Shopping at the farmers market gives consumers a chance to talk to farmers about their products, see how a farm changes across the seasons, and gain a better understanding of the challenge of farming. It’s a big improvement over a sterile grocery store where the origins of fruits, vegetables, eggs and meat are unclear, […]

Delighted by her love of cheese, Anthony and his wife Kelli, who makes the cheese from the raw cow and goat milk produced on their farm, invited the Cheese Baby to the Estrella Family Creamery cave christening, held Saturday night…. Samuel OK’d our request after warning us not to let the buck pee on us. We limited our visit to the mama goats and their kids, which must be bottle fed, guessing by how enthusiastically they greeted us. We returned to the party and found Anthony among friends in the garden…. Kelli said a few words of thanks before the family’s pastor offered a blessing, and then Chef Roy Breimann of the Salish Lodge conducted the christening, opening the champagne with a saber and a blessing of his own, which he credited to Napoleon: “in good times you deserve it, and in bad you need it.”… These ceremonies were succeeded by a remarkable feast, including roast veal, spit-roasted baby goat, grilled salmon, mussels, heirloom potatoes, farro salad with root vegetables, and of course a selection of Estrella cheeses, the cheese table having been moved from the garden to the light-string- and candle-lit supper tents by tractor…. We thus finished our meal with two Estrella creamery products that we can’t buy at the farmers’ market: whipped cream, which isn’t available because the cream usually goes into the cheese, and butter, which isn’t available because it’s illegal to sell unpasteurized butter in the state of Washington.

I have been so busy gardening and cooking and enjoying the last few weeks of summer that I never got around to writing "Vermont Diary - Part II", the thrilling sequel to "Vermont Diary - Part I." Contributing to my negligence was a short trip to Maine, highlights of which I will include in this […]

I just came back from 2 amazing days in Northern Vermont.

You see, I was hired to be a chauffeur to an evil capitalist management consultant who was going to a small Vermont town - with or without me - to convince a nice small-town Vermont construction company owner to diversify and morph into […]

I went on a CUESA-organized farm tour last Sunday to Monterey County, about 2 hours south of San Francisco (Jen Maiser was also on the tour and wrote about it at Bay Area Bites). Our first stop was Far West Fungi in Moss Landing, just a few miles from the Pacific Ocean. The Moss […]

I’m in Tunis, and I’ve finally yanked out the DSL plug fused directly into my brain, in order to enjoy the last few days of serious R&R while Marc so ably keeps the Ethicurean home fires burning. (Pelosi, how could you?)

…but that doesn’t mean she won’t still be fixated on the same things.

What’s with the empty fridge? Well, the Potato Non Grata and I are going on a much-anticipated vacation, first to Holland (to visit family) and then to Tunisia (to visit one of my best friends). I hope to post a few things from the road, but it will be sporadic.

Welcome to one of Cowboyland’s greatest ironies: Unless you make direct arrangements with a farmer or rancher, it’s fairly difficult to purchase beef (or any other meat, for that matter) that has been both raised and processed in the state of Wyoming…. (For more about the good aspects of state-inspected facilities, see this article from the New Rules Project of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance) C&A Meats is not state-inspected, meaning that it can only process animals that ranchers will use for their own consumption, or that have been sold live to consumers and then processed after the sale…. A great many excellent articles have been written about the barriers to small- and mid-sized livestock production created by the application of existing processing and inspection standards to small processors, including this one by Rod Dreher from a 2003 issue of the National Review and this one [PDF, but worth it] by Kristi Bahrenberg Janzen from Farming Magazine…. Train and certify a greater number of food safety inspectors for mobile slaughterhouses, farmstead operations, and small-scale processing facilities, and develop reasonable and consistent standards for food safety inspections of these facilities…. Most small farmers only want them to be reasonable (for example, it makes no sense that it should be legal for someone to take a minor risk to his health by eating raw oysters, but illegal to do the same by eating a soft raw-milk cheese); simplified (regulations vary widely from state to state); and flexible (that is, taking the small farmer’s limitations into consideration).

Note: This is the second part of a 2-part series about my visit to Toronto, Ontario. Part One can be found here.
“Pass the peas!”
“Pass the chicken!”
“Pass the matzah!”
One thing about visiting family: You eat A LOT.
Trying to work off some of the unnecessary calories that we had ingested at the uncountable number of family meals […]

To celebrate Passover, a time when the Jews wandered 40 years in the desert searching for the land of milk & honey, Noshette and I wandered 4 hours westward in search of organic milk and wild honey (and some other sustainable foods). Noshette was born and raised in Toronto, so we were going there to […]

Josh’s Organic Market - Hollywood, Florida
After our 1-nighter in the Gulf Coast of Florida, where we saw a memorable Leon Redbone concert and enjoyed a good meal of local fish and seafood, Noshette of the North and I drove back to the Atlantic coast along the famous “Alligator Alley”, where we saw plenty of gators […]

Noshette and I packed up the sled dogs and shed our parkas to spend some time in warm, sunny Florida. We were there to visit with my mom and to relax a bit before I had rotator-cuff surgery, but also to eat some good food.
 
(Here is a shot of Noshette and a friend sitting by the beach […]

I’ve never been inside a proper slaughterhouse, and I don’t have a burning desire to start taking tours. But the most arresting moment of the trip Sir Loin and I took to Morocco last fall was watching men in Marrakesh shop for chickens.
To see it for yourself, this is what you have to do. Go […]

Cascadia Girl over at has a nice write-up of weekending in Methow Valley, including where to stay and what to do. Why the interest here? Methow is where the Butter Bitch and I source much of our beef, through a meat CSA, and lamb through direct purchase.  We knew that the Crown […]