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

Here at Bay Area Bites, we believe in equal-opportunity coverage. So, while yesterday's post gave you tips on finding vegan marshmallow chicks and dairy-free chocolate bunnies, today we're going to tell you how get those rabbits out of the Easter basket and onto the table!

Yes, rabbits are cute. However, if you choose to eat meat, you should know that they're also lean, tasty, and take limited time & resources to reach market size, making them a practical and sustainable meat source.

When I was a restaurant critic, I always ordered rabbit when I found it on local menus. Why? First, because I liked it, and secondly, because it was very nice to have something different to write about for a change; there's only so many ways you can describe a steak, a chicken breast, or a piece of halibut. But, oh, the looks of pleading I got if I dared urge any of my dining companions to order it instead! Those Easter-bunny associations are strong.

There's no real reason to be squeamish about rabbit. Unlike, say, kidneys, brains, or blood sausage, there's nothing dramatic, weirdly textured, pungent or funky about rabbit. Yes, it does have a slight resemblance to chicken, but with a silky, meatier texture that's all its own.

In Italy, its mild flavor makes it a popular baby food; little jars of coniglio line the shelves at the supermercado and the farmacia. Rabbits were counted among the domesticated courtyard animals, like chickens and guinea fowl, that were one step closer to the house than livestock like cows, sheep, and goats.

A small but growing number of local gardeners are adding a few rabbits to their backyard mix of chickens and bees. However, if you're not quite up to raising (and dispatching) your own rabbit, you can still find local, humanely-raised rabbits in the Bay Area.

In the East Bay, you can find 3-lb Jones Farm rabbits from Santa Rosa for $10/lb at the Marin Sun Farms butcher shop in Rockridge Market Hall. At Avedano's Holly Park Market in San Francisco, rabbits from Devil's Gulch Ranch in West Marin arrive every Friday, where the 3-to-4 lb rabbits are $30 apiece. (They are also sold at the Marin Civic Center Farmers Market on Sundays from 9am-1pm)

Being a lean meat, rabbit benefits from a little enrichment during the cooking process. You can go the Italian way, browning it in olive oil and then braising it with tomatoes and herbs, perhaps a splash of balsamic vinegar. The French prefer it lavished with mustard and cream, baked to a fragrant golden brown, and it's this version that I'm sharing with you today, adapted from a recipe in former Chez Panisse chef David Tanis's first book, A Platter of Figs and Other Recipes. It's rich but simple, a luscious amalgam of mustard, thyme, and cream, with bacon on top to add crispness and smoky depth.

Unless you have a sharp cleaver and a steady hand, it's wise to ask your butcher to divide your rabbit into serving pieces for you. At Marin Sun, the butcher tells me there are many, many ways to divvy up a bunny; we settle for separating out the legs (the meaty haunches and back legs, and the narrower front legs and shoulders), then chopping the rest of the body (the saddle) into 6 even pieces. Like a chicken, the more muscular legs take longer to cook; he advises putting the back legs in first, followed by the front legs 15 minutes later, and the saddle pieces 15 minutes after that. He also suggests, for my next rabbit, that I get the saddle boned out in one piece. Spread out, rubbed with fresh herbs and garlic, rolled and tied, then grilled or roasted, it becomes a kind of rabbit porchetta, easy to serve and eat.

What to accompany them? Why, carrots, of course. Tanis suggests simmering equal parts peeled potatoes and carrots in salted water, then draining and mashing them with a lump of butter, a generous pinch of saffron, and enough milk or creme fraiche to make it smooth and creamy.

Easter is coming up, and what better way to prepare than by planning out all the sweet treats you and the children in your life will be devouring? Vegans love Easter candy just as much as the next person, and, luckily, many vegan candy makers are happy to oblige. Below is a round-up of what is available (we wanted to give you early notice, since many of these may have to be ordered and shipped).

Just remember that while the Easter bunny is adorable and fluffy, it is always best to stick to the chocolate variety. Please don't purchase a rabbit for your child as an Easter gift. Every year thousands or rabbits are bought as cute gifts who then end up being abandoned at animal control where they will almost certainly be euthanized, or thrown out into the wild, which results in certain death in a matter of days. Rabbits can live for up to 12 years and require just as much care as a cat or dog who they equal in intelligence and emotional bond to humans (they know their names and can be litter-trained!). The responsibility and the the fact that they do not enjoy being cuddled and held (they prefer you hang out next to them instead) often turn owners off soon after purchase, resulting in their abandonment. However, if you do feel that you or your child can (after doing proper research and meeting with a rabbit organization) adopt a bunny into your family, please seek out a rescue organization and not a breeder or pet store. SaveABunny is an award-winning, wonderful organization that is truly a leader in rabbit rescue and they are always looking for good homes for their rescues. And if you cannot adopt but still want to give some love to a bunny, then donate money, sponsor a rabbit, or give supplies.

And now for the candy:

1. Who doesn't adore Cadbury Cream Eggs? This intensely sugary treat was an Easter staple during most people's childhoods. Luckily, vegansaurus just did a "Vegan Cadbury Creme Egg TASTE OFF!" and has two great options they recommend that mimic the creamy candy perfectly.

   
   Vegan "Cadbury" Eggs from Queenbalch on Etsy and VeganSweets Vanilla Cream Eggs at Pangea
   Photos by Laura Beck of vegansaurus

2. Everyone knows those sugar-covered, brightly-colored, fluffy chicks and bunnies that appear in stores every year. Unfortunately Peeps are made of marshmallows, which contain gelatin. So they are actually not even vegetarian, let alone vegan. But masters of vegan marshmallows, Chicago Soy Dairy and Sweet and Sara, are here to satisfy our cravings.

   
   Chicago Soy Dairy's Tweets available at Cosmo's Vegan Shoppe (photo by Quarry Girl) and Sweet and Sara's Easter Peepers and Skippers available at Sweet and Sara's shop or Cosmo's.
   

3. Purveyors of fine vegan chocolates, Sjaak's never disappoints for holiday (and everyday!) vegan chocolates. You can go for a tub of simple easter eggs or a an adorable box of truffles. But my favorite is the chocolate bunny basket.
   
   Sjaak's Organic Bunny in Basket
4. Finally, here is a great line of candy bars from Go Max Go. They are not specifically for Easter, but they are damn good and, thankfully, available year-round. Meant to mimic chocolate bars we all know well--like Snickers, 3 Musketeers, Milky Way, and Almond Joy--these bars use creamy rice milk chocolate to envelope nuts, coconut, and vegan caramel and nougat. The company is coming out with peanut butter cups and a crispy rice bar very soon.

   
   Go Max Go rice milk candy bars

If you still can't decide on what to buy, check out the other Easter selections at Vegan Essentials, Cosmo's Vegan Shoppe, Pangea, and Sjaak's.

And if you want to forgo candy all together and focus on just decorating some eggs, pick up a few wooden or cardboard eggs at your local craft store, and get painting!

Happy Easter, everyone!

Eggs in a dish at Readers Books in Sonoma. Photo by Laiko Bahrs

I love the smell of Paas and vinegar in the morning! Really, who knew those little tablets, so ubiquitous at this time of year, were invented by a savvy colorful-egg-lover in Newark, New Jersey in 1880?

So happy Easter, all, and here's to the rituals celebrating birth, rebirth, resurrection and the arrival of spring. The chicks are pecking, the lambs are frolicking, and in my house, the return of warmth and sunshine (in between the April showers) means gathering friends and family for brunch.

And brunch, of course, means eggs. Now, you could serve your meal at one p.m. and call it Easter dinner, bring out the ham and peas, salmon and hollandaise, leg of lamb with electric-green mint jelly, with a basket of soft white rolls alongside and strawberries to follow. All perfectly lovely food that I've enjoyed at my mother's family's table many a time, and all dishes that any edition of The Joy of Cooking could tell you how to make in neat and foolproof detail.

Eggs and Easter, however, are inextricably linked, and since you'll be getting a dozen for dyeing, why not get a few more for eating, too? If eggs are going to be the centerpiece of your meal (not just the decorative center of your tablescape), this is the moment to splurge a little and get the good ones, from happy chickens that scratched and flapped and ate a poultry-happy omnivorous diet of worms and bugs as well as veggies and chicken feed.

In Italy, the term for egg yolk was il rosso, the red of the egg. The first time I cracked an egg in my kitchen in Bologna, I understood: the egg yolk was a brilliant, glowing deep orange, thanks to a rich and varied diet. Besides color, the texture of the egg can tell you a lot about its vigor and freshness. A fresh, hearty egg will have a plump stand-up deep yellow yolk ringed with a thick, clear, almost jellylike white. This is the egg that will scramble up like a dream, make a silky créme brûlée and a lavishly puffed soufflé. A slack yolk and a watery white—both indicative of weeks-old eggs, unhappy hen husbandry, or both—won't taste like much, and won't rise to any kind of glory.

Good eggs will cost a bit more, sometimes a lot more. But still, the price only seems high in comparison to the supermarket price we've gotten used to. Seven or eight dollars will get you one Mason-jar glass of wine at Heart, a little plate of roasted-beet salad at Frances, two cappuccinos at Four Barrel. Or a dozen happy eggs from Marin Sun, Clark Summit, Eatwell, or Soul Food Farm. That's about 60 or 65 cents an egg, a buck twenty for two over easy.

That is, if you haven't already made trading friends with your latest hen-keeping neighbor. Up in Marin, my best friend recently added 4 chicks to her husband-two-kids-and-a-dog household. Dubbed Honey, Duck, Athena, and Medea, they are impossibly fluffy and cute, and I can't wait to start trading jam and gardening help for their fresh eggs.

Egg cartons on the counter at Omnivore Books in San Francisco

Until then, I'm getting the next best thing, eggs from my friend Celia's neighbors near Dillon Beach in Tomales, which she sells over the counter at her wonderful Noe Valley cookbook shop, Omnivore Books. In fact, it was a proscuitto-and-spinach soufflé served by Celia and her partner Paula at a Christmas brunch 10 years ago that inspired this Easter recipe. (Meanwhile, there must be some kind of chicken/book connection; at Readers' Books in Sonoma, a chicken-keeping customer supplies the shop with eggs in exchange for books. And yes, the eggs in that top photo came in those colors straight from the chicken. Specialty breeds like the Araucana and the Ameraucana lay blue, green, and amber-shelled eggs, ready for Easter every day.)

The nicest part about this soufflé recipe is that it has never failed me. Forget whatever unfounded soufflé fear you may have picked up like a bad habit over the years. As long as you are gentle in your folding, and don't open the oven door while it's baking, you will be rewarded with a supremely impressive golden puff and a deliciously moist and fluffy plateful of sunshiny goodness.

Green & Pink Soufflé for Spring
Serve this alongside a nice green salad dressed in a mustardy French vinaigrette, and pour a pretty pink rosé. A tip: you'll get the most volume out of room-temperature eggs. To take off the chill, put fridge-cold whole eggs in a bowl and cover them with warm water for 5 minutes before cracking and separating.

Serves 4 dainty eaters or 2 greedy ones (with a little left over for later)

Ingredients:
3 tbsp butter, divided, plus extra for greasing
1 tbsp or so of minced green garlic, scallions, or shallots
2 big handfuls of tender greens, such as spinach, nettles, or chard (stems and any hard ribs removed)
2 1/2 tbsp flour
1 cup whole milk, warmed
4 extra-large eggs, separated, at room temperature
1 egg white
4 tbsp grated Swiss or Gruyere cheese
2 to 3 oz proscuitto, cut into strips
Salt, freshly ground pepper, and freshly grated nutmeg, to taste

Preparation:
1. Butter an 8-inch straight-sided ceramic souffle dish. Preheat oven to 375F.

2. Over low heat, melt 1 tbsp butter in a saute pan. Add green garlic and cook, stirring, for 2 minutes. Add greens and cook, stirring, until collapsed and tender. Remove from heat. When cool enough to handle, squeeze out excess liquid and chop finely. Season to taste with salt, pepper, and a little nutmeg. Set aside.

3. In a smallish, heavy pot, melt remaining 2 tbsp butter. Add the flour and whisk like crazy, letting it cook until it looks smooth and thick and smells slightly biscuity but doesn't color, about 2 minutes. Dump in the milk and whisk madly as it bubbles up and thickens, 2-3 minutes. Take off the heat and let it cool for a few minutes.

4. Whisk in the egg yolks one at a time. Stir in the grated cheese, greens, and sliced proscuitto. Add pepper to taste; the cheese and proscuitto will probably make it salty enough. Set aside.

5. In a large bowl using a clean whisk or hand-held electric mixer, beat your 5 egg whites until they form soft, droopy peaks when the beater is lifted.

6. Fold a scoop of whites into the cheese mixture to lighten it, then fold the rest in quickly and lightly. It doesn't have to be uniform; leaving some visible streaks of egg white is just fine. The egg whites are what will give your soufflé its fluff, so don't deflate them by over-mixing. Pour into the prepared dish and pop into the oven.

7. NO PEEKING! Let it cook for at least 30 minutes. Then check; it should be well golden-browned and beautifully puffy. Shake it gently; the center should be a bit jiggly without being soupy. Serve immediately, as it will begin to sigh and collapse shortly after being removed from the oven.

There is a tradition in my house around this time of year. Come Easter Sunday, a cake must be made, and it must be made in the shape of a bunny or a lamb, using a special bunny- or lamb-shaped cake pan (preferably the one passed along to me by my mother, from her mother). Once the cake is baked, it's frosted with white icing and lavished with pastel-dyed coconut (to represent bunny fur or lambswool, if bunnies had a thing for Manic Panic hair color). Jelly beans stand in for eyes, mouth, and general bejeweling. The type of cake--white, yellow, lemon--is less important than the fabulousness of the decoration.

Now, if you're the sort of person who notices bylines, you might be a little curious by now. Why is someone named Rosenbaum waxing rhapsodic about bunny cake? Shouldn't a Rosenbaum be making matzoh kugel this time of year, chopping charoseth and grating horseradish, whipping up a batch of Marcy Goldman-via-David Lebovitz chocolate-covered toffee matzoh crunch?

Well, as a matter of fact, I'm doing that too. On a line for religious affiliation, I'd have to write "Baking Jew." My Hebrew skills are nonexistent and my grasp of Torah imprecise, but I can whip up a mean Rosh Hashanah honey cake, an excellent Purim hamentaschen, a swell matzoh ball and a pretty great Seder spongecake, even in a studio apartment with a kitchen counter smaller than a newspaper.

So, where does the bunny cake come in? The short answer: my mother converted when she got married. So my sisters and I were raised Jewish, with no bacon, Hebrew school three times a week, challah French toast on Saturdays and lox and bagels on Sundays. But we still got to have fun on Easter, in a purely secular, egg-dyeing way, up at my grandmother's house. We would spend a gleeful afternoon on an Easter-egg hunt around her house, filling our plastic-grass lined baskets with Peeps, Cadbury creme eggs, and hollow-eared chocolate bunnies.

But therein lay the moral quandary. For understandable reasons, there is no such thing as kosher for Passover Easter candy. If, as commonly occurs, Easter fell during the eight days of Passover, we couldn't eat those marshmallow chicks and foil-wrapped eggs until Passover was over, which could be up to a week away... When this happened, my grandmother would take pity on us and make her bunny cake with a kosher-for-Passover cake mix: an absurd but also wonderful gesture, as I see it now.

This weekend, I'm out in Minneapolis with my sister and brother-in-law (a Methodist), and their 3 children. We're having a Seder tonight, with an Easter ham stashed in the fridge for Sunday. Her bunny cake mold is made of pink silicone now, already pre-portioned into kiddie-sized chunks. My sister and I are sharing matzoh and averting our eyes from the rest of the family's morning waffles. She's added a Sephardic date-and-ginger charoseth to the mix, and my brother-in-law is providing the pot roast. It may not be totally kosher, but it tastes like home.