The rain was pouring down in sheets, the streets smeared and shiny as licorice along Larkspur's main drag. You'd think that, on this chilly, wet Monday night, everyone would be at home pulling a pizza from the freezer and flipping through the Netflix stack, but up and down Magnolia Street, there's not a parking place to be found. By eight o'clock, nearly every table at Picco is full and happy.

Welcome to Marin Mondays, chef-owner Bruce Hill's popular eat-local brainstorm. The concept is simple: each Monday, the restaurant offers a homey, five-course prix fixe menu showcasing local producers, for $30-$33 a person. (The restaurant's extensive regular menu is also available, and the Marin menu items can be sampled à la carte.) Think Ad Hoc with a locavore twist, and so far, it's brought out big crowds every week, on a night that's typically a slow one in the restaurant biz.

This might be a tricky proposition in, say, Fargo, or Cleveland, but with the Pacific Ocean on one side, San Francisco Bay on the other, and the rich, rolling green fields, woods, and pastures of rural West Marin (plus oyster-friendly Tomales Bay) in between, Marin County is pretty much a year-round bounty of bliss for local-conscious eaters and producers alike. Fishermen, dairy ranchers, farmers, vintners, and foragers all work the land (and water) here, raising sheep, cows, goats, and chickens on grass, farming oysters in the bays, making cheese, distilling liqueurs, catching squid, growing greens, picking mushrooms, baking bread in wood-fired ovens, and more.

So, sourcing: not a problem. And the menu's once-a-week status gives Picco's cooks the chance to be micro-seasonal in their creativity as they come up with new recipes based on whatever cool stuff is available each week. As long as there's enough of it to feed one night's worth of customers, they can use it-- a great boon to the foragers and farmers with just a few acres of continually cycling crops. And the menu isn't strictly local-limited; there's coconut milk in the curry, candied ginger on the ice cream, sriracha hot sauce on the fish cakes. But flavorings aside, the bulk of the ingredients come from nearby, because even in the depths of winter, abundance reigns.

And the menu is open to interpretation each week, instead of being locked down in the pristine, unadorned Cal-Med style, all sea salt and olive oil, that has become the de facto way of cooking local here. On the night we went, the inspiration was Thailand, with a side of Jersey & Buffalo. Or at least that's how we interpreted the appearance of sliders, chicken wings, and soft-serve ice cream between the squid salad and beef curry. To sip, there are two local libations, a Stubbs Estate organic chardonnay and a Shaken, Not Stirred cocktail made with house-infused elderflower liqueur and Square One cucumber vodka, made in Novato.

Last Monday, in honor of Beer Week, there was beer from Marin Brew Company in every dish, from Hog Island manila clams steamed in Albion ale to a fritto misto battered with IPA, cheddar soup with pilsner and rye croutons, and a stout cake with Straus Dairy caramel ice cream.

But back to Thailand in Marin. We started with a light and lovely squid salad, tender and tangy and tangled with cubes of crunchy Asian pear and fresh herbs, alongside a puff of succulent miners' lettuce, that wonderful winter weed named for adding much-needed vitamins to many a Forty-Niner's salt pork-and-sourdough diet.

Next up, a gloriously (but not excessively) greasy fish "slider," White Castle meets Thai fish cake. Unlike the fish cakes in Thai restaurants, which are often bounceably rubbery, these were more like crab cakes, made with rock cod from Bolinas, gentle and just a little springy, lavished with crunchy County Line cabbage and Star Route Farm carrot slaw, dripping with sriracha-spiked mayo and paired with super-crunchy, extra-salty chiplets made from sunchoke curls.

Superbowl-sublime chicken wings from Coastal Hill Farms followed, lacquered sticky-meaty mouthfuls, messy and wonderful. A thick puddle of seasoned Straus yogurt sauce and a mound of shredded celery root with baby watercress replaced the ranch dressing and celery sticks of sports-bar tradition. Dressing up lowbrow favorites doesn't always work (I'm still shaking my head over the dainty arugula-and-mandarin-orange salad served with the lobster roll at nearby Yankee Pier when they first opened—when, as every New Englander knows, a true lobster roll needs nothing but a bag of chips) but in this case, it's great.

By this time, we're pretty happily fed. The main dish, a Mussaman beef and potato curry, looks a little skimpy lurking at the bottom of its big white bowls, but it's deceptive. Rich and coconut-sauced, dotted with translucent, almost fetal baby radishes, the Marin Sun braised short ribs fork tender and lush, it turns out to be all we need.

All we're expecting for dessert is a bitty swirl of Picco's famous Straus Dairy soft-serve, what might fill a Chinese-restaurant teacup. Instead, we get a massive swirl towering above a cereal bowl, heavily crunched with candied ginger and pecan praline. Lovely, palate-cleansing, and crazily big.

Then again, being graced with too much ice cream made from the milk of happy local cows? Way, way down on my list of Bad Things.

Picco
320 Magnolia Ave.
Larkspur, California 94939
Map
415.924.0300
Picco on Facebook

Photos by Debra St. John

No, I don't have a back 40. Maybe I have a back four like you, a 4x4x4 chunk of concrete back patio in Bernal Heights, ancient cactus in one corner, Wizard-of-Oz cyclone cellar door in the other, a few beat-up chairs, windchimes, and ashtrays filling in the rest. Perfect for a garden! Last summer, my gardening lust didn't get tripped until July, when I came home with high hopes and a couple of leggy tomato plants, only to find myself running a soup kitchen for a hungry neighborhood of whiteflies and aphids. Embarassing for someone with a certificate in ecological horticulture, to say the least.

This year, I put that hard-won CASFS knowledge to use. To wit: pests prey on weak plants, plants growing out of season, deprived of the nutrients they need. A healthy eco-system is one that supports beneficial bugs and pollinators, with a mixed palette of plants and bugs that can overwhelm destructive pests. Food not lawns, sure, but flowers can be just as hard-working as veggies, pumping out the nectar that feeds the bees and wasps, and in the process both enabling plant sex and elbowing out less desirable insects. Bachelor's buttons, borage, sweet alyssum, morning glory, cosmos, sunflowers: they all bloomed and did their part, along with the stunning salpiglossis that was just there to look gorgeous.

So, what was growing in the back four by four? Tomatoes, of course, which no summer gardener can be without, even in too-chilly, too-foggy San Francisco. Not having the willpower of the Zen gardeners at Green Gulch, who bow to the powers of their surrounding cool marine winds and don't even try, I compromised with a couple of cherry tomato plants, a Chadwick Cherry (named after Alan Chadwick, mad genius and founding UCSC gardener) and a Golden Nugget, both birthed from thumb-sized starts from the Free Farmstand. The rest of the veggies came from seeds, thanks to my conviction that unless it's grown from seed, you didn't really earn it and it's not really yours.

Now, I'm not a spiritual person. Planting seeds is the closest thing I get to an expression of faith: you hold these tiny specks, all shapes and colors, and trust that they contain everything to rise into life. You slip them into the dirt, water them every morning, and the day after you've skeptically succumbed to doubt, they pop up, all fresh and new, eager to spin the whole wheel again. Samsara, sure, only it all tastes really, really good.

What I grew, all in containers using just potting soil, encouraging words, and (no, I'm not proud, but I'm honest) the occasional dose of Miracle-Gro, along with size-10 sneakers unashamed to stomp on lettuce-munching caterpillars: French Baby Nantes carrots, which stayed pinkie-sized but were amazingly sweet and crunchy; sugar snap peas, prolific and delicious, despite a leaf-devouring case of fog-borne powdery mildew; the aforementioned Golden Nugget and Chadwick Cherry tomatoes; African blue basil, skimpy-leaved but prolific in pretty mauve flower spikes; tiny whorls of green and red container lettuce, mostly eaten by those effing caterpillars; and of course, early summer's fingerling potatoes.

My old pals Sally and Christina, who came over to photograph, then eat, that first potato crop, came by again to dine on the fruits of the Summer Salad Project, augmented by a variety of local items. There was some crusty sourdough flatbread I'd made from locally grown and milled grains: whole-wheat flour from Eatwell Farm and cornmeal from Erin at Ridgecut Gristmills, glossed with olive oil from McEvoy Ranch near Petaluma and flavored with summer savory from a Marquita Farm mystery box.

With it went garden antipasti: the five ripe cherry tomatoes we could pick, a handful of sugar-snap peas and baby carrots, sheep's milk ricotta from West Marin's Bellwether Farms and a bowl of homemade mayonnaise. And Julia Child's advice aside, you don't even need to warm the bowl; as long as you go slow whisking in the oil in the beginning, making mayonnaise is a snap. All it takes is olive oil, lemon juice, salt, egg yolks, a little mustard, a whisk and three or four minutes' worth of patience.

There were also deviled eggs made using more of that mayonnaise, because who doesn't love a deviled egg? For dinner, garlicked-and-lemoned greens, made from a mixture of erbette chard, radish and beet greens, all pulled from the mystery box, and the piece de resistance: a succotash of Brentwood corn mixed with roasted serrano chiles, heirloom tomatoes, basil and savory from Mariquita, plus roasted torpedo onions and fresh flageolet beans grown by Annabelle at La Tercera Farm. In our glasses went pink vin gris from Bonny Doon, bought on sale at Good Life Grocery up the street.

Now, I'm name-checking for a reason. This isn't brand-naming just for some kind of locavore dirt cred. The dinner was local on purpose, but it also wasn't particularly hard to put together, thanks to the agricultural abundance surrounding us. What was on our plates was also community through commerce; all these vegetables were the livelihoods of people I've gotten to know, even just a little, through buying their vegetables week after week, visiting their farms, walking through their fields or orchards. It doesn't take much time to put a face on your food, and to make it part of a larger web of interlocking stories and histories, a personal geography marked by olives and zucchini, the taste of a milky green wheat kernel or the sight of two tiny leaves poking up out of the dirt.

And that night, looking around the table, Christina said grace to thank the earth, the farmers, the cook, and friendship, for making it all worth it.

One of the most exciting pieces of food news this year is that "locavore" has been knighted "word of the year" by the Oxford University Press. However, I absorbed the concept of the Eat Local Challenge before I did "locavore," which, in all honesty, I thought had something to do with the phases of the moon and the lycanthrope society. (It's possible I've watched one too many Frasiers.)

The first time I heard about the Eat Local movement, it was over two years ago, and since I was still trying to ferret out where to buy my favorite French nut oil, Mexican ginger beer, and New England pumpkin ale, I felt totally overwhelmed.

Did I really need to think about each and every food product that came into my kitchen when I was just starting to find my cooking legs in San Francisco? Of course not. If you give the smallest crap about eating local, it's not necessary to ensure that every food product -- salt, coffee, flour, sugar, produce, meat, Diet Coke -- in your kitchen is from local purveyors. If you give the smallest crap about eating local, you just think about what you're buying and wonder if it's local. Because you care.

That's all you need to do to effect change: start thinking about it. Start caring about it. Then maybe, you'll start acting on it. Frankly, if it hadn't been for Jen Maiser, I'd still be just thinking about eating local and not actually doing anything about it. Not only does Jen blog about eating local at her own site, Life Begins at 30, she's also the editor of the Eat Local Challenge blog and has worked at various farmers' stands at the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market.

After my failed first attempt at participating in an Eat Local Challenge, I started following Jen's efforts more and more. Her passionate, yet refreshingly frank and evenhanded writing style drew me in deeper and deeper, and before I knew it, not only was I examining every tag, sticker, and vittles visa at Andronico's, but I was delivering earnest, flushed-cheek diatribes to my Minneapolian parents and sister about why they should think to ask, "Where did this come from?" before they stuck anything in their mouths. It got to the point when my mom was collaring the hapless meat guy at Whole Foods and demanding to know why he was offering her lamb from New Zealand and not from Minnesota.

Jen shares her information widely, energetically, and -- most importantly -- nonjudgmentally. She embodies the sentiment that you don't have to harvest your own coffee beans, dry your own salt, or refine your own sugar to be a conscientious eater, you just need to wonder, "Where?"

In fact, "Where?" is the sentiment of the newest Eat Local Challenge. According to Jen, the next ELC -- set to be unveiled early next year -- is: "a challenge focused on where our everyday foods are sourced from. Instead of challenging participants to eat food from as close to home as possible, we will be asking them to take everyday items that their families eat -- processed foods like crackers and potato chips, mass-produced products, and fast food items -- and try to find out the source of the product ingredients. I think it will be interesting to learn what we can, and can't, find out about our food."

I'm thrilled that "locavore" is being recorded in the annals of history, but without the Eat Local Challenge spurring me to think, question, act, and eat, I have a feeling I'd still be assuming that locavores howled at the moon and stuffed pillows with their own hair.