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From Earth to Table
Cooking class celebrates using fresh, organic foods to create delicious dishes
By Starshine Roshell, News-Press Staff Writer

Hens cluck boisterously, roosters crow and gravel crunches underfoot as 30 eager visitors make our way through the morning fog into the heart of Fairview Gardens organic farm.

There are home gardeners from Carpinteria, culinary students from Santa Barbara City College, avid cooks from Santa Ynez and gourmands from as far away as Long Beach. We have flocked to the century-old farm this cloudy Saturday morning for the first in a three-part summer cooking series with celebrity California chefs.

The 12-acre farm, perhaps best known to locals for its roadside produce stand on Fairview Avenue, is dedicated to teaching the public about sustainable agriculture and the inherent connections between food, land and community well-being.

The trio of four-hour classes, called "From the Field to the Plate," celebrates the interdependence between growing, cooking and eating fresh food. Participants get to take a tasting tour through the farm, watch guest chefs prepare mouth-watering dishes and then feast on a hilltop overlooking the farm's fertile fields and orchards.

"I've had cooking classes before, but here you get to see it come from the earth to the table," said Pasadena resident Manuel Rangel, explaining why he came such a long distance for the first class on salads and cooking greens.

Our tutor that day was Judy Rodgers, the award-winning chef and co-owner of San Francisco's trendy, Mediterranean-themed Market Street eatery, the Zuni Cafe. Dressed casually -- no starched white chef's hat or high-buttoned jacket for her -- she gave an impassioned speech about the value of knowing the agricultural lore of what we eat.

"It can be really wonderful when you're cooking to have stories to go with the food," she said. "It makes the food taste better to have a little romance with it."

s. Rodgers also lavished praised on the farm for its exceptional produce. She regularly buys bushels of the white asparagus for her restaurant, and doesn't think twice about shelling out the requisite $9.50-per-pound plus shipping.

"This is the best white asparagus in the world, there's no question," she said, adding that she likes the look of it as much as the taste. "I consider this probably the most exquisitely beautiful food on the planet. It's like Christmas ribbon candy."

She joined farm director Michael Ableman in leading us on a tour through
the farm's small but dense valley, past neat rows of red lettuce buds, bushy green apricot trees, tufts of purple statice and orange marigolds, cherimoya groves and Algerian mandarin orchards.

Mr. Ableman occasionally leaped up to pull down a branch and pluck some fruit from a mulberry tree, or slice open a raw kohlrabi for us to taste.

"Now, this is really a sublime experience," he said, passing around some tiny pink petals from the flowers of a pineapple guava bush. We were surprised and delighted by the sweet flavor, velvety texture and the way they literally melted in our mouths.

The farmer discussed planting, growing, watering and pest-control techniques while the group nibbled parsley leaves and crunched carrots we uprooted ourselves.

Along the way, Ms. Rodgers revealed her unbridled enthusiasm for farm-fresh food. Standing beside a pomegranate tree heavy with crimson flowers, she explained how she loves tossing the tangy seeds into summer salads. Strolling past a line of strung-up fava beans, she gasped with excitement when a student suggested plopping the beans on a barbecue grill. Her eyes opened wide with delight when another pupil told her about a recipe for carrot-top soup.

"I want to try that!" she said, and she may have been the only one among us.

Her culinary fervor really got cooking when the tour ended at an outdoor kitchen consisting of a stainless steel sink and stove beneath a canvas tent strung with vines. We students took our places on an amphitheater of stair-stepped hay bales and watched Ms. Rodgers embark upon her unique approach to meal-making -- one as organic and fresh as the food itself.

The menu read like a who's who of swanky summer veggies: Parsley Salad With Smoked Prosciutto and Hard-Cooked Eggs, Butter Lettuce and Beets With Egg Gribiche, Long-Cooked Kale on Toast, Green Beans With Toasted Breadcrumb Salsa and Raw White Asparagus and Arugula With Hazelnuts, Parmigiano-Reggiano and Truffle Oil.

The recipes were reprinted for us from her upcoming "The Zuni Cafe Cookbook," which will be published by Norton in September.

The chef explained every step as she lovingly crafted each dish, confessing that she rarely pays attention to recipe amounts but instead works by taste and texture.

"It's a consummate feel-as-you-go sort of thing," she said of her cooking style.

It's apparently a taste-as-you-go sort of thing, too, as Ms. Rodgers went for many a finger-dip into her bowls and pots.

"I do everything with my hands. I'm not a tool person," she said, but proved handy with a chef's knife when she used the pointed tip to casually fling a hungry bug out of a sauce-in-progress.

Any one of us observers would have given our front teeth to be that bug, as we grew hungrier and hungrier with each glug-glug-glug of her oft-used bottle of olive oil. She threw us a bone, or rather a plate of raw green beans, to munch while we waited.

"It's like eating velvet," she said of the freshly picked French filet beans. "Only about 1 percent of the green beanson this planet are good enough to eat raw, and 90 percent of those are on this farm."

We picked up useful cooking tips, such as how to dice onions without cutting off a finger, use a paper towel to sop up excess vinegar and choose the best lettuce leaves for a salad.

"I take off any leaves that are not impeccable and silky," she said, "or that I would not wear on the runway in Paris."

After dropping a few sloppy forkfuls of steaming kale onto a hunk of toasted peasant bread, she offered one final point of instruction.

"Take a steak knife and a fork, and go to heaven," she said. And so we did.

But for the chirp of some far-off birds, the farm fell silent as the now inspired but ravenous group of students inhaled our exquisite meal. It would have been easy to imagine we were in a five-star dining room rather than huddled under a blooming jacaranda in Goleta, but as we deliriously scraped the last morsels from our plates, an announcement was made that assured us we were still on a farm.

Four baby goats had been born during the class.

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© The Santa Barbara News-Press, June 6, 2002.
Reprinted with permission.

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