The Bread is Red

We’ve moved!  That is right, Red Bread now has a beautiful site all its own.  And the Cultivated Life has a prime spot to call home.

I am really thankful that I started this blog, it has turned into more than I ever dreamed.  Since launching Red Bread we have found ourselves embraced by the community.  Not only am I am able to share stories and recipes here, but I can now feed my community delicious and nutritious wholesome foods.

If you’d like to stay in touch for more recipes, garden advice, fermenting adventures, jam giveaways, new store items and classes find them from now on at:

www.thebreadisred.com

You can find blog central here and check out all our new classes over here.

I hope you will join me there.  For now I leave you with this guy whose mopey because he lost his bandana.

Red Bread

hello@thebreadisred.com

424.272.5752

 

Bedfellows and Hötka

In the heat of summer almost all our peppers are turning the most beautiful true red.  With all the other greens growing in nearby beds it looks like an early Christmas.  The peppers are part of the “Salsa Garden”, growing alongside Big Boy and Early Girl Tomatoes, a few sweet bell peppers and onions to be sown soon.

Some plants are natural bedfellows.  Their symbiotic relationships make their jobs of growing beautiful green leaves and delicious fruit easier.  Our Salsa Garden relies on these bedfellows to make our work as gardeners and cooks easier.

Wednesdays @ SMFM!

Good News Everyone!

@

Santa Monica Farmers Market

Every Wednesday

Starting October 3 2012

8:30-1:30pm

Arizona and 2nd St Downtown Santa Monica

Rain or Shine or first contact from an alien race.

 All holidays, except New Years Day and Christmas Day.

 The farmers of  California are at the heart of Red Bread.  We believe the ingredients you start with determines everything.  The farmers and organizers of the Santa Monica Markets are especially near and dear to us.  Red Bread has been making  delicious goods with the freshest produce from the Santa Monica Farmers since we opened our doors.  We couldn’t be more proud to be joining them.

In addition to many of the items from our Sunday delivery reserved through the eMarket, we are busy putting the finishing touches on some new recipes we will be unveiling as Wednesday market exclusives!

We can’t wait to see you there.

Featured Purveyor: Chivas

We are extremely excited to announce the addition of Chivas to the Red Bread eMarket’s ever-growing roster of amazing purveyors. The mother-daughter team from Fillmore, CA has provided us with goat milk soap and laundry detergent, the latter of which is made especially for Red Bread!

“Chivas” means “female goats” in Spanish and thanks to the rich milk from Donna and Lauren’s incredibly adorable French Alpine goats (say hi to Shrek above!), you too can enjoy the benefits of a goat milk-enhanced beauty routine.

The Feast Outside

This past weekend I went on a foraging hike in Hahamonga Park with Urban Outdoor Skills.  Our small group was led by the knowledgable and fearless Pascal Baudar.  Pascal has been foraging since he was a boy in Belgium and does some incredible things with wild food.  I never ceased to be amazed when every 30 feet we walked Pascal would turn around and tell us the feast we had just traversed.  Suddenly, plants started to pop out and catch your eye: passion fruit clutching a willow, wild sugar on Eucalyptus Leaves, a Fig Tree obscured by bushes, and white sage hidden in the buckwheat.  These are a few of my favorites found off the beaten path:

Western Black Nightshade

Not to be confused with the very poisonous Belladonna of Europe, our Black Nightshade can be eaten ONLY when ripe.  The berries go from green (poisonous) to deep black and have the taste of a gooseberry and a tomato mixed.   The fruit are small and many hours of foraging are required to make a meal.  It was late in the season so there were even fewer to be found.  What little I gathered of the sweet savory indulgence was eaten like a wild caviar as we headed deeper into the hike.

Featured Purveyor: Plow and Gun

We are thrilled to introduce to the Red Bread eMarket our first featured purveyor: Plow and Gun Coffee! Hand-crafted in Southern California, this seasonal single-origin coffee is roasted and prepared with a perfectionism bordering on obsession.  We’ve been hooked ever since they showed us the roasting ropes!

Plow and Gun roasts only one coffee at a time, designing the roast to bring out what’s best about that coffee. The origin will change every few months as different regions come into season.  Currently Plow and Gun is roasting Colombia Buesaco, their second offering from the Nariño region. The coffee exhibits the classic floral aromatics of great Colombian coffees, and has a distinct green-apple sweetness that melts into caramel notes as the cup cools.

Besides the coffee being amazing we are a sucker for a good story!  Plow and Gun is inspired by the 1862 invention of the same name, a combination plow and gun for the utility of the farmer under assault. As Plow and Gun explains, “it was not so much the invention itself, but the ideas behind it: that the frontier is hard work and dangerous. That unique problems require unique solutions. That with rugged tools, courage, and ingenuity, one can carve out a little place for himself.”

We couldn’t agree more.  So drink up, you have seeds to sow and fields to guard.  Get it delivered to your door this week.

July July July! Jam Giveaway!

Another great week at the Meet! We are always thrilled when we get to spend a day out in the Sun with Venice Folks and talk about good food done right.  This past weekend was no exception as we got deep into conversation with customers about food, in between bites of delicious cookies and jams of course.  Speaking of jams, once again we debuted our newest jams of the season!

Champelone

This jam calls out for a celebration. Our Champelone jam marries the sweetness of summer melons with the sparkle of our favorite drink, Champagne!  We can’t stop eating it paired with proscuitto and creamy cheeses.  Made with Sugar Cube Melons from Weiser Family Farms, Raw Cane Sugar, Meyer Lemon from Garcia’s Orchards, Champagne and apple it is hard to put down.

Vermicompost at Squiggle University and the Great Snail Wars of 2012

The first time we met the garden it was more than wild.  It remained wild until a profound thing was said to me, to be a great gardener feed your dirt.  Feed it and turn it into rich soil.  The problem with composting for many is that to generate adequate heat to transform food waste into rich organic matter more space is required than most people have.  Enter Vermicompost, which I’ve touched on very briefly before.  Vermicomposting requires very little space, is tidy enough to be done indoors if space is truly limited.

Vermicomposting is also very fast, 10 weeks, compared to regular Composting which can take 6 months or more.  Vermicomposting requires no turning, only that food be buried under soil (this keeps unwanted guests such as flies from visiting) and the worms will do the rest.  Regular composting also requires watering to the consistency of  a wrung out sponge, again not necessary for Vermicompost where the worms create their own moisture.  Make sure you situate your worms under some shade so they don’t dry out.

Red Bread and our own Test Kitchen keep our worms happy with regular food scrap feedings.  We’ve become quite fond of them and refer to their little corner of the garden as Squiggle University.  We even have a fight song.

Introducing….Another JAM Giveaway

This past weekend at the Meet the name of the game was Jam Tasting!  We had all our flavors on parade and people were more than happy to get a little sticky.  In addition to our Lemonilla Marmalade and Strawsilberry Jam that were a hit at the May Meet, we debuted three new jams!  After being wiped out of our stock at the Meet, we spent this week whipping up more small batch jams using fresh produce from our favorite farmers at the Santa Monica Farmers Market just for you!

As usual, with the debut of new jams we have a JAM GIVEAWAY.  Leave a comment about a memory involving jam and vote for one of the two new flavors below.  Sunday we will draw a winner!  Happy winning!

A Wild Harvest or Cream Flower Soda

A few months ago I caught an article about the West’s DIY Food Crafters.  Among them was a soda maker named Emily Ho who made sodas out of wild and fresh ingredients. As a likeminded soda hater but carbonation lover I had an instant hero. Life only got better when it turned out we were in the same Master Food Preserver Class (Graduates Tonight!), and just as I suspected she is awesome.  Like all great friends, she has introduced me to a new vice: Elderflower Syrup.  I have been hooked since she brought it in to share one night. I am fairly certain I was responsible for drinking half the bottle, which amounts to 5-6 glasses of a floral fizzy dream.

Unfortunately I don’t have Elderflowers in my neighborhood.  But I had something that very much looked like Elderflowers growing rampant in my neighborhood.  I asked gardening and foraging peers and no one could quiet decide.  But the honey bees seemed to love it, the scent was divine and I am a brave sort. How else will you discover things? I also had a good lead that even with toxic stems, leaves or roots, blossoms are rarely toxic hence the bee love.  In the end all I know is this little bud combined with sparkling water is the best cream soda I have ever had.  And it keeps delighting all those I bring it too.

If you decide to be similarly bold,  I encourage you to ‘gather ye flower buds while ye may’ I have already begun to see these tiny white flowers begin to wilt. Take this opportunity to have a wild harvest by following some simple guidelines: