I didn’t even hardly take any pictures.

But guess what, we’re moving forward.

Today on the California Report they were talking about how the new healthcare legislation is going to affect Central Valley farmers. I am sympathetic to all independent farmers, organic or not, but the outcry about their new burden is the wrong outcry. It makes me sick that we, as a nation, stare at the prices on supermarket shelves, nodding approvingly when they go down, squealing like stuck pigs when they go up even fractionally, without a thought to the true cost of that food. The billions of lost tax revenue for government subsidy and environmental cleanup could go to our schools, our bridges, our arts and our sciences: we are getting screwed for Monsanto. We talk about farm laborers, legal or not, like a commodity. We spend millions on fucking dog toys and we can’t acknowledge, as a society, that these human beings are entitled to a living wage and access to health care.

But chicken parts are 79 cents a pound, so it’s ok.

Listening: Radio Paradise: listen, and give them some money!!

Sunset Over Harmony Bird Sanctuary

Well, at the crack of ass tomorrow, I’m flying back to Sunny So-Cal. Yes, I’ll be driving up to No-Cal while I’m there, but I just can’t seem to stay away from California these days.

I know I have often said that LA is the nadir of human culture, and it may be, but that doesn’t mean that it’s all bad. It’s certainly preferable to, say, Des Moines. California, North and South, just has a different idiom from the rest of America; it’s part Western independence, part intense aloofness but also a strange kind of inherent truth. I can’t explain it fully.

And it’s also home to some very important people in my life, one of whom turns 80 next week. You know what that means: I’m making 80 cupcakes on Friday, boo-ya. I’m also going on a pasta-making adventure. I’m locking myself in the house with 10 different kinds of flour and I am going to write a cohesive pasta recipe that I actually like- whoa.

Speaking of pasta, there are just a handful of whole wheat pappardelle left in the freezer, and it’s time to feed this fish. I’m thinking butter, cheese… maybe something green.

Remember, when in doubt- add some frozen peas.

Also, since this post doesn’t seem to be about anything specific, I’ll just mention that I have been catching up on [Carol in Maryland who's cooking her way through the French Laundry Cookbook](http://carolcookskeller.blogspot.com/). If you haven’t read this woman’s blog, you need to in a hurry. She’s a passionate home cook, with a job, kids, a business, and she’s making puff pastry from scratch. And trust me, Betty Crocker she ain’t. If you’re expecting some odious Marth Stewart type, just check out her [video of lobsters lip-synching Celine Dion on their way to the big steamer in the sky](http://carolcookskeller.blogspot.com/2007/05/butter-poached-maine-lobster-with-leeks.html).

It’s not so much moribund as it is darkly humorous. All I know is I would not want to be on her bad side.

Listening: “Mekong” The Refreshments Fizzy Fuzzy Big and Buzzy

Lamb and Okra

We dodged hippies and faced off with moms on cell phones, but we came up with the spoils of an interesting if not completely balanced meal:

**Marinated Japanese cucumbers with radishes
Stew of morels and english peas over artichoke bottoms
Okra with corn and tomatoes
Rack of lamb with agrodolce jus, herb butter and wild asparagus
Plumcots**

The cucumbers were sort of inspired by a dish from [O Chame](http://www.themenupage.com/ochame.html) in Berkeley. It was a salad of Japanese cucumbers cut in large chunks with sliced icicle radishes, dressed with salt, pepper and [Banyuls](http://www.epicurious.com/drinking/wine_dictionary/search?query=banyuls&submit.x=0&submit.y=0&submit=submit) vinegar. Very complex, very good.

The stew was the sum of several dishes and ideas I’ve had and thought of over the years. I sauteed some shallots and carrots in butter and olive oil, then added morels and mushrooms and cooked until all their water was released. I added some stock which reduced most of the way, and some cream, then the peas.

Meanwhile, I carved the artichokes. You basically peel away the outer leaves, then pare around the bottom, until only the soft inner leaves and meat are left. Then you scoop out the fuzzy choke until you’re left with a completely edible little cup (be sure to pare yourself a flat bottom). Trim and cook your chokes in acidulated water (with lemon juice or vinegar added) to keep your artichoke bottoms from turning the color you look after your third jaegermeister. Then, put them in the oven with a little butter, and when they’re just hot, cover with the stew and bake them together until you feel good about it.
Carving Artichoke Bottoms
Filling Artichokes with Stew
Shuna made the okra, sauteeing sliced pods in olive oil until they caramelized, then covered them with white corn kernels and covered the pan. When the corn was mostly steamed, she added chopped tomatoes and cooked everything together *a point*, as my old chef would say.
Okra Saute
The lamb was marinated with carrots, shallots, olive oil, white raisins and herbs: parsley, thyme, savory and mint. When the time came, the rack was seared on the stove, then covered with the vegetables from the marinade and finished in the oven to medium rare. We made a pan sauce with more banyuls vinegar, stock and butter, and an herb butter with the same herbs from the marinade, but since I decided to season it while smoking crack, it wasn’t all it could be. These were served with beautiful little wild asparagus, blanched and tossed in butter, they were like little green wheat stalks. Kind of. In my imagination.

Leave me alone.

Sauteeing Wild Asparagus
Anyway, it rocked and rollled and we sat on the couch and ate plumcots.
Dinner

Pictures by Shuna and ruined by Drupal Image. I’m working on that…
Listening: birds. No, not The Byrds, just birds.

Let me take the opportunity to thank Tana “Banana” Butler from [I Heart Farms](http://smallfarms.typepad.com) for taking time to share this incredible landscape and charming grandson with me.

First, we visited former Tai Chi instructor Bob Thorson and his partner Jean Harrah at Deep Roots Ranch in Watsonville. They bought the farm- so to speak- from Jean’s parents who had rented the land to berry farmers who left the soil in less than ideal shape. Bob and Jean- with help from Gort the Dog, have grown a beautiful and fully functional animal pasture in its place, with grasses, clover and wildflowers growing as high as me in places.

Gort

View from Pig Pen- not kidding

After lunch and some misadventures with a group of septuagenarian cyclists, we hit the Farmers’ Market, where I got to meet Joe Schermer from Dirty Girl Farms- which, by the way, is in the city limits of Santa Cruz, also unbelievably, neighboring another farm.

I also got to meet Joe Rubin from Live Earth Farm just as he was giving what-for to some old bat preoccupied with USDA organic, trying to tell him that “we” need the USDA to tell us what is good and what isn’t. Joe’s answer? Buy produce from a farmer who lives in your community that you can talk to and visit the farm.

Joe Rubin

This woman, who- by the way- is at a farmers’ market talking to a farmer, tells Joe that people aren’t going to talk to farmers. I almost grabbed her by the cheap straw hat and said, ‘Yeah, foxy mama, let’s trust the government with our food just like foreign policy. Yeah!.’

Theresa’s Produce

Anyhoo. I also met this very nice/cool woman named Theresa, the name of whose farm I didn’t scribble down, but I did take a picture of her beautiful self, beautiful produce and rocking t-shirt (it’s the most basic precept of organic farming). John Gorzynski, if given an ear to bed, can go on and on about “the husbandry of the soil.” If you have the opportunity to have your ear so bent, I recommend you listen.

Theresa talked me into some Berenice Lettuce, which is a slightly bitter green oak leaf variety; and she twisted my arm damn near out of its socket to buy some garlic scapes, a few weeks ahead of NY’s scapes, no less.

Theresa and Her Cool Shirt

The day sort of randomly ended with us cooking the spoils for dinner at Tana’s with her partner Bob and their super cool grandson Logan (Logie-O), who discovered this rocking hiding spot at the market.

Logan’s Feet

Listening: The rental car has a jack for an iPod. We love that. Right now, it’s REM: Orange Crush.

I wrote the [last recipe I posted here]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/135) somewhat in haste, and I all but skipped over a topic that I feel is little understood, or at least improperly considered, in cooking: the place of stock.

As we go through our lives as cookbook readers, countless hours have been spent poring over the basic preparations in the backs of the cookbooks written by our favorite chefs and cookbook authors. Many of these sundry recipes- and often whole prose chapters- are dedicated to the topic of stock, its importance and, certainly, its preparation. Interestingly, the role of stock in the greater food consciousness is little discussed. I am here to tell you that homemade stock is not indispensable, or at least, one can still cook without it.

Cooks in restaurants need only go over to the kettle or walk-in to get white or brown stock. On television, a bubbling brew simmers in a shiny overpriced saucepan, ready to be put into service. Indeed, stock, *petits-fours* and *tournee* of vegetables are all well and good if one has a staff, especially a free or nearly free staff of externs, apprentices and dishwashers. Meanwhile, on earth, we all have lives.

I have a job. I’m very fortunate that I have a job that usually leaves me with four free weekdays to do with as I please, so it’s not uncommon that I spend at least one of those days in a complicated cooking preparation, and if that preparation involves meat, rest assured, there will be stock. After all, if the kitchen is already unfurled, what trouble is it to throw the detritus in a pot at the back of the stove? However, that doesn’t mean that I make stock to order. In fact, it often gets made during the course of a simpler preparation. That stock then goes in the freezer. Not in a block, mind you. I might put a cup or two at a time to freeze in small containers, but the majority of the stock I make ends up frozen in ice cube trays. Then I store the cubes in a plastic bag in the freezer, ready to use in increments of about 3 tablespoons. It’s a marvelous system.

Do I always have stock in the freezer? No. I get busy, you get busy, we all scream for ice cream. What, then, do you do when you have the need to cook, but the stock has run dry?

Well, the first answer to that question is, consider what you are making. Remember what is perhaps the oldest cooking truism: the quality of what you are making will be in proportion to the quality of the ingredients that you put into it. It may seem backwards to make this point first, but lest I be accused of heresy, I want to make this absolutely clear: if you are going to make *consomme madrilene* you absolutely must use a great stock. *Sauce Perigord* deserves the time and effort of *glace de viande* that you have fine tuned for your taste and your guests.

But what about a pan sauce? Maybe you’ve fried up some pork chops and apples for dinner and want to have a nice little brown elixir to moisten them, perhaps in the oven for a moment, or just on the plate? You look in the freezer and- forsooth- your scurrilous roommate has used the last of the veal stock. The first thing I would suggest is to look around. Maybe there is some leftover roast beef in the fridge with a ton of gravy on it, or turkey gravy, even. There’s a half empty bottle of wine over there that you weren’t crazy about, and, look, the string beans are ready to be drained of their green, vegetal cooking medium. Taste the water: it tastes like string beans. This is the larger point: you can deglaze the pan with water and have a decent sauce, but the more depth of flavor you put into your choice of liquid, the more depth of flavor your sauce will have. The following is from the ingredients list of a [post on risotto]( http://omnivorousfish.com/node/105):

>stock, water or other flavorful liquid (dried mushroom soaking liquid, cheese rinds (not wax ones) simmered in water for a half hour, half-strength bouillon from Knorr brand cubes, water from cooking vegetables, almost anything)

I don’t expect anyone to have all these things just lying around, but if you cook often, you’d be amazed how often one of these things, or something similar, is staring you in the face. How often have you barbecued steaks and had that big plate full of succulent juice leftover? (For me the answer is never, because I drink and/or sop up anything that’s left, but I’ve seen people throw it away. This is sacrilege.) Pasta water (that is to say the water from cooking pasta) should be bottled and sold.

My point is that anything that has flavor has value, and it is through the frugal conservation of flavor that everyday items can be imbued with uncommon tastiness with little or no effort on the cook’s part.

This brings me to my last and most controversial point: bouillon cubes. Stay with me for a second. I don’t recommend the idle use of bouillon made at the strength recommended on the package. What I do recommend is the judicious use of half or three-quarter strength high-quality condensed stock. I often have an open cube in the box that I might crumble a little corner off of to throw in a simmering pan sauce. Thick soups are done no harm by bouillon, and even if they don’t come to their full zenith as they might with a lovingly made stock, they will be better than they would if made with water.

The great Andre Soltner, in his book The Lutece Cookbook, recommends Knorr brand bouillon cubes by name. If they’re good enough for Andre, they’re good enough for me.

Naturally, I am now convinced that Northern California is heaven on earth and everything wrong in my life would be better if I lived there. I fantasize about farmers’ markets and chilly foggy evenings in late spring, wearing [cable-knit sweaters](http://www.benbellen.com.au/alpaca-sweaters/mens-alpaca-sweater.html) and growing my hair longer.

We ate at Tabla last night, but the truth is I have been staring at the screen for an hour, and just don’t feel like writing about it. It was ok. I wouldn’t go back. I liked the decor, and the service was what you would expect from Danny Meyer, but the food all tasted like cumin, and nothing on the menu jumped out at me.

Listening: Watching Law and Order reruns, never a good sign.

Cacti and Lemons

The [Long Beach Farmers’ Market](http://www.harborareafarmersmarkets.org/) is a perfect example of how you can vote with your dollars. It’s not in downtown LA, it’s in the middle of comparatively sleepy Long Beach, centrally located (which in California means a short drive) and teeming with local produce. I talked to farmers from Lancaster (95 miles), Fresno (240 miles) and some other places I can’t recall just now. Some were organic, some weren’t but they all were happy to talk to me about how they farm, even if in halting English. A cursory examination of prices puts most of the produce available on par with or cheaper than area markets, and if you factor in quality, forget about it.
Long Beach Tomatoes

There were several kinds of tomatoes, but the stands weren’t overrun with expensive (and pretentious) heirloom varieties. Mostly red cluster varieties, there were a few yellow and orange cherry-types. Piles of cactus and pasillo peppers (that is to say poblanos, not pasillas) flanked more familiar chard, beans, carrots, turnips, squashes and watercress. The obligatory Hass avocado, too, was abundant, its somber color offset by baskets of fresh cayenne and bird chilies.
Avocados

Too late for them in New York, I took advantage of some unbelievably flawless Italian eggplants (with hardly a seed in them). Enormous, healthy, tight-skinned onions piled high at several stands, competing for attention with heaps of white and red persimmons and crimson pomegranates, stacked up two and three feet high. I also encountered four or five varieties of cilantro, but strangely only one of mint (spearmint, my least favorite), plus a host of local things I didn’t recognize and, unfortunately, didn’t have time to stop and talk about.
Long Beach Cherry Tomatoes

I love learning new things about food, especially about foods I think I am familiar with. Nuts, often, get taken for granted as a barely perishable commodity, stored nearly indefinitely in the freezer. In New York, certainly, I buy them in the grocery store, since nuts make rare appearances at the greenmarket. They have always seemed more like flour or sugar than like peaches or onions. At this market, there were at least two farmers selling only nuts, the boastful Peanut Man (who, to be fair, sold real nuts, too) and the farmer from Lancaster, who was only too happy to help us choose from among his almonds, pecans, walnuts, peanuts and macadamias (California having recently begun giving Hawaii and Brazil a run for their money). He also had black mission and calimyrna figs, dried, but recently dried, and bursting with moist, figgy-raisiny goodness.

So what lesson did I learn? Just like any other seed pod, nuts are better when fresh, too. Snacking on some fresh-from-the-tree almonds, we were amazed when, after about 20 seconds of chewing, our mouths lit up with the Technicolor taste of almond. The almond of almond extract and almond cookies and almond ice cream, a taste delivered to us mostly through unnatural flavorings, turns out to be as real and as vibrant as a kick in the nuts.

Did I mention that I missed peaches? I [went away](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/14) before they came, and got back after they were already gone. The season in California, clearly, is a bit longer for peaches, especially Last Chance peaches, a variety, not an admonition. Last Chance have an excellent smell, tender flesh and clean taste, although they don’t have the peach-orgasm intensity of flavor one expects of the earlier varieties.

**Caramel-Baked Peaches**
Serves 4

Pie is too hard. I don’t have time. I don’t have the trick with dough. Whatever. They’re all excuses. The only excuse I’ll accept is “I ran out of flour.” Then you merely bake your fruit by itself.

I love baked fruit. I love apples and Bartlett pears baked with streusel, or just by themselves. Peaches lend themselves to caramel (and almonds) but it could easily be any combination of apples, pears, peaches, apricots or nectarines, with or without the sugar, keeping in mind that the softer fruits (and the sugar, for that matter) will cook much faster than apples or pears.

½ cup sliced almonds
6 peaches
pinch of salt
1 cup brown sugar

Toast the almonds in a heavy dry skillet over medium-high heat or on a baking sheet in a 350 degree oven, stirring often, until lightly browned and fragrant.

Preheat the oven to 425 degrees. Split the peaches in half and remove the stone (you may peel them, but I prefer them unpeeled, I hardly ever peel fruit). Cut each half into 3 to 5 slices, depending on size and preference. Arrange in an enamelware or glass baking dish and sprinkle with salt and brown sugar, coating peaches thoroughly. Arrange almonds on top. Bake for 12-17 minutes, until caramel is mahogany-colored and peaches are very soft, but still intact. Cool slightly and serve.

Tom and Michael’s House

Bella Isabella

Naples Canals

The Cabin

Last night we had delicata squash, crimini mushrooms (which are white button mushrooms plus 3-4 weeks) and swiss chard on farfalle with some surprisingly good but ethically horrible processed pecorino-style cheese from the supermarket.

I have [mentioned before](http://omnivorousfish.com/node/32) my discomfort with supermarkets, and all this reading and research I have been doing about the USDA lately (more to come on that) has made it even more so. I look at bags of chips and jars of salsa like they are about to explode with hazardous materials, and maybe they are. The meal we ate last night was fantastic because it was more than the sum of its parts: the friends, the wine, the beautiful home and the atmosphere; but the simple fact is that the food from the supermarket just doesn’t taste as good. The swiss chard was bland and unvibrant, the mushrooms past their prime and don’t get me started on the squash.

OK, we’re off to the market.

Listening: Cats thumping on the stoop, blue jays and Michael nattering on the phone. Organic music.