A Few of My Favorite Things September 21, 2008

Crisp… Rich… Fragrant… Alive. Is it a new wine? Cab? Syrah? Rhone Blend? White? Chardonnay with not too much oak? NO! It’s Fall! Autumn! Harvest! The time where leaves fall, grapes become wine, air becomes cool, and food is at it’s best. I so look forward to this time of year.  All the things I love are in this bountiful season: Football, Halloween, Bird Hunting, and best of all Oktoberfest, that unique celebration of beer that we enjoy so much. Kids are back in school telling and writing stories of the summer’s wayward adventures. Farmers are in the field, busily bringing in their crops.  Colorful decorations of burnt umber, sienna, and soulful greens will be placed around houses and businesses, adding warmth and richness to our daily routines. That, coupled with the natural color changes happening in our local flora and fauna make for a vibrant couple of months. And Lets not forget about the Pigs!

Autumn being the time of harvest it is befitting to tell you that it is also the time of Charcuterie. The time we harvest hogs for the making of that ancient and noble art of sausage making. Salting, curing, mixing, hanging and drying. We here at Villa Creek are having 4 hogs raised for us this year. So there will be plenty of work and delicious pork pleasures to be shared.

There are several reasons to come to the Central Coast during this season. We Have the Harvest wine tour, which is on the third weekend of October.  Four Vines Winery and Villa Creek will be teaming up again for a memorable dinner out in a stunning tempranillo vineyard on the east side of Templeton.  We will be doing a private tasting and “Day of the Dead” dinner with Villa Creek Cellars on that weekend as well.  I believe we will also team up with Tablas Creek for that weekend, so there are many opportunities to really get a taste of the season at Villa Creek restaurant.

Windrose Farm will be harvesting some of their incredible bounty throughout the next couple of months and we are pleased and honored to be able to feature the fruits of their  labor on a regular basis.

Firestone Brewery and Bristol Cider will be joining us in the month of November for a Beer dinner.  I will keep you posted as to the date and time.

I will be posting more information on all these events on the website and the blog in the near future.  My favorite time of year is Fall and I am excited to share it with those of you who are able to make it to the Central Coast to see the Grape Harvest, taste some wine, sample the local cuisine, and enjoy the richness of the season with us.

Sustainable as a Theme July 3, 2008

Dining in all the fabulous restaurants in the big cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or San Francisco, you can find a wide array of themes. You can find facilities with Nuevo Latino, Italian, French, Dim Sum… classic themes like these, while some restaurants rock the latest trend, which could be whatever the Food Network has told America. With the somewhat recent release of Al Gore’s film The Inconvenient Truth, rising gas prices, and rocky economy, creative marketing has become a very sought after skill. Other informative and mind-opening media pieces such as Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me or Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma have caused the food industry to reevaluate the way food is sold. Corporate food chains display bright banners with words like ‘organic’ or ‘fresh’ embossed across the packaging that is ‘biodegradable.’  T.V. commercials or ads are bright and coupled with a kitschy soda-pop soundtrack to lure our unsuspecting youth.

Coming out of culinary school, I wanted to shape the industry and show everyone something they hadn’t seen before.  Armed with my new piece of paper that told me and everyone else that I knew how to make hollandaise and butcher salmon, I was led to believe I was going to get my face on the covers of Saveur, Food & Wine or possibly my own cookbook. However, what I wanted to show the world was prepackaged and the same thing that the instructors at the school had spoon-fed to many other students like me. I was left with something that was not new and lacked my soul and any real foundation, and my quest to invent something new must begin. Luckily I came to the realization that the old way of doing food, the really old way, was and is still the right way. Restaurants, hotels and cooks of households in rural towns shopped in the market square that we know now as the Farmer’s Market and prepared what was available to them at the market. The geographic location of where you lived dictated what was available to you. For example: if you lived on the coast, the ocean’s treasures were there for you. If you lived in the mountains, goat, rabbit and cattle might more likely make an appearance on your menu. Of course the geographic location with its soil content and climate also affected what produce was available to you.  Living in California I am fortunate as I have a huge array of vegetables and fruit here for my picking, as well as the most expansive coastline in the U.S. and several fresh water resources to fish from.  Within a hundred mile radius all of these things are at my fingertips. The proximity eliminates the gas consumed to deliver any nonlocal product, and ensures freshness.

As a cook I want to serve foods that taste good and are exciting, but at what cost?  Should I be serving pumpkin in the middle of spring? Or should I be flying in halibut from Alaska if I have fresh California halibut available? These don’t support my local economy or help my environment by flying or driving a product hundreds or even thousands of miles away to reach my table. As a consumer, these questions should be asked: Where did my vegetables come from? How is it that I am having English peas in the middle of fall?  It’s spring, how or why am I enjoying figs?  Is it that these things do not matter?  Of course they do! Neither is available in those seasons.  Again this goes back to the classic way of doing things. Foods should only be prepared while they are seasonally available. Now of course with modern developments like planes, trains and refrigeration, people in South Dakota can get fresh tomatoes, avocados or mangoes and in the blistering cold winter.  Again, at what cost?

For me, I like having the ability to visit with the farmer and ask him or her what is on hand as well as what will be coming on line in the next few months. Sure, its fabulous to be able to display exotic items from far off places and sit in a dining room that looks like it was pieced together from a town in the La Mancha region of Spain, but again at what cost?

So now with a few years of industry realities under my toque, I have developed an idea of what the world needs to see (and I strongly emphasize the word, needs).  With a cynical but very realist chef as a boss and mentor showing me the way as a young epicurean, I have realized that yeah, all the million dollar restaurants with chefs who have their names embroidered across their chests and dining rooms designed by GQ’s top rated interior designers are great but what are they doing for the community in which they reside? How are they giving back? Being in a small town versus a large city, this point is far more important in the birthing years because you do not have the masses to visit your establishment and pay your bills.  However, in the grand scheme of things if more restaurants decided to only buy local either from fishmongers, cheese mongers, cattlemen or farmers, the local agricultural economy would thrive and allow for growth and security instead of being outsourced from a stranger hundreds of miles away.  And come on, isn’t nice to know where your beef came from and not just seeing a picture of your happy cow in a green pasture chewing on some grass behind a wood fence? FYI, I have decided that Happy Cows come from Cayucos. Just look at that view!

Happy cows come from Cayucos

The beauty of this concept of Local, Organic & Sustainable is that any cuisine can fit this mold. It’s this simple if an ingredient is missing in order for your cuisine to be completed you either do away with the recipe or the cuisine as a hole. Don’t get me wrong, I love having all the Chinese, Thai, Indian or Italian restaurants around to dine at but just imagine how much better they would be if they were based in their proper environment. This idea allows for a fresh menu that correlates with what is fresh that day. This is so cutting edge because now the cook is faced with a challenge to prepare something what is available now and not with a set of ingredients he or she is so used to having readily available due to modern logistic capabilities. Could there be a better market for the consumer? Farmers, ranchers and fishmongers working hand-in-hand with chefs to bring the consumer the freshest product available?

The very idea has sparked my appetite.

Pop Tarts, Tainted Meat and Idol Chefs February 21, 2008

Where to begin?

They serve Pop Tarts at schools. Did you know that? They serve them at schools in seemingly progressive areas in California. In the same zip code that organic farmers and Grass fed beef ranchers barely break even on a yearly basis doing the things they believe to be right, the School district has the unmitigated gall to serve “pop tarts” at the student run snack bar. Without a toaster. What is a Pop Tart? It certainly can’t be food. Is it a toaster candy bar that nods its head toward the fruits and vegetable block of the food pyramid? Or is it just another way we can further utilize the surplus corn that is grown in our fertile land in Middle America, to destroy the health of our youth.

I can’t tell which is more appalling to me; the way we underpay our teachers and overpay our politicians or the way we worship our Celebrity Chefs and yet pay no attention to the true heroes of the food industry, the farmers. Both are equally insipid, both equally damaging to our future and day to day life. But one seems obvious while the other is still cloaked in a perception of integrity. We can all agree that the crime of overpaying fat cats on the hill, whilst the mentors of our youth live in respective squalor is atrocious, and that it is so bogged down in the mire of bureaucracy and unions that we may never really find national solution. But do we really understand the idolatry involved in raising chefs to a level of god-like celebrity, and not really praise those who live on little or no profit to tip at windmills against the great corporate farming giants (seemingly in bed with the chemical companies, the pharmaceutical companies and the insurance companies. I like to call this the evil empire just to tip my hat to George Lucas).
We should be making TV shows about the Spencers of Windrose Farm or the Proprietors of T & D Willey. We should laude and write songs about the three visionary women who started Veritable Vegetable in the Bay area. Where are the parades and awards shows for sentries like Frank Lamacchia of PL Bar Ranch beef who raises smaller cattle on grass right up until they are respectfully loaded on trucks 6 at a time to go to slaughter at a local meat house. Or the Hearst corporation who funds the Hearst Ranch beef project that does the same thing, utilizing natural genetics to create tender beef not genetically modified corn slurries created by and funded by the evil empire. For that matter we could talk about even smaller ranchers Coco from Fair Oaks Beef who has gotten together with a rancher from New Zealand (a place much more spatially challenged than us) who together have been working on genetics and pasture management to create a more efficient use of land and resources to create their beef. Why are we not giving congressional medals to them? They seem to be more interested in our future than either the politicians, teachers unions or chefs. And these are only the farmers in my neck of the woods.

I don’t want you to get the impression that I am unaware of the relative handful of celebrity chefs that do speak about their farmers and are advocates for a better food system. But why are we not as outraged about the sneaky pop tart as we are the dairy cattle that are being abused (Again not to undermine the ethical treatment of livestock, I will be ranting on that next week). Because we are entirely too enamoured with ourselves. The media makes gods of lesser men and denies deity to those who truly are heroes. Because we can look to those who create tasty treats with things like corn syrup and pectin powder, bleached and enriched flour with such doe-eyed respect that we lose sight of what is real. That is how we justify pop tarts that say things like “real Fruit” and “all natural”. We are putting our respect and trust in the wrong people. Go to Your farmer ask him where and what you should eat. Or better yet ask him what your children should eat at school. Ask him why abused cattle are getting into the school food system and ask him how we as a nation of small communities can change what we are doing to our future. He will tell you what chefs are doing the right thing. She will tell you where and what to buy, and in my experience they tend to be less self-serving than the media chefs.

When you stray from what is real, when you no longer respect those who provide for your needs, you inevitably run the risk of allowing questionable slaughter practices and the sneaky pop tart into your life and your children’s schools.