The Inadvertent Gardener

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

Note: This is reblogged from BlogHer, where it appeared yesterday. But I wanted to share this with those of you who don’t read me over there.

I have spent a good portion of my life trying to balance out time for creative work and time for work that actually pays the bills, fitting in art and writing at the edges. I write stories on planes, in that window of time when people have gathered around a conference room table but a meeting has not yet started, in the mornings before work when most people I know are still asleep. I carry my camera everywhere, shoot whenever I can, and process photos late at night because there’s no other time to do it.

But every now and then, I stop and devote a luxurious amount of time to the creative, and over the weekend, I carved out a full day to take a restaurant and street food & culture photography workshop with Penny De Los Santos in San Francisco.

Penny, who blogs about food and photography at Appetite, is an award-winning photographer whose work appears in Saveur Magazine, National Geographic, Sports Illustrated, Newsweek, Time, Latina and Texas Monthly.

Penny talks about making photos in a reactionary way–finding details and stories and moments in markets and homes and restaurants all around the world. In Penny’s aesthetic, the food you see is the food you could actually eat — she might rearrange the food on the plate to make it more photogenic, but she’s not going to use many of the inedible tricks of the trade food stylists use to make food look better in a magazine.

The two-part class started in my favorite restaurant in all the world, Contigo, where we photographed food as it came out of the kitchen (and, on occasion, snuck into the kitchen itself to make a photograph or eight), and continued in the afternoon around San Francisco’s Mission District, where Penny dispatched us with assignments designed to take us out of our comfort zone and make photographs that showed the food and culture of this rich neighborhood. Whether tasked with sitting down at a table with strangers and photographing them and their meal, or shifting perspective and really showing the Mission through unexpected images, Penny pushed us to find photographs that told stories through details.

Penny started her photographic life as a documentary photographer, and though she still documents life all around the world, she most often does so through the prism of food. She said other photographer colleagues and friends sometimes ask her why she has moved to primarily food photography. “I tell them you have no idea what you’re missing,” said Penny, who explained how the stories that arise from food and community are often the most compelling.

Penny taught a similar class, minus the out-in-the-street component, in Seattle in December, and I watched many of the participants tweet about it (including the photos of the incredible images they were making throughout the day). Rebekah Denn of Eat All About It shared her thoughts on the Seattle version of the workshop on her own blog, as well as a detailed list of what she learned from the class on Al Dente.

Paula Thomas of Paula Thomas Photography, who also took the class in Seattle, wrote an interesting comparison of that workshop with one given a few months earlier by Lou Manna:

“I found myself comparing Penny to Lou a lot and found they do things almost totally opposite each other. Here are a few of the differences I noticed. Penny uses natural light, Lou likes to shoot in studios with lights. Penny hand holds her camera, Lou uses a tripod. Penny uses auto white balance, Lou uses custom white balance. Penny likes to step back and get all the food in the shot, Lou likes to get in close. Penny doesn’t alter food to make it inedible, Lou adds inedible things to food to make it look pretty. Penny and Lou are both very successful food photographers. It just goes to show you there is no one right way to do things and there are lots of different styles out there. I think it’s great to hear from two people with completely different styles, it makes you see things differently.”

Though I only took the one class, the two-part component of it gave me two different approaches to the process of making photographs. (After all, the food on the plate doesn’t talk back to you when you try to take its picture.) And the opportunity to spend an entire day thinking only about how to improve my photography and think differently about the images I make — of food, of people, of places, of objects — was invaluable.

You can see my full set of photos from the day on Flickr, and there is a Flickr pool where our class’ work is going as people post it.

Here are some more posts about street food and food photography:

• Lara Ferroni of Cook & Eat describes street food as her “favorite,” and tells the tale of a three-day run of street food eating in New York.
• Kitchen Chick took a walk through Hong Kong, trying a variety of dishes and capturing images of food purveyors at work.
• Deb of Smitten Kitchen describes her approach to food photography.

I have friends all over the place, most of whom I’ve met the old-fashioned way: in person, through some job or school or work or networking connection. But oh, how the Internet has enriched my life and brought me in touch with people who, otherwise, I might never have met.

Yeah, I’m pretty much going to count 75 percent of my friends in the Bay Area in that number, just by the way.

Let’s just take a look at The Tennessee Locavore, for example. Though we both attended BlogHer Food last year, I managed to miss her entirely during the operation, and instead we have been forced—FORCED, I SAY—to become friends via Twitter and Facebook instead.

What does this mean, you ask? This means that, on a day that was, for the most part, good, but due to a Very Strange and Disturbing Incident on the way home from San Francisco, I arrived home to a care package of local food goodness (Snickerdoodles, people, Snickerdoodles.) either baked in Kristina’s kitchen or procured in her locavore zone. Also, there was a sparkly and blinky ring, which, as a devotee of Burning Man, I promptly announced would make the 2010 trip with me to Black Rock City.

I have been working through the contents of this care package, and this week, made it to the Benton’s prosciutto, which I knew I wanted to save for something special. I cooked it up to add to a dinner of locally-made gnocchi, which seemed only appropriate considering the value Kristina puts on eating in one’s own foodshed. And it was, I must say, delicious. Even if you don’t have Benton’s prosciutto at hand, and even if you aren’t lucky enough to have a care package arrive that contains pork products, this recipe is simple and delicious, and you should make it.

And, Kristina? Though I have adored getting to know you through your words, enough already. We owe each other some in-person cocktails, and some hugs. And I promise the thank you note that I more than owe you is coming shortly.

Gnocchi with Sage and Prosciutto
(Serves 2-3, depending on how hungry you are)

2 Tbsp. butter
½ Tbsp. olive oil
8 oz. prosciutto, chopped
8 oz. sage, leaves stripped and chopped
12 oz. gnocchi

1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil and salt it.
2. Melt the butter in a sauté pan, and add the olive oil. Warm over medium-high heat.
3. Add the prosciutto and cook it until it’s crispy.
4. Add the gnocchi to the water and cook until it just starts to float at the top of the boiling water.
5. While the gnocchi is cooking, add the sage to the prosciutto and sauté until the gnocchi is ready.
6. Drain the gnocchi and toss it with the butter-sage-prosciutto mixture. Serve immediately, sprinkled, if you would like, with some grated Parmiggiano Reggiano.

“There’s a restaurant downtown I think you’d like,” said my friend Amy when I visited her in Madison, Wis. last week.

Oh my friends, how they know me. Amy was, of course, totally right, and that is how we ended up at Harvest, a small, warm space on the square that features the state capitol, for a Sunday night dinner last weekend. This farm-to-table restaurant features seasonal, regional cuisine, and apparently the Executive Chef, Derek Rowe, is all about the challenge of keeping that rolling even through the harsh Wisconsin winters. I tip my hat—that’s more of a challenge than I was willing to manage for more than three of those Midwestern winters in a row.

It turned out we’d stumbled in on a night when the restaurant was hosting a fundraising dinner—they’ve been invited to host a dinner at the James Beard Foundation on April 6 in New York City, and proceeds from last Sunday night’s feast were slated to help get the staff to the East Coast for that event.

The $25 prix fixe menu featured a salad of field greens, radish, and sunchokes with a sherry-walnut vinaigrette or a curried parsnip soup with parsnip chips; a mushroom ragu with creamy polenta and spicy spinach, a pot roast of Wisconsin grass-fed beef brisket, or an incredibly light fish and chips served with a crisp winter coleslaw of cabbage rutabaga and turnip. Dessert options included a vanilla bean panna cotta with grapefruit supremes, a date walnut cake with mascarpone ice cream, or a house-made licorice gelato with an almond biscotti.

The locavore attitude extended even to the cocktail menu, which included my choice: The Door County Cherry Drop, made from Death’s Door Vodka (made with wheat from Washington Island, Wis.), Door County Montmorency Cherry Juice and fresh lemon juice.

Harvest will host two more James Beard Foundation fundraiser dinners: one tonight from 5 p.m. until closing, and another on March 21, also from 5 p.m. until closing. If you’re in Madison or passing through, I encourage you to check it this warm, welcoming space that supports local and regional farms and producers.

One of the most gratifying things about putting out the word that a patio garden is in the offing has been the offer of seeds from friends near and a little bit far. Seed shopping? Nope. Don’t need to.

One of the offers came from a coworker, who told me she had a variety of heirloom tomato seeds and some Tokyo onions, a varietal that she described as somewhere between a green onion and a leek, and that is excellent when doused with brown sugar and soy sauce and thrown on a grill until caramelized.

“We pretty much throw them in the dirt and they grow,” she said.

“That sounds like the right kind of plant for me,” I replied. “I’m definitely in.”

A few days later, she popped her head back in the office. “I’m afraid I’ve communicated incorrectly about the seeds,” she said. “I may have been unclear.”

I assumed that she was about to tell me she didn’t really have any seeds, and that I was pretty much SOL on that front. I have one of those minds that makes up the story in absence of any sort of facts, so sure enough, I was already figuring out which one of my other friends might be able to share some of their seeds.

“I can’t give you seeds,” she said. “I’m going to have to give you seedlings. I already have them all started.”

Good people of the Internet, I cannot emphasize enough what LITTLE problem this is. Someone else will have done the work for me. For all intents and purposes, this is like going to a store and buying seedlings, except I don’t have to buy them. All I will have to do is throw them in the dirt in the wine barrels and call it done.

Of course, there is no dirt in the wine barrels yet. So, there’s that to be taken care of. Ahem.

Over the weekend, I went in a giant grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin with my friends in search of some local cheese curds. We found what we were looking for, but since it has been so long since I regularly shopped at that kind of store, the aisles and aisles of brightly-colored boxes of processed food overwhelmed me.

At the end of the weekend, on my way home from the airport, I stopped at my local Whole Foods, a behemoth of a store in itself, and certainly a bastion of its own panoply of processed foods. Let’s not kid ourselves, right?

But I was psyched to find, there in the produce section, sandwiched (oddly) between two different kinds of radishes, a pile of bunches of beautiful baby golden beets from Happy Boy Farms, a local producer that I buy from at the farmers’ market almost every week.

Sure, it was Whole Foods. And sure, it’s California. But the fact remains that, in this country, the food producers getting the tax breaks, the government support and attention, and the most shelf space in most American grocery stores are the industrial producers, not the smaller, local guys like Happy Boy.

This week, though, you have an opportunity to help change that balance. This week, Change.org is hosting a crowd-sourcing competition called 10 Ideas for Change in America, and the top 10 ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama administration. Even better, Change.org will mobilize its grassroots network to support those 10 ideas.

Among those ideas? Slow Money, a radical idea to fund real, healthy food by investing in small producers and local farmers. The return on that investment—for our environment, for our health, for our food security—is certainly more than any results I’ve seen in my 401(k) lately…

The voting on the top 10 ideas runs through Friday, and I encourage you to go over and check out the options. I’d love to see Slow Money make it into the top 10, but there are other great ideas that will improve food systems, including the American Farmland Trust’s effort to save ranch and farmland across this country, and an effort to put a garden at every school.

Don’t delay. It’ll take about five minutes of your time to promote 10 ideas you think can change the world, and maybe change what’s on the shelves at your local grocery store.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

The move to the new apartment is complete, but I’m still unpacking. Plus, it’s been raining in Northern California. Raining a lot. Except for yesterday, when, of course, I was at work, and couldn’t actually work on implementing my Grand Patio Garden Plans.

Fatemeh was at work, too, but her business operates out of the apartment, which gave her the opportunity to send me this little multimedia message. Thanks to the stupid that is my first generation iPhone and it’s inability to actually receive such messages, I got to view this on the web, which means I can also share it with you:

Yes, those are indeed empty wine barrels sitting in full sun. Which means that soon-ish, that full sun will fall on some freshly-planted soil. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am about this.

Giant. Freaking. Rabbits.

(Thanks to Deb Roby for pointing this one out to me.)

Here’s the thing about wine barrels. Even when they’re empty (and oh, how sad that they were empty…), they are quite awkward and heavy. The photo you see here may indicate that one person can hold these, and they can, but you may notice the photo is a bit more blurry than I might have liked.

“Come on, camera,” I said while I was taking it. “Focus.”

“It’s probably saying it can’t focus when the subject’s legs are shaking so badly,” Fatemeh said. The damn barrel was, after all, nearly as wide as she is tall.

She had met me at the back stairs to haul the barrels up the stairs and along the back side of our building to our patio. I told her we would have to do them one at a time.

“They’re splintery, and there’s nothing to hold on to,” I said. “In fact, I just gave myself a splinter.”

Fatemeh pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “I am deathly afraid of splinters.”

“That’s why there are two of us,” I said.

We hauled the containers up one by one, sneaking along the back side of a number of other apartments, keeping our voices to a whisper so no one would become alarmed.

After they were in place, I told Fatemeh about what I’d learned about how blueberries love the acidity. “I’m not growing blueberries,” I said. “That seems like a lot of commitment.”

And maybe it would be. But that leaves the next question to be answered. If not blueberries, then what to plant? It’s time, after all to begin planning my very first urban crop.