Packing to go
Passion rolling. (Prop 8, a measure designed to take away marriage rights for same-sex couples, passed. Can’t see any good coming out of that.)
Howdy there. Long time no see! I’m on a book tour, in support of Edges of Bounty. William and I have about 15 events over 15 days, all over the Central Valley. As I write, there are still about seven or eight events left.
I’m writing this kind of in the middle of things, so the chronology will be all boogled up. Right now, I’m sitting in the back seat of William’s Jetta, on our way to Sacramento, where we’re appearing on radio station KXJZ, on our fourth day of this extravaganza tour. After, we’ll jog back to Davis for a reading at the Avid Reader, and with some luck, link up with some of our Davis connections–Pru at Tuco’s, Jaymes of Aisu Pops, etc.
Olga, William and I in the green room at KXJZ, Sacramento. Peter Case came on and played after us. You can hear the whole show here.
Last night (meaning Thursday the 6th) we had a brilliant reception/reading at the offices of Heyday, in their new digs, which is the old home of Ifshin, the violin maker. The night was great, but the building deserves a few words, owing to the special touches to the woodwork obviously put in place by the former tenant:
There are an insane number of different, fine woods making up the flooring and moldings, all finely finished of course. Most noticeable are the violin backs set into many of the doors and floors. Just amazing. I should remember to take some pictures.
Yesterday was pretty well consumed by getting food ready–William catered the event, with foods gathered from produce stands and folks in the book (and in the case of Jerilee of Tony’s NOT in the book, alas–see below).
Just a little of the grub getting ready to be gotten ready
William’s friend Alexandra doing some persimmon pudding magic
I drove out to Putah Creek country to see Mike Madison (he’s featured in the first chapter of the book, and sells Yolo Press oil and Yolo Jam and Yolo Bulb flowers in the Davis farmers market).
Mike was just pressing his first olive harvest of the season, and gave me a tour of his plant, which consists of one very awesome machine whirring loudly and fragrantly in Italian in his olive shed. The machine is the kind of highly specialized, semicustom, small-shop-produced piece of equipment that switches on “gearhead Scott’.
Mike’s mill has electricity and hot and cold water lines going to it, and at one end is a hopper about 4′ square that you dump the fruit into. It shakes them out and a blower blows the leaves and dirt off. Then the olives go through a bath to clean off dust and any critters.
Then they go through the grinder part, which is two knurled rollers (one is adjustable for distance, to accommodate olives with different sized pits. Mike said the guy that built the mill says, ideally you want it to break each pit into seven pieces.
After the olives are ground, they go into a longitundinal drum with a worm agitator, where (I think, a small amount of water is added, and) the slurry is heated to about 85 degrees F to loosen up the oil.
From there it goes into a centrifuge spinning at 4200RPM. The oil collects and filters out through a baffled box that helps to separate the water and guck, and there’s a little spigot from which drips a bright, fruity, spicy oil that makes my mouth water just typing about it.
Perfectly lovely.
After Mike bottled up a bit and smoothed a nice label on it, he sent me on my way, saying he’d see us later.
Mike Madison labeling the first Yolo Press olive oil bottle of the season
From Mike’s, I went to Elmira, just east of Vacaville, which is almost not a town at all (no offense, Elmira, wherever you are), except that Chepo’s Tamales is there.
Food styling by Scott Squire. And his appetite.
Chepo’s is one of those places you find only by going down the tiny roads and stopping at a lot of random little no-account looking places that turn out to offer nothing special at all. Only then do you find that some of the no account are of account after all–you find in this way the spots that do offer something special. This is a point I never get sick of having driven home.
“Stop. Go back. Did that sign say ‘tamales’?”
Señor Chepo has in his employ some very kind ladies who make a lot of beautiful tamales, from pork or chicken, a dollar a piece. The place itself is not much to look at, scarcely set up for dining in. Looks like it used to be (and still kind of is, really) the town grocery.
Señor Chepo oversees his operation.
It is an art, and a job, making tamales.
This is (a bad scan of) one of my favorite pictures that didn’t make it in the book.
I bought a dozen for the reception, six pork and six chickn, and a pork one for my lunch. La señora spooned out a spunky tomatillo salsa into little plastic cups and packed it all in some zip-loc bags. As good as I remembered.
The reception at Heyday was buzzy, drinky, giddy and crowded. That was my impression anyway. My invitations and William’s and Heyday’s had more than paid off; there were more people there than there was space to show them all a good time.
This is no knock against Heyday, to be sure–it’s a new office, and a new book. The food–which all came together kind of miraculously, in that way that I’ve seen William pull off many times by now–was served.
William is a gifted natural cook, and is justifiably confident in his intuition on flavor and texture combinations. Lots of stuff nobody’s ever eaten before, and all delicious. It consisted of:
- Bartlett pear pasta with Chico Locker smoked pork and Saeturn mustard greens
- spaghetti squash salad, with carrots, onions, pistachios and Mike’s Yolo Press olive oil.
- Persimmon salad with Kiwi, pomagranate seed and Harold Dirks’ star thistle honey
- Chepos tamales
- Scalloped yams in cardamom and chipotle cream sauce and Chico Locker shoulder bacon
- Five California cheeses from the Pasta Shop, including the wonderful San Juaquin Gold–our sole Valley cheese.
- Persimmon pudding with whipped cream, and Dark chocolate clusters with dried fruits and nuts, both made by William’s chocolatemaker friend Alexandra.
- Roan Cream beer, made by William and Andrew for this event. It was a hearty English style Ale, with a bit of hop and a big round (but still restrained) fruit. Righteous
AND IT WAS GOOD.
The small presentation room and the big event.
Malcolm Margolin, the publisher, introduced us in a thoroughly classy fashion, and flattered book and authors roundly. He’s a wonder.
I’d printed up the best print I can make of Ramon Cadena’s walnut shelling portrait, and had it framed modestly to present to him as a gift of appreciation and officewarming.
Thanks to everyone who came. I wasn’t able to really get my head around the event, neither was I able to give my friends and well-wishers the attention they deserve. Honestly though? Kind of a rush.
Neither of these shows the event’s fullness, but then, I was not exactly in event-shooter head.
By now we are five days and five events into this tour, and as I type, the chronology is all screwed up, since we’ve had two more engagements between now-typing-time and when-I-started-typing time. I’ll just list the events in their order, below, starting with the earliest:
The River Reader, in Guerneville, CA, on the Russian River, up north of Sebastopol. That was on Monday.
We liked Guerneville right away.
William, obliging.
Susan, who runs that place, had arranged for some folks to bake some pumpkin pies, and had a crock pot full of hot spiced apple cider. She took us out to the taco truck down the block, which–everyone in town pointed out to us–had been written up in Gourmet Magazine. It was everything a taco truck should be. Delicious carnitas, and I had a tostada de ceviche also. Yowch!
That big fomecore poster? It’s still in that window, on account of we forgot it.
Hey, lookee: A table of our stuff, right there in the front of the store!
Susan had gotten the word out really effectively, and I’d say there were something like thirty people there. Lots of pleasant, bookstore-going kinds of people, many of whom seem already to have been familiar with the book. Quite exciting, to have smart questions about your work from people you don’t know who nevertheless are paying close, thoughtful attention to that work.
Susan did a great job. If you go to Guerneville, stop in, buy books.
There was a little bit of excitement that the sometime local and important food industry muckymuck, Clark Wolf might be in attendance. Clark runs the Clark Wolf Company a food, restaurant and hospitality consulting company and knows just about everybody who’s anybody in the food biz. He also has a book coming out, on cheese.
Clark did indeed show up, and helped to take our post-reading conversation into some pretty interesting cultural territory.
There is a natural gap, culturally, between the coasts and the middle of the country; Clark’s read on our read on the Great Central Valley was that the Middle West (Middle America, in essence) has largely emptied out its center parts of culture and people (leaving gutted little towns and giant lonely agricultural installations in their place), moved closer to the edges of the country and is now taking up residence just inland of the Coast Range.
If we understood him right, in other words, the increasingly polarized sociopolitical climate in our country–red counties versus blue counties, “Real America” versus “Media America”–and the decreasing diversity of crops grown in rural areas, essentially mean that our most pressing, most current domestic battle isn’t the one being fought for the hearts and minds of Americans, but for our bellies. And that the front in that battle is becoming an increasingly bright line.
If this is a reasonable way to think of the differing ideas about how best to feed the 300 million people in our country (and I’m not convinced it is), then our book might be seen as a chronicle of the resistance. We’d originally thought we might include the phrase “guerilla ariculture” in our concept. In this context, it definitely fits.
What with the pie and the nice people and the general warmth of the River Reader reception, we kind of figured it was a fluke, and that we very likely wouldn’t get treated anything like that nice at subsequent readings.
Wrong!
“Mama Rose” Febbo, at KZFR in Chico
Tuesday morning we had a brief appearance on Mama Rose’s Kitchen, a radio show on KZFR, Chico’s publich station. Rose Febbo made our book part of her membership drive premium lineup, which also included half a locally grown lamb, donated by Chico Locker and Sausage, one of the businesses featured in our book. So we got to make a nice connection.
That day we went and had lunch at Chico Locker, and reacquainted ourselves with Dave the owner, who’d granted me pretty much carte blanch two years ago during the height of deer season, to shoot the place up. I was in hog heaven, and made a couple of my favorite pictures during that time.
Too many good meats.
After we finished our sausage sandwiches and pork ribs lunch, we gave him a copy of the book, and thanked him again. Wed return the following day as well, to gather provisions for William’s day of cooking for the Heyday reception described above.
Election night we spent at Duffy’s, a pretty down-home bar in Chico, until it got too crowded and we got too hungry. We had dinner at Tres Amigos–fancy-frat-Mex–and saw McCain give his concession speech across a room crowded with people on first dates and sorority girls singing each other happy birthday. As far as I can tell, we were the only ones even paying token attention to the TV screen. It was weird.
Something about the combination of the light-skinned Black woman in the late ’70s Pabst ad and the light skinned Black man getting elected president on TV seemed important. I don’t think I have the chops to articulate why.
Umm, HOLOGRAM journalism? “Help me Obi-Wolf” This seems to me like a gimmick to get the live-bloggers talking, in order to get folks to switch channels in real time. What other value can it possibly have? Except to draw attention to the resources CNN is NOT devoting to sending folks out to do actual journalism.
Hey! Is that a sheetmetal frog in a sombrero?
Hey! Margaritas, frozen in glasses or pitchers. Strawberry & Peach!
We spent that night at Days Inn on the edge of downtown, on account of we might as well, since Wednesday night we had a reading at the Chico Grange, sponsored by Lyon’s Books. Great bookstore. Like the River Reader a couple days before, they were stocking lots of the kind of books and magazines I would pick up. Seems like a good sign.
Heather Lyon was beyond gracious, lending William and me her and her husband’s bicycles to go exploring up in the TOTALLY RIGHTEOUS park that leads from the middle of Chico up into a canyon outside of town. Gorgeous place. Quite a vision, to have a big huge park like that, smack in your town.
About one-fifth of the dessert tonnage that was on hand. Wow.
The evening at the Grange was really cool. It was actually the kickoff event of the fourth annual Sustainability Conference, which we were informed was the largest conference on sustainability in US history. I’m not really sure what that means, but I suspect it’s good.
Just the Grange itself was cool. I mean, there are grange hall in ag towns all over the country. For generations they served as the main seat of nonreligious social activity in these towns. Dancing, socials, orgainzing, governing, all kinds of the stuff people do in order to work better with their neighbors. Lots of granges are closed, boarded up, as the older generation retires and dies off and the younger generation moves into different lines of work.
But the Chico grange has had a renaissance, with a new generation of earnest young farmers and would-be farmers tearing off the boards, applying a new coat of paint, and setting up a social calendar for the building. And the organization.
Because we were part of this event, and because somebody is very thoughtful, there were something like thirty home-baked desserts on hand. The hall was decorated in a warm, homely, functional fashion for the evening. Owing to a conflict with a Tai-chi class in the main hall (with the projector), we had extra long to schmooze with the broad mix of people who turned out.
So, persimmons sure are pretty, huh? This one was in Heather Lyon’s yard.
O blessed community Americana! I do love you so.
Karen of Lyon’s, selling books. Thanks!
William, reading at the Chico Grange. Harold Dirks on the screen.
There were probably 70 people there at the evening’s peak (some enterprising souls snuck out after stuffing themselves on–and barely making a dent in–the dessert extravaganza).
We were introduced by Scott McNall (Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Development), who, it turned out, has a Kansas connection and who wrote a book that William has on his shelf here. Small dang world. Not that it’s that tough to have written a book William has on his shelf, come to think of it–he seems to have most of the available ones.
It was a great evening.
Last night’s reading in Davis was at the Avid Reader.
Jaymes (whose black hair you can just see poking out over the top of the red-plaid fellow’s on the right) came, and brought a couple other folks as well. She brought us some of her Amazing Aisu Pops. Thanks Jaymes!
After the reading, we went to Tucos, and visited with owner Pru and Megan, the wildly enthusiastic waitress who’s been there just about every time we have visited. Tucos is, I think, my favorite restaurant in California. or at least vying for top honors. There’s a chapter in the book about Tucos, and we were pleased to give him a copy of the book. With some luck, we’ll be able to arrange to have the book sell in his space, or have an author dinner down the road a piece or something.
There is, at Tucos, a very sophisticated understanding of combining flavors. Always remarkable.
Salad Nicoise. Gorgeous. This is not food photography; this is remembering.
