If you are in town Thursday evening, you should plan to visit the Yamashiro Farmers Market in the Hollywood Hills. It’s from 5-9 pm, a lot of fantastic vendors – unlike the traditional markets. It’s more of a community gathering, lots of tables and chairs to meet up with friends, they have wine tasting, pairing, buy by the glass or bottle, great hot foods, a great view of Los Angeles; we share a booth with an Australian coffee company, jazz band and open mic for other musicians to come in perform.” (In particular she raved about Vinyl Soul.)

On Saturdays the Santa Monica market is a classic, although I was truly surprised to see it only 2 blocks long this week.

Sundays are a tough choice. Just a few of your options:

• At the 4 block long Hollywood Farmers’ Market you can discover the new pastries and preserves from Valerie Confections; goat cheese from Soledad Goats (now also at Beverly Hills; the cheese in olive oil is a MUST try) and lots of great produce, honey, nuts, and even couture clothing.Avila Farms‘ new pistachio, pecan, and other nuts butters they make from their nuts are a must try. They’re going to be ramping up production soon. Plus there’s the market cafe, which I have yet to experience.
• A market in Beverly Hills on Little Santa Monica behind the police station often has petting zoos and live music. If you haven’t had Bolani from East & West Afghan Gourmet, based in the Bay Area, I’d trip here for a taste.
• A small market in Larchmont Village has a nice selection of fresh produce and a few stands I hadn’t seen elsewhere, including sun tea.
• Visit the Mar Vista market where my friends of p.o.p. candy often sell their freshly made butter crunch and you’ll find great granola and other treats, in this small market.
• If you haven’t gotten enough, trip on over to Venice where you’ll find a market packed with beach goers and locals. Be sure to try Basil Tops pesto. They grow their own basil. Yum. (Also now at Hollywood.)

This is a small smattering of available markets that can keep you well fed and loaded up with fresh fruit, ready to eat avocados, and plenty of delicious breads and pastries.

Find farmers’ markets all over Southern California.

Amy’s Kitchen, Sensory Manager

Are you a Foodie with a passion for creating great tasting meals? Do you have a background as a chef in a restaurant where you developed an appreciation for food prepared the right way?

We are looking for candidates with the above qualities to help us bring the same sensibility into our production environment. We prepare frozen organic meals on two shifts, Monday through Friday, in a new production facility near Medford , Oregon . We are looking for someone to work with our production and quality staff to ensure that each meal that we produce is of the highest quality. The successful applicant will enjoy working with people in a production environment to help generate a focus on the sensory qualities of the food we prepare. These positions are designed to provide a communications and training bridge between our kitchen and the production lines to ensure that we never drift from our goal to make perfect meals every time.

If interested please email a resume to orjobs@amyskitchen.net or visit our website at www.amyskitchen.com

“Off the Grid” Every Friday Night – Fort Mason

What: A roaming gourmet mobile food extravaganza that travels to different locations daily to serve delicious food, with a free side of amazing music, craft  and soul.
(The San Francisco Cart Project is where to find the vendors ongoing or find out how you can live your mobile food truck dream!)

“an impressive lineup of street food vendors and numerous trucks serving crazy-delicious food hailing from all over the dang place, from India to Seoul to Malaysia.” -Tablehopper

August 9-15 in Union Square – San Francisco Food, Wine & Spirits Week

SFChefs 2010 is a food and wine event celebrating the unique flavor, diversity and bounty of Northern California. The main tasting tent will be in Union Square, where chefs, wine makers and distillers will offer an exploration of taste featuring local products. Classes and seminars will offer interactive opportunities for the public to participate with local farmers, ranchers, chefs, winemakers, distillers, media, luminaries, authors, vintners, mixologists and culinary experts in an entertaining forum.

August 21st – SF Street Food Fest

(Free!)

What: The San Francisco Street Food Festival is an event hosted by La Cocina that advocates for the creation of policies that support the formalization of mobile food vending in San Francisco. Eat, drink and scavenger hunt.

Who will love this: If experiencing amazing new foods – especially ethnic – checking out the mobile street food scene, and supporting very small food entrepreneurs is your thing, don’t miss it.

Visting San Francisco? It’s easy to get there by BART.

August 22nd & 23rd – Fort Mason, San Francisco

Over 325 winery members of the Family Winemakers of California will be at Fort Mason’s Festival Pavilion for the Association’s 20th Annual “Tasting” in San Francisco. This special 20th Anniversary tasting gives wine enthusiasts an outstanding opportunity to meet the winemakers themselves, taste over 1,000 different wines, and find their new favorite varietals.

August 27, 28, 29 2010 – Eat Real Festival – in Oakland

(Free!)

And this is just August!

More Bay Area food event listings:

• Visit California has Bay Area food and wine event listings.
• Yelp – lots of little local food events around the bay.
• Meetup – Find people organizing get togethers around food events.
• SF Weekly Food & Drink Events

Follow me to hear about interesting underground and over ground food events. What “can’t miss” did I miss?

Smiling Chef Mahoney in hour 1.

Hour 1: Overview of setting up the brisket in the smoker.

• You want to keep it at 275 degrees for 18 hours.
• Use charcoal and mesquite.
• Keep the fat side up so it drips down.

To build a DIY smoker, Scott used a canola oil drum, from a bakery in Berkeley, and cut it in half. This smoker has had one long life! We once smoked trout in it (wrapped in foil) which was amazing.

Hour 5 – Just starting to brown!



Hour 10 – Night time and still smoking strong.

Hour 21 – Hard to resist a small morsel, even at 7am.

Hour 25 – The first taste is sublime. And the may tastes thereafter. The brisket stayed in the smoker for several hours more, completely infused with smoke.

Quite the opposite. It really is “Lisa’s” shop. And the shop is a commercial kitchen, attached to her home, in which Lisa herself makes all the cookies.

Recently I had the chance to visit Lisa – on the weekend in which she and her family were furiously producing and packaging cookies for the 2010 Emmy’s gift bag.

It was a made for reality TV moment: Over a thousand cookies, all nighters, and in laws assisting in the production. The cookie? “The Kitchen Sink,” a crispy yet chewy oatmeal cookie laced with chocolate chips, cranberries, and other tidbits. In other words, one of those “healthy snacks” you can justify even for breakfast.

The Emmy gift bag recipients will be enjoying a cookie that Lisa originally made for family gatherings, throwing in whatever she had in her kitchen. Today this cookie is shipped nationwide and has a loyal following in her local town on down to Manhattan.

Food Business Tips from Lisa’s Experience

Product Offerings Tip: “Don’t try to please everyone.”
Lisa started out with options to customize the cookies in lots of ways, along with a number of cookie flavors.

When it’s just you, and you’re starting small, it’s hard to make dough for every order and tweak it. Go with crowd pleasers. Consider how well they travel and shelf life. Test new products at local stores or include samples when you ship a package.

Packaging Tip: When you’re just getting started it’s a big decision to pre-print packages. You’re locked into the flavors and ingredients. If any small thing changes, you’re out the investment. On the other hand the cost and labor of producing and applying many labels can add up. There are always tradeoffs.

The proud (and relieved) Cierello family gets ready to deliver to the post office. They’d given the post office a heads up the packages were arriving.

Shipping Tip: Shop around for different delivery options and consider how to minimize the number packages to greatly reduce shipping costs. You can often tape FedEx boxes together for example.

Jones Tip (for any reader): You can find Lisa’s freshly baked cookies and cookie bars at Lisa’s Cookie Shop or her Foodzie store. And at various stores in New England.

Do you have a small food business? Please share any other tips from your experiences.

A visit to Krugerrand Farms, a daughter and father goat cheese operation in upstate New York, gave me all the answers. Here’s a short list:

• The high cost of goating: feed, hay, and general caretaking
• The time to individually milk 60-odd goats
• The 1.5 gallons of fresh goat milk (about 10 pounds) it takes to make each pound of cheese. (After it gets finished aging it comes out to about 12 lbs of milk to a pound of cheese.)
• Many hours to make each wheel of cheese (check out all the steps below; I left all the time cleaning up out, but this place is clean!)
• Then many hours to wash the natural rind off the cheese before delivering it to customers

However it’s all worth it. Here I’d like to share my delightful visit and give you a taste of the story, love and labor that goes into Krugerrand Cheese. As well as the visual here of my latte made with milk straight from the goat. (Instant foam!)

Making Cheese – From Goat to Grate

Morning begins with the “running of the goats” – into the barn that is. There they await their milking and munching. The farm has a variety of goats, some prize winners. Lisa is a co-owner of the cheese company and also recently graduated with a civil engineering degree from a Michigan college.

Lisa and James Andela love their goats, which they milk each day. The goats – each who they know by name – eat natural feed during the milking.

Every other day, Lisa and Jim make cheese. This one vat makes about 30 pounds of cheese. Each pound of cheese takes 9-10 gallons of goat milk. During the aging process, due to the natural rind, the cheese evaporates which is important to factor in when calculating the cheese making costs.

This was the most fun part! There’s a horizontal and a vertical slicer and running it through the vat breaks up the soft curd into chunks.

Working the curds by hand lets the cheese maker more closely monitor the progress of heating and texture of the curds. Lisa gathers the curds to mold into wheels.

The pressed curds go through several stages before they’re ready to be aged. First it’s put in the brine (salt) solution for a couple of days. The brine creates the protective layer.

Then the cheese drains and dries for a couple of weeks on racks, before getting ready to hibernate to its glorious state of aged-ness.

The raw milk cheeses are aged for about 6 months (2 months is the minimum raw milk cheese needs to be aged in the U.S.)

All of the cheeses have natural rinds, and it takes a lot of scrubbing to “clean them” before the team ships them out to cheese shops, restaurants, and cheese lovers.

Learn more about Krugerrand Farm and the qualities of their cheeses.

You can also find them on Foodzie.

Want to visit Krugerrand Farms?
They’re looking into agri-tourism stays and WWOOFing so you too might be able to make a goat milk latte!

Just when you thought you’d played it all, it’s time for Cheese or Font!

Picking where to have coffee in Portland can be stressful: So many good choices and you never know if there’s somewhere just a little better a block away. After seeing the scene at Tin Shed, which had shades of 18th St. hipsteresque, I turned back and headed to randomness.

There it was, a shelf full of large freshly baked muffins in the most diverse flavors I’d ever seen:
-Raspberry coconut bran (my choice – yum);
-bacon cornmeal cheddar made with Beeler Bacon and Tillamook cheddar (how local can you get);
-cinnamon rhubarb which my muffin-pusher declared her favorite; a -gluten free lemon poppyseed which I’d go back for if I weren’t having lunch in an hour
-and blueberry for the traditionalist

Serving Stumptown coffee, free wifi, and lots of light this could become a serious hangout if I didn’t have so many other cafes to experience!

1800 NE Alberta St, Portland, OR 97211

A Cheesy Day at Rogue Creamery

It’s worth a visit to Rogue Creamery to taste a variety of cheeses that may be hard to find elsewhere. We reveled in the 2010 World Cheese Awards Silver Medal winning Caveman Blue – sublimely creamy, just blue enough – and the very impudent tongue stinging Brutal Blue, a unique blue cheese experience as far as American blues are concerned.

The new-ish Rogue Creamery tasting room is awesome with artisan food from all over as well as local, including a local bread made with Rogue cheddar cheese as well as lots of beers and Gary West beef jerky.

For road trips, the bags of cheese curds – pesto, jalapeno, chipotle – are a perfect finger food.

If you’re summer roadtripping to / from Portland, Central Point is an easy pit stop off I5!

Lillie Belle Farms Chocolate Factory and Shop

It’s a happy coincidence that the companies whose cheese and chocolate combines into the Smokey Blue chocolate truffle share a parking lot.

You can stumble from Rogue Creamery over to Lillie Belle, optionally stopping at the wine tasting room in the back of the lot, cheese company whose Smoky Blue marries with a Lillie Belle chocolate truffle where you can see some of the most creatively flavored and pretty chocolates being made as well ataste and buy.

Many of the berries for fillings are grown in Jeff’s garden nearby. But perhaps more importantly Jeff explained the liquor flavors use only top shelf spirits, at the insistence of one of the chocolate makers. (Don Julio tequila and Maker’s Mark, for example)

Unfortunately we arrived too late (in life) for their absinthe marshmallow smores made with home made anise seed graham crackers – a concoction that needs a repeat performance.

Do cherry cordials remind you of a drugstore? Not these. Check out how fresh  bing cherries are soaked and soaked and soaked in a thick mixture of rum infused with vanilla beans. (Warning watching this may be intoxicating.)

I gallantly tasted a freshly dipped cherry cordial: a thick chocolate shell encases the very pure bing cherry and rum filling. For the full story, see how they coat the molds with chocolate, then shake it out to make the shell…let it harden, fill it up, and then cap off the bottom. Each cordial (and any of their wrapped candy) is individually wrapped by hand, rock music blaring in the background all the while. Artisans with attitude!

You’ll find lots of samples – spicy, bacony, nutty. All like nothing you’ve ever had…and I’ve been around the chocolate block.

While most peanut butter filled chocolates are creamy, or maybe have a slight bit of soft crunch like peanut butter brittle (mmmm), Chuck fills these butterfly shaped wonders “with our smooth, creamy homemade peanut praliné (a combination of caramelized peanuts and chocolate).”

Now imagine miniscule pieces of hard caramel, ground up, adding the slighest bit of sugary crunch to your peanut butter confection.

Which led me to David Lebovitz’s “killer” caramelized peanut / almond recipe. It is his go-to recipe and surely will be mine, especially in my experiments with grinding the nuts into butter and pairing with chocolate.

On a side note related to using sea salt, I’ve become addicted to the Maine Sea Salt’s Applewood Smoked Sea Salt, with an aroma that’s as if you’re right there in the smokehouse – nothing subtle about it…just smoky flavor that nearly equals a wood burning fireplace. Note large salt chunks in photo.  (Dear Bay Area readers I have some on hand if you want a sample!)

Smoky Salty Sugarless Nuts

If smoked sea salt and nuts if what you’re going for rather than sweetness – I’ve got the ultimate cheap and fast trick. Lazier than lazy: I mix a little of the sea salt in a bowl with water then toss the nuts in it before toasting in a toaster or dry roasting in a pan. Amazing with pecans.

The decadent and messier version would be to toss the nuts with oil before coating with salt. If you do this, the salt’s going to be grainier so saltier than the diluted version.

(Photos will definitely come, along with future experiments.)