Hello!
Help Save Tierra Vegetables: If you follow our Instagram stories you know we have a regular tortilla habit, making them every week with fresh masa from Tierra Vegetables, a 20-acre sustainable farm located in the heart of Sonoma County wine country. Sadly, due to a culmination of hardships, including the drought, the fires of the past few years and the pandemic, the farm is in dire straits and needs help.
“A perfect storm of disasters, starting with the series of wildfires that began in 2017, the pandemic and now the current drought, was capped off by the recent failure of their water well. The farm is now in dire straits. At this point, Lee and Wayne cannot afford the cost of a new pump or even make payroll. Eleven families rely on Tierra for their livelihood. Their need is great and urgent.” We just made a donation: Tierra Vegetables Go Fund Me.
By the way, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. Welcome to all the new subscribers this week! If you'd like to hop off anytime, simply unsubscribe. I appreciate you reading (and sharing) this newsletter.
Let’s eat!
Roasted Nectarine Sundae with Caramel Sauce and Toasted Pecans: This is serious bang-for-your-buck cooking: little work for big flavor. It’s the perfect vehicle for experimentation so use your abundance of summer fruit and have some fun with it. Edible SF
How to Cook Nopales: We pick up these cactus paddles at the farmers market and mix them with some homemade salsa to go with our fresh tortillas. “My favorite way to cook them, aside from grilling them, is to sear them in a skillet with a bit of oil for a few minutes and then let them cook covered until all of that liquid comes out, then uncover until all that liquid cooks off. Pretty much like cooking mushrooms.” Patti Jinich
🤖 IF YOU READ JUST ONE THING THIS WEEK
In the Midst of a Climate Crisis, Does Local Food Matter? “Shifting our systems to produce more beans and grains and fewer steaks matters. So does making sure that farmers who are stewarding land and conserving biodiversity and producing healthy food in regions all over the country are able to continue doing so. The relationships, spaces, and foods that make up “local food” systems are the very things that are worth saving.” Peeled
🍷 What to Drink This Summer? “Darker rosés that drink more like red wine and lighter reds that drink like a rosé. The category of Cerasuolo-esque wines seems to be big with producers all over the wine-producing world.” Dominique Henderson of Gemini Bottle Co., in Punch Drink
What to Drink During the Heatwave: “If you’re feeling thirsty, you’re most likely already dehydrated, so drink water consistently throughout the day, throughout the night, especially if you’re planning on doing outdoor activities.” HuffPost
West Coast Clam Boil: An estimated 1 billion small sea creatures — including mussels, clams and snails — died during the heat wave in the Salish Sea (BC), off more than 4,000 miles of linear shore, according to marine biologist Chris Harley. The Washington Post
Hotter Than a Can of Sardines: “There is no food that will make you hotter than tinned fish. Straight up. Do you know a hot girl who doesn’t exist on protein? I don’t.” Caroline Goldfarb, co-founder of Fishwife, in Vice
Actually Nice Once You Meet Them In Person: We toss stranded Dungeness crabs into the surf (to save them from seagulls) all the time on our morning beach runs, but we never really stopped to consider, “Are Crabs Truly Crabby?” Nautilus
The Wealth of Wild Salmon: “I live under the delusion that there will always be food even though I am not growing, fishing, hunting, or storing it. Shelly lives under no such pretense. Who is the wiser?” Safina Center
Meet the Climatarian: “Those who follow the diet stick with fruits and vegetables that are in season relative to their region; they avoid meat that comes from factory farms; and they seek local ingredients because those have lower carbon footprints.” The New York Times
The Gopher Diet: “Our estimate is that a family of barn owls removes 3,400 rodents from the landscape every year,” Johnson said. “So some of these farms, like this one that has 20 occupied boxes, you're talking about 70,000 rodents removed every year.” KQED
Grazing Menu: “In California and across the drought-parched West, programs are springing up to help goats, sheep, and cattle eat down the plants that would otherwise become fuel for wildfires.” Civil Eats
Survey Says: There were 30 million to 60 million bison in North America in the 1500s. Four hundred years later, roughly 1,000 bison remain. Now there’s a new movement to bring wild bison to the Great Plains to help restore one of the world’s most endangered ecosystems. Undark (h/t Edible Alaska)
The A-Word: “Asserting authenticity is a surefire way to start Twitter spats among the fooderati, and the mere appearance of the word on press releases rings alarm bells.”
A Is For Authentic
B Is For Bat Soup
C Is For Chinky
Celestial Peach (h/t Anna Jones)
The Story of Karachi’s Fast Food: “Last winter, I was served roasted sweet potato at a street cart that came wrapped in a copy of someone’s death certificate. I suppose I’m so inured to the city's bizarre ways, and its cruel and informal recycling system, that I read about the person’s death as I tucked into my food.” Vittles
Don’t Throw Out Date: “It’s really hard to imagine you’re supposed to trust your own nose and mouth,” Adler said. “Add that to convenience culture and rapacious late-stage capitalism and, well, we’re fucked.” Tamar Adler in Vox
Speaking of Fucked, or Rather What the Actual Fuck? “A small fraction of restaurant relief recipients ended up with a massive chunk of the money, new data shows. Despite rules that limited chain restaurants’ access to funds, approximately 10 percent of grant recipients were franchise operators. Some of the biggest names we found include Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts, Golden Corral, and McDonald’s.” The Counter
Here in SF: “I work and live in San Francisco. I am a chef. I am a mother. I am an entrepreneur. I am Black. And I’m a San Francisco native fighting to keep the community that I know and love thriving. I want to remind ourselves of our history through the food I cook. I want to inspire others to do what they love.” Tiffany Carter, chef and owner of Boug Cali in Resy
👀 SPOTTED
🎧 ICYMI, Our July Playlist: A bit of cha-cha-cha to warm things up and then some new-ish tunes from Lionel Boy, Demi Lovato, Japanese Breakfast, Aldous Harding, Locnville, St. Vincent, and more. Plus three Bowie covers, a vintage Patti Smith rocker, and a salute to Joe Strummer. Enjoy!
📻 Playlist archive: January | February | March | April | May | June
That’s all for this week.
Thanks for subscribing to Eat. Drink. Think. This post is public, so feel free to share it.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
–Bruce
Do you follow us yet?
Instagram: 25K+ followers
Twitter: 52K+ followers
Facebook: 6500+ followers
"Everything will be okay in the end. If it's not okay, it's not the end" –John Lennon