Kitchen Note

Cooking is an Act of Kindness A Teacher’s Story By Laura E. Miller The best cookbooks and recipes are messy: food-stained, dog-eared, drawn-on, and annotated. Cooks write all sorts of things on their recipes, like what substitutes they used when they didn’t have an ingredient, who they fed and when, what other dishes they served on the…

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SolidariTEA Partners with Local Nonprofits

A Potent Brew At SolidariTEA, social justice is part of the business plan By Rachel Trachten For iced-tea entrepreneurs Caroline Sandifer and Trey Jalbert, business success goes hand-in-hand with generosity. As they manage the day-to-day tasks for their company, SolidariTEA, the duo have been steadily donating a portion of their time and earnings to two…

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About Our Cover Artist

Once again we have the privilege of showcasing the breathtaking work of Oakland watercolor artist Wendy Yoshimura on the cover of Edible East Bay. At left are her past covers. Read more details about Wendy’s life and development as an artist in our Winter 2013 issue: She was born in the World War II Manzanar…

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Gardeners’ Resources

Summer 2018 Gardener’s Notebook Crop-Swaps Share your garden’s bounty and come home with someone else’s at these free weekly crop swaps. Some swaps encourage trading gardening tools and materials, recipes, baked goods, and tips on getting more involved in your community. Arrive on time for the best selection. Meet your neighbors and be part of…

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A Community of Peach Pickers

The Peachy Time of Year Philip Gelb never really stops thinking about the Masumoto Family Farm peaches, even in the dead of winter. The only difference at the peachy time of year is that he has boxes full of these exquisite fruits stacked up in his West Oakland catering kitchen, where he devises recipes for…

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Neighborhood Gardening

Grow Your Garden into a Local Food Network By Joshua Burman Thayer | Illustrations by Cheryl Angelina Koehler Small is beautiful. Henry David Thoreau’s most famous foray into agricultural writing arose out of observing a patch of beans he had seeded outside his cabin at Walden Pond. That simple act in the 19th century is…

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Allison Arevalo’s Pasta Friday

‘It’s Pasta Friday, it’s Pasta Friday!’   By Allison Arevalo | Photos by Denise Woodward It’s also 7am But my boys don’t look at the clock. They jump on the bed, rousing me and Alejandro in the not-so-gentle way of three- and five-year-old boys. Friday is their favorite day of the week. They know tonight…

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Source Guide Summer 2018

Arts, Education & Entertainment BAUMAN COLLEGE  Nutrition Consultant and Natural Chef training programs encompass the revolutionary ideas and scientific approach to nutrition. baumancollege.org EAST BAY WALDORF SCHOOL  Where Children Thrive. Located 20 minutes from Berkeley at 3800 Clark Rd, El Sobrante. eastbaywaldorf.org KOSA ARTS  Artisinal fashion supporting high-level craftsmanship, creative process, sustainable material, and meaningful livelihood. 386…

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Got A2 Milk?

  A Northern California farm family brings nutrient-dense dairy products to the East Bay By Colleen Riordan What’s new in dairy? High-tech apps, perhaps? Maybe not so much. Trending terms in the lexicon of dairy innovation are more along the lines of “sustainable nutrition” and “holistic landscape ecology.” These developments actually began a quarter century…

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What’s in Season?

  Produce harvested at its peak is your sure bet for flavor and freshness. By Barbara Kobsar | Illustration by Charmaine Koehler-Lodge May It’s caneberry season, and if you love those delicious blackberry hybrids—like Boysenberries, olallieberries, and Loganberries—you’ll want to head out to the farmers’ markets or Brentwood u-pick farms right now to get some.…

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Food-saving Tips from StopWaste

It’s Summer Salad Season Keep Your Lettuce Crisp and Delicious What’s better on a warm summer day than a big bowl of crunchy, fresh salad? This time of year, Bay Area farmers’ markets are brimming with many varieties of lettuce, much of it grown in nearby Salinas Valley, dubbed “America’s Salad Bowl” for obvious reasons.…

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The Cost of Progress

What Should a Tomato Cost? A farmer’s essay on the real price of modern farm technology By Mike Madison Take the example of processing tomatoes, an important crop in our area. The farmer prepares the soil, plants the crop, irrigates it, fertilizes it, protects it from pests and diseases, manages the weeds, harvests it, and…

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Hanif Sadr

From the Oilfields to the Kitchen Mechanical Engineer’s Detour Leads to New Life in Food Hanif Sadr, Golestan’s after-school cooking teacher, grew up in Tehran and spent summers on his grandparents’ farm in Northern Iran, where he developed a lifelong love of exploring nature. After earning a college degree in materials science in Iran, he…

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Contents Summer 2018

   RECIPES Barbara Kobsar’s Fresh Fig Salsa Romney Steele’s Tomato and Peach Salad Eric Tucker’s Grilled Peach and Quinoa Dolmas Philip Gelb’s Polenta Peach Cake and Peach-Pecan Ice Cream Hanif Sadr’s Kuku Sabzi (Persian Herb Frittata) SolidariTEA’s Cinnamon Peach Toaster Pastries SolidariTEA’s Hunter’s Moon cocktail More Cocktail recipes using SolidariTEA Allison Arevalo’s Dad’s Cannolicchi with…

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Bite by Bite

With a memorable tasting menu, Sabio turns Pleasanton into a dining destination By Alix Wall Four small bites come out on a wooden plate that looks like it was cut straight from a tree: a deviled egg with a bit of Dungeness crab, paddlefish caviar, and a sprinkling of chives mounded atop the yolk; a…

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Tucker’s Lives On

A Sweet Deal Local Alameda Family Purchases Beloved Dessert Shop Photos and story by Sam Tillis Here’s the scoop on the new owners of Tucker’s Super Creamed Ice Cream in Alameda: They’re two families, both longtime Alameda residents and experienced business owners, and, of course, they love ice cream. The fairy tale–like story of how…

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Bubble Tea

BOBA BY THE BAY: A Brief Guide to Bubble Tea When Edible East Bay’s teenage intern Kiani Laigo told us of her bubble tea obsession—like, with an “it changed my life” kind of enthusiasm—we had to admit to our huge dearth of knowledge on the beverage sensation also known as boba tea. We asked her…

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Editor’s Mixing Bowl

“I hope this isn’t going to be gloomy,” my friend Mary Tilson grumbles jokingly one rainy evening in early April as I drag her off to a showing of Demain (Tomorrow), a documentary in which French filmmakers Cyril Dion and Mélanie Laurent visit 10 different countries to look in on projects offering real-time solutions to…

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Bonding in the Backyard

New date: Sunday June 10 Last year, Jacqueline Kelly decided to turn her West Oakland backyard into a space for community building. She started hosting dinner parties so that friends, family, neighbors, and strangers could come together and fundraise for local nonprofits. For each cookout, Kelly and her team select an organization they admire, one…

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Our Community on Instagram

“Community” can mean so many things. We went wide with our interpretation for this gallery to showcase inspiring efforts toward building healthy ties within our families, neighborhoods, businesses, and ecosystems. Follow us @edibleeastbay!

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A Kitchen at the Heart of a School

Golestan kids learn about the world through food By Anna Mindess | Illustrations by Margo Rivera-Weiss Mounds of fragrant green parsley, cilantro, dill, and chives sit atop ten colorful placemats in front of ten children. The six-to-12 year olds chop the herbs just like professional chefs do—their fingers holding the herbs are carefully tucked back…

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