Cute Vegetables and Familiar Faces at the South Berkeley Farmers' Market

 

Moving from San Francisco to the Oakland-Berkeley borderlands (with an interlude in Rio de Janeiro) has brought a few challenges of acclimation, like getting lost in Oakland every other time I try to find the Grand Lake movie theater or a frozen yogurt place close to the Oakland Museum. But my food procurement routine has presented some reassuring continuities. I continue to find a wide selection of produce and bulk foods at Berkeley Bowl, my Rainbow Grocery substitute, while the South Berkeley Farmers' Market presents some old favorites (Dirty Girl, Blossom Bluff, Blue Bottle coffee) alongside some new friends. Full Belly and Riverdog are two farms I've known about for a long time but that don't make their way into San Francisco, so I'm excited to start sampling their produce on a regular basis. Riverdog seemed to have an especially broad selection of cute vegetables last Tuesday, including some of those pictured above. 

L-R, they are Armenian cucumber, an albino eggplant, a summer squash that looks as though it were hand-dipped in grassy hues, tiny radicchio, Chinese (or Japanese) eggplant, a fist-sized cauliflower, stripey eggplant (not sure what variety), French breakfast radishes right out of a children's picture book or the Chez Panisse Vegetables book, and pale lemon cucumbers, which turned out to be surprisingly sweet for cucumbers. They are mainly from Riverdog Farm, with a couple cuties from Dirty Girl.

I got a reminder + $2 coupon in the mail letting me know that the farmers' market had relocated 10 blocks closer to Oakland from its old location (for my personal convenience, of course), and though a few people have grumbled about the move, most of the vendors seem happy with the larger space.

I've been going to the Tuesday afternoon market, which starts at 2pm. This is exciting because I usually can't wake up in time to get the best of the market on Saturday and Sunday mornings, plus getting there at the start of the market also offers sightings of local foodie movers and shakers. As I strolled along with a Weird Veg special agent chef, he pointed out Charlie Hallowell, chef/owner of the most delicious Pizzaiolo and Boot & Shoe Service (where I just ate a delicious nettle pizza on Saturday night), as well as Russell Moore, chef/owner of the much-lauded Camino going about their food shopping. Both are part of the ex-Chez Panisse, local-vegetable-loving mafia, which has been spreading its influence over Berkeley and Oakland for years (Oliveto is another restaurant with Chez Panisse ties that comes to mind, as well as the San Francisco restaurants Quince and its spin-off Cotogna. I wish someone would compile a list of this mafia and their restaurants, or send me a link to where one already exists).

As I hovered over some Riverdog lemon cucumbers, a broad-shouldered, salt-and-pepper mustachioed man passed by me and I had a feeling of déjà-vu that threatened to linger as an unbearably unscratchable itch. Where had I seen him before? "Pal's Take Away," my agent said in a low voice at my side. Ahhhh, yes, one of the masterminds behind my favorite secret sandwich shop in the Mission, where I used to live in San Francisco. Suddenly, it didn't seem that I had moved so far away.

Eggplant Penguins

 

Meanwhile . . .  back in northern California, WV correspondent and specialist in critical vegetable studies Morel Tea reported on the sighting of two emperor eggplant penguins at the veggie mecca known as Berkeley Bowl. Tea writes:

While I was at the bowl today, curiosity led me to investigate a most peculiar sound--something like a low muttering--which seemed to be coming from the southernmost corner of the produce section. Much to my surprise, I happened upon this happy pair of emperor penguins, dressed up as Indian eggplants, who were passing the afternoon by exchanging bawdy jokes . . .

 

The penguins had surely been on the run from pesky naturalists and German documentarians driving them to the brink of insanity in their native South Pole, swimming north and taking shelter in markets along the way with this crafty disguise. No doubt they were hoping to land in the homey yet elegant North Berkeley home of a pair of professors, living it up on the patio while drinking in endless sunset views of the Bay.

2009: The Year in Vegetables

Considering the fact that making lists is one of my favorite procrastination activities and that I look forward all year to the NY Times Magazine Annual Year in Ideas issue, it is something of a bizzarity that I haven't ever posted a Weird Vegetables year in review. I can only attribute it to lack of ambition and an aversion to making authoritative pronouncements (i.e. "2009 was the year of the squash. Most certainly. Indubitably.") But since I'm stuck in a cabin in Lake Tahoe with nothing better to do besides read Sherlock Holmes stories and howl at the moon while my family eats broccoli and iceberg lettuce, I thought I'd compile a list of notable vegetable moments from the year.

1. Michelle Obama's White House vegetable garden...


...sent the press into shock and awe back at the start of spring (ah, remember pea shoots and artichokes?) and since then, many others have been planting their own edible gardens. Michelle's green thumb must have left its imprint on the Queen of England, who installed a vegetable patch just three months after that infamous "hug," which was more of a hand pat on the back really.

As of the fall harvest, the White House garden team has plucked 1007 pounds of vegetables from their fertile plot (yes, the 7 makes it an auspicious and more random, hence real-seeming, figure). The winter garden is being done up in hoop houses that will keep the carrots, spinach, chard, lettuce, and mustard greens nice 'n' cozy, according to the White House blog. The only complaint I have to file is: Where's the kale?! Photo lifted from here.

2. Acceptance of weird vegetables (and fruit) into the EU

In a victory for weirdly wonderful produce everywhere, legislation repealing the EU's twenty-year ban on certain twisted, dwarfish, wonky, and otherwise "malformed" (how dare they!) vegetables and fruit went into effect this past July. The previous regulations had set standards for "normal" produce, dictating such silly rules as cucumbers must be "practically straight" (No queers! And that means you, Armenians and serpentines). Not only was the sale of these abnormal-looking specimens banned, but they were also prevented from being donated to soup kitchens or food banks, leading to the tossing out of 20% of the British harvest according to the Daily Telegraph.

Anyone who pays the least attention to cooking and eating knows that while freshness matters, looks don't necessarily correlate to taste and nutrition, and that twisty carrots can taste just as good as straight ones, if not better. Think of the pomelo, which reaches its sweetest only after it begins to deflate, and pomegranates that signal their juicy ripeness by cracking all over, thus marring their smooth exteriors. Unfortunately, some harvests are still beholden to these arbitrary standards, such as the non-bendy banana, which must be "the thickness of a transverse section of the fruit between the lateral faces," while "the middle, perpendicular to the longitudinal axis, must be at a minimum of 27mm (1.06ins)." My appetite ends when choosing produce becomes a mathematical word problem.

Read more about it from Nicola Twilley at Edible Geography (my newest food writer heartthrob!) and at the Times of London. Thanks to our occasional Internet mole Leafy Heirloom for dropping these links into the secret underground WV drop box before shuffling back to his tunneling.

3. Young woman diagnosed with lachanophobia...


...which means "fear of vegetables," originating in the Greek root "lachano," or "vegetable" ("lachanopolist" means greengrocer, the Oxford English Dictionary tells me).

In November, the Daily Telegraph reported that one Vicki Larrieux, 22, of Portsmouth, England, suffers from "panic attacks at the merest sight of a sprout or a pea." Her boyfriend is kind enough to help out with the grocery shopping, which is dangerous territory for Larrieux: "It is a bit of an ordeal to go to the supermarket because the veg is usually right by the door." Perhaps reading back issues of the Telegraph can give her some ideas on how to cure this truly tragic phobia. It was hypnotherapy that helped Krissie Palmer-Howarth, 61, a cabaret singer from Newhaven, East Sussex, overcome her lachanophobia back in 2006. Expect another variation on this theme in 2012, when the Telegraph again needs space filler and figures everyone's forgotten all about lachanophobia. Scary Alien vegetable creature found here.

4. The New England Tomato Blight


While traipsing around bucolic New England during my cool, wet, American summer, I became aware of the plight of organic tomato farmers there, whose crops were suffering from the blight, a merciless fungus whose rotten spores love the rain and travel the winds, reaching distances of ten miles in one day. It is the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine in 1845 (or the Great Famine), which brought so many shamrocked immigrants to this side of the world in search of healthy produce, among other things. This summer's outbreak was thought to be spread especially by blighted tomato plants sold to backyard farmers at big box stores (beware the wares of Wal-Mart).

So while we in California were basking in late summer and fall rubied heirloom tomatoes, our comrades to the east had to make due with the remaining fungicide-sprayed tomatoes and assorted substitute nightshades. Interestingly, it was community supported agriculture subscriptions (CSA boxes) that saved some organic farms from taking big income losses, since their customers had already bought into the harvest and accepted alternate produce. Huzzah! The above photo of Lindentree Farm of Lincoln, Massachusetts comes from the Boston Globe, which has more on the story.

5. "Junk" the Eggplant, a Canadian Idol is born

While tomatoes were decaying in the U.S. northeast, Canadian WV readers Paul and Carmen proved the agricultural pooh-poohers and garden plot naysayers to be FOOLS when they brought a velvet eggplant plant to successful fruition in Vancouver's cold and foggy climate this past August. Paul writes, "I hope these photos bring a laugh and inspire fellow gardeners to keep on digging." They sent in several photos of the eggplant they nicknamed "Junk," including the one above of their prized pet nestled lovingly in the crotch of an unidentified admirer.

Despite the connotations of his name, which stunted the early development of his self-esteem by making him feel the very opposite of precious and that he was interesting only in the cheapest of ways, Junk eventually made his way on the hardscrabble streets of Vancouver. A talent scout spotted his charisma, got him blingee'd out, and he's been on the upswing ever since, winning the hearts of Canadians from Toronto to Nova Scotia with his magnetic dance moves and sustainable lyrics. His fall Organic Hip-Hop Rainbow Funk Fest tour sold out in a matter of minutes, and he has plans to follow up his solo album Another Shade of Purple with a collaboration with American Idol's dreamy & dreadlocked runner up Jason Castro. All our congratulations go out to Paul, Carmen, and their Lil' Junk.



Happy New Year! And remember this in 2010: Eat vegetables. Weird ones. Lots of them.

Bea My Eggplant

After all the excitement of being a newsy (for approximately 20 glorious minutes before my stack of S.F. Panorama's disappeared into eager hands; all 1,500 of the $5 street copies sold out in a heartbeat on Tuesday) and of admiring a whole page of the most lovely weird vegetables, I needed to find something else to keep up the high. Enter Bea, the scrumptious offspring of my friends Kathy and Drew. Here, she merges an overwhelming number of my favorite things: anthropomorphic vegetables, velour, crafts (mama made the costume! Oops! Correction: mommie didn't make the eggplant, but she did craft the other two below), the color purple, the color green, funny jester hats, epaulettes, pantaloons, cuteness with an attitude à la Yoshitomo Nara's fierce kiddies.

Lil' Bea can claim both Japanese and Korean before the hyphen to American, and so for the past three years, her parents have amused themselves and their child's fawning public by dressing her up for Halloween as variations on a theme in Bea that traverses the borders of language and food. Most recently, above, we have NasuBea, or nasubi, which is Japanese for eggplant.

Last year, she sizzled as E-Bea Furai, or ebi furai (Japanese fried shrimp):



And she was just a wee giggling bay-Bea when she made mouths water as Gal-Bea, better known as galbee (or galbi or kalbi), a marinated Korean short rib.


I know I'm supposed to be a vegetable person, but I must admit that Bea's getup makes me nostalgic for walking out of Brothers BBQ (officially Brothers Restaurant, and Brothers II) on Geary Boulevard with my hair smelling like smoke and my belly stretched tight. Still, I hope that her mother will consider sticking with the vegetable theme next year, perhaps spicing it up with Wasa-Bea?

Bull's Blood: A Vegetable Offering

7am. Three Saturdays ago. San Francisco's Mission District. My bedroom.

My eyes spring open. The silence crouches, and the room fills with a flash of unearthly light.

CRRRRACK BOOM!!! (but bigger than that even)

Thunder shakes the sky and descends into my bones. The black cat Osiris skitters from his spy position at the window over my desk and slides under the bed.

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID:
Why have you forsaken the Bay Area? What do you mean by leaving at the peak of late summer produce season? Why do you insist on poking around dusty, not very exciting East Coast vegetables and then fleeing to the mountains of Colorado only to miss the local farmers' market while you stay up all night holding a flashlight in a movie theater and spend all day hiding in the Telluride Public Library like a whey-faced turnip squealing about "work" and "deadlines"?

Me: [sobbing and blubbering like a baby carrot] I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I don't know what came over me. I'm a wreck. It's positively grotesque. I've become a monster, I'm monstrous [spoken through fingers that clutch at my face]. But the whole time I kept dreaming about heirloom tomatoes back home and the Early Girls and figs and and and--[out of breath, hiccuping]

WHAT THE THUNDER SAID:
The vegetables gods are angry. They must be appeased.

Me: What can I do?

THUNDER:
Get thee to a farmers' market and prove to them that you truly appreciate the spectacular bounty of Northern California and that your vagrant wanderings are the necessary consequence of an overburdened spirit, a condition that mind-blowing produce alone could not soothe. They must have blood. Blood, I say!

Me: Then I know what I must do.

The rain continued to pour down in rushing waves. I pulled on my dull green rubber boots and pushed my way into the grabby crowds and chaotic produce of the Alemany Farmers' Market to bring back a vegetable offering that would sufficiently impress upon the Bay Area vegetable deities my unwavering faith in the superiority of their produce. It had to be dark, dramatic.

An hour later, I dragged the sacrificial produce home in a purple net bag and lay the offering out on the kitchen island.

To test the waters, so to speak, I sliced into the orange tomatoes and made a spectacular salad, heavy in taste. The tomatoes were richly sweet, the greens crisply bitter, the crumbled ricotta salty.

"Too friendly," a voice rumbled. They wanted something that crawled further away from the mainstream salad bowl, something that would evoke the raw pain of the local earth as I left it behind for other topographies.


So I selected the rosa bianca eggplant, which looked swollen with heartache, a nightshade turned pale from weeping.

I sliced her creamy flesh into rounds and admired them for a moment:


"Bloodier," the voice intoned.

Next I put the knife to a round of radicchio, the chicory whose bitter taste and scab-like coloring recall wounds not yet healed over.


"Bloodier," the voice intoned.

Seeds oozed onto the cutting board as I hacked into the dark-ringed bulk of brandywine tomatoes:


"More blood," called a different voice. "Besides, these tomatoes have catface," came its petulant tone.

The catface was minimal and not necessarily offensive to me, as a person who rather enjoys cats' faces and oddly formed produce. These gods were getting a bit demanding for my taste. I had to shut them up.

While considering what final effort would prove my local vegetable love, I set the oven to 350°F, laid the eggplant and radicchio out on a baking sheet, and painted them with olive oil and salt on both sides.


Then I tossed the tomatoes with more olive oil and salt, plus a sprinkling of Italian herbs, arranged them on a separate baking sheet, and put both sheets in the oven.


After roasting all parties for 20+ minutes, I chopped the pieces even smaller, put some into my mouth, and added the rest to a base of sauteed garlic and onion, a 14 oz. can of stewed tomatoes, and basil that had been simmering on the stovetop for about 15 minutes.


A hot wind blew through the kitchen. The only sound was the gentle rustling of the colored papeles picados strung from the ceiling. The hearty aroma of tomato sauce wafted throughout the apartment, yet still I sensed a rancid air of discontent that lay ready to pounce.

[Murmuring] There must be true blood. Vegetable blood, that is.

Then they came to me unbidden--

The beet is the most intense of vegetables.
Beets are deadly serious.
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime.

--the lines from Jitterbug Perfume that I had quoted in an earlier post.

Elsewhere, autumn may be the "Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness," as Keats writes, but in San Francisco, fall is the most intense of seasons. September bakes the land into a stupor, while October sends us into the hot swoons of earthquake weather. Only the maroon, cracked-blood meat of beets could reflect the depth of my desire for the Bay Area's autumnal harvest and the suffering I experienced at being separated from it.

My task required a beet of crimson root and greens incarnadine. What I sought was found at the Alemany stand of Tomatero Farm:

BULL'S BLOOD BEETS

I would have to consume every part of this elegant creature--the root, the stems, the greens (though perhaps they should be called purples, they're so dark)--to demonstrate the totality of my devotion.

Wiping the soil from my brow, I set to work with my Global chef's knife. With possessed fingers, I scraped the fine rooty hairs away from the beets, separated the stems and leaves, and rinsed them carefully. As I chopped, my vision became soaked in bull's blood and I cried out for some baby chioggia beets to break the red tide with their blushing pink and white stripes. Soon the deed was done. I wiped my blade on a dish towel and sauteed the greens and stems with balsamic vinegar and salt, while the red beet roots roasted in shallow water at 400°F in a covered enamel pot.

In just short of half-an-hour, the beets softened and sweetened, and I plucked the globes from their ruddy bath and laid them out to make a kind of vegetable altar.


Feeling faint, I sank to my knees. The room began to spin and hysterical laughter emanated from all sides of the kitchen. Bull's blood. Bull's blood. Bull's blood, the voices chanted gleefully. I was struck momentarily blind, and when my eyesight returned, I saw that the beets had exploded into discs that spread out across the counter top.


Trembling weakly, I slid one into my mouth, and its tender sweetness assured me that I had been absolved of my vegetable crimes. I whispered that I was to go away again for just a little longer, but that I would return in time to attempt some acorn squash tarts. The breeze caressed my hair in acquiescence as church bells rang in the distance.

Martha's Vineyard Weird Vegetable Spectacle

In these last dog days of summer, WV's New York City squirrel-in-chief, Gabrielle, has been out spying for us on Martha's Vineyard, trying to catch some evidence of President Obama's "unique metabolism" that David Plouffe cited admiringly in the NY Times after calling the president "a chess player in a town with a lot of checker players," and secretly congratulating himself for thinking up that analogy. A few days prior to the first family's photogenic arrival, our correspondent killed some time by wandering through the Martha's Vineyard Agricultural Livestock Show & Fair. There, she encountered the above pepper-and-bean angry cat and what looks to be an eggplant-maxixe-carrot LOBSTER, below (wow, impressive).


I haven't seen maxixe, also known as bur cucumber, since being in Brazil last summer. Here's a closer look at the maxixe (mah-SHE-she):



I was hoping for a glimpse of the Woodsmen's Contest, or the Judging of Goats, but this kindly fairytale spinner will suffice for now:

Life on the island, which lies in the Outer Lands region just off of Cape Cod, must get a bit dreamy at times from all that gazing out to sea, as suggested by this islander's mixing of greens and beans into a marine scene, explained by the caption:


"After sailing all summer, I began to see reflections of maritime life in my garden."

Perhaps a similar image flashed across senior adviser David Axelrod's mind as he thought ahead to the president's island respite in the eye of the political storm called Healthcare Reform, then donned his sea captain's cap at a jaunty angle and philosophized:

"What we’ve learned ... is that you have to look to the distant shore. You can’t panic from the choppy waves around you. He’s got his eye on that.”

I'm not sure what the spindly diorama below is meant to represent, but this caption seems fitting:

"There’s something about August going into September, where everybody in Washington gets all wee-weed up.”

--Barack Obama, days before arriving at the Vineyard (in the same article).

legumes estranhos! (edição brasileira)

Weird Vegetables is going Carmen Sandiego on your asses as Erin and I embark on our summer search for eye-popping produce. Erin will be traipsing up and down the East Coast, itself a strange and daunting endeavor for a native Californian, while I'm down in Brazil spreading the gospel of "legumes estranhos" to newfound converts.

Today, I went to the Tuesday farmers' market on Praça General Osório in Rio de Janeiro after my yoga class (which was like no other kind of yoga I've ever done and involved Bollywood-type dancing and heavy nasal breathing meant to induce snot rockets--I kid you not, the instructor handed me some Kleenex to hold in front of my nose before we got started. But that's all for another blog...). The market rotates between squares on different days, but I remembered this one from when I used to live in Ipanema.

My favorite thing about Brazilian farmers' markets, at least the ones in the Zona Sul region of Rio (basically, the neighborhoods by the beaches, like Copacabana, Ipanema, and Leblon), is their mix of chaos and OCD produce layout. You can have all sorts of rinds flying through the air, old ladies running you over with their rolling carts, lime-and-garlic vendors tugging at your elbow, and just as you're about to lose it, a pristine pyramid of fruits and vegetables reminds you that there nevertheless remains an underlying force of order in the universe. A lot of produce here is sold in fixed portions called "lotes" and pre-grouped or pre-chopped in little plastic baggies. [July 23 oops! André, a very knowledgeable editor in São Paulo, kindly informed me that the whole "lote" deal is a Rio thing. Just so you know.]

Today's curiosities are "maxixe" and "jiló." Both plants are thought to originate in Africa and to have been introduced into Brazil at the time of the slave trade. Maxixe (mah-SHE-she) is the prickly one that looks like a projectile of choice for teenage boys. It's actually just like a cucumber on the inside and can be eaten raw. I ate the spikes too since the ones I got weren't overly mature. It is also known as the "West Indian gherkin" and "bur cucumber," but I think the Portuguese name wins the prize for "Best Name to Repeat Over and Over Again in a Sing-Song Voice." That's okra, hanging out in the upper right-hand corner of the bottom left-hand photo (hello, old friend!).

What looks like a small, green eggplant is the jiló (gzee-LAW), also known by the less appetizing name of "garden egg." It's kind of like an eggplant, 'cept different, and the rounder ones, like these, are bitter. They are harvested while still unripe because the mature crops become even more bitter (and turn orange). You can sautée them with garlic and other veggies for an interesting mix of bitter and salty.

The Secret Parts of Eggplants

Not to make you blush, but you are looking at the his and hers genitalia of the Rosa Bianca eggplant. They caught my eye (the eggplants, not the genitalia) at the Balakian Farms stand at the SF Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market a few months ago, and I was so pleased with their sweetness and creamy texture that I kept going back. The Rosa Bianca is an apparently fancy pants, highly coveted Italian heirloom variety. I like its plumpness and delicate purple shading. They were more purple in August, but now that we're coming to the end of the season in December, they're looking decidedly wan. Balakian Farms has closed its Ferry Plaza stand until the spring, but you should be able to catch the last Rosa Biancas of the season from another local purveyor of produce.

Look for the glossier ones that are heavy for their size but not too big, since the larger ones have more seeds, which can taste bitter. Certain winds of folk wisdom say that the male eggplants have less seeds and are therefore less embittered than the females. So who's who up there? The male has a round dot and the female has "the wider bottom," as the Balakian lady told me with a knowing smile.

If you're into "science" and stuff like that, then you've probably concluded that eggplants are in fact fruits that have no gender, and that this whole male/female thing is an elaborate ruse cooked up by the farmers to make life seem more fun and exciting than it really is. I'm okay with that. If you want to know more about this purple majesty, NPR has a nice feature on "Making Over the Much-Maligned Eggplant."

I usually dice my eggplants and drench them in oyster sauce for stir-frys, but these are so lovely that you can eat them straight out of the oven. Just slice into thin rounds, drizzle with olive oil, sprinkle with salt, and roast in the oven at 350°F for about 20 minutes.