Rocketfish- NoCal's Best Sushi Happy Hour

Rocketfish, a new joint in Potrero Hill, has the best of many sushi Happy Hours in San Francisco. Sushi Happy Hours are a very happy trend with amazing values. Such as this $3 seaweed salad with kikurage mushrooms, akamodoki, hanasakuraso, wakame and agar,

or this $3 langostinos fritos with Japanese aioli,

or the $3 spicy tuna roll,

or the $8 walu carpaccio, with with salty lemon confit, caperberries, jalapeno vinaigrette, and sprouts ( my favorite dish)

and especially the $3 wok roasted shishitou chilies.

All of which encourages the drinking of a little midori, with a choice of cups

or this And some more serious plates like the $8 ceviche of shrimp, clams, ocotpus, salty lemon confit, caperberries, jalapeno vinaigrette and sprouts,

or the Kamehamela Roll, featuring more walu, escolar and cucumber salsa,

or some baby calamari tempura, with more shishitous,

some wagyu carpaccio with green mango,

and some skewers of chicken and pigs ears.

Finally, dessert - a little roasted fig with cinnamon,

and a trio of ices, raspberry-cabernet sorbet, green tea and Kahlua ice creams

Breakfast At Gourmet Village

First, a little Oaxacan tamal at the Orange Farmer's Market

Then on to Gourmet Village. This little spot in Millbrae packs them in on weekends. By noon they were sold out of pork cheeks and marinated duck tongues. By 12:30 there was a line waiting outside. Family dinners include shark's fin, abalone, birds nest, squab and other dishes for less than $50 per person.

A breakfast amuse bouche of pork belly
A tofu skin salad - my favorite dish.

Seafood chow fun included ling cod and several shell fish

"Farm chicken" clay pot included whole heads of baby cabbage, black mushrooms and some Loondu style streaky pork.

Osteria Coppa

New joint in downtown San Mateo uses local farmers and fishermen for fresh & local menu. Salami, pizza (650 F gas oven with Italian stone) and pasta are all scratch made in house.
Bigoli with with cranberry beans from Iacopi, home made pancetta and PR - excellent flavors, my favorite pasta

Fettucine with lobster, celery root and lemon verbena - nice pasta, semi bland sauce

Halibut tartare with winter radishes and cucumber and preserved lemon - this worked

Calamari babes, garbanzos, padron peppers and chile oil - my favorite plate

Artichoke pizza with Paremesan fonduta and lemon thyme
- pie looked better than it tasted. Onions overwhelmed all other flavors. Could barely taste cheese or chokes and didn't really like the flavor of the perfect - tavern style crust.

Renewable Energy Is All Hot Air

Research released to day by Bloomberg New Energy Finance exposes the political stances of progressive pols as hopelessly hypocritical. The news reveals that despite the hot air of politicians, governments of the world are spending 13 times as much money subsidizing dirty forms of energy over renewables and biofuels.

Governments provided $43-46 billion to renewable energy and biofuels technologies, projects, and companies in 2009, BNEF concludes in preliminary analysis. That total includes: feed-in-tariffs (FiTs), renewable energy credits or certificates (RECs), tax credits, cash grants, and other direct subsidies. It does not include subsidies to corn farmers to grow feedstock for use in US ethanol plants nor any value transfer due to carbon cap-and-trade schemes.

The figure contrasts $557 billion spent on subsidizing fossil fuels in 2008, as estimated by the International Energy Agency last month.

The full story http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/home/permalink/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20100729006007&newsLang=en

O Holy Cow

Radiance Dairy: Fairfield’s Milk Cult

(Editor's note - this story was written in 2002. Francis Thicke is now running for Iowa Secreatary of Agriculture & Land Stewardship. We will update our Thicke file soon.)

The food of 21st century Iowa tells a tale of irony. During the last 50 years we homogenized the foods we grow, as corn and beans replaced diversity from border to border. At the same time, the foods Iowans eat diversified, with regions holding on to unique specialties. Northwest Iowa is steakhouse country and the southwest is scalloped potato and ham land. One goes to the Loess Hills for apples, Fort Madison for fried strawberries, Scranton for loganberry pancakes and Fairfield for paneer.

Why do paneers, those ambrosias of fresh made cheese and vegetables, taste richer in Fairfield than anywhere else this side of India? Some credit the peaceful town’s good vibes, but the real secret is more physical than mental. It’s Francis Thicke’s divine cows. Radiance Dairy’s organic milk is the only milk in Iowa still bottled on the farm and it is only available in Fairfield.

The man behind the happy cows and their adored milk has an office appropriate for a “Goethe farmer,” as writer Parker Forsell labeled him. When we visited, a music stand held the score to Herbert L. Clarke‘s “Carnival of Venice.” Thicke played its wistful melody on his trumpet and told us how music changed him.

“I wanted to be a musician, thought I was pretty good within the context of my small Minnesota school. So I went to North Texas State, the second largest music school in America, and found out quickly that I was not professional class. That gave me perspective. The trumpet had been my whole life, but I soon noticed that outside the narrow world of trumpet players, no one much cared about the things that had consumed me,” he recalled. So after a Bachelor’s degree in Music and Philosophy, he went for a Masters in Soil Science and a Ph.D in Agronomy, then worked at the US Department of Agriculture.

A sign in the office read: Born Again Pagan.

“In Catholic school growing up we would put our money in a jar to buy ‘pagan babies,’ so that priests might convert Third World children in whom they saw no divinity. Now, I think there is divinity in all things. I call myself a ‘Born Again Farmer’ too, because I went off to be a bureaucrat. There’s a joke about a USDA worker who is crying, so his colleagues ask him ‘What’s wrong?’ and he says, ‘My farmer died.’

Thicke told us he has been practicing Transcendental Meditation for 30 years, but dissociates from the TM movement.

“I am a TM heretic. I run on instinct, not intellect. Bertrand Russell said that solutions come to problems, if you just forget about them for awhile. Einstein said his discoveries were not made through processes of rational thinking. I don’t make quick decisions,” he said, deliberately.

Thicke liked his work in D.C., but the lifestyle was not what he and Susan, his wife and business partner, sought. His ten mile commute to work took an hour. The city’s crime and violence interfered with his peace of mind. They knew Fairfield was a unique place.

“People who meditate think about what they eat, they care as much about the purity of their food as the purity of their thoughts,” he explained.
So the Thickes bought a Fairfield dairy business and its twenty-two cows in 1992 then relocated them to a 326 acre farm outside town. As he showed us around, the philosopher rose within the farmer.

“The farm is an organism. Diversity empowers an organic farm’s ecosystem.”

“I come from a part of southern Minnesota which is hilly, almost mountainous. Such land encourages independent thinking and diversity in farming - it was never appropriate for single crop agriculture,” he explained.

The rolling hills are better suited to the pastures Francis has created, than to the cornfields that were here when he bought it. At that time, there was only one field and a corn crib. The Thickes first built a processing facility and lived above it for four years. Francis has now divided his pastures into 60 paddocks, with moveable electric fences, water tanks and high grass, which is nutritionally better for the milk. Francis plants brome, timothy and various clovers and lets the cows graze in each paddock half a day. That pasture then is allowed to rest 20-40 days, depending on how fast the grass is growing.

“You should be careful of what kind of energies, or products, are brought onto the farm, or are taken off, because you really have an organism here and you want it to grow with its own integrity,” he explained.

Earthworms have returned in multitudes, a sure sign of healthier soil. Like manure, worms excrete rich organic matter and aid in recycling and building up the soil. Other things came back since converting to pastures: song birds; cow birds; meadowlarks; and bobolinks. Cowbirds help control flies, so do wild turkeys.

We saw waist high grass, but no weeds, nor bare spots of dirt. The cows were all clean, the day after heavy rains had made some roads to the farm too muddy to drive. How different from typical dairy farms where filthy cows have to hosed down before every milking and grass is rarely more than 2-4 inches high.

Thicke likes honey locust trees because they have a porous canopy, allowing enough light to promote grass growth. These trees also have pods that are high in protein and good nutritionally for the cows. He is planning a solar pump to a large water tank that would service several paddocks.

“Grass loves by nature to stay in one place. Cows love by nature to graze. The madness of modern agriculture reverses the process.”

Thicke’s cows were friendly, happy, if humans can judge that. One kept nuzzling my arm, like a dog. “Our cows harvest their own food and spread their own fertilizer and they love their work. This makes more sense than the modern mode of hauling fertilizer and feed in trucks going opposite directions. Production isn’t as great, but profitability is greater and energy use is significantly less, self sufficiency more,” he explained.

His cows are all Jerseys, a breed Francis finds best for grass diets. Cows are ruminants and more modern breeds have been cross bred for grain diets and short lives.

“Industrial agriculture is non-competitive. It’s a common myth that each farmer feeds 130 people, but that number doesn’t include all the people in each farmer’s support group: the people to build and service the combines and John Deeres; the fertilizer production plants and staffs; and the environmental clean-up crews,” he noted.

Francis’ milking parlor is “New Zealand style,” meaning a low cost, low maintenance operation that does not push cows to overproduce. The Thickes milk 60 of 130 cows and sell all their milk in Fairfield, where it is a civic heirloom. They deliver milk twice a week and each delivery sells out by the next. Three supermarkets and twelve restaurants consume all of Radiance’s production- milk, cheese and yogurt.

“Expansion misses the point,” Francis answered a question we wished we hadn’t asked.

At Every Body’s supermarket, probably Iowa’s best stocked store for organic and conscientiously raised foods, Radiance actually outsells all other milks, even at a premium price. It’s deep yellow color contrasts with other milks. Co-owner John Dey told us that he never has any returns, or any spoilage on Radiance products.

“We learn as we go along.”

Gurus admit imperfections. Francis is still short of one goal - total grass diets. He feeds the cows 6 pounds of barley a day, because barley is still an old crop that has only recently been biogenetically modified.

“It hasn’t been over bred. With corn, there are always some low levels of GMO contamination,” he said.

Other lessons required patience.

He used to keep cows in the loafing barn all winter until he realized they wanted to be out in pasture, even in cold weather. “This way, the manure is spread all winter and Spring springs quickly.”

Originally, Thicke thought cows’ horns were natural and fit his biodynamic agriculture model, so he let them all grow. But young cows used them as weapons on older cows, not a good situation during twice a day milking. So he stopped letting them grow out.

He used to truck chickens to help keep the flies off the cows, but in the pastures chickens became coyote dinners. Now he keeps them in the loafing barn with the calves.

“It’s as important for me to learn from the farm as it is for the farm to be improved by my activities. The land itself has the answers and its own organizing power. That’s part of this co-creative process, we have to be involved and give our best creative input, but it’s all there anyway,” he said, with an acquiescence unbefitting a heretic.

Consuming Radiance

Some of the health benefits of organic milk are obvious. Several studies have shown pasture-grazed cows produce up to 500 percent more of the anti-carcinogen Conjugated Linoleic Acid, than confined cows. Other benefits are subtler.

At The 2nd Street Coffee House in downtown Fairfield, owner Bonnie White told us that her customers wouldn’t tolerate a less expensive milk in their lattes. White is Asian, an ethnic group that is often lactose intolerant.

“I grew up only able to drink soy milk, but this milk is just fine, no problems at all,” she told us.

Thicke said he had heard the same thing from several others. “But I wouldn’t make such a claim because I haven’t seen the science,” he admitted, still learning.

Paramjeet Singh’s India Café on Fairfield’s town square serves a full menu of South Asian cuisine, both vegetarian and non-vegetarian. They are one of Radiance’s best customers, mainly for their exquisite home-made paneers, made from organic milk and paired with different vegetables..

Paneer Recipe
for 6

4 cups whole milk
3 tablespoons vinegar

Boil the milk, after it starts boiling, add vinegar. When the vinegar makes curds out of the milk, put the curds into a cheese cloth and tie it with a small rope. Place the curds in the cheese cloth onto a plain surface and weigh it down with something heavy. This pressure makes the curds into cheese in about 3 hours. Cut it into bite size pieces.

Fairhope: Iowa Seeds Bear Alabama Fruit

A wise bear, Wro says that "History loves irony." From a tree on the Grand Hotel grounds in Mobile Bay's Eastern Shore, he's meditating on the intermingled destinies of Fairhope, Alabama and Des Moines.

Had Ernest Berry Gaston been born when Iowa farmland was not considerably more expensive than waterfront property on the Gulf Coast, he might very well have changed Iowa dramatically. Iowa’s loss became Alabama’s gain when the Des Moines expatriate fathered one of America’s most eccentric communities on populist, utopian principles that survived the 19th and 20th centuries.

In 1889, even before graduating from Drake University, the precocious descendent of French Huguenot nobility bought the Suburban Advocate which served University Place, now the Drake neighborhood of Des Moines. Gaston used that newspaper as a platform to develop his ideas about social justice. During the next four years, he made a fortune in Iowa real estate, got married, started a family, invented a snow plow and was elected justice of the peace, town recorder and fire chief. He developed his "Single Tax" philosophy from a mixture of Henry George‘s social theories, Populist Party platforms and personal notions about human behavior.

Gaston organized his followers into "The Fairhope Industrial Association" (FIA) with the purpose "to establish and conduct a model community or colony, free from all forms of private monopoly."

Unfortunately, Iowa’s fertile land was prohibitively expensive and other utopian communities had already formed in the West and Great Plains.

Gaston’s followers researched several locations in the South and voted to plant the seeds of their dream on the eastern shore of Mobile Bay, in Baldwin County, Alabama where a wealthy Ante Bellum community had deteriorated into shanties. Land sold for just fifty cents to a dollar an acre.

Like today’s snowbirds, Gaston and his followers left Des Moines in November of 1894. Unlike other utopian communities, the heart of Fairhope remains free of private property today. That has attracted a community of artists, dreamers and utopians who anchor the Eastern Shore’s unique life style - called “Carmel on the Gulf.” Fairhope’s 13,000 current residents include colorful professional athletes like World Series star JC Romero and Leon ’”Wrong Way” Lett of the Dallas Cowboys, authors like Fannie Flagg ("Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe") and Winston Grooms ("Forest Gump")

and artists like Nall (pictured in the Grand Hotel lobby), whose eccentric art is as well known in Europe as Christo‘s is here. Fairhope and its cool image has attracted resorts, golf courses and some of the wealthiest zip codes in America, in all directions around it.

A master gardener and student of history, Des Moines Mayor Frank Cownie confesses a long fascination with the Fairhope experiment.

“My ancestors moved to Des Moines the same time that Gaston lived here. I like knowing that the seeds of that town came from Des Moines, especially because it has blossomed into something so interesting, attractive and unique,” Cownie said.

Last spring, the mayor sent heirloom seeds to the eastern shore’s historic Grand Hotel, which has an illustrious guest register that includes nearly every US Presidents since the Civil War. (The hotel in Point Clear ooutside Fairhope, was recently named to Conde Nast's list of the world's greatest hotels, at #31.)

Grand Hotel Executive Chef Michael Wallace planted Cownie’s seeds in the resort’s Chef’s Garden. By late summer, guests from Iowa were being treated to the bounty of those seeds.

Sometimes, it takes years for a seed to bear fruit. Sometimes it takes centuries.

Fast Food Goes Green?

A "salad" at Wendy's

Is That Even Possible?

Nearing the tenth anniversary of the first “fast food made me obese” lawsuits, marketers are busy crafting a new “healthier” image for McIndustry. Most fast food chains have reduced calories, fats, trans fats and sodium in their fare. Marketers for industry whipping boy McDonald’s now point out that their signature Big Mac has fewer fats, half as many carbs, and only 38 % as much sodium as a burrito from Chipotle - the Oprah-approved, green darling of the food media. Most fast food giants promote salads now, some with recently reduced calories, and sodium. Press releases for Wendy’s “apple pecan chicken salad with pomegranate vinaigrette” enticed me into the brave new world of fast food greens.

I began with McDonald’s “premium bacon ranch salad with crispy chicken.” Its greens impressed me with their freshness and generous ratio of mesclun to iceberg. Grape tomatoes were crisp but carrots were pale with age. A chicken filet was served hot on top of cold ingredients. A light Paul Newman dressing tasted like buttermilk. A fistful of shredded cheeses plus swarms of bacon bits challenged the claim that this salad has only 370 calories, 200 grams of fat, and 970 mg of sodium. All those numbers are down significantly from similar reports on the same salad a couple years ago.

I found the best presentation of the week at Taco Bell (TB).

“Chipotle steak taco salad” was served in a crisp tortilla bowl with beans and rice on the bottom. Lettuce and tomato topped that, covered with tender seasoned beef, cheddar cheese, sour cream, salty chipotle dressing, and multi colored tortilla strips. TB made no health claims for this salad’s 900 calories, 57 grams of fat, and 1700 mg. of sodium - numbers unchanged from a couple years ago. The lettuce was iceberg and TB’s condiment bar had no fresh salsas at all.

At the KFC by Drake, the company-promoted “zero trans fats KFC crispy chicken caesar salad” was not available. No specialty salads were. Does the company think college kids don’t eat salads? This was not the first time that KFC innovations have been withheld from the Des Moines market.

At Wendy’s, the new salad that had inspired my quest was not available either. In my mind, franchisees should not be the last people to know about a company‘s new products.

I tried a “Mandarin chicken salad” that had similar nutritional numbers to the one that had teased me. It included a good mix of greens, including mizuna and tango. Roasted almonds tasted strangely like peanuts. Crispy noodles tasted like salt. Mandarin oranges tasted like sugar. Chicken was bland with just a trace of paprika and garlic salt. White sugar, brown sugar, corn syrup, and pineapple juice dominated the sesame and ginger flavors in the sweet dressing. At 570 calories, 25 grams from fat and 1370 mg. of sodium, nutritional numbers were second to McDonald‘s.

Burger King’s (BK) “TenderCrisp chicken garden salad with Ken’s caesar dressing” defied the trend toward “healthier” salads. Its 1070 calories, 86 grams of fat and 2900 mg. of sodium (almost double the CDC recommended daily allotment) were up from numbers on a previous nutritional check of the same salad. The difference might result from three kinds of cheeses not included in the previous count. BK’s packaging was true to their motto “Have it your way.”

Tired lettuce was packed in a salad bowl with baby carrots, tomatoes, and shredded cheeses compartmentalized in a different bowl. Additional packets included dressing, croutons and a chicken breast. That created a lot of personal plastic and paper to rip open. This salad was named one of six “diet destroyers” by business travelers’ web site Divine Caroline.
Bottom line. Costing around $5, most of these salads are not bargains. Less costly burgers were actually “healthier” choices than most too.