Oakland Bites
The 11th annual Eat Real Festival at Jack London Square this weekend drew in thousands of people with an appetite. Food trucks, environmental advocacy booths, and stalls serving locally-sourced food and drink fed a steady crowd hungry for new flavors. Eat Real is a food festival where lines become masses, and sensory overload is, above all, driven by the nose—between the yeasty pungency of beer, smoky slow-cooked southern-style barbeque, and the thickness of frying oil. Among the dozens of vendors…
Hey all, Casey Miner here guest-blogging for Oakland Bites. Elise asked me to write about my experiences with urban farming in Oakland, which is one of my favorite topics, so.
On Friday, I headed to Palo Alto to meet up with Charlie Ayers, restaurateur and former head chef at Google, for a story I was working on. I ended up sticking around for breakfast at his newly open Calafia Cafe and Market-a-Go-Go, and it was a good move. With a motto of “slow food fast” and a menu stocked with comfort foods, there are plenty of options, even for the committed vegetarian. My smoked salmon scramble with hash browns and…
I spent this afternoon in Mountain View Cemetery working on a project with a classmate, and it was breathtaking. It may seem a little weird to think about a leisurely stroll through a cemetery, but this one–designed by none other than Frederick Law Olmstead–is like nothing I’ve ever seen, and there are people biking, strolling, dog-walking and even having picnics all over the place. Now a cemetery would not necessarily be my first idea for a picnic spot, but it…
Over the weekend, I headed home to celebrate Easter with the fam over the mother of all brunches. While this one was crazy and chaotic–63 people, one life-sized rabbit–it got me thinking that for all the time I’ve spent in the East Bay, I think I’ve only been to brunch twice, and I haven’t yet found a regular spot. I’m a big fan of the neighborhood-y Fat Apples in North Berkeley and the hippy dippy All You Knead on Haight…
That’s the tag line for Three Twins organic ice cream, and it pretty much hits the mark. With flavors like Madagascar Vanilla, Strawberry Je Ne Sais Quoi (the quoi being a splash of balsamic vinegar) and Peanut Butter Cookie Confetti Crunch, each taste is a bit of an adventure and even classic flavors like Mint Confetti (your typical mint chip) taste way better than their grocery store counterparts. Yesterday at the Berkeley Farmers’ Market, the parents of two of the…
While I do care about what I eat, I’m no stranger to the cheeseburger. Or french fries, or cookies or a million other things that are bad for me. I mean, I’m not eating Twinkies for breakfast or anything (I’ve actually never had one), but I’m not averse to a little junk food in my diet. Which is why I was so surprised at my reaction to thisiswhyyourefat.com. A friend of mine had it as her away message, and as…
I was really, really excited for a box of produce to start showing up at my door every week, particularly after the vortex of grad school kept me from going to the grocery store for two weeks. (I know. Gross.) After looking into some great suggestions from commenters Art and Raphael, I was ready to go. But after trying to fill out two, count ’em two, order forms at two CSAs, I found out that I am not the only…
Please forgive yet another news blog/article/tidbit about how ____ is doing in the current economy by reading to the bottom of this paragraph. It’s all I read about too, but while traveling this past week, I’ve been involved in debates with friends about the slow food movement in San Francisco, New York and DC. Between the recent Times article on the food revolution’s day in the sun (please see White House Victory Garden, etc), and Alice Waters’s appearance on 60…