Chips 101

Our local "deli" meal: chicken, Cabot cheese, and homemade pesto sandwiches
on Iggy's bread, with my own pickles and sweet potato chips. Amazing!

After months of eating sweet potatoes 1000 ways, I found a new way to eat them: as chips! We have a long tradition of eating "chip-and-dip" in our family, so this was a dangerous thing to try because I knew they would be very good and very addictive. I was right. They are easy to make and taste delicious, and were the perfect accompaniment to our deli-style dinner last night!

To make sweet potato chips:

1) I left the skin on the potatoes after a good scrubbing and used the Cuisinart slicing blade to make the very thin sweet potato slices.

2) I heated a couple of inches of vegetable oil to 325 degrees in a cast iron pot, and used a thermometer to monitor the temperature. The temperature can rise and fall very quickly, so needs careful attention.

3) I cooked these in batches of 10 until they were golden brown, drained them on paper towels, and then tossed them with Kosher salt. They were amazing and disappeared in seconds! Next on the agenda: perfecting the dip.

Humboldt Fog

Sonnet to Humboldt Fog

The winner of the the inaugural birthday bash,
The soft, creamy goat with a layer of ash.
Purchased at the Cheeseboard, with views of McCovey Cove,
We oft sampled the finest offering from the molds of Cypress Grove.

It preceded Le Roy dinners, on the deck and sunshine rays,
Baguette and glass of wine, sealed many West Cali. days.
Its flavor leaves you smiling, as it melts upon your tongue,
I cherish memories of our Bay Area "Fog" (as background carillon rung).

We see it in the Bay State - and it never makes our cart,
It doesn't match our local eats, with its Humboldt County start.
I might also add the cross-nation trip, it doesn't look so nice,
In addition, compared to Berkeley, we'd be paying twice the price.

So if ever in California, with an afternoon where there is no rush,
Find a wedge of Humboldt Fog and a bottle of white wine (Husch).

-Andrew A. West

It's bahl hornin'

During one of our California adventures, Andrew and I spent a night in the Boonville Hotel in Boonville, CA. While we were there, we sampled beer at the Anderson Valley Brewing Company, where the motto is "It's bahl hornin'", or "It's good drinking", in Boontling. When the town was founded in the late 1800s, its residents developed this dialect of English, which contains words from Gaelic, Pomonan (the local Native American language), and Spanish. There are published books about this language, but Wikipedia has a dictionary that's fun to peruse.

Andrew gives a shout-out to Somerville in Boonville, California!

The beer at the brewing company was delicious - though not quite as delicious as the West favorite Bear Republic Brewery - and we enjoyed making friends with the mascot, Barkley the Beer (a bear with deer antlers!).

Green String Farm

Geri, Dick, and Andrew visit the farm stand at Green String Farm.

Every time we visit our family in Sebastopol, California, we make a stop at Green String Farm for produce. This farm stand is in Petaluma, CA, where it has been building since 2003 and the farmers practice sustainable agriculture.

This means that the farmer, Bob Cannard, tries to reduce soil erosion, dependency on pesticides, and supports biodiversity through a variety of farm practices. This includes crop rotation, composting, and planting cover crops, which helps to nourish and maintain the soil. The resulting produce is relatively - and surprisingly!- quite affordable and incredibly delicious. They have expanded their farm store to include a small selection of other local products, including their own chicken eggs, and the store employees are incredibly friendly, knowledgeable, and devoted.

Beets - roasted in the oven with olive oil, salt, and pepper - make a wonderful side dish!

Not only can you visit the farm stand nestled among the hills of Petaluma, but Green String Farm supplies their sustainably-grown and delicious veggies to restaurants around the Bay area - including the famous Chez Panisse. Having eaten at this fine and extremely expensive Berkeley landmark, I was content to find that these vegetables are just as good simply prepared in my own kitchen with family and friends.

"Time to Make the Syrup"

Early spring in New England means one important, coveted crop is harvested: maple sap. This humble ingredient is harvested and transformed into syrup when the weather is the perfect combination of cool nights and warm days, when the sugar is high, and when the sap has started to run. Our Boston and Somerville papers were full of references to the syrup season, from major operations in Vermont, to the Somerville Community Garden production, and even backyard producers here in Massachusetts.

Many people in this region continue to use horses to pull the pallets of buckets out of the woods, and the technology needed for reducing the sap to syrup is surprisingly simple: the sap is boiled until enough water has evaporated to leave behind the amber liquid. The sap flows but once a year, and the harvest and production is labor intensive, making this product very expensive - but worth every penny.

Andrew has dreamed of having his own maple syrup production, and we visited a producer in Vermont last spring where we learned that the University of Vermont has a maple research center! The Proctor Maple Research Center focuses its research on the sugar maple, and they have the forest, sugarhouse, and labs to study this tree and syrup production - they even have a webcam focused on the sugarhouse ("Sugarhouse Cam") during the syrup-making season so we can follow their progress. While the winter may feel very barren and bleak in the darkest days, there are constant surprises and food wonders!