2012 Food Trends: What’s hot?
LOCALLY GROWN MEATS, fruit and produce, gluten-free food and signature sandwiches will be among the hot trends this year, according to “What’s Hot,” the National Restaurant Assn. survey of 1,800 chefs. “Local sourcing—from meat and fish, to produce, to wine and beer—is a big trend,” says Joy Dubost of the Restaurant Assn. Other trends are [...]
Soups & Stews: Where to find comfort by the spoonful
Soups & Stews: Where to find comfort by the spoonful in the foothills and Sierra:
Gumbo
Not the traditional roux thickened gumbo. It is a hearty soup topped with gingered greens and served with cornbread. Changes daily. Ike’s has been “keeping it Creole” for a decade.
Ike’s Quarter Cafe
401 Commercial St., NC, 265-6138
IkesQuarterCafe.com
Chicken Tortilla Soup
Fresh [...]
Fresh, local feasts for the holidays
In the foothills, the possibilities abound for preparing a fresh, local feast for Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah or New Year’s. Here are some suggestions for finding the ingredients and preparing it:
Farmers Markets
“They’re only for summer,” you might think. Not so. The Foothill Farmers Market in Auburn is open year-round on Saturdays, 8 a.m.-noon at the [...]
Best Burgers in the Foothills and Truckee/Tahoe
THE BURGER IS AN AMERICAN CLASSIC, just like mom and apple pie. Each year, Americans chow down 40 billion of them. Now the scrawny patty that gave rise to the $130 billion-a-year fast food industry is being reinvented as a gourmet entree.
More burgers are being made with organic and local ingredients: grass-fed beef, homemade [...]
BriarPatch’s Fresh Food Teams and Veggies in a Box
FRESH FOOD IS BOOMING IN OUR region. Another organic market just opened, New Earth in Yuba City. Auburn’s Foothill Farmers Market is open year-round. Four Frog Farm in Penn Valley now offers community supported agriculture all year long.
As demand for local food rises, more farmers are selling their products directly to the public, according to [...]
Fresh, local feasts
Historians aren’t sure what topped the table for the Pilgrim’s first Thanksgiving. But they suspect lobster, venison and partridge were on the menu — and not ham, pumpkin pie or mashed potatoes.
The Pilgrims were the original “locavores” and now, after decades of factory farming and processed foods, many people have come full circle. They desire [...]
Eat like Lance at Amgen bike race in May
You might not be riding in the Amgen Tour of California bike race when it rolls through the Foothills, but you still can eat like a champion bicycle racer.
Endurance cyclists get their energy from healthy eating: grains, legumes, fresh fruits and vegetables, fish and meat — but not too much. They eat plenty of carbohydrate-rich [...]
NEW: A picnic with Jim Gates of Nevada County Free Range Beef
Jim Gates, owner of Nevada County Free Range Beef, invited us to his annual picnic and barbeque — a family gathering that has grown to friends and family.
Jim is a longtime rancher here, whose grass-fed beef business has grown to 120 Shorthorn, Red Angus and other cows grazing on separate parcels comprising 2,240 acres near [...]
BriarPatch and Cal Organics also for meat eaters
We’re big fans of fresh local food. We eat lots of fruit and veggies, but we also eat beef.
We like to go to the BriarPatch for “green” food but also for meat and poultry. The same goes for California Organics, which touts the nation’s only 100 percent organic meat counter, where we go to the [...]
The Official Online Guide to Nevada County