Buff the Cat moves with the sun

Buff the Cat moves to new parts of the garden to catch sun rays. It’s mid-August, with fall fast approaching. She crawls through a rose bush, then gingerly turns around avoiding the thorn-encrusted canes to settle for a nap, her head resting of the wood edging a pathway.

The air is delicious.  High clouds string out like linen towels on a drying line.  A light breeze riffles the slender leaves of liriope.  Spent stalks of liatris resist the wind, tall sentries at the end of another season of bloom.  Marjoram cascades down the bank on either side of brick steps.  Bees bounce from flower to flower as they gather late nectar and pollen.  Strong straight rays of sun burrow into the stone patio under the wild cherry tree.  Shadows cast by the pergola are sharp-edged, non-nonsense expression of late summer shade geometry.  Up the hill, layers of green ground cover, weeds, trees -- all mingle in endless overlaps of foliage.  The morning temperature, at 65, hints at cooler weather to come.

A robin fledgling rolls and scratches on the flat roof of the woodshed then files into a blueberry bush where a flutter of leaves reveals his continuing discomfort.  Then, he’s off to the birdbath where he pecks at his new feathers, then squats in the water as if it might provide some relief

Aiki Farm

To complete the ingredients list for your Chez Panisse golden moment, shop for mixed greens at Aiki Farm’s market tent.  Bob Burns engages in a constant patter with his customers.  In his slow nasal New England drawl, he encourages newcomers to try pea shoots or a small cup of wheat grass juice.  Bob, a slim intense man, begins his day at 5:30am with a 45-minute seated meditation.  A former lead instructor of aikido at the United States Marine Corps Depot in San Diego, Bob returned to his native Connecticut to combine the practices of martial arts and farming. 

Each summer, college-aged apprentices come to live and study at Aiki Farm.  The program is farm-based but adds the study of martial arts in a studio called a dojo.  Each day’s schedule combines meditation, aikido practice, field work and lessons in bio-intensive farming techniques.  Students also join Bob at Farmers Markets. 

Bob’s speciality is Aiki Salad Mix, a combination of 27 varieties of field grow lettuces that include zesty additions of Asian and Italian greens.  He sells the mix at Farmers Markets and to local restaurants.  

Bob’s shoots are also popular.  He corrects me sternly when I call them “sprouts.” Shoots of peas, sunflower, popcorn, as well a buckwheat are on offer.  The last is commonly known as wheat grass.  When pressed, the young shoots expel a bright green juice.  Down it neat, like a slug of iced vodka. While Aiki Farms greens are field-gown, shoots need a carefully controlled indoor environment to bring seeds to harvest-size in a little over a week.  

Beltane Farm

Paul Truby, center

Success stories such as Laura Chenel Chevre and Earthbound Farms lettuces encourage other artisans to enter local niche food markets.  Stonington Farmers Market has two such candidates.  For excellent local goat cheese, look to Paul Truby of Beltane Farm; for local lettuce mix, find Robert Burns of Aiki Farm.  Buy their products and duplicate a culinary moment of history: the legendary Chez Panisse salad course. 

Beltane Farm hosts visitors only before or after its busy summer market season.  I drop in on a Sunday afternoon for a fall tasting event.  In the hills of Lebanon, only a mile off the main highway to Hartford, I am sure my GPS has betrayed me.  To prevent such treachery, I always bring written directions.  The detailed explanation runs a full paragraph and includes the following references: “past the cow field, follow the road into the woods and continue almost a mile ...”  I feel completely lost, then round a curve and come upon a line of cars parked on the shoulder of this very narrow rural road.  Across the street is the entrance to Beltane Farm where Paul raises Oberhasli, Swiss dairy goats, and produces both fresh and ripened cheese from their milk. 

A white colonial house and large old barn announce that the farm has been around for a while.  Across the house yard stands a small shed heated by a potbelly woodstove.  The warmth is welcome on this crisp October day.  During the summer, Paul and his staff sell 90 percent of the farm’s output direct to customers at local Farmers Markets.  But today, Paul and his market staff are back on the farm to give tours through leaf-strewn pastures, small paddocks, and immaculate dairy facilities.  After a brief exploration, guests bring both increased knowledge and whetted appetite to cheese tasting.  

Beltane Farm is home to numerous goats and an assortment of other animals, including Nestor, the donkey.  Paul and his staff milk the goats twice a day, then pasteurizes the milk at 145 degrees for half-hour.  After rapid cooling, a vegetable enzyme is added to curdle the milk.  The resulting curds, hug in cheesecloth bags, become dry as liquid, called whey, drains away.  The curds are then salted in a large pot and formed into logs.  Dried herbs, black pepper, or shopped scallions decorate and flavor the small silky white logs.  

You can find Beltane Farm chevre in twelve Farmers Markets, 30 retail stores in New England, New York and New Jersey and on line through the Artisan Made in New England website.  Along with the traditional fresh chevre, Beltane Farm produces two different aged goat cheeses and a Greek style goat cheese yogurt. 

New salad launches two industries

Returning to complete her degree in Berkeley, Alice Waters continued to dream of establishing a place to eat where fresh and local American products could be used to express French cuisine.  By ferreting out the sparse number of existing local growers in the Bay Area and encouraging others to join her network of fresh food providers, Alice gradually established sources she could trust.

Ten years after opening Chez Panisse, Alice discovered Laura Chenel’s operation in Santa Rosa and put in a standing order of fifty pounds of goat cheese a week.  Chez Panisse baked these pungent rounds, then served them on a bed of baby greens.  This remarkable salad course led not only to a new understanding of the relationship between quality, local production, and taste.  It also launched two industries: American-produced French-style goat cheese and mixed baby greens now commonly called spring mix. 

In 2006, Laura Chenel sold over two million pounds of her goat cheese.  Meanwhile, Earthbound Farm, based in the Salinas Valley, has ridden the spring mix market to ever-higher levels of sales.  Begun in the early 1980s by two transplanted New Yorkers, Drew and Myra Goodman, Earthbound Farms invented an industry: triple washed and bagged salad mixes.  The operation began on 2.5 acres, rented land near Carmel California.  

In 2013, Earthbound Farms grew lettuces and other vegetables on 53,000 acres of certified organic farmland.  With annual sales of $460 million, Earthbound remains the largest grower of organic produce in the United States.  Sixty-five percent of sales come from packaged salad greens. 

Chèvre Comes to America

Slow Food not only supports the recognition of distinct regional foods and heritage breeds.  It also recognizes the importance of local food processing techniques.  Until the late 1970s, the production of goat cheese was limited to Europe, with France the acknowledged star.  The United States had no commercial operations to produce goat cheese, now a wildly popular artisanal product.

If Slow Food ever publishes a list of people important to expanding the types of food processing practiced in the United States, Laura Chenel must appear on the list.  It was her single-minded effort to study French-style goat cheese production and replicate it in California that brought chèvre to America.  After participating in a series of cheese apprenticeships in France, Laura returned to Sonoma County with a viable recipe to make a bright, white, tangy cheese that quietly announced itself as made from goat milk.

Laura began production of her signature chèvre in the late 1970s.  I met her shortly thereafter.  As I remember, her cheese production at the time was housed in a cinder block building on the outskirts of Santa Rosa.  Inside, the building was cool, the light dim.  The interior climate contrasted sharply to the day’s summer temperature.  Wooden racks with slatted shelves held the current batch of carefully placed pillows of cheese dusted with a coating of gray ash. 

Across the Bay, another important taste-maker was building her business.  Alice Waters opened her now famous restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley in 1971.  The restaurant was inspired by a tip to France during college.  Originally conceived as a semester to study French literature, the trip turned into an extended excursion that became a serious study of French food: where it came from, how it was cooked, how it was presented.  Alice haunted Paris’ open-air markets, cooked her way through Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking, visited southern France where sumptuous flavors spilled from hillside fields into local markets: fresh picked herbs, garden grown vegetables, olive oil, garlic.

Heritage Foods

Heritage foods are also called artisan or artisanal foods.  Slow Food’s Ark of Taste, contains several New England candidates, including a quince and a chicken.  Meech’s Prolific Quince, originally discovered in Connecticut around 1850, is rarely grown today.  In fact, I’ve not discovered the variety in any nursery catalogue.  According to reports, the highly fragrant fruit resembles pineapple. 

The second nominee is Rhode Island Red chickens.  These well-tempered birds, developed in the 1880s, were once the best-know breed in the world.  Their tawny to dark brown feathers and bright red comb represents the universal chicken in children’s storybooks.  Remember the Little Red Hen? 

Members of the breed are good layers, producing over 200 eggs a year.  Also good in the pot, Rhodys produce deeply flavorful chicken dinners.  Rhode Island Reds, once ubiquitous, are now rare.  The American Livestock Breeds conservancy estimates fewer than 2,500 exist in North america.  The variety is indeed in need of rescue.

Chickens today are bred to new food standards, industrial standards.  The “broiler industry” rules the roost.  An acceptable breed must now meet the following production specifications: fast-paced growth, a broad plump breast, efficient conversion of feed to meat.  The bird of choice is the white-feathered Cornish Cross.  The breed has great virtues:  ability to live in very close quarters, lack of desire to forage, fast-paced growth.  Its greatest virtues, however also create the breed’s biggest failures.  The Cornish Cross grows to market weight in seven or eight weeks. (Rhode Island Reds takes twelve weeks.) Along the way, however, the phenomenal growth rate produces physical breakdowns such as broken legs and heart failure.  Close quarters demand antibiotics to ward off disease.  

Unfortunately, the predominance of the Cornish Cross has effected the entire species.  Breeders concentrate their resources on producing only one breed of chicken, the industry standard.  Heritage breeds have fallen under a pall of disrespect and their numbers are in decline.

Slow Food

The Slow Food organization not only celebrates currently popular local foods, it also honors foods and culinary techniques that are close to extinction by listing then in a special catalogue: The Ark of Taste.  Revered Ark of Taste products include the Kerry, an Irish breed of cattle; Navajo-Churro sheep; and the Gravenstein apple.

I encountered the last on the list, the Gravenstein apple, when I lived in California in the 1970s and l980s.  This smallish, tart green apple with unique slashes of red on its shoulders is primarily grown in Sonoma County, 50 miles north of San Francisco.  Once grown on almost 7,000 acres, orchard now occupy less than eight hundred acres.  Land used to grow apples is under pressure from both housing and viticulture developments. 

I was only one member of a large crowd of fervent supporters of this plucky little apple. To announce the Gravenstein’s merits, the Sebastopol Chamber of Commerce once rented a billboard situated along the freeway that links apple country to the Bay Area.  A huge green apple with its distinctive narrow bands of red stood proudly on the billboard’s white face:  “These apples have earned their stripes!”

In 2005, Slow Food agreed.  The organization declared the Gravenstein a heritage food and added it to The Ark of Taste.  The Gravenstein joins a list of 158 other heritage varieties grown throughout the United States.