Cook A Delicious Meal For The Fiesta!

Our last assignment for ESF was to cook a delicious meal from local, seasonal ingredients and document it. It was awesome to be challenged in this way and I took some time doing research, looking through cookbooks, and going to farmer's markets before I decided what I was going to make.

Let's start from the beginning. I have Italian neighbors. They are awesome people and one day we began to talk about food. I was new to the city and wanted to know their recommendation for the best Italian in the city. I had moved from Reno, Nevada and was excited about all the choices of cuisine in San Francisco. I didn't expect their response of "North Beach is crap, all crap." I had gone to North Beach for my birthday, in fact, and enjoyed it very much. Regardless, they are the Italian ones, so I suppose I trust their opinion. The conversation eventually turned to their favorite Italian dish. Paolo, who is originally from Genoa, Italy, told me his favorite dish was gnocchi with pesto sauce. Gnocchi was something that I'd only recently heard of via one of my vegan cookbooks and I'd been wanting to try out a recipe. "Excellent!" I said. "I shall make you gnocchi with pesto!"
"It wont be as good," Paolo plainly stated.
Slightly offended, I asked him what he meant. Apparently, Genoa is famous for their particular strain of basil, and thus any pesto made from American basil would simply not be as good. After that conversation, I got slightly discouraged regarding gnocchi-making, and eventually forgot about it.
Getting back to the assignment, it occurred to me that gnocchi would be an excellent recipe to make for the class. I went to two farmers markets: the one at USF and the one on Divisadero and Grove.



At the USF market, I bought:
- 1 garlic



- 2 baking potatoes (the last four!)



- 1 artichoke (for one dollar!!)


At the Divisadero market...






I purchased....


- 2 bunches of basil (the last two!)

- 1 bunch of carrots (so sweet!!)

Then I headed home to start the work!


First the potatoes had to be baked for 1 hour in the oven.


Then they had to be placed in ice water so I could peel them while they were still hot! It kinda hurt...


Then I put the potatoes into the food processor with some non-local turmeric. I looked around for local turmeric, but just couldn't find any.
As a side note, I only put the potatoes in the food processor because my masher was broken. I think the food processor was the downfall of my gnocchi. I'll tell you why in a second...


Then I put the mashed potatoes into a mixture of flour and salt. The flour was from Rainbow Grocery and locally milled. The salt I got from my neighbor because my roommate moved out and well...it was her salt. Very funny how you take these things for granted. Anyways, I didn't have any salt, so I decided to do the old-fashioned thing and walk upstairs to ask my neighbor Jamal if he had any salt. I was very lucky because he had this crazy black-colored salt that he got from Rainbow. He said it was stronger than normal salt, so I adjusted to taste. I believe the salt was local because I called Rainbow and they said most of their sea salts were, but I'm not certain.


I mixed it all together and it was incredibly sticky. Because the next step was rolling it out, I had to add a TON of flour in order to prevent it from sticking in huge gooey gobs to my hands and counter (which I cleaned with antibacterial kitchen cleaner before using!). As far as what went wrong, my guess is that the food processing of the potatoes broke up the potato cells too much and released too much water into the mixture. Anyways, rolled out the dough and cut it into pieces. I placed the pieces on a cookie sheet to freeze them. This was the most time consuming part of making this recipe.



While the gnocchi were freezing, I decided to make the pesto. The first step was to roast the pine nuts. I got the pine nuts from Lucky, and I believe they were made in China and distributed out of Southern California. Not very local, but pesto without pine nuts doesn't sound too tasty, especially since the recipe was vegan and would not contain parmesan cheese for extra flavor.


Then I ground the pine nuts, garlic, and salt together in the food processor.


And added basil and olive oil.


I put the pesto in the refrigerator to chill and began to boil water for the gnocchi. I took the frozen gnocchi and dropped them a few at a time into the boiling water and scooped them out to drain when they began to float on the top of the water. I put the cooked gnocchi into a serving dish and tossed it with the chilled pesto. It wasn't as great as I wanted it to be, but people seemed to like it, so I guess that's all that matters!


Trash Produced:
- 1 small plastic bag which contained the pine nuts (so very regrettable...)

I could have made this recipe producing no trash by buying ridiculously expensive pine nuts, but I just didn't have the budget for it at the time.

Anyways, that's my last post for ESF! It's been an amazing year!
Thanks everyone!

Haight Project

On our trip to the Haight, we visited two very different restaurants: Zazie and McDonald's. The way we decided to eat at these places seemed innocent enough. Like most things in ESF, the decision was made during a casual conversation thrown in between an intense literary analysis of our reading of the week. David was telling us that we had some extra money in our class fund due to a mistake with the Castro dinner, and suggested that we go somewhere nicer for dinner. Almost everyone was immediately on board, though we decided to drop by McDonald's for dessert to honor our original up plan. Someone said we should go to Zazie, and we felt that because of Zazie's dedication to seasonal, local, and human dishes, it would be an appropriate last field trip for the class.

Zazie is located in Cole Valley. Cole Valley is filled with cute (if not somewhat yuppy) shops and restaurants, overpriced health stores, and classic San Francisco architecture. The average person on the street is usually dressed in nice clothing, whether hip or classy, is carrying some sort of attractive bag to carry their belongings, and looks somewhat intellectual. These are the sort of people who shower everyday, are on successful career paths, and care about their health. Because of their decent salaries, they can buy health food from the overpriced health stores and have leisure time to exercise and read. These are the people who are eating at Zazie. These are the people who can afford to eat cows who were raised with an ocean view and seventeen dollar plates of pasta. Walk down a couple of blocks and you get to McDonald's.
The people hanging around Haight and Stanyan are colored with the grime of the street. They look unhealthy and most likely are if they are eating at McDonald's. McDonald's is so cheap that you can get a whole cheeseburger with change you find on the street. The cows that went into the burgers at McDonald's didn't have an ocean view, but that never comes to mind. Nothing at McDonald's really looks anything like an animal, as Michael Pollan mentioned in The Omnivore's Dilemma. However, the food's appearance isn't the only reason you never think about the cow's view. Consider these two lifestyles:

1. Your family doesn't have a lot of money. You spend your money where you can get the most for your dollar. You can't afford college and have to work long hours, after which you go relax with friends or go to sleep. You don't have much leisure time to spend participating in outdoor activities or reading about healthy lifestyles.

2. You were raised by a family who is well-off. You go out to dinner on occasion to try new things. You go to college where you are constantly questioned about your views and forced to examine them. You have some leisure time and spend some of it in the school gym.

In our country, the poor people are the overweight ones. They spend most of their time working, which in a natural world would keep them in shape because the "work" that exists in the natural world is that of survival: catching, hunting, growing, collecting your own food. We've created office jobs and grocery stores which take us completely out of that cycle and it's killing us. Unless we have the money to buy "whole" foods, we are going to buy what we can afford. Unless we have time and money to exercise, we are going to be sedentary because we do not need to move in order to survive. We have become the equivalent to the great dane living in a tiny studio in New York whose owner is always out of town. We need health articles to tell us the sun gives us vitamins. We are living an artificial and inefficient lifestyle.
In my opinion, it's strange and unnatural that someone with less money can afford to eat a fattening and inhumanely produced cheeseburger from McDonald's, but cannot afford to buy the ingredients for a nutritious home-cooked meal made from local ingredients. Local ingredients take less gas to get to us, and yet because of the way the food industry is structured in this country, it is more expensive. Real food costs more than unnaturally produced food. Maybe this seems natural. Real food is, of course, more desirable, and thus more expensive. However, my question is: Why does fake food exist in the first place and how can we get rid of it? How can we reclaim our mammal-ness?