Monday, March 26, 2007

Culinary Gifts from Indonesia

To the extent that my social identity has a lot to do with food, and given that we entertain quite a bit, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that we receive a lot of culinary gifts. To mention just a few of the gifts that I haven't already posted on, there's been wild blue berry jam from our friend Pete, sourwood honey and Jacques Torres chocolates from my colleague Mia, and more wine from more folks than I can sensibly list.

Still, I was surprised when our friend Karla came back from indonesia with the salt and vanilla pictured below. I have not tried either yet and, as always, will hope to have time to say more later.



Sunday, March 04, 2007

Wild Boar Farms Tomato Seeds Available Online

I recently received an e-mail from Brad Gates of Wild Board Farms letting me know that he'd begun selling seeds for some of his tomatoes online. You can check out his selection here. All of my favorites are available including Evan's Purple Plum, Pink Berkeley Tye Dye, and Brad's Black and Brown Boar. Direct from the fringes of heirloom tomato genetics you can also even buy seeds for Brad's Black Heart and "fuzzy" tomatoes - tomatoes with a variegated matte finish.



While these last two varieties in particular are probably unique in the world of tomatoes (I encourage you to check out the R&D thread at Tomatoville on this point), I believe the entire Wild Boar project borders on revolutionary.


Brad's raising and refining thousands of plants a year here, and has a colleague raising and refining thousands more in New Zealand. The rare combination of location(s) and skill that go into these tmatoes cannot be underestimated. I've sampled the goods of other folks offering comparable looking tomatoes, that fell plainly flat when eaten - they tasted like something I could do.

My belief that these tomatoes are a unique expression of where they are grown isn't going to keep me from raising seedlings, probably much later than someone who knew what they were doing would really advocate, and throwing them in the ground in Oakland.