I created this recipe for a couple of different friends who sell local lamb and wanted some new recipes to share with their customers. Below you’ll find instructions for a small sirloin roast and also for sirloin chops, but you can make this salsa and use it on roast leg of lamb, rack of lamb, or whatever cut you like.  I think it would even be good sprinkled over lamb stew. It’s also great on sandwiches made with leftover lamb.

Pastoral Plate is the meat CSA and buying club that I’ve been ordering chicken, beef, lamb, eggs, and other goodies from. Run by Jonathan Lewis, who personally visits all the farms from which he sources, Pastoral Plate is a great source for local meats in San Francisco that I highly recommend. They’ve also been selling a killer sheep’s milk feta that would be great in this recipe, but any good feta will do.

Casa Rosa Farms is run by my friends Rachel and Anthony in Madeira (whose house in Oakland I used to live in). They raise gorgeous California Red sheep and just started selling their organic olive oil and meats at the Kensington Farmers’ Market and the Alameda Farmers’ Market. If you like videos of adorable lambs, fan them on Facebook.

To accompany my lamb, I cooked up a little farro and tossed it with steamed broccoli rabe, golden beets, and a super light blend of tahini and plain yogurt. It was fantastic with a glass of rosé on a recent warm night.

For the marinade:

Make a paste of

1 garlic clove pounded with salt

1 teaspoon Ras el Hanout spice blend

1/2 teaspoon Aleppo pepper (or mild cayenne)

A little olive oil

A few drops of sherry vinegar

Salt and freshly ground pepper

Spread over roast or chops and let marinate for a day in the fridge

If making a roast, preheat oven to 200 degrees and remove roast from refrigerator. Heat a skillet over medium high heat and add a little olive oil. Brown the roast all over and transfer to the oven. Roast for about 2 hours until the temperature inside is 140 degrees. Remove from oven and let rest before slicing.

While the roast cooks, prepare the salsa:

For the salsa:

1/4 cup finely chopped lightly toasted shelled pistachios

1/4 of a preserved lemon (rind only) rinsed and chopped finely

About 3 tablespoons crumbled feta cheese

1 green garlic, chopped finely (or one small clove of mature garlic if green garlic not in season)

1 generous handful parsley leaves, chopped finely

A few mint leaves, chopped finely

A few glugs of olive oil

Freshly ground pepper

Combine all the ingredients, adding the olive oil last, until the salsa is chunky but spoonable.

If making chops, prepare the salsa before you start cooking. Grill them over a medium hot fire to desired doneness or cook them in a hot non-stick skillet with a little olive oil.

Serve slices of the roast or whole chops with the salsa spooned over. Sorry about the blurry photos. It was dark! But I promise it tastes good, even if it doesn’t look so great.

If you’re looking for something fun to do in a beautiful setting on Memorial Day weekend, you should consider joining me for a hands-on DIY cooking class at River Myst Haven. It’s a gorgeous place that’s nestled among the hills west of Healdsburg on Westside Road.

From scratch, we’ll create building blocks of the DIY kitchen and then use them in a seasonal menu that we’ll all enjoy together.

Participants will learn how to make mustard, which we’ll use to create a glaze for pork canapés and also the vinaigrette for a seasonal salad. We’ll enjoy homemade Meyer lemon parsley aioli on a sustainable seafood stew. We’ll learn how to make yogurt and talk about all the different ways to use it, as we create a yogurt cake with seasonal fruit. Finally, we’ll have a cultured butter making demo and tasting. $100. Sign up here.

MENU:

Mustard Glazed Pork Canapés

Seasonal Vegetable Salad of

Artichokes, Asparagus, Snap Peas and Fava Beans

with Homemade Mustard Vinaigrette, Fresh Herbs,

and Ricotta—(subject to change based on availability)

Sustainable Seafood Stew with Meyer Lemon Parsley Aioli

Yogurt and Seasonal Stone Fruit Cake with Streusel Topping

Butter Making Demo and Tasting

I’m always fascinated by how ideas percolate up into the culture and become bona fide trends.

An idea is sparked, acted upon, talked about…and suddenly everyone is doing it.

The DIY trend is one example. While I was formulating the idea for DIY Delicious in early 2008, the social, economic, and political conditions that gave rise to the book were also working on other people’s psyches, but in different ways. The results: websites and businesses like Food in Jars, Punk Domestics, and Farm Curious, movements like Yes We Can, and Canning Across America, as well as countless books on DIY Dairy, canning, curing, and pickling. It’s as if these ideas are just floating out there in the ether waiting to alight on someone’s brain.

The latest activity that has captured the imagination of cooks is food bartering. A couple weeks ago my friend Ellen emailed me with a full-blown plan for a barter market in which everyone would bring “lots” of homemade food (cheese, jam, sauerkraut, pickles, or anything) worth roughly $10 ea. to trade for “lots” of equal value with other participants.

One table of “lots”

Her reasoning was that, while many of us are making many different food items, not everybody has the skills or inclination to make everything. For the price of your own expertise you can enjoy another’s artisanal, homemade goodies.

Another goal: Sharing food is like glue. It strengthens our communities and fosters friendships and civility. How can we not recognize our commonalities when we gather to swap foods we’ve spent time and thought creating for the express purpose of sharing with others?

Shortly after Ellen’s email, this article about Brooklyn food swaps appeared in the New York Times. Then, about two weeks before the event, I heard of another woman in North Oakland (where Ellen and I both live) organizing an Oakland swap the day BEFORE Ellen’s. Crazy that neither of us know this person. Then, one of our invitees was assigned to write about food swapping in the Bay Area by an editor at The Bay Citizen and before you know it, Ellen’s food swap hits the New York Times!

Curious about how to set up a swap? Here’s how it works

Somebody’s booty

Have you been bartering food formally or informally? What do you like about it? Tell me about it in the comments!

Photos courtesy of swap co-organizer Leila Khatapoush

My friend Ellen’s underground restaurant took an interesting turn last week. Instead of dinner, the meal served was brunch and, instead of Ellen being the sole cook and bottle washer, we partnered up on the menu, with the invaluable help of Leila for shopping, prep and clean-up duties.

The goal of the brunch was to finally give people enough damn bacon. You know what I mean. No matter how many slices of bacon are on your plate, one more is always better. So we set out to make sure nobody left feeling deprived of porky goodness.

Besides pigging out on bacon, our other mission was to taste the offerings of our excellent local bacon producers side-by-side and find out how the slices stack up. Yes, we served bacon flights. The results were, if not exactly surprising, interesting and porkalicious.

The 4 Contenders:

Highland Hills

Prather Ranch

Marin Sun Farms

Fatted Calf

The guests were split down the middle between choosing Marin Sun Farms and Fatted Calf as their favorite.

Us kitchen folk unanimously liked Marin Sun the best for its perfectly fatty mouthfeel and appealing subtle smokiness.

All three of us have commented in the past that the Prather Ranch bacon is too sweet…tasting mostly of maple syrup. This tasting didn’t exactly change our minds but, to me, the bacon seemed less sweet and overall more appealing than I remember.

The Highland Hills….well, it was just wrong. As in, something went wrong with the batch. It was blackish-gray in color with a hard, unyielding texture and completely devoid of the succulence and crispy fat one expects in bacon. There was absolutely no flavor of salt, curing, spices, or anything. To be fair, we tried another package of Highland Hills that had better color, but the flavor was still lacking. There’s definitely a consistency problem there, but if the better package is the best they can do, it’s still not good.

The menu—all vegetables and eggs purchased from local producers

Appetizer:

Smoked Salmon with Homemade Crème Fraîche on Anna’s Daughter’s Bread

Fresh Squeezed Orange Juice

Blue Bottle Three Africans

Black Tea

nice looking table eh?

First Course:

Winter Greens Salad with Spiced Pecans and Persimmons

Second Course:

Frittata with Chard, Dry Farmed Tomatoes and Homemade Goat Feta

Potatoes Roasted in Duck Fat

Bacon Flight accompanied by palate cleansing Homemade Sour Plum Sorbet

Main Course:

Oat and Rice Flour Pancakes with Homemade Crème Fraîche and Temescal Foraged Plum Sauce

Platters of Plenty of Bacon, Bacon, Bacon

Dessert:

Raw Truffles from Coracao Confections

Though it took place last month (how is that possible?) I wanted to take a moment to blog about the home-brewed soda class my pal Nishanga taught at 18 Reasons.  Nishanga showed class participants how to use ginger bug and whey to naturally ferment sodas. She discussed other starters and I brought along some homemade root beer I’d made using the method in DIY Delicious that calls for brewing yeast.

Nishanga telling them what’s what.

Grating ginger and turmeric for the ginger bug

Slightly fermented ginger bug

Class participants putting together their very own sodas

After the demo, participants put together their own starter batches to ferment at home. Nishanga shared tastes of her lovely home-brews featuring amazing flavors out of her garden in Berkeley. We tried Lemon-Rosemary and Hibiscus Schizandra Soda. For snacking, we used the yogurt we’d drained the whey from to make a quick dip and served it with my homemade crackers from DIY Delicious.

PS: Nishanga recently signed a contract for her own cookbook with New Harbinger Press.

It’s sure to be a great and completely unique book because nobody I know has so much gastronomic talent combined with a professional grounding in Chinese Medicine and nutrition. Congratulations Nishanga!

Straining the sarsparilla for root beer

Root beer fermenting

The inaugural DIY Delicious book event was held recently at Jimtown Store in Healdsburg, CA. Since working on the recipes for the Jimtown Store cookbook was my first foray into cookbookery, it only seems fitting. Plus it’s a warm, welcoming space that feels like home and Carrie Brown and her staff know how to make a party!

But first the food: My dear friend Ellen helped me make fresh cheese, crackers, ajvar dip, and yogurt cakes the day before—all from the book.

Upon our arrival, all we had to do was crisp the potatoes, assemble the canapés (which included homemade sauerkraut and mustard from the book) and arrange the other items on platters. Carrie and her staff provided the flowers, the space and all the gorgeous herb bundles.

It was a fabulous party. Both my sisters showed up, many friends, ex-husband, and even some folks from as far away as Palo Alto.

Ajvar Dip (from DIY Delicious page 74)

This is a wonderful dip to make this time of year when the eggplants and peppers fill the markets. If you take the time to really char the eggplants (don’t worry, the stove will clean up just fine) you will be rewarded with a lovely smokiness that reminds me of a very good baba ghanoush, only better. Look for this recipe on the Chronicle Books Blog later this week.

Time Required: 30 minutes active; 30 minutes passive

Makes about 2 cups

1 globe eggplant, about 1 pound

2 red bell peppers

2 garlic cloves, peeled

Salt

2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice

1/2 teaspoon ground Aleppo pepper or paprika

1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil

Freshly ground pepper

Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

Wash the eggplant and poke it with the tines of a fork in several places. If you have a gas burner, lay it right on top of the grate, turn the burner to high, and roast until blackened all over, turning often with tongs, about 15 minutes. Transfer to a parchment lined baking sheet.

Roast the peppers the same way and transfer them to the sheet as well.

Put the charred peppers and eggplant in the oven and roast until completely soft, about for 10 minutes for the peppers and 20-30 minutes for the eggplant. Remove the peppers to a bowl, and cover with a plate so they can steam. Leave the eggplant in the oven until it is very soft all the way to the center. Test it with a fork to be sure.

Once the peppers are cool enough to handle, peel them, and remove the seeds and stems. Transfer to a food processor. In a mortar and pestle, pound the garlic with a pinch of salt until you have a smooth paste. Add to the food processor with the peppers and pulse until chunky smooth.

When the eggplant is cool enough to handle, scrape the flesh from the skin and remove as many of the seeds as it is easy to do, without worrying too much about removing all of them. Transfer the eggplant to the processor with the peppers and garlic. Add the lemon juice, Aleppo pepper and pulse a few times. Add the olive oil slowly while pulsing. Add salt and freshly ground pepper to taste. Serve immediately or refrigerate, well covered, for up to 10 days.

What:

Win a signed copy of my book, DIY Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food from Scratch. All you have to do to qualify for a random drawing is to submit a story about your catalyst for canning, preserving, or creating your own food from scratch. Your story can inspire others!

Who:

This contest is in partnership with FarmCurious. FarmCurious is a new company created by Oakland resident Nicole Kramer to educate, inspire and equip the urban homesteader. FarmCurious is running the Urban Homesteading General Store at Oakland’s Eat Real Festival on August 27, 28, 29. Stop by to learn more about how to grow, preserve, culture, and ferment your own food, as well as purchase everything you need to get started. The winner of the contest will be able to claim his or her copy of DIYDelicious at the FarmCurious booth.

Why:

Many of us didn’t grow up canning or making our own artisan food from scratch or, if we did, we lost it somewhere along the way. If your story is like many people’s, you were too busy with college exams, demanding jobs, and busy social lives to worry about where your food came from. But perhaps one day, the stars aligned and you had your ‘spark’ – that aha! moment when you realized that putting food away wasn’t a waste of time, that making cheese is sexy and that curing meat will win you more dates than a bikini wax.

For me, it was visiting my aunt’s farmhouse (the house where my mother grew up). Seeing the pantry lined with homegrown and home-preserved fruits and vegetables was an unforgettable moment. It was like experiencing a part of my history that my mother had left behind. I set out to reclaim it, and after several years of dabbling, my “from scratch” book, DIY Delicious: Recipes and Ideas for Simple Food From Scratch, is being published by Chronicle Books.

For Nicole Kramer, proprietor of Farm Curious, her spark was reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. It changed the way she saw everything. Suddenly, dirt was soil and vegetables were miracles. Water became a resource to be conserved and appreciated and she started seeing time in seasons. Around the same time, she met an amazing friend with a similar interest in food who worked at an organic produce wholesaler. The stars had aligned and her cupboards were soon full of beautifully colored mason jars and her freezer packed with vacuum-sealed treats.

When:

What’s your spark story?  Submit it today to either me or Nicole of FarmCurious for a chance to win a free, signed copy of DIY Delicious. The winner will be chosen through a random drawing from all story entries. Deadline to submit your story is August 24. Winners will be announced on our blogs and Facebook pages, as well as Twitter.

Contest Rules:
Submit the story of what inspired you to dabble in DIY artisan food through any of the following ways:
* On Facebook – “Like” the Facebook pages for DIY Delicious or FarmCurious and add your story as a wall post
* On FarmCurious.com – Add your story as a comment to the DIY Delicious Spark Contest Post here
* On VanessaBarrington.com – Add your story as a comment to this DIY Delicious Spark Contest Post
* Use hashtag #DIYspark on twitter to link to a post on your own site with your story

The winner will be announced the morning of August 27 and the winner can stop by the FarmCurious booth at any time throughout the festival to claim his or her prize.

You'd think it was the holidays judging by how much I’ve been eating. It’s a little weird when the forced austerity of tax time collides with not-to-be-missed eating opportunities. Credit card bills and elastic-waist pants are usually the result.  No regrets here because hey, this is just how I roll now. Living in the moment and all that.

I attended my first ever Kermit Lynch party on Saturday the 17 followed by 4 days of gorging on all manner of both street food and fine restaurant eats in Portland.

Oyster Bliss is all about oysters, homemade sausages by Chris Lee and Samin Nosrat, wine by  Kermit Lynch and desserts by Café Fanny, along with plenty of sun, friends, and music. It was a blast drinking buckets of rose, chewing on sausages, slurping oysters and laughing with friends and tablemates. It’s tough to spend a Saturday afternoon like that because it’s too tempting to continue the debauchery. Luckily I’ve reached the age of reason and spent the late afternoon and early evening napping.

Fanny's strawberry rhubarb tart

Fanny's Chocolate Pave

 Barely recovered from the oyster party, Tuesday I arrived in Portland and proceeded to eat my way through town. I had plenty of good company and made countless new friends. Here are a few of the pictorial highlights.

The dreamiest coffee ever from the sweetest 200 square foot storefront.
 

Porchetta sandwich from The People's Pig Cart. Yowza!
 

Ziba's pitas: like my grandma's strudel only savory with cheese and lamb and Ajvar!
 

Poutine from Spudnik
 

I've had some pretty sorry examples of Korean tacos. This was not one of them.
 

Ok so I probably didn't really need to eat Texas toast grilled cheese with hamburger.
 

Cutest shack ever
 

My roomie Amy's Schnitzelwich from Tabor. She was nice enough to share. It was a textural wonderland.
 

Civilized lunch with new friends Laiko Bahrs, Maura Sell, Brona Cosgrave, and Patrice Savery at Pasta Works.
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Green garlic soup!
 

farmers market pizza!
 

Much to my surprise, I walked into the Chronicle Books party and there was my book cover all blown (and grown) up and looking gorgeous. I had to get a happy shot. It's blurry but too fun not to include.

In closing, the conference was inspiring, exhausting, exhilerating and magical this year. The best ever. Everyone I met, famous or not, was kind, engaging, friendly, and helpful. It felt like one big giant love fest and sharing sphere. It made me feel like anything is possible and we’ll all get where we are going by helping one another. And you know what? I believe we really will. I don’t know if it’s the new economy or Portland itself but the conference felt like one big happy family. Maybe I just had “city of the roses”-colored glasses on, but I don’t think so. I think it was real.

Though the wind came up, roaring through the chicken houses and causing hens to scurry and cluck, the weather held. It was a lovely romp through the different parts of the farm followed by lemonade and chicken salad sandwiches in the kitchen, where we chatted with Alexis and one another between bites. We even made it to the tail end of the Berkeley farmers’ market on the way home. Pretty perfect Saturday if you ask me.

These are the meat birds. Note the clean straw and healthy looking chickens. They take about 10 weeks to grow. These, I believe, are about 7 weeks old.

These are the meat birds inside their house. The modular houses are disassembled and moved around the farm every few months to keep things clean. The birds are never given any drugs to keep them healthy. Sage oil in their water acts as an anti-microbial. 

Sort of like a chicken/or Easter egg hunt but not. Now this is free-range.

3 day old chicks that arrive by US Mail to the post office, where Alexis picks them up cheeping away in their boxes. They look like Peeps don't they?

These are the laying hens outside, but under a shelter. Note how healthy they look. Their beaks have not been clipped, which is commonplace in the egg industry (yep, even the organic, cage free kind).

What a pretty pretty girl!

Comfortably roosting in clean, dry straw.

These were gathered in the hen houses by farm tour participants.

Llamas and chickens are friends. The llamas keep the predators away from the hen houses at night.

Here we are walking up the gentle slope of the farm. This is the site of the devastating fire last fall that nearly killed the farm just before its CSA program was about to launch. Amazing how nature renews. 

What a wonderful opportunity to be able to feel so connected to the eggs and chickens and people who feed me!
 

Our hostess, Haven Bourque, decided on a Persian menu. There were several reasons for this: One was a recent musical outing, that inspired us to want to eat Persian food, one was an article in the New York Times, and one was a vegetarian on the guest list, and our own veggie leanings.

Here’s the menu:

First Course:

Seder plate—in the Persian tradition green onions are on the table for the guests to beat one another with. Yep, that’s right. It symbolizes the sting of the whips of the Egyptian slaveholders. Rather fun and they do sting!

The charoset was wonderful. Lots of delicious dried fruits, cardamom, and pistachios.

Second Course:

Beet soup—very simple vegetarian version made with beets and leeks and balanced with champagne vinegar and then garnished with lebne and cilantro.

Third Course:

Smoked salmon

Asparagus roasted in a blazing hot oven with olive oil and salt

Deviled Eggs

Mainish Course:

Two types of grape leaves—one with lamb and rice and one with rice and dried fruit from the recipe in the New York Times above

Roasted/braised baby artichokes: Quartered and roasted with salt, olive oil, thyme sprigs, and sliced lemons until brown and then oven-braised in white wine.

Dessert:

Flourless chocolate cake and macaroons from La Farine and illegal for Passover baklava from Zand’s. Best baklava I’ve ever had. I finally understand why people eat baklava.

The ceremony was great. It was a secular humanist Passover and we sung songs of social justice while drinking plenty of wine.

Hope I get invited back next year!