A Fruit-of-the-Month Club subscription? Some Williams-Sonoma peppermint bark?

Oh, if only your holiday shopping could be that easy! Irresistible as that minty bark may be, would any foodie worth her Maldon salt be caught wrapping something that anyone with a credit card could secure with a few clicks or a trip to the mall?

This year, as the vogue for food trucks, bike-delivered treats and pop-up markets continues to grow, contemporary cachet demands not the most expensive gifts but the most hyper-local, made on a micro-scale by moonlighting chefs or your enterprising, underemployed neighbors who know how to rock their chocolate-covered bacon (and their Twitter feeds).

While chefs like Daniel Patterson get bragging rights from the obscurity of their foraged ingredients (reindeer lichen, anyone?), the holiday-hostess gift of choice this month will be something made by one guy in the Mission and sold only every other Wednesday in a warehouse off Cesar Chavez or San Pablo.

For many, the charm of these places lies in the opportunity for community chat. You can talk to the person who made what you're buying, probably that very morning, and find out that she used to play in your buddy's band, or that you both once worked in the same overpriced Union Street restaurant. And, of course, there's the here-today, DIY settings where the soundtrack's more likely to be The Pogue's "Christmas in New York" than syrupy carols crooned by Carrie Underwood.

Produce to the People Jam. Photo by Lauren Anderson

On Saturday, Dec. 4th, from noon-4pm, youth-training organization Produce to the People will be running a foraged-fruit jam fundraiser at Mission Pie. For sale: quirky jams (plum with blue basil, apricot lavender, ginger pear butter) made from locally sourced fruit and herbs, hand-drawn fruit calenders, jam recipe cards, and more, plus you can chow down on some tasty pie while you're there.

Every Wednesday in December before Christmas, Real Mercantile will be running a food gifts-and-crafts market at Chez Poulet, a San Francisco warehouse space on Cesar Chavez St. from 5-9pm. (Full disclosure: I have sold homemade jam at this market, and may be selling there again.) Organized by Nieves Rathbun, who will be selling her own line of body-care products, this market started with crafts and fashion, but has been adding more take-home food products lately, as well as on-site tasty treats for noshing. Featured vendors include Underground Preserves, Cocotutti, City Smoke House, Mo Foods, Boffo Food Cart, and more.

On Wed., Dec. 8th and Wed., Dec. 22nd from 5-7pm, Oakland's chef-run Pop-Up General Store will return with its usual elegant (and pricey) eats from a long list of local chefs and artisans. (Pre-ordering online several days ahead is encouraged, since quantities are limited.) They'll also be including some non-food (but food-related) gift items, like handmade dishware by Diana Fayt, hand-sewn market bags, a seasonal-produce calender by Pie Bird Press, and a new addition, the Pop-Up Bookshelf, with signed copies of books by local authors such as Novella Carpenter, Alice Waters, and Vanessa Barrington.

On Friday, Dec. 10th from 4-9pm, La Cocina will be holding its 2nd annual Gift Fair at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco. On offer: well-packaged sweet and savory delights from the many small food businesses that use La Cocina's spacious kitchens-for-hire. And there'll be on-site gift wrapping!

The church-basement tradition of holiday markets gets a hipster makeover at St. Gregory's this season, with the advent of the New Taste Marketplace at 500 DeHaro St in San Francisco on Saturday, Dec. 18th. The requested sliding-scale door donation ($0-$10) goes to support the church's weekly free food pantry. There will be over 30 vendors, selling everything from granola to jam, sausage to soda, chocolate, flavored butter, DIY ramen kits, bbq sauce, and much, much more. The don't-miss item? Bacon Crack (chocolate-covered bacon brittle) and Irish Coffee on a Stick, both by Kai Kronfield's Nosh This.

"Nosh This" Medley. Photos by Kai Kronfield

Still hungry? On the same day, the SF Underground Market will be running a special holiday version of its uber-popular market, with take-home items for sale from 11am-4pm and hot foods to eat on the spot from 6pm-midnight. The market has grown exponentially from last year, and now fills the SomArts space at 8th and Brannan in SF. Admission is $5; free pre-registration required.

Know of another holiday pop-up market happening in your neighborhood? Tell us about it in the comment section below!

Sshhh…don't tell!

When I started procrastinating about an hour ago, Facebook group Secret San Francisco was at 42,654 members. Now, it's at 43,736 members. A mere 10 days ago, it was just a glint in Jamie Quint's eye.

The 24-year-old entrepreneur started this group based on the model of Secret London, which went from zero to 180,000 members in under 20 days. The group is an open forum for people to spill San Francisco's best kept secrets, from restaurants and bars, to events, shows, and random cool things to do.

Discussion boards contain threads on topics like Best Sandwich, Best Brunch (for foodies not alchies), and Best Outdoor Workout…to burn off all those carbs and eggs benedicts. There is even a brief diatribe that ensues when an out-of-towner catastrophically requests some good tips on where to go when she visits "Frisco" this summer. Eeek. Poor thing won't be uttering that jaunty little nickname for a long time.

There is a lot of noise on the Wall, but search and you are bound to happen upon a hidden gem or two, and get inspired to plan an excursion the next time you have a free weekend.

Now, I know we all love the Internet and everything, but still…it is remarkable how popular this group has become in such a short time. Is it because we all love a juicy secret? Is it because we're bored? Or because Yelp reviews are too hiply cryptic to understand sometimes?

In a time and place where Twitter-roving street food carts are the new speakeasies, slinging Kung Fu Tacos and Sexy Soup to the masses willing to seek them out, "underground" is the new black, and "secret" is the new twenty.

SF Underground Farmers Market, 01.28.10

Just ask any one of the hundreds of kombucha-thirsty flavor-ravers who turned out for the Underground Farmers Market last month.

Mission Street Food, 01.28.10

Or walk by Lung Shan on a Thursday or Saturday night, when an unassuming Chinese restaurant turns into the packed, twinkle-lit, pop-up restaurant, Mission Street Food.

Perhaps we gravitate to these projects because they exude a sense of authenticity, of being "in the know", and part of something special and communal. Or, it could simply be...some things are just too good to keep to ourselves.

Flavor-ravers, SF Underground Farmers Market

Secret San Francisco Facebook Group
If you're interested in receiving a weekly digest of the best posts on Secret SF in your email, you can sign up here.

Bay Area Bites bloggers, Michael Procopio and Stephanie Rosenbaum join Leslie Sbrocco, host of Check, Please! Bay Area in a new local food and wine segment on This Week in Northern California. This week, the conversation is about restaurants and the recession and underground food markets.

WATCH THE EPISODE:

Posts related to this segment:

• Underground Farmers' Market
• Cutting Corners: Tipping in a Down Economy

Related Twitter feeds:

• Leslie Sbrocco
• Michael Procopio
• Stephanie Rosenbaum
• Iso Rabins at ForageSF

Six o'clock on Friday night, and the line outside the door at 17th and Capp was snaking down past the motorcycle repair shop and around the corner. Clutching brown paper bags of Sam Adams and Tecate, the crowd was a typical Mission mix: young guys in goatees with bike locks slung through their messenger bags, cool dads with baby strapped to their chests in slings, women staying warm in hand-knitted scarves and stripey fingerless gloves, even a few used-bookstore-looking folks with wild gray hair and heavy glasses.

What was the scene? An iPad giveaway? Lifetime free coffee at Four Barrel? A Radiohead jam session?

No, no, and no...instead, it was the second Underground Farmers' Market, organized by ForageSF's Iso Rabins. Essentially, an extra-groovy bake sale, held for no reason except to showcase the fun stuff being made by your friends and neighbors. What was on the table? All kinds of delights: kombucha by the jug, bags of peanut brittle and beef jerky, bergamot marmalade, white-grapefruit vanilla jelly, onion-bacon relish, lemonade, butternut-squash lasagna, little bowls of rice and mung-bean stew scooped out of Mason jars, acorn fudge, made-while-you-wait Indian chaat, corned-beef sandwiches, pumpkin pie by the slice, raw chocolate truffles, cupcakes, cucumber marmalade, kale, fresh chanterelles, granola, chipotle popcorn.

Photos by Wendy Goodfriend

Well, awesome, you may say. But this is San Francisco, hardly a place starving for access to raw-chocolate truffles and artisanal chicharrones. Between our dozens of farmers' markets, our thousands of restaurants, and our many, many gourmet stores, why would anyone need to stand in line on Capp Street to score good food?

Because walking into a store and handing over money is easy. Anyone can do it. To get to the Underground Farmers Market, you had to know about it—through Rabins' own 1000+ person email list, through a re-tweet from a street-food cart, or from one of the many blog or media mentions that had been buzzing around the concept since the first market, held last December. Just like at a show by a new band, though, a lot of the attendees seemed to have gotten there the old-fashioned way: they had a friend selling stuff, or knew somebody who knew somebody who told them to check out this cool scene.

So there was the buzz factor, and the undeniable urban urge to be in at the beginning of the next new thing. And, like a warehouse show, there was a little of the Permits? We don't need no stinkin' permits feeling, too. After all, this was outlaw food, made by artisans canning on the far side of the law—in other words, brewing the 'buch or popping the corn in their home kitchens, uninspected by the health department.

Few of the vendors make their product professionally in commercial kitchens; for most, it's a fun side gig, something they were doing anyway for friends and family, a way to make a little extra money from a particular passion for chocolate or kimchee. (Of course, the continued stream of layoffs have made more and more people seek profit in their passion; at a recent SPUR panel discussion on the economics of street food, Imelda Reyes from the Department of Public Health said she gets 12 to 16 calls a day now from would-be street-food entrepreneurs curious about the permitting process, up from 2 or 3 a week a year ago.)

Is this how twentysomethings are rebelling now? As outlaw onion-bacon relish-makers, flaunting the law with their organic flax-seed crackers or park-foraged miners' lettuce? Whatever the reasoning, the scene was amazingly cheerful. This was a church social of a different stripe, bringing together like-minded urbanites eager not just to shop and nibble (although shop they did) but to to put a face on their food, talking pickling, swapping project ideas, sharing chicken coop innovations and enthusing about the excellence of Fatted Calf's butchery classes. That bunch of mustard greens? Grown and bunched by Patricia on an eighth-of-an-acre vacant lot in Berkeley, thanks to a friendly landlord happy to see vegetables sprouting instead of weeds and trash. That lemonade? Made by Robin from lemons picked in her friend's backyard, and served up with peanut brittle "made from stuff I just had in my kitchen."

Selling my own hot-from-the-oven homemade bread, apricot jam and vanilla pear butter from a card table in the corner, it was easy to feel like instant friends with everyone to whom I handed a warm loaf. After all, I'd kneaded and shaped each bread just a few hours before, peeled every single pear after it was picked at an orchard I knew.

The recession may be fueling a renewed interest in home cooking and small-scale entrepreneurship, but money was definitely being spent. By 10pm, Becky of Urban Preserves estimated that she'd sold over half of the 150 jars she'd brought; Kitty of Kitty's Creations, who makes her products in her church's kitchen in the Sunset, had maybe 5 dozen left of the 14 dozen jars of jam, chutney, and relish she'd walked in with. Slow Jams, on the verge of going pro, charged $10 and up for their sleek jars of sweet and savory jams and relishes; by 9pm, they were sold out and packed up.

By 10:30pm, organizer Iso Rabins looked equally exhausted and thrilled, if a little stunned by the turnout. A lot of advance press and a savvy use of social media, combined with a particular young-urbanite quest for authenticity, had made the night's market popular beyond anything he'd imagined. For the next one, a bigger venue will clearly be necessary. How big can it go and still feel underground? How many of the novelty seekers will come back? How much jam and jerky does the city need? For the moment, it seems, that if you make it, they will come.

Watch This Week in Northern California tonight, Friday January 29 at 8pm to see Leslie Sbrocco, host of Check, Please! Bay Area in a new segment on local food and wine trends. This week, a conversation about restaurants and the recession and underground food markets with Bay Area Bites bloggers, Michael Procopio and Stephanie Rosenbaum.