On Thursday Sophia and I went to a fundraiser for Obama in Park Slope.  It was organized in part by some of our new friends from Umami Mart (our preserves pantry  was happily placed next to Umami Mart's table at The Last Supper last week... we enjoyed the proximity to Payman's delicious and inventive Caprese Cocktail).  The fundraiser was a lot of fun- food photographer/ hostess Erin Gleeson had an amazing spread of food from the green market-- how often do you get to go to a party with roasted mini-eggplants, yellow and purple carrots and simply grilled vegetables?  Not often enough! Stay tuned on KC for a video of Payman's latest cocktail creation: The Baroque Obama....

Husk cherries, ground cherries, cape gooseberries- whatever you want to call them- are going out of season. You must get them while you can! You might have overlooked these little fruits, as they can easily hide beneath their husks. But you can’t let the last of the season go without trying a few. All you have to do is peel off their paper husks, and then pop them into your mouth. They are almost nutty in taste, with only a slight sweetness. It would be hard for me to compare their taste to anything that I have ever had before, as they are nowhere near as sweet or acidic as a berry. I went to go buy a bunch the other day and found out that the farmer who was selling them to me had picked the last that she was going to pick for the season. You can store them for up to a month in your kitchen, meaning you can stock up. And so I repeat- Get them while you can!

Wendell Berry makes me want to do everything slowly and to make sure that I do it well. I'm reading The Unsettling of America right now, a book that has been on my father's shelf since long before I was born. After hearing Mr. Berry speak at Slow Food Nation a few weeks ago, I went back to my dad's apartment and scoured his shelves to find it (my dad claims his books are organized into categories, I have yet to find the key that breaks the code of this organization, but looking through them is always a fun journey).  This is the first time in a long time that I have read a book slowly, not just going for essence, but making sure that I am aware of every sentence (I'm still only on page 80).

Thinking back to the panel Mr. Berry spoke at I wonder if maybe he has this effect on everyone; he prepared some opening remarks for the culminating panel of the weekend (the all-star one with Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, Eric Schlosser, Wendell Berry, Alice Waters and Carlo Petrini). After reading these remarks, Corby Kummer (the moderator) asked him to re-read them so that the audience could more fully digest.  Within the context of the weekend this resonated with me. I was glad that not just food was valued as something to be prepared, enjoyed and discussed with integrity, but also the ideas and exchanges themselves. I had never seen anyone take the time at a panel like that to allow something to be respoken, to just get to sit with it for awhile.  Now that I'm actually reading Wendell Berry's work, I see that this is the effect he has. I want everyone to read his book, and maybe we can all start doing less a little better.

His remarks from the panel were about the neccessity of local adaptation, I've transcribed them here:

http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSBKK27922820080828?fee...

http://features.csmonitor.com/environment/2008/09/11/his-aim-bring-city-...

 Fogging Up Those Old-Time Forecasts

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/09/09/ST20080909...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7557107.stm

This weekend we will be doing demos at two different Greenmarkets. On Saturday we will be at the Grand Army Plaza Greenmarket, demonstrating how to make sauteed grapes with rosemary. It is a great warm up for Fall, and is perfect as a topping for crostini. On Sunday we will be at the Tompkins Square Park Greenmarket, doing a demo for a September Peach Salsa with all of the great veggies of the harvest. Here is a photo of a salsa I whipped up today to whet your appetite. We hope to see you all out there buying up the September abundance!

It is weeks like these when I feel so lucky to be doing what I am doing. Emma and I have spent the past couple of days in upstate New York working on various segments and projects we have coming up. We drove to Ithaca on Wednesday morning to film with Autumn Stoscheck and Ezra Sherman of Eve’s Cidery. We made it to Ithaca in due time, and dropped our bags off at the Log Country Inn Bed and Breakfast. Then we had a few mishaps. We were not sure of where we were supposed to arrive, and landed at the cider press (after missing the driveway twice!), where Ezra was working on cleaning up for the next day. It turns out that Autumn was waiting for us back at the orchard about 35 minutes away, so off we went once again. It was not until about 2 hours after having arrived in Ithaca that we finally got to the orchard. Autumn took us up the hill by their farm in the back of a pick-up, and we meandered down through the orchard, learning about the different cider apples that they grow. I guess God has plans after all, because the light hitting the orchard in the late afternoon was one of the most beautiful things I have seen. Autumn climbed up her ladder and started picking some apples. She confessed that picking was one of the reasons that she loved to make cider. I understood why- there was something intimate about her work with nature, something personal. That night we gathered at their house with some of their friends for a local dinner, of which the details I will share later. Autumn is a great natural cook with a creative spirit. The next day we woke up at the Log Country Inn Bed and Breakfast for some of Wanda’s, the proprietor, blintzes. We totally recommend her cozy inn, which has a lot of charming rooms to choose from. Now we are up in Cooperstown canning whatever we can get our hands on. Last night we tackled beets, cauliflower, and string beans, as well as corn relish and whole peaches. Today is another day up here in the vast glory of upstate New York.

Sophia and I are in upstate NY.  Yesterday we were filming at Eve's Cidery in Ithaca-- we will be posting the video we made with Ezra, Autumn and James of Eve's Cidery the last week in September so stay tuned! Now we're in Cooperstown, we're going to spend the weekend canning and preserving foods, next week we are participating in The Last Supper, a multimedia arts show in Brooklyn on September 20th. We are doing a food installation- a recreation of a food pantry so we are busy bees this weekend getting prepared for the show.

Since we've been filming for the past few days I had a lot of editing to catch up on so that was most of the evening.  As I was editing away in the kitchen, Sophia was cooking us a tasty dinner-- she was testing a recipe we will be posting next week, a low-sodium soup for Senator Harkin.

 This is how we like to work, cozily traveling, good company, good food- cooking and creating as we go.

The Pickle and Chutney booth at Slow Food Nation, was one of my favorite stops in the Taste Pavilion. A highlight, beyond the pickled eggplant and kombucha, was Bay Area-based photographer Terri Loewenthal's Pickle Barrel Photo Booth. Her unmanned/unsupervised photo-booth enabled visitors to momentarily become part of the exhibit, an unique experience among the pavilions.

Each section of the Taste Pavilion was designed by a different architect. The Pickle and Chutney area was designed by Sagan Piechota Architects and featured canning lids hanging from the ceiling, racks of canning jars and pickling instructions in fun cartoon form lining the base of the booth. You can see all of the taste pavilion designs by clicking here or visiting the Slow Food Nation Flickr photo gallery.

Boy do I feel healthy today! I woke up and went to my yoga class, and then headed down to the Union Square Greenmarket. I was planning on stocking up on tons of produce, chicken, and bacon for the week, but my plans were put to a halt when I tried to take out money and found my account empty. All I had on me was $20, enough to get a few basics and enough for lunch. I found this to be a blessing in disguise, because I had to be very careful with what I selected. I ended up buying some green beans, fresh dill, half a dozen eggs, bread (made with local wheat), grape tomatoes, and goats milk yogurt. For lunch I hardboiled two of the eggs and cooked the green beans. I sliced the grape tomatoes (sooo sweet and delicious) in half. I took a third egg and separated the yolk from the white, and saved the white for a later use. I might make a scrambled egg white or something. I mix the egg yolk with mustard and some olive oil to make a mayonnaise. I seasoned it with some vinegar and threw in some chopped dill. My plate was absolutely beautiful- green beans, chopped up hardboiled eggs, sliced tomatoes, all covered with a silky dill mayonnaise sauce. That meal did not add up to more than $5, and it was all from the market. And the best part about it is that I feel so healthy and good about my body afterwards. I attached a photo of my lunch here so that you can see how simple it is to prepare a healthy, inexpensive market lunch.

Starting off a local eating month in California feels a little bit like cheating to me, mostly due to the fact that I've been up to my ears in figs. Figs have always seemed like the ultimate in vegetal indulgence. But it's not just figs, I have access to everything here-- there are nuts and pomegranates, citrus galore! Something I have noticed amidst all this plenty is that I'm having a hard time distinguishing what's local because it seems like it all could be. Even if something says "grown in california," which roughly 70% of all supermarket produce does*-- California is a big state, so it's not neccessarily grown within a reasonable distance of San Francisco.

Luckily today we went to Rainbow (my favorite grocery store on earth-- anything you could dream of comes in bulk) and Rainbow puts a tag next to every item that comes from 200 miles of the store. There is another side to all of this abundance though, I went to the farmer's market at the ferry building on Tuesday, and I will have to admit that it made me look forward to going back to the Union Square Green Market in New York. Things somehow feel more precious there, maybe because the growing season is finite... Or maybe it's just because I know right where to find my favorite edible jewels.

* Not a real figure, but one that I thought sounded about right.