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.

rad & rad

Radical! Treviso radicchio and amethyst radishes. The former from Dirty Girl and the latter from the stand to their left at the Ferry Building whose name I forget. This is like the WV equivalent of one of those S.F. Chronicle front page photos of fog over the Golden Gate Bridge or some guy rollerblading with sport sunglasses on. Nothing really important's happening and the space could really be devoted to something more urgent and illuminating, but hey, we had the nice photo and decided to run it, just for the hell of it.

Speaking of radical, though, have you ever wondered about the origins of the word now most commonly associated either with a wild departure from the status quo or with southern California dude sports and the thumbs-up sign?

The OED tells us that radical, as an adjective, means, in the first sense of the word:

Of, belonging to, or from a root or roots; fundamental to or inherent in the natural processes of life, vital; spec. designating the humour or moisture once thought to be present in all living organisms as a necessary condition of their vitality; usually in radical heat, radical humidity, radical humour, radical moisture, radical sap. Now hist.

Perhaps none of these meanings are altogether unrelated, though. The further we depart from the origins of things, the less radical, less vibrant they--and we--become. Wildness dissipates and softens, the radish withers, and the radicchio wilts the farther they get from their soiled root beds.

Happy Chez Panisse

Oh, hello! Here I am. It's been awhile. I've been split into various pieces, like poor Osiris, my energies dispersed by my evil sibling pursuits and obligations, and only now have I been put back together enough to attempt a new post. These beautiful eerie carrots appear on the front of the menu of the Chez Panisse Restaurant from Monday, February 8, 2010. It was my birthday--an Aquarian date of distinction shared by Elizabeth Bishop, James Dean, and Nick Nolte, among others.

It was cold and rainy on the streets of Berkeley, but inside it was warm and smelled faintly of sage (we were the first seating at 5:30pm, and they must have waved a smoldering herb bunch in the air to set the space properly). The downstairs room feels like the dark, paneled inside of a wooden jewelry box lit up in a golden-orange glow from angular light fixtures and reflecting off various mirrored surfaces, a cozy secret.

The menu:


The weird vegetable highlights were the wild fennel slivers in a light lemony vinaigrette swirled with mint that accompanied the "fried Monterey Bay squid" (aka calamari) appetizer, then the grilled, wilty-crunchy, slightly bitter, purple-and-green radicchio and the cream-colored butter beans, chubby to bursting, that floated in the hearty sauce of dry chilies, cumin, and marjoram that the goat was braised in.

My family's table was right in front of the kitchen, and I could spy some kind of gigantic celery-looking vegetation partially visible on the other side of the glass-paned door. Before dinner began, I asked our more-than-gracious French server about them, and he strode back there to grab a bunch of what turned out to be monstrous cardoons and waved their bushy gray-green leaves delightedly at us as he talked about them. I was disappointed that we wouldn't be able to try them--they were to be baked in a gratin with chard for the next night's prix fixe dinner, which was much more exciting in terms of vegetables, I must admit with only the faintest twinge of regret (see the Feb. 9 menu).

With a prime seat facing the kitchen theater, I drifted in and out of dinner conversations while watching white-clad chefs spin the leg of goat hanging from string above an open fire whenever they thought of it or happened to pass by. I stared lovingly at the piles of radicchio that would get tossed atop the grill below and to the right of the goat as they magically shrank and were transferred to terra cotta saucepans.

My father doesn't eat goat or lamb--perhaps an effect of having been born in the Year of the Ram, but then so was I and I have no trouble eating my own--so they offered him the vegetarian menu:




I was most excited by the grilled chanterelle entree, but my father preferred to eat some kind of dead animal, so the head chef was nice enough to substitute petrale sole with the sides from the chevreau à la mexicaine (a funny Frenchification of a Mexican dish) that the rest of us had.

I probably do not need to go on about how delicious the meal was. It was very. Tasty. And succulent. And delicately yet deeply flavored. Satisfying but not gluttonous.

Throughout dinner, I had seen various civilians wander into the open kitchen and not get angrily shooed away, so while waiting for our dessert of tres leches cake topped with creme fraiche and chopped pistachios surrounded by (oh!) candied kumquats and a perfectly tangy-sweet slice of blood orange, my brother Minh and I took our own turn about the long, narrow kitchen. We smiled at various line cooks and chefs (only age seemed to distinguish chefs from cooks as far as appearance went), I asked about a bowl of black trumpet mushrooms (for the cafe upstairs, alas), and we inspected the delights of the pastry station. Earlier, excitement had been savored by all when the scent of burning caramel erupted scandalously from the back of the kitchen, and my dad shouted gleefully at our politely restrained server, "Hey, they're burning our dessert!"

My other brother Stephen presented me with Alice Waters's latest manifesto-cum-cookbook, The Art of Simple Food: Notes, Lessons, and Recipes from a Delicious Revolution, which she introduces as a kind of basic cooking course, as opposed to say my Chez Panisse Vegetables, which is more of a reference. I'm looking forward to reading it through and sharing some recipes and ideas with you.

Minh & me, happy as can be.

A radicchio is a rose is a radicchio...

is a rose

and sometimes it looks like meat!

a veritable treat!
though not so very sweet...

in a salad or a skillet,
you can grill it to perfection,
a chicory confection
to fit your predilection!