A sure sign of spring at local farmers markets is the appearance of green garlic. It arrives in late winter, but it is a sign of what’s to come: spring meals resplendent with fresh green peas, spring lamb, mushrooms, radishes and asparagus.

Hard garlic bulbs come into season in June and July. At that point, the bulbs are dry and look like what we typically use the rest of the year (they are stored in dry, ventilated rooms by the farmers). But to get to that point, garlic begins much earlier in the year as a green stalk that is similar in appearance to a leek or a spring onion. As the year goes on, the end portion becomes more bulbous until it starts to harden and dry out.

While green garlic can be used in any recipe calling for garlic, it has a subtle flavor that is unique from dry garlic. When I particularly want to highlight the flavor of green garlic, I make egg dishes, risottos, or simple meat dishes with gads of the herb.

Fellow bloggers also enjoy green garlic and have published recipes:

• Pim suggests shrimp stir-fry with green garlic
• Brett likes his green garlic in a Spanish tortilla with white beans
• Catherine has a cabbage and green garlic soup recipe for us
• And Laura Rebecca brings us a green garlic pesto

You can find green garlic at most local farmers markets. I have never seen green garlic in a traditional supermarket. Farms I know that carry green garlic include:

Eatwell Farm (Ferry Plaza Farmers Market)
Knoll Farm (Ferry Plaza Farmers Market)
Marin Roots Farm (Ferry Plaza, Marin Farmers Markets)
Phan Farm (Heart of the City Farmers Market)

I admit to being a bit of a design snob. I initially judge blogs on the way that they look or their terrible photos rather than the quality of their writing. And I often want to avoid restaurants whose websites have irritated me in one way or another. Of course, once I look further into some of those blogs I find writing I love, and once I actually go to some of those restaurants I find I enjoy them. But first impressions mean a lot.

A couple of days ago, a friend was asking me for a restaurant recommendation. Easy task, I thought. I had some restaurants in mind and just needed to check and see if they were open and send her the websites. What should have been a 5-minute email turned into a half-hour nightmare as I slogged through websites that are more intent on impressing me with movies, music, and other annoyances than on giving me direct information.

Hear this, restaurants: We are not looking to your sites for entertainment. We want to get our information, get out, and get back to watching Eli Stone. Noise of clinking glasses or a dull roar or fancy music does not make us want to go to your restaurant more, it just tips off our employers that we are making dinner plans instead of filing our TPS reports. We don’t want to sit through 30 second flash movies of how happy we’ll be if we go to your restaurant. We just want the facts: When are you open, what’s for dinner, and how much does it cost. And I want to do that in as few clicks as possible.

Oh, and also? We are in the Bay Area — arguably the technology capital of the world. How difficult is it to learn to code up a simple HTML page? Why are you still making us click through to PDF’s of your menus or (horrors) Word documents? It’s all about time for me, and opening up the pdf takes up my precious seconds.

MY FAVORITES

Some of my favorite restaurant websites are super basic, nice to look at, and tell me all I need to know.

Spork. Looking at this website makes me want to spend my hard-earned money to hire this designer to redo all other restaurant websites. It’s gorgeous.

Bar Jules. The lovely Bar Jules site changes daily and tells us what’s for lunch and dinner.

Slanted Door. Chock full of information, and has a handy plug-in to make an Open Table reservation.

Arizmendi Bakery. Arizmendi’s pizza changes daily, and Arizmendi has a calendar for the whole month of delicious flavors.

SITES THAT MAKE ME WANT TO SCRATCH MY EYES OUT
(warning, many of these have music)

Bix. I want to send a friend directly to Bix’s list of cocktails, as I had an excellent one there the other night. Oh wait … the whole site is in FLASH so I can’t send a direct link!

Market Bar. Don’t. Resize. My. Browser. Ever. (And while you’re at it, you might want to get spellcheck. Mediterranean is spelled with one “t”.)

Spruce. Let’s review how many steps I have to go through to find the Spruce dinner menu:

1) wait for flash site to load
2) click “menus”
3) click “food”
4) click “dinner”
5) change my browser to allow pop-ups for this site
6) PDF!

House. Give us prices. Seriously. Not having prices reeks of pretentiousness and is absolutely useless.

And then we have a “bandwidth exceeded” message over at 1300 Fillmore.

Fortunately for us consumers, there are ways around these horrid websites. Menu Pages, while not the prettiest site out there, lists over 4000 menus in San Francisco. And Yelp is the easiest place I’ve found to figure out restaurant hours.

Let’s call out all the bad restaurant websites — which would you nominate? What are your pet peeves?

Next week, the Center for Urban Education and Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA) will be hosting a discussion called “Agriculture in a Warmer World.” The discussion will include presentations from two different researchers and will focus on how climate change will impact food supply, food distribution, and food security.

Dr. W. Michael Hanemann is Director of the California Climate Change Center at UC Berkeley, and Dr. David Lobell is a Senior Research Scholar at Stanford’s Program on Food Security and the Environment.

We’re already seeing changes in our food supply due to global warming. Just this past weekend, an international conference was held in Barcelona to talk about the effects of climate change on the wine industry. And in August, a top UN official warned that climate change could have devastating effects on food production in India.

CUESA’s last informational panel was on food safety, and covered topics ranging from genetic engineering, food recalls, and the leafy green industry in California.

“Agriculture in a Warmer World” is part one of a two-part series. The second, to be held in about a month, is called “Climate Friendly Eating” and will focus on how our personal food choices affect the climate.

When: Thursday, February 28
Where: Port Commission Hearing Room, Ferry Building
Time: Reception at 6:30, Program at 7:00 pm

Wanna know how cold it was. Too frigid for apples. One farmer stood in the cold; when a hearty customer arrived, she would bang on the truck door. Her partner, with the better end of the deal, would pass along a bag from the stash. Cold.
- “Vital Information”, regarding an Ann Arbor, MI farmers market in January.

I am constantly humbled by how fortunate we are to live in the Bay Area foodshed. Here it is the middle of winter, and we have many farmers markets to choose from and can still come home from the market with our bags laden with fruits and vegetables.

“Please find me just one avocado,” I have been begging Will Brokaw every time I see him. “Sorry, not for a few weeks,” he tells me sadly. I have been craving avocados and the winter hiatus in the avocado season seems longer than ever this year. But two weeks ago, after eating a sub-par, underripe (”watery fat” a friend of mine called them at this stage) avocado, I thanked Will for holding out and not putting out avocados before they’re ready. It will be a while longer for Will’s avocados, but he is offering us a new crop of delicious kumquats in the meantime.

Steve from Rancho Gordo had a new offering for us this week: dried Chiles de Arbol. I’m looking forward to making something fun with these super spicy delights. While a few are being reserved for a pickled lime recipe that I’m in the process of making, I think I’ll try out this recipe from Orangette for the bulk of them.

Have I mentioned Tory Farms? I first learned of Tory during a June Taylor conserve class, when she mentioned the farm’s stone fruit several times. Tory joined the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market within the past couple of years, and I have been a fan since day one. Their stone fruit is very good in the summer, but right now they are bringing spectacular citrus fruit to the market. Namely, Paige Mandarins and Oro Blanco grapefruits. They are located in the back, right under the Ghandi statue.

Achadinha Cheese Company is a weekly stop for me. Farmer and cheesemaker Donna Pacheco brings goat cheeses to the market from Petaluma. I’ve been buying the feta cheese lately — it’s cured in a sea salt brine and a great addition to my weekly salads and pastas. A hint: if you can think of it, bring a jar for the feta cheese. Donna is happy to give it to you in a ziploc, but I find that my cheese arrives home more safely when it’s in a jar.

Overall, it’s a great time to get to the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market. The CUESA newsletter says that we can look forward to spring vegetables this month including asparagus, spring garlic and cippolini onions.

Grace Cathedral is the eponymous “cathedral on a hill” in San Francisco. It’s located on Nob Hill, and many of us have been there to see the beautiful Keith Haring altar at the AIDS Chapel, or to walk the labyrinth inside the church.

What I didn’t know until recently is that Grace Cathedral hosts a Forum program each week before the Sunday service, and that the program is often focused on current news makers or people of interest.

The Forum, which is available in a podcast archive, often focuses on food issues and I have enjoyed the past season of speakers for that reason. It’s a worthwhile podcast to subscribe to even if you pick and choose which speakers pertain to your interests.

In October, I went to Grace Cathedral to hear Dr. Jane Goodall speak. While Goodall is known foremost as a champion of animals and a teacher of the ways of primates, she is also an advocate for conscious eating and published a book called Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating. At the Forum, Dr. Goodall spoke to the importance of food choices in the overall health of the planet, and I found her message challenging and inspiring at the same time. Dr. Goodall implored the audience to become vegetarian or at least eat free-range meat, saying “It’s not widely known the extent to which the intensive farming of animals is damaging the environment. People don’t want to know about the suffering and the cruelty that goes on within the intensive farms. ”

A month or two later, Mollie Katzen visited the Forum. Katzen is the author of the Moosewood Cookbook and one of the founders of the Moosewood Restaurant in Ithaca, New York. She writes about vegetarian cooking and is credited with helping make vegetarianism a mainstream eating practice. Her interview was compelling due to her ties to the Bay Area, and the fact that she’s a great speaker. Surprisingly, Katzen is not a strict vegetarian. She eats some meat, but her cooking is inspired by a fierce love for all things vegetable.

Last week, Michael Pollan visited The Forum. He is currently on book tour for his new book, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. This was an informative hour, and it serves as an excellent overview of his book and his outlook on eating.

As an aside, my friend and colleague Bonnie Powell of Ethicurean will be interviewing Michael Pollan in a Slow Food event in Vacaville on February 7. You can find more information on the Ethicurean site.

The Grace Cathedral Forum schedule can be found on the cathedral website. You can attend the forum sessions in person for free on Sundays or can download them from the Internet. You can also listen over the Internet in real-time and email your questions to the moderator.

The Forum with Jane Goodall
The Forum with Mollie Katzen
the Forum with Michael Pollan

Heart of the City Farmers Market located in the Civic Center.

In 2006, I reported here about the Heart of the City Farmers Market, the oldest farmers market in San Francisco. Heart of the City has been in existence for 26 years, and is held each Wednesday from 7:00 am to 5:30 pm and each Sunday from 7:00 am to 5:00 pm. Even the hours of the market give you the clue that this is not the normal market that we have in the city — most other markets run for half days or a few hours each week.

There are several reasons to specifically attend the Heart of the City Farmers Market, which I remembered when attending both the Wednesday and the Sunday markets last week.

1) It’s a bargain. At Heart of the City, you can expect to leave with bags of produce spending very little money. The market location is a low-income area, and fruits and vegetables are priced to attract the neighbors. As a result, you will find very little organic produce, but you will find great produce from hard-working, local farmers.

Green garlic available in abundance this week.

2) Phan Farms. This is a farm that grows Asian produce in Sacramento. Recently, a friend mentioned that we have local dragon fruit available to us. I somewhat incredulously asked her what farmer was growing it, as it’s pretty unusual in our part of the world. When she told me Phan Farm, I wrote, “Thanks - I should have known. When in doubt, the answer is always Phan Farms.” Phan is the place you go when you need specialty Asian fruits and vegetables, or just to see produce that usually can’t be found at local farmers markets. This week, I picked up some young ginger from them. Phan Farms attends the Heart of the City Market on Wednesdays and Sundays.

Rare bergamot lemons from De Santis Farm.

3) De Santis Farm. This is a farm out of the Central Valley that grows many different varieties of citrus. Over the course of a year, I buy green walnuts, Buddha’s hand, pomelos, delicious Satsuma mandarins, and any variety of specialty citrus from this farming family. Last week, De Santis had bergamot lemons. They set me back a whopping $9 for two, but it was fun to try out this unusual fruit. De Santis attends the market on Wednesdays only.

4) Waffle Mania. There is quite a stir happening on the Internet about a waffle maker who drives his truck into local farmers markets and serves up delicious Belgian waffles. When I tasted the waffles, it took me back to the same delectable that I’d eaten walking around the streets of Europe many years ago. The only time you can have these waffles in San Francisco proper is Wednesday mornings at the Heart of the City Market.

If you are a farmers market shopper, I can’t recommend this market enthusiastically enough. It’s a part of San Francisco’s history, is a vibrant market full of a representative cross-section of San Franciscans, and an enjoyable place to shop.

Heart of the City Farmers Market
Market Street
(between Seventh and Eighth streets)
(415) 558-9455
Wednesdays, 7:00 am - 5:30 pm
Sundays, 7:00 am - 5:00 pm

The Saturday Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market has a new vendor that I am very excited about. Marin Roots Farm is one of my favorite farm booths whenever I attend the San Rafael Civic Center market and I was really pleased to see them show up at the FPFM a few weeks ago. “How long have you been here?” I asked the farmer, Jesse Kuhn, thinking that I’d been missing them for weeks. “About 6 hours,” he replied.

The Marin Roots Farm booth is a thing of beauty. The farm specializes in lettuces, leafy greens and root vegetables. It’s typical to find many varieties of lettuces and there is no other booth in the market where I have to ask “what’s this?” as often as at Marin Roots Farm. Which is a good thing — it’s fun to take home a bag of new greens to try. Because of Marin Roots Farm, I have started to use chickweed, a nutty green that I often toss into a dish raw or put on a sandwich, and ancho cress, a spicy green that can be eaten raw.

Marin Roots Farm is a 10-acre certified organic farm west of Petaluma. The farmer, Jesse Kuhn, leases a piece of land on a 250-acre dairy farm. His farm is located between several large farming operations — backs up to a 1100-acre cattle ranch. Marin Roots Farm is a relatively young farm, as it’s been in existence for four years. Kuhn didn’t have to put the farm through a transitional phase (required when transitioning conventionally-worked land to organic) which can take up to three years. Because the land before Kuhn arrived was pretty pristine, and it was allowed to move through organic certification quickly.

Kuhn knew that he was interested in farming and went to school for it and spent some time working on other farms. He leased the Petaluma property because of the size, the quality of the land, and its proximity to a good water source. The hardest part about starting up the farm, he said, was the unknown of giving up his full-time landscaping job and leaping to a job without guaranteed income. Fortunately, a USDA loan came through “just when I needed it most.” He currently has 5 people working with him in the field, and a couple of people working at farmers’ markets.

Kuhn has just leased an additional piece of land near Tomales, and is growing garlic, shallots and onion to begin with.

Kuhn is excited to be at the Ferry Plaza Market and said that it was “instantly our best market.” Aside from finding Marin Roots products at the farmers’ market, you can also eat their vegetables around the city at restaurants including Foreign Cinema, Market Bar, 1550 Hyde, Zuni Cafe, and Greens.

You can find the Marin Roots Farm booth in the front portion of the Ferry Building, on the south side near the (secret) Blue Bottle Coffee booth that is located in the arcade.

This New Year’s Eve, as with many New Year’s Eves past, I spent several days with my best friend’s family in Sea Ranch, about 150 miles north of San Francisco. A few days ago, I hopped in my Zip Car and headed out on the windy road that would take me to this pristine area of California with its fantastic views and relaxing atmosphere.

One of the highlights of the drive is a stop in Freestone — a teeny tiny town west of Sebastopol — to join the throngs of customers at Wild Flour Bakery. Wild Flour is popular among food lovers throughout the area for its delicious organic savory and sweet breads.

Wild Flour is open Friday through Monday each week, and they bake 900 loaves of bread a day that are sold only from their bakery.

I dream about Wild Flour’s fougasse — a bread that changes ingredients slightly throughout the year but that typically contains 1-3 cheeses, potatoes, herbs and sometimes sweet peppers and onions. It’s a delicious, dense bread that I can make a meal from.

Also popular are Wild Flour’s sweet Bohemian bread and their sticky buns which are large enough to fill a plate and share with several friends.

Wild Flour is popular among bloggers — here are just a few reports:

Becks & Posh loved their bread with a bowl of steaming soup.
The Fresh Loaf found their fougasse to be worthy.
Fork & Bottle calls their biscotti “awesome.”
Sweet Napa declares “it’s like eating perfection.”

You can read even more about Wild Flour Bakery:
San Francisco Chronicle
Bay Area Backroads

Wild Flour Bakery
140 Bohemian Hwy
Freestone
(707) 874-2938

Open 8:30 - 6:00, Friday through Monday

This is the second time that I have listed my top 10 tastes for a year. The flavor highlight of this year was a three-week trip to Vietnam at the beginning of the year. Truth be told, I could easily list at least 10 tastes I had there that rocked my world. But in order to give a little balance to the list, I’ve chosen just two from that trip and the others from other travels and from my home city.

As with last year, these tastes are in chronological order.

Pepper Leaf Pork at a street vendor, Hanoi.
People often ask me about the best thing that I ate in Vietnam. I usually hedge on the answer because it’s a difficult one. But often, my mind travels back to this bite. It was pork wrapped in a leaf — pepper leaf or betel leaf, I don’t remember — and grilled. The whole package was then wrapped in lettuce with condiments.

Grilled Goat at the Boiled Goat Inn, Ho Chi Minh City.
It was a hot day in Saigon when my friend and I decided to try the Boiled Goat Inn. The menu had five items: boiled goat meat, fried goat meat, roasted goat meat, mixed sour goat meat and “goat meat boiled with Chinese medicine.” We ordered the roasted goat meat which involved our cooking it at the table on small grills and then wrapping the goat meat in lettuce and dipping it. Fantastic.

Bun Cha Ca at Bodega Bistro, San Francisco.
I’d never eaten Bun Cha Ca until I had it at the most famous place to eat it in Hanoi. It was very good there, but I actually really love the Bodega Bistro rendition that I ate when I returned to San Francisco. Noodle Pie does a great job of describing this dish. It’s basically white fish in oil with saffron, dill and peanuts. The large amount of dill and the side of rice noodles, salad wraps and herbs makes this a wonderfully fresh tasting dish.

Mushroom Pizza at Ken’s Artisan Pizza, Portland.
I wrote about this when I first tasted it, and eight months later, I am still thinking about the delicious pizzas at Ken’s. Like so many things on this list, part of the deliciousness of the taste was also wrapped up in the experience of the night: great friends, great wine, and a wonderful trip.

Lamb Popsicles at Vij’s, Vancouver.
I spent a few days in Vancouver over Memorial Day weekend, and ate a delicious meal at Vij’s, an upscale Indian restaurant that is world renowned for it’s cuisine. The lamb popsicles are served with a fenugreek cream curry, heavily spiced and delicious.

Malted vanilla ice cream with peanut brittle and milk chocolate chunks at Bi-Rite Creamery, San Francisco.
As was evident when I posted this post outlining my ice cream forays for a week in July, I love this ice cream from Bi-Rite Creamery . I’ve had to force myself to try other flavors at the Creamery because every time the aforementioned ice cream is available, I gravitate straight to it.

Porchetta sandwich made with Roli Roti Porchetta, San Francisco.
One of the fun additions of the Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market this year is that Thomas, the roaster at Roli Roti has started making a drop-dead amazing porchetta along with his rotisserie chickens. It’s not always available, but when it is, Thomas offers it by the pound or in a sandwich. He sprinkles it with sea salt and rosemary. On the day that Jeanne and I canned tomatoes, we picked up some of the porchetta and made our own sandwiches at home with Della Fattoria ciabatta, Philippe’s mustard, and a tomato. Heaven.

Fresh shelling beans with pork soffrito and the panino at SPQR, San Francisco.
I know that I should shut up about SPQR already, but I can’t help myself. SPQR gets two tastes of my year. The shelling beans are offered as part of the small plates, and it’s a bowl of soupy beans topped with crispy pork that is homey and comforting and I want to lick the bowl every time I have it. The panino is basically a grilled sweet dessert sandwich that has a dulce de leche style filling with pears and is topped with chocolate and fleur de sel. It’s an “Oh my God” dish, as many people — friends and strangers — who I have made taste it exclaim that upon their first bite.

Bone marrow dumpling at the Schneider home, Oakland.
When I was invited to Derrick and Melissa’s house for dinner in November, I knew that I was in for a treat. The best taste of the night was a crispy fried ball on top of the salad that was full of bone marrow. This bite epitomized perfect tastes — it was just one small bite that left me wanting more and more.

I hope you had as many wonderful tastes in 2007, and wish you many more for 2008!

The restaurant list for the 7th Annual Dine About Town has been announced. Dine About Town (DAT) was designed seven years ago to allow customers to try out new restaurants around the city at a reasonable deal. Modeled after restaurant weeks in cities such as New York, DAT features a fixed price lunch and dinner at over 100 restaurants throughout San Francisco. This year, DAT will take place from January 15 - 31.

For a three-course, preset meal, you will pay $21.95 for lunch and $31.95 for dinner at any of the participating restaurants.

Food enthusiasts around the city make a sport out of trying to find the best deals and the best meals that can be had during Dine About Town. While restaurants will continue to be added to the DAT list until opening day on January 15, the current restaurant list features some participants that seem to be good deals or to have interesting menus:

Absinthe (lunch)
Aziza (dinner)
Bacar (dinner)
Big 4 (lunch/dinner)
One Market (lunch/dinner)
Sens (lunch/dinner)

Chowhounds warn of spending more on a DAT meal than you would normally spend at a restaurant for a comparable meal. Examples of this are Chou Chou, Scott Howard, 1550 Hyde and Le Charm — many of which have year-round prix fixe meals for slightly less than the DAT price. An additional tip: when finding DAT deals, check out the actual prix fixe menu. Some restaurants relegate their most boring, pedestrian dishes to the DAT menu, unfortunately.

The rules of Dine About Town:

* You must pay with Visa.
* You must tell the server that you’d like the Dine About Town deal when you arrive.
* The best DAT deals fill up quickly so make a reservation.
* All meals are preset and three courses.