Daniel Patterson (Coi), a longtime Soul Food Farm supporter, has chosen to use the farm’s chicken in a high-profile fundraiser with Manresa Chef David for the Bocuse d”or Foundation. From SF Weekly:
In December, the Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation announcedthe 12 semi-finalistsfor the next team to rep America at the so-called Culinary Olympics. To help raise funds to support the cause,Daniel Patterson—who was invited by Daniel Boulud and Thomas Keller to be on the Bocuse council—will be teaming up with fellow Michelin two-star chefDavid Kinchfor a special one-night dinner engagement extravaganza at Coi. Epic? Yes. The pricetag is steep ($195) but then again, it could be the meal of a lifetime (or maybe an early Valentine’s Day treat). The dinner takes place on Monday, February 8, and reservations—which should go quickly—can be made via Coi at 415-393-9000.
The menu, which will have the two chefs alternating courses:
The chefs have some surprises in store, including several amuse bouches, an intermezzo course, and mignardises. Following are the main courses:Assorted Shellfish with Radish and Apple, Seawater (Kinch)
Beet and Goat Cheese Tart (broken, inverted) (Patterson)
rye, dill
Steelhead Trout with Onion and Marrow “Tears,” Chervil Cream (Kinch)
Winter, Pastoral (Patterson)
young carrots roasted on a bed of hay, radish powder, shaved pecorino
Crispy Chicken and Egg Confit, a Roasted Chicken “Dashi,” Black Truffles (Kinch)
Steamed Chicken Breast (Patterson)
wild mushroom porridge, brown butter, wood sorrel
It’s Almost It (Corbett)
chocolate, oatmeal, orange
Meanwhile,Manresa’s blog spells out where the chicken’s coming from:
To emphasize the Foundation’s commitment to sustainability and great American products, a different American heritage breed will be chosen each year. This year’s dinner series celebrates American heritage breed poultry. Patterson and Kinch’s menu will feature poultry fromSoul Food Farm.
The UK’s respected Financial Times newspaper has a delirious review of Frances, Melissa Perello’s new restaurant. Melissa is a highly recognized chef who also happens to be a staunch farm-to-table supporter.
From the review:
Named after the chef’s grandmother, it is a family effort. Perello’s father helped her with the walls and the wood finishing. Her mother sewed the big-buttoned cushions that soften your seat, and worked on the aprons worn by the staff. They are made of a rough-hewn fabric that I mistook for burlap – it’s actually brushed silk.
Perello’s “modern California” cuisine is the same: sounds like burlap, tastes like silk. Chew on applewood-smoked bacon beignets to start, or chickpea fritters with Meyer lemon aioli. Then, for your appetiser, pick the unusual, eggy semolina gnocchi with duck confit. I used to think I hated gnocchi; now I realise that I just hated any gnocchi not made by Melissa Perello
For your main course you should order the beef. Alternatively, you could do what my companions did on both visits and order the Soul Food Farm chicken with savoury bread pudding. They practically licked their plates clean. Now we all understand how Perello earned a Michelin star for Fifth Floor, her previous restaurant.
I’ve eaten at Frances. It really is that good! We hope you’ll all go check it out too!
Monday Jan 25: Chez Panisse is having a special Soul Food-themed dinner downstairs featuring the chicken and cured olives that Eric did just for this, plus an egg dish and maybe some of the wild bay leaves and lemons from Pleasants Valley Road. Make a reservation
Saturday, Feb. 20: Alexis is doing a meet-the-farmer day at the Prather Meat Co. shop in the Ferry Building, to talk about the farm and whatever else people want to chat with a farmer about. Stop by and say hi! We’ll update this with the times as soon as we know them.
Tuesday, Feb. 23: Special event at 18 Reasons on keeping chickens in an urban sitting. Special guests: a couple of live Soul Food Farm chickens. Ticketing not yet posted, but check http://www.18reasons.org/
Alexis had a terrific long interview air in December with KCBS Food Editor Narsai David. He talked to her about the fire, the dismal economics (but joyous rewards!) of raising pastured poultry, and much more. You can listen to it via the Pastured Polutry and Eggs link here or download the MP3.
Posted by Bonnie Powell on 18 December 2009, 10:28 am
Anita and Cameron, of Married …with dinner San Francisco food blog fame, have been staunch supporters of Soul Food Farm throughout this difficult year — coming out to the farm to build chicken houses after the fire, serving as a CSA pickup site for our first San Francisco drop, and helping to publicize the CSA far and wide. Now, they’re killing two chickens with one well-timed stone, by offering a Soul Food CSA membership as a prize in the online Menu for Hope campaign.
For two weeks each December, bloggers from all over the world offer a delectable array of food-related items for this multi-blog charity raffle. Last year, organizers raised $62,806 to help the UN World Food Programme feed the hungry. This year, the raffle supports a new initiative at the WFP, called Purchase for Progress (P4P), which enables smallholder and low-income farmers to supply food to WFP’s global operation.
This year’s campaign runs December 14 to 25, and every $10 you donate earns you one virtual raffle ticket for the item of your choice. (To learn more, head over to Chez Pim to see the entire list of goodies and check out her Menu for Hope page.)
The Married …with dinner duo came up with the idea to offer the following item:
Bid Item UW02: Locavore Starter Kit
Many readers tell us that they’d love to eat more local foods, but they don’t know where to start. So we’re making it simple with a Locavore Starter Kit: A trial membership to the Soul Food Farm chicken-and-egg CSA(or another CSA of your choice* if you live outside the Bay Area) and a farmer’s market tour with breakfast and local treats.
Soul Food Farm and Married …with Dinner are offering a $100 CSA credit toward the winner’s choice of whole chickens, eggs, olive oil, and other farm-fresh goodies. Pick up your winnings all at once, or spread it over multiple pickups: It’s up to you how to spend your CSA credit (subject to the usual order terms).
Plus, Soul Food Farm farmer Alexis Koefoed offers a personal tour of Soul Food Farm for the winner and up to 3 guests at a mutually agreeable time in 2010.
Bloggers Anita & Cameron will also include a personalized tour of the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, complete with breakfast or lunch for two, to help our winner find all the great foods they need to make the leap to la vida locavore.
And if that’s not enough, they’ll also bring along a bag full of local treats and homemade goodies for you to take home after your walk-around. The bag will include some of our own preserves, and an assortment of treats from local folks — including a bag of brown rice and a jar of almond butter from Massa Organics.
Alexis and Eric in front of their house. (David La Spina photo for the New York Times Magazine)
Chirstine Muhlke’s profile of Soul Food Farm for the New York Times Magazine just came out this past Sunday, on Thanksgiving weekend. Titled “Field Report: Learning about Community Supported Agriculture the Hard Way,” it focuses on the dismal economics of a small farm like Soul Food, and how something like a comparatively minor fire can almost kill a farm.
From the consumer’s point of view, Soul Food Farm looks as if it’s raking it in: eggs cost up to $8 a dozen, and meat retails at about $6.50 a pound. Outsiders aren’t afraid to voice their opinion. After the fire, an online detractor wrote that the farm should have more than enough cash to rebuild.
If people think that farmers are driving home from the market in BMWs, Koefoed said, “they should go visit the farmer and see how hard they’re actually working.” Even before she laid off two of her three employees after Eric lost his civil-engineering job, the mother of three was rising at dawn and working late to tend to her 8,000 birds, which roost in houses dotted around the scrubby land. Until she bought an egg-washer last year, she cleaned 1,800 a day.
Soul Food Farm operates on razor-thin margins. To bring in extra money, Koefoed is concocting a lavender-products business with a neighbor; plans for a cooking school are in the works; and she began a pilot project in which others raise her meat birds on their land. In October, she started a C.S.A., or community-supported agriculture program, selling her produce to people who might not be able to afford it in restaurants. Cutting out the middleman means she’ll get all of the much-needed proceeds. “This romantic vision of the poor farmer needs to be thrown out!” she said emphatically. “It’s not romantic to be poor. It’s a struggle.”
Naturally, Koefoed would like to struggle less. She’d also like to see the day when people realize that cheap food is a lie, and values have shifted enough so that those who pay $8 for a six-pack of beer or thousands for a plasma TV won’t “gripe about paying $8 for a dozen eggs.” Those dollars go back into the community, she said, not to some corporation raising robo-chicks. “This should really matter, because it’s going into your mouth and fueling your capacity to get through the day,” she said. “Food is the bottom line: we all need to eat every day. Then ultimately aren’t farmers the most important resource we have in this country?”
The article has goosed CSA sign-ups, so quite a few readers seem to agree with her. So did Andrew Simmons, in a warm post over at the SF Weekly blog.
A couple of CSA members have asked me about freezing/storing the fresh chickens. They are fine in the fridge for 3-5 days, I have cooked mine up to 7 days after getting. I always rinse inside and outside and pat them dry before cooking regardless. If you are going to freeze, I think best to do so whole, in their cryovac. If you are on a budget, the best way to get the most from your chicken in my opinion is to roast it whole. I do this with the damaged birds too.
I am no chef by any means, but a chef did teach me to roast chickens this way and it does make for pretty foolproof crispy skin and not-overdone flesh. Continue reading ‘Chicken tips’ »
Soul Food Farm’s Community Supported Agriculture program has just completed seven weekly deliveries, and so far most have gone smoothly. (There was that one time the Bay Bridge was closed unexpectedly due to a rolled truck, and Eric had to turn around and drive all the way through Marin to get to Potrero Hill.) Our CSA members have been understanding about the seasonal egg shortage and the occasional olive oil mixup or addition error.
I wanted to share some nice feedback we have received, both anonymously and signed.
On December 1, chef Melissa Perello’s new restaurant, Frances, opened for business. In addition to being a star supporter of Soul Food Farm, throwing a benefit dinner at Sebo that raised several thousand dollars post-fire, Melissa is quite the star chef, with awards and accolades from Food & Wine and the James Beard Foundation. She started at Aqua working with Michael Mina, served as executive chef at Charles Nob Hill at age 25, then was executive chef for Fifth Floor, getting it a Michelin star in 2006. (I interviewed her about her favorite Bay Area spots for Condé Nast Traveler’s Insider Guide.)
Frances is open Tuesday-Sunday, 5-10 p.m. serving sustainable modern California cuisine in a relaxed neighborhood setting, 3870 17th Street in San Francisco. Go!
When Eric and I bought this property, the first ting we did was plant 250 olive trees. Long before we had a single chicken, we knew we wanted olive trees and to start a family tradition of harvesting and pressing our own olive oil. Well, the trees grew and last year we had our first crop. Our second olive picking was Nov. 15. We and lots of family and friends worked from 8:30 a.m.till 4 in the afternoon and only finshed half the field. That was enough to turn into 30 gallons of delicious olive oil the next day at Yolo Bulb Olive Press in Dixon.
On December 1, chef Melissa Perello’s new restaurant, 