Sadly, we have to share Mendocino’s bounty with the rest of the country. And share we do. Another fun factoid from the good folks at the Brewer’s Association:

Of the nation’s 1,500 or so craft breweries, Fort Bragg’s North Coast Brewing Company ranks in the top 50 for sales. At number 45 on the list, North Coast isn’t much of a threat to Boston Beer Company, the makers of Samuel Adams, or Sierra Nevada—numbers one and two on the list—but the company’s sales are still mighty impressive, especially since the brewery has to haul its beer over Mendocino County roads to reach the outside world.

Other Northern California craft brews in the top 50 include San Francisco’s Anchor Brewing Co. (#20), Petaluma’s Lagunitas Brewing Co. (#26), San Jose’s Gordon Biersch Brewing Co. (#27), Eureka’s Lost Coast Brewery (#36) and Bear Republic Brewing Co. in Cloverdale (#50).

Represent!

Meanwhile, another Mendocino County beer-maker, Mendocino Brewing Company, landed on the list of the Top 50 overall brewing companies, along with the likes of Anheuser-Busch and MillerCoors. Intriguingly, the maker of Red Tail and Eye of the Hawk doesn’t qualify as a craft brewery according to the Brewer’s Association’s definition. Perhaps that’s a post for another time.

Oh, and don’t forget that Thursday is Pint Night at North Coast’s Tap Room in Fort Bragg. Buy a beer, get a pint glass.

The inevitable has happened. Ken Allen, who founded Anderson Valley Brewing Company in 1987 and grew it into one of Northern California’s most beloved craft breweries, found a buyer for his little company that could.

The new owner, HMB Holdings LLC, is a new company founded by Trey White, a former VP at the Stamford, CT-based booze distribution business, United States Beverage.

In a AVBC press release about the sale, Allen is quoted as saying, “I have looked long and hard for the right person to whom to entrust our legacy and I could not have found a better partner in Trey White. His passion and knowledge of the craft beer industry, coupled with his respect for the brands we have developed, will make him the ideal person to take the Anderson Valley Brewery to the next level within the growing craft beer industry.”

Yet the reaction from beer blogs and Facebook fans has been swift and sorry, with online eulogies of the old AVBC popping up across the Internet. Among AVBC lovers, fear and corporate loathing ring loud and true.

In a Facebook comment, Chris Motley of Denver, CO threatened, “If you guys mess with one single molecule of the Deep Enders Dark Porter, I will lose my mind.” Bob Palin of Torrey, UT wrote, “It’s never good when the big fish eat the small fish, what a shame.” One local commenter, Lisa Manning Strom, was concerned about how AVBC’s community involvement might change, “:( I hope they continue the community fund-raising beer festival… and the dog friendly beer garden.”

All of this anti-corporate angst is only barely offset by the desire by some out-of-state aficionados to see Anderson Valley beers get broader national distribution, which is the stated reason for the sale:

“HMB will retain the current brewing and production facilities at Anderson Valley Brewery while expanding the sales and marketing capabilities.”

But locals are unmoved. “Hate to sound all doom and gloom,” writes Mike Lenihan, manager of Dick’s Place in Mendocino. “It’s just that we all fear and resist change especially when it involves something as sacred as our favorite beer. It’s yours to ruin…….Please don’t.”

The new AVBC Brewery

This just in, from the AVA’s intriguing foreign foods desk:

“Akee when boiled, drained and simmered in oil with salted dried cod with your choice of vegetables and hot peppers, becomes Jamaica’s national dish Akee and Saltfish.”

akee is also known as “brain vegetable”- the part you eat is the white pulp, from around the seeds. each piece of pulp looks like a miniature brain, and has a texture that might be called brainy… weird and tasty!

Mm...brains.

Normally, I’m not one for quaintness. And I especially bridle at the idea that the way to resurrect America’s abandoned downtowns is to rebuild them in the image of the past — as if cutesy storefronts, Victorian architectural detailing and million-dollar sidewalk widening projects can replace a local economy built on something besides retirement accounts and a historic pot bubble.

And yes, Fort Bragg Bakery is cute to the point of quaint, with food that borders on overpriced (a $10 salad that skimps on toppings and no table service?). But the Kump’s vision isn’t just to be a charming, old-fashioned bakery serving flaky pastries and overpriced lattes to out-of-towners and window shoppers. The Kumps aim to do something else. They hope to build a commercially viable wholesale bakery — to not only hock their wares from their own storefront, but to distribute bread to restaurants throughout the region. They aim to be an industry, in other words, and to produce their breads on scale.

Think of Thanksgiving Coffee or North Coast Brewery. This bakery has that kind of potential and that can only be good for Fort Bragg.

The oven is nice too.

***

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From Ireland, with love.

I spent most mornings of my childhood standing, with legs splayed like a saw horse, above an old gas floor grate furnace in my dad’s house on the Mendocino Coast. I love that heater. There was a time when nearly every pair of my shoes had grid lines melted into their souls from moments I lingered too long, hoping it would drive the fog from my bones. But this winter—the first I’ve spent in my childhood home since I left a decade ago for college and beyond—we’ve turned on the gas heater only a handful of times.

That’s because the house (which we’re watching after, while my dad and his girlfriend are off on Caribbean sailing adventures) has a life-changing new addition: a massive, cast iron Waterford Stanley wood stove. Made in Ireland, bought used from Craigslist, it’s a beautiful machine—one that’s transformed not only the way we heat this drafty old house, but the way we cook.

Each morning, we light a fire first thing, then feed it throughout the day. Because cast iron retains heat so well, a relatively small, slow burning fire keeps the kitchen and living room warm for hours. Meanwhile, we can use the stove’s range to make our morning coffee, fry grilled cheese sandwiches, simmer homemade chicken soup or anything else we cook over the course of the day. The Waterford even has an oven, which I’ll admit I find a bit finicky for cooking that requires exact and consistent heat, but which I love for roasting vegetables or warming already-baked bread.

But burning wood, like everything else we do, has environmental consequences. This recent story on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer show got me thinking about the climate impact of wood stoves. It’s a worthwhile listen for anyone who uses firewood to heat their homes or cook their food.

–

Half of the world’s population still burn wood, dung, coal, or other solid fuels for cooking, which leads to environmental and health hazards around the world. So how do you build cheap, durable, clean-burning stoves for three billion people? The New Yorker staff writer Burkhard Bilger reports on the quest for a stove that can save the world.

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Here’s a link to the original Bilger story in the New Yorker:

“Hearth Surgery,” The New Yorker, 12/21/09

This story

With swine flu fears running high—and a firm belief in the healing powers of an ancient, medicinal plant—people began hoarding. They bought large amounts when the price was low and, later, when there was a shortage, they sold old high—reaping small fortunes from the pungent root. As a result, garlic is now more valuable than gold in China.

The Spicy Hot Oil of the Gods

Sometimes I discover a new cooking technique—a little trick, long-established but new to me—and it feels like I’ve landed on a new continent, where colors are twice as brilliant and my tongue possesses double the taste buds. Earlier this fall, I had such a moment of discovery when I picked up a bottle of Hot Sesame Oil.

Freshly home from two months in Mexico, my palette had become spice-dependent. I scoured Harvest’s shelves in search of new ways to add heat to my early-fall diet of garden-grown vegetables.

I’d long used regular toasted sesame oil in cooking, but I’d never fallen in love with its effect. Roland Hot Sesame Oil was different. It was a revelation.

The first dish I made was fried tofu. Simple, healthy, but never that terrifically satisfying. Fried in hot sesame oil—with some garlic, pepper, and a few dashes of Bragg Liquid Aminos—the tofu had this amazing heat and flavor, plus a freakishly perfect, slightly chewy golden skin. It was a fundamentally different food than any tofu I’d had before, but so easy.

Then, I sautéed greens—bok choi, chard, even collard greens—in the hot oil, with similarly delicious results. I fried eggplant in it. I added it to my Thai curries. I cooked my omelette mushrooms in it before adding them to the eggs. I went crazy with the hot oil. For a period of weeks, it found its way into almost every dish I made.

But then I started to have doubts. Maybe I’d been blinded by my excitement over a fun new ingredient? Maybe it wasn’t the hot oil that made my tofu so perfect and tasty, but something else—the right temperature, the Bragg, the copious amounts of garlic or some combination thereof.

Then I found myself at Fort Bragg’s excellent new restaurant, Franklin Street Café. I’d eaten there a couple of times, and had perfectly prepared scallops and the best flank steak I’ve ever—literally, ever—had, so I knew the food was good. But on this evening I had already eaten and I was there for a bit of live music, a glass of wine and a snack. I opted for the fried tofu. It was fine—attractive wedges of crispy soy—but without being doused in sauce, it was bland. It was the fried tofu I used to make.

And for me, that was confirmation enough. I’ve gone through two bottles in the past month.

Thanksgiving Duck

Some impulse purchases are more gratifying than others.

This Thanksgiving was to be a small get-together; for our expansive family, an unusually restrained event. As such, we decided to keep our celebratory dinner to the essentials of a Northern California feast: We’d gorge on Dungeness crab, instead of a turkey. We’d throw down a few extras—a couple of vegetarian sides, a salad and some pie—and we’d call it a day.

There would be no bird. No stuffing. Just hunks of chilled crab meat, a few small bowls of butter-beer sauce and the accompanying sounds of cracking, sucking, and, yes, noshing.

Dungeness crab is one of my loves—the food I miss most when I’m far from home.Once, while Tim and I were living on student loans in a 600-square-foot New York apartment, I spent the better part of our weekly food budget on two, large crabs—frozen, overpriced and, ultimately, near flavorless—from Whole Foods Union Square. They were there, and I couldn’t resist.  I’ve never understood how our local delicacy has been so overlooked, so under-appreciated, in a lobster, King crab and jumbo prawn world loving world. But it’s Dungeness’s relative obscurity that keeps its price mostly within my humble reach, and for that I’m grateful. So crab seemed as good an idea as any for Thanksgiving dinner.

But truth be told, there was something that seemed anticlimactic about Dungeness as the center of our holiday meal. For me, hours of cooking—all of the careful negotiation of timing and counter space, of family and food in a hot kitchen—is integral to what Thanksgiving is about. It’s about working on a shared project, then sharing in the results. Serving crab meant that there would be no need for one person to stir, while another pours, no need for Tim to hold open the oven, while I slide one dish out and put another in; no need for dad to carve or for Marco to baste. It’s not that crab wouldn’t be delicious, it was just too easy.

While shopping at Fort Bragg’s Harvest Market the Monday before Thanksgiving, I stopped by the meat counter. I wanted to know how the store’s crab supply was selling—and whether I could pick ours up the night before the holiday. There was plenty, I was told. Six hundred pounds had been delivered that day. But as I walked on, past the long line of turkeys, wrapped in plastic and ready to travel, I lingered over the meat case. I found myself eyeing the brines and basters.

And then I bought a duck.

The butcher had caught me eyeing his birds and I’d asked—out of curiosity, I said—if they had anything smaller than a turkey. Did he have some other kind of game bird—something small that I could stuff and baste. Something I could fret over. Something we’d have to work at? So he handed me a duck and sent me on my way.

Then came impulse purchase, number two: The Spanek Vertical Roaster.

Triumph the Comic Duck

It was just there, on the shelf with all the turkey cooking paraphernalia. The contraption claimed to cook duck and that’s what I had. I had a duck, and I didn’t have a clue how to prepare it. The Spanek, for its part, didn’t look like much. I was skeptical of its claims, its cheesy QVC packaging and its simple wire form—like a sloping Eiffel tower.

Only when I got home, and began researching duck recipes, did I realize what I’d gotten myself into. Having never attempted water fowl before, I didn’t realize it was notoriously difficult—with thick skin and copious amounts of oily fat. But somehow, contrary to all my journalistically-imbued skepticism, the Spanek was a success.

The duck was rich and delicious, with crispy skin and herb-infused meat—and she looked triumphant standing upright on the table, surrounded by dumplings and gravy, stuffing and cranberry sauce. There was crab too, of course. It came as a pre-dessert of sorts, right between the main event and the pumpkin pie.