This Saturday was the final downtown Nevada City Farmer’s market on Union Street. The streets were alive with farmer’s in costume and their booths were bursting with colorful fall produce……winter squash, purple Peruvian potatoes, greens, turnips, beets, carrots, apples, figs, and my personal favorite….persimmons! I was struck with the sense of community that the market [...]

The Bluebird Farm contingency has decided to revive the Thursday night summer potlucks……..only they have centered the gathering around a communal bread bake. They have built a cobb oven at the Wet Hill Road homestead off Cement Hill Road. A cobb oven is a wood fired oven made from clay and straw. Around 6 pm [...]

These upcoming events are going to be really fun and informative. If you are interested in learning more about eating out of your own “foodshed”, these events will be a great introduction to what that means, how to identify edible plants and mushrooms and how to prepare them. The 11th Annual Fungus Foray North Columbia [...]

is filled with apples……Joe and I have been going on early morning gleaning missions around downtown Nevada City. The foods we have our eye on currently are apples, chestnuts, walnuts and some grapes here and there. As mentioned in my previous post, our new friend Jerome was just visiting……we went on a gleaning walk with [...]

This weekend I had the opportunity to assist 2 of the chefs at Chez Panisse They were in Nevada City doing an event for the For-Site Foundation Jerome and Stacy rolled into town with a truck full of local goodies…….fruit from the bay area, apples and lamb from Penn Valley, veggies from Bluebird Farm. The [...]

I know my favorite time of year has arrived when those beautiful, mysterious, hard-bodies winter squash begin to appear at the farmer’s markets and in the grocery stores! Butternut, Acorn, Carnival, Delicata, Pumpkins and my personal favorite, Kabocha! The ways of preparing squash are endless….soups, baked, roasted, or steamed. The warm, nutty and comforting flavor [...]

I have been wanting to make this leap for some time now…….the leap to the MINI FRIDGE! It seems like most American;s think that they need a big, cold, space-taking-up box in the middle of the otherwise lovely kitchen. I beg to differ. If you are eating a mostly fresh, local diet of vegetables and [...]

Today I took a trip to Palermo, California. Located In Butte County, Palermo and the surrounding county has the most olive trees in all of California! We visited a dormant olive orchard to check out its potential viability as a working orchard and business for a friend of ours. The trip was a stoker, the [...]

A group of some of Nevada County’s talented, creative and all around generally bombastic ladies have gathered and organized a day celebrating women and all forms of female creativity! 2 ladies in particular have worked extra hard in making this banging day come to fruition, Jesse Locks and Sasha Soukup (http://www.kitchenwitch.typepad.com/) check out her herb [...]

Last night I attended a fabulous class that taught us the traditional art of canning. This is a method of preserving any surplus of food when it is bountiful and thus having it available to you in the winter months when those foods are not in season! We made 2 kinds of pickles (Curried honey [...]