for freshness, taste, and price. Dungeness crab is harvested in the fall and winter, for instance. When in doubt, ask. Most Americans who eat seafood choose salmon, shrimp, or tuna. Check out Arctic char or Pacific halibut for a change.
• Reconsider frozen and farmed fish: A properly frozen fish (landed gently, bled, and quickly chilled preferably at sea) can be a high-quality, carbon-foot print friendly option, if handled well, says Selengut. While hook-and-line wild fish is a better bet than seafood caught by dredging or trawling, which can produce a lot of bycatch (accidentally caught species unintentionally killed in the fishing process), farmed fish are a wise choice in some circumstances, adds the cookbook author. Farmed fish may be a more sustainable choice for fish lower on the food chain that are either vegetarian or require only small amounts of fish protein to produce flesh. Find an example of a farmed fish that may be gentler on the environment in a recent Time magazine story on a western Massachusetts-based outfit farming barramundi, a fish much loved in my homeland.
• Find a fishmonger you trust: Local picks include the year-old San Francisco-based online sustainable seafood supplier i love blue sea, co-founded by Martin Reed, a panelist at the recent Sustainable Foods Institute. I love blue sea doesn't sell any of Seafood Watch's red-listed fish and ships via FedEx across the country. (Bay Area residents can pick up directly, avoiding the expense and guilt associated with air freight).

  Newcomer Siren SeaSA founded by Anna Larsen, offers a CSA-like option for seafood lovers: For six Saturdays starting July 16, subscribers can pick up an assortment of seasonal, sustainable seafood in San Francisco or Petaluma. Catch of the day may include wild king salmon from Bodega Bay, squid from Monterey, wild-caught Pacific sardines, Miyagi oysters from Tomales Bay, and hook-and-line caught black cod. Limited to 100 members for its trial run, a six-week subscription is still available at a cost of $255 for seafood portions calculated to feed four people. Larsen plans to continue the program beyond this initial summer launch.

  A Community Supported Fishery (CSF) program is also running this summer out of Half Moon Bay. And a very new online resource Local Catch, promises connections to CSF members via a zip code search function.

• Frequent seafood restaurants with a sustainable seafood rap: Top picks from San Francisco's "Good Fish, Bad Fish" story by Erik Vance this year include The Basin in Saratoga, Flea St. Cafe in Menlo Park, Nettie's Crab Shack, Nopa, and Tataki Sushi and Sake Bar in San Francisco, Revival Bar & Kitchen in Berkeley, and Zazu in Santa Rosa. See how 18 other big name Bay Area restaurants fared on the sustainable seafood front in the magazine's story.

Learn more about sustainable seafood:

Read Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg, which documents the tenuous outlook for salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna.

Follow the reporting of sustainable seafood writers such as former Gourmet scribe Barry Estabrook of Politics of the Plate and freelance food writer Clare Leschin-Hoar.

Watch Isabelle Rossellini's entertaining, educational, and amusing Green Porno series, which documents the plight of sea creatures and other animals.

See the seafood documentaries The End of the Line and Red Gold.

Cook Find Mark Bittman's simple recipes for serving white fish fillet a dozen ways in the New York Times. Check out acclaimed seafood chef and National Geographic Fellow Barton Seaver's new cookbook For Cod and Country or Selengut's good fish, which features fifteen types of Pacific Coast sea creatures (including clams, crabs, char, cod, salmon, scallops, squid, and sardines) in 75 recipes. Check out the instructional online videos from the private chef and cooking teacher, who also blogs at chefreinvented.

Got a sustainable seafood resource to share? Add your voice below.

Juice Bar Collective in Berkeley. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

As any just-opened food truck can tell you, it's not so hard to get customers (and press) when you're the hot new thing on the block. Pull up to the curb, put the word out on Twitter, start serving your Japanese curry, Korean tacos, grilled cheese sandwiches or escargot-on-a-stick, and for a while at least, novelty will be your cash register's best friend.

But how do you stay in business for three decades making smoothies, soup, and sandwiches? How do you keep the same faces happy on both sides of the counter, for decades on end? Swerving from our usual pursuit of the new, we decided to check in with Berkeley's Juice Bar Collective, still in full swing in its original location, 35 years and counting. Here's what we learned, courtesy of Krissa Schwartz, a four-year collective member and now part-time worker:

Location, Location, Location

If you're going to start a small-scale, high-volume food business, plunk it down in a friendly neighborhood with lots of foot traffic and a bunch of compatible businesses. Not that the Juice Bar's founders knew in 1976 that they were setting up shop in what would come to be known as the Gourmet Ghetto. But a few like-minded tastemakers were already in place. The Cheeseboard (another collective, started in 1967) was around the corner. Alice Waters had opened Chez Panisse nearby in 1971. Alfred Peet was roasting coffee beans and serving espresso in his first cafe just half a block away, at the corner of Walnut and Vine.

Juice Bar Collective members at work. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Keep Your Ideals High, Your Workers Happy...

The Juice Bar has been a worker-owned collective since its inception. While none of the original founders are still involved, two collective members have been working there for over 25 years, others for 20. Most of the newer members have been remained there anywhere from 3 to 6 years.

Job responsibilities rotate, so eventually each member takes a turn doing all the jobs needed to keep the business running, from doing the ordering and payroll to working the cash register and washing dishes. Mandatory monthly meetings are run on a one-member, one-vote system. In return, collective members share an equal hourly wage and receive full health, vision, and dental benefits, plus 4 weeks' paid vacation.

Juice Bar Collective menu. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

...Your Menu Short

When the Juice Bar started, it offered just two things: juice and soup. The menu of made-from-scratch dishes has expanded over the years, but fresh-squeezed juices and homemade soup remain, along with a brief roster of smoothies. No room for a freezer means no frozen yogurt or sorbet in the smoothies--meaning these smoothies are pure fruit and juice with a little milk or soymilk added, not sugar-laden milkshakes in health-food disguise. The rest of the menu? A half-dozen sandwich varieties, a few veggie salads, a handful of hot dishes. Almost everything is made from scratch, mostly vegetarian and vegan, although there are tuna and turkey sandwiches, plus a much-loved turkey shepherd's pie served in the fall and winter.

Black-bean-and-polenta casserole with salsa, soup and a smoothie. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Times Change, and So Should Your Casseroles

For all their much-vaunted progressiveness, Berkeleyites feel strongly that some good things should stay that way, forever. Regulars still ask, longingly, for the soybean casserole, even though it was dropped from the menu nearly a decade ago in favor of more up-to-date offerings like pizza, lasagna, and a black-bean-and-polenta casserole blanketed in a choice of melted cheese or salsa. In a town of endless potlucks, these hot dishes, sold by the tray, have proved very popular for casual catering. What bring-your-own-dinner wouldn't be improved by a panful of no-fuss, ready-to-heat lasagna or vegan polenta?

However, the brown-rice bowl, lavished with peanut sauce and topped with a rotating choice of Asian-inspired salads, remains, and that delicious peanut sauce is now also sold in tubs to go.

And soybean lovers can still enjoy chocolate-tofu pie (melted chocolate whipped into silken tofu, poured into a graham-cracker crust) and a baked garlic-and-ginger tofu sandwich.

Buy (or Barter) Local

It takes a lot of fruits and vegetables to make all those soups and smoothies. The Juice Bar gets its organic produce from the distributor Veritable Vegetable, which started in San Francisco in 1974. Asian ingredients come from Yin Hop in Oakland's Chinatown, except for tofu, which is made locally by Hodo Soy Beanery and picked up at the Thursday farmers' market on Shattuck Ave. Sonoma's Alvarado Street Bakery, a worker cooperative started in 1981, makes their sliced sandwich bread, while baguettes from the Cheeseboard are bartered for orange juice.

And Keep the Neighbors Happy

Casual trade happens up and down the street between the Juice Bar and other food businesses. Nearby merchants and workers often get a small (and usually reciprocal) courtesy discount.

Any other secrets they've learned over 35 years in business? Enthusiasm is great, but experience pays off, especially when you're hiring a crew to work elbow-to-elbow in a tiny space (something every food truck has learned the hard way). Keep your regulars happy, but don't be afraid to mix up the menu a little to keep things fresh. Make your food organic, comforting, and healthy, like what your customers would eat at home, if vegetables chopped themselves. And perfume your kitchen with the smell of melting chocolate and baking muffins whenever possible.

Organic Blueberry Muffins. Photo by Wendy Goodfriend

Today, after the last of the snow in our backyard melted, it snowed again. It has been a long winter -- as it usually is in Minnesota (although I’ve only experienced two). This extended period of long-underwear, wool socks, and root vegetable stews is the reason why more people don’t live here. But as the snow melts and the temperature rises above 32 degrees, there is real joy. It’s not just a nice day for us… it’s excitement, anticipation and even a relaxation (of whatever muscles are used in shivering). And for me, most of all, it’s the search for wild foods that gets me out walking in the woods.

Over the course of the last year making episodes about food in Minnesota, of all the topics, foraging has been the most prominent. I suppose it is so with any subject, but the more you learn, the more wonderful and intriguing it becomes. A walk in the woods is not just beautiful, it is a shopping trip and a treasure hunt. So this time of year is the most exciting of all.

At this point in April when we (Minnesotans) have a few wild edibles popping out of the ground, you (Californians) have been eating them for months. But that doesn't make them any less special. So, this last Saturday we had a pizza party in celebration of Spring. It was quite ironic as the temperature dropped into the 30's that evening. Regardless, that morning we went foraging for the first of spring's offerings. A ritual that I wish was part of every cooking job: first go harvest, then go cook.

We found garlic mustard, nettles, ramps, daylilies and dandelion greens. The nettles were small and purple in color. They aren't woodsy or bitter at this point, more like spinach. We used these as a base for our pesto. The ramps were still a little young, so we didn't over pick them. If you haven't had a ramp yet, they are garlicky and delicious. I usually use the leaves for pesto while pickling the stems. The daylilies are shooting up all along the edge of my house, if you get them when they are young, they add a nice crunch with a very slight onion flavor. And dandelion greens -- they are bitter of course, but add a taste that connects you to the earth.

Recipe: Ramp Pesto

Ingredients:
• 1 part ramp leaves
• 3 parts nettles
• 1 part garlic mustard
• 1 part dandelion greens
• 1/2 part Extra Virgin Olive oil (more if needed)
• Salt

Instructions:
Blanch the nettles in hot water followed by an ice bath. Wring out the water. Puree all the ingredients together. You can add nuts or Parmesan if you want, but we we're going for more of a sauce type consistency. This could be used in pasta or as a sauce for more full flavored fish or a lighter meat. We used it on pizza, with a few dollops of chevre and cooked it in a wood-fired oven then garnished with some micro greens. A delicious spring.

---

Recipe: Pizza Dough

The pizza oven and the levain used in the dough were both created by Lisa Ringer of Two Pony Gardens. She spent the last year collecting large stones from her property to decorate the oven all the while managing her wild yeast "mother." I used her levain to create my pizza dough, no commercial yeast added.

Ingredients:
• 1 Cup levain
• 3 Cups flour
• 1/2 Cup warm water
• 2 Tablespoons EVO
• 2 teaspoons sea salt

Instructions:
Because I was making dough for 150, I mixed the dough in a mixer. But for a small batch, do it in a bowl. Add a little extra water if necessary, you want the dough to be nice and wet. Once the dough is formed (as little mixing as possible, just knead until combined), I let it rise for a couple hours in the kitchen and then overnight in the fridge. The next morning, I divided it into small balls, covered with a damp towel and let it slowly rise again until i was ready to cook the pizzas. In the heat of a wood-fired oven they don't take more than a minute.

Eggs from Tara Firma Farms

Happy Easter! And where better to spend this egg-centric holiday than Petaluma, land of butter & eggs? This pretty Sonoma town is worth a drive anytime, especially now while the surrounding hills are green and the cows contented.

Start your Sunday with brunch at Della Fattoria Bakery and Cafe. If you shop at the Ferry Plaza or Marin County farmers' markets, you've probably ogled Della Fattoria's big brown loaves many a time as you try to choose that week's purchase: pumpkin-seed or polenta? Meyer lemon-rosemary (my favorite) or olive? A square Pullman loaf for slicing and toasting, or a crunchy-crusted epi to rip and dunk?

At the heart of Della Fattoria's operation is a farm and bakery, where their breads are baked in wood-fired ovens. The farm doubles as a site for outdoor, communal "ranch dinners"; there's also a small cottage available for rent by the week or by the night.

Easter brunch menu at Della Fattoria

In downtown Petaluma, Della Fattoria runs a bakery-cafe that serves breakfast and lunch 7 days a week, plus dinner on Fridays. The menu shifts a little with inspiration and the seasons, but farm eggs, local meats, and bakery products are always front and center.

Polenta, asparagus, and egg at Della Fattoria Bakery & Cafe

This Sunday, you'll find eggs bennie (eggs Benedict), of course, made with poached ranch eggs, ham, and spring asparagus under a cloak of hollandaise sauce over husky whole-grain toast. Creamy polenta comes topped 3 ways: with braised artichokes, with Italian-style meatballs, or with asparagus, a poached ranch egg, and some rosettes of proscuitto, a lovely, luxurious way to start the day. Bigger appetites might start with fruit salad bathed in brown sugar and champagne, followed by scalloped potatoes with eggs and black-pig bacon, biscuits in gravy with maple-pecan sausage and poached eggs, or a hot pressed ham-and-Gruyere sandwich.

The room is high-ceilinged with walls the color of terra cotta and two long communal tables in the center, plus five smaller tables against the walls. Bouquets of sweet peas and ranunculus add a bright splash of color to each table, where diners share newspapers while kids gnaw on house-baked bagels. At the back is a pastry counter filled with croissants, bear claws, cookies, and tarts, plus a wall of tempting breads.

Enjoy yourself, sip that perfect cappuccino, but don't linger too long; it's time to take a scenic five-mile drive out of town, along meandering, bumpy but beautiful I Street, past horses, cows, and California poppy-studded green hills to Tara Firma Farms. If you're a farmers'-market shopper, you've probably been handed a flyer advertising their pasture-raised meat CSA program and weekend farm tours. Every weekend, from 10am-3pm, owners Craig and Tara Smith do on-the-hour walks around their property, where they're raising pigs, beef cattle, and chickens for both meat and eggs. (There's also a small market garden, three very friendly pet goats, and Roland, the farm dog.)

Craig and Tara started the farm in 2009, raising about 40 head of pasture-raised cattle who move around the farm daily, grazing on three to five acres a day. (Craig still has his day job as the owner of a large long-term-care insurance company; Tara left her job at the same company and now does much of the day-to-day farm management.) They gather about 500 eggs a day from some 700 hens, all of whom spend their days out in the fields, scratching, grazing, pecking, and laying fertile eggs of all sizes and colors. Staunch proponents of the Joel Salatin method, they practice rotational grazing for all their animals. "Everything is always on the move," said Craig, noting that adopting this system made "a huge difference" in revitalizing what had been worn-out, heavily overgrazed land.

Chicken at Tara Firma Farms

After meeting Olivia the sow and her 12 adorable, two-week-old pink-and-black piglets, we walked up to one of the chicken tractors, a shed on wheels kitted out with nesting boxes and secure predator-proof roosts for nighttime. The chickens are busy earning their keep: every straw-lined nesting box we peered into held a clutch of three or four still-warm eggs. It's prime egg-laying time right now, said Craig, as the days get longer and warmer after winter's molting season.

Olivia the sow and her piglets

Pointing out the pond stocked with fish (catfish and large-mouthed bass, for catch-and-release fishing) and encouraging everyone to come back for a hike, Craig said, "We want all our members to feel like this is their farm. We really want to help people understand where their food comes from."

About 80% of the farm's production is sold through its CSA program, which offers both meat and veggie shares; members can pick up boxes at the farm or through one of its 12 drop points between Santa Rosa and San Francisco. After the tour, visitors can browse through the small farm store, where fresh eggs and a small area of produce is on display, featuring a mixture of farm vegetables and produce from County Line, a nearby organic farm. But those in the know head straight for the freezer, where the farm's beef, chicken, and pork are packaged for sale.

As for me, I'm happy to go home with a box of souffle-ready eggs, perfect alongside some Della Fattoria toast.

---

Della Fattoria (The Cafe)
Address: Map
141 Petaluma Boulevard North
Petaluma, CA
Phone: (707) 763-0161
Hours: Mon-Thu & Sat: 6am-3pm, Fri: 6am-9pm, Sun: 9am-3pm
Twitter: @DellaFattoria
Facebook: Della Fattoria

Tara Firma Farms
Address: Map
3796 I Street, Ext
Petaluma, CA 94952
Phone: (707) 765-1202
Twitter: @TaraFirmaFarms
Facebook: Tara Firma Farms