By Kimberley Burch, Sunset imaging specialist

As you may remember, Betty (our second hive) swarmed in March and we named her replacement Midge.

Well, Midge didn’t live long. We are pretty sure that about six weeks ago we killed Midge. Oops. It was a hard day at the hives.

How do we know? About 4 weeks ago (2 weeks after Midge’s estimated demise) we did a full inspection of both brood boxes. We found no brood and several capped queen cells at the bottom and top of the frames. And Midge was nowhere to be found.

The girls were also pretty dang feisty—stinging over 20 times. In fact, they got me twice when I wasn’t even in the hives. I was taking notes a few feet away. Sign of no queen, no?

We left the hive alone for four weeks, giving the new queen time to emerge, mate, and settle in. We inspected again today, intending to just make sure there is young larvae and signs of a queen, and found the distressing signs of a queenless hive:

The queen cells we found four weeks ago gone or ripped open.

Several half-developed queen cells with more than one egg in them.

We also found the following problems:

Varroa mites (duh)
Small Hive Beetles

Wax moth larvae and damage

Now we wonder what to do about this hive, formerly-known-as-Midge-formerly-known-as-Betty?  I’m guessing we should split Veronica, but how?  And can we still use the existing boxes that have chalkbrood in them?  What do we do with the bees still living, though probably demoralized, in the hive?  Wait until they die off? Since it seems we have a laying worker, given all the drone brood, would they reject a new queen if we could find one for them? Or would the laying worker kill any queen the bees tried to make (assuming they'd make one with eggs from Veronica)? We are pretty sure the hive is demoralized since the full inspection did not elicit one sting and we did not need to use smoke. But we understand. We would be too with all those problems!

Some good news
On the other hand, on Tuesday we inspected hive Veronica (still our original queen from Randy) and were surprised with a full super of honey (which we excitedly harvested) and the hive boiling over with bees.  We cut out the drone frame and pulled a few frames to find lots of honey in the brood box where it’s supposed to be and the middle frames filled with brood.  Good job, Veronica.  (You may remember that we found Veronica with NO brood whatsoever in the beginning of June, but practically every cell filled with honey. We pulled several frames, put in empty ones, plus one frame of brood from Then-Midge, and seemed to have successfully prevented a swarm and brought the hive back to boiling over.)

We hope to use Veronica’s strength to help formerly-known-as-Midge get back to a queenright, functional hive. We could sure use some good wishes from you, readers.  And some luck!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Even though I knew that going to see the movie Food Inc. would not be mind-changing for me--I mean, talk about preaching to the converted!--it's so worth seeing, even if you've been a Michael Pollan fan for the past 10 years and can recite passages from Fast Food Nation. My top reasons:

* It communicates the difference between mindless slaughter and careful harvest of food animals. And it does so without making you want to run out of the theater clutching your stomach. In fact, the industrial feedlot scenes are the least gory.The bloodiest scene (and it's not that bloody) takes place in the most humane setting: a great farm, run with respect for animals—Polyface Farm, in Virginia. 

* It makes the best case for avoiding GMO crops (like most of the large-scale corn and soybeans grown in this country). Not necessarily because they're intrinsically harmful to the human body, but because the seeds are patented by enormous corporations—and are considered intellectual property. If farmers harvest seeds from their new crop for replanting the following year, as they've done for centuries, they violate intellectual property law. So they're forced to buy all new seed from the company. This is like having to pay for rain, or sun. 

* It tells the story, compellingly, of ethical farmers who challenge giant corporations and get squashed--easily, because our laws totally support the corporations. These are very courageous people who lose everything for the sake of doing what's right, and were it not for this movie, would probably have gone on living in obscurity: the poultry farmer, a haggard woman with a vestige of beauty, refusing to enclose her grown-for-Purdue chickens (already dying by the dozen) in lightless sheds; the seed-cleaner, a man forced to give up to Monsanto the names of his customers—for whom he'd clean seeds so they could be planted in the spring. Doubtless there are hundreds more like them, unseen, unheard, and heroic. (FYI, filmmaker Robert Kenner told NPR's On the Media that his legal fees for Food Inc. were more than those for his past 15 films combined. And remember Oprah's legal struggle over her on-air hamburger-disparaging comment?

* It points out how easily our food supply can be contaminated when it's run like a giant machine. One example: Industrially raised cows, fed grain (largely corn) instead of the grass they're actually built to digest, have developed a whole new (and especially virulent) form of E. coli bacteria in their intestines called E. coli 0157. This strain is the one that's been causing so many of the foodborne illnesses in the past few years: hamburger (several times), spinach, even frickin' cookie dough. 

* One good way to fight food inc.? The One-Block Diet! Seriously, any form of local eating—whether you're raising crops yourself or supporting your area's farmers--will be better for your body and your community; and it will nearly always be fresher and taste better. For more ways to take action, see these 10 tips from the moviemakers themselves.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

My sweet gardeners, please help.

Problem #1 - Radicchio
This is what I planted:

See the nice red leaves? The thick white veins?
This is what mine looks like:

Where are the nice red leaves? Where are the thick white veins?
There is a hint of possible reddening:

 

Can I really expect the entire plant to change color so drastically so as to resemble the seed packet by harvest time? That seems unbelievable!

Problem #2 - Floppy quinoa

Believe it or not, "floppy quinoa" doesn't garner very helpful advice on a google search. Thus, I turn to you. My quinoa is beautiful. It looks like the seeds are finally starting to form:

It's also starting to flop over:

It's especially severe in the center of the bed. It looks like a giant took a step in the middle of the bed. I've got no problem staking -- it's just that I wasn't expecting to have to do so, and want to make sure that everything is copacetic with my quinoa. Thoughts?

by Brianne McElhiney, Sunset Editorial Assistant to the editor-in-chief

In hopes of some insight to making the intoxicating draught for our One-Block Diet, Margaret, Kimberley, and I paid a visit to the Rabbit's Foot Meadery on a quest to learn more about honey wine.

Since the meadery is located in a business park in Sunnyvale, California, we expected to visit only the production site of Rabbit's Foot mead.  Instead, we were greeted by customers pouring out the door, mugs in hand, due to lack of space inside the bar.  Yes, a bar in an industrial business park.  I must admit, I like their style.  Is this Silicon Valley's secret weeknight hotspot?

Michael and Maria Faul started the meadery about 15 years ago when they began experimenting with mead in their garage and giving it to friends.  Before they knew it, the couple was making 200 gallons a year and their friends were still drinking for free.  Do you see anything wrong with that picture?  Michael and Maria did too and the sale of mead began.  Not only has Rabbit's Foot won many awards since, but their meads are now sold at dozens of grocers and served at many restaurants, including The French Laundry in Yountville, California.

After a tour of the meadery, led by Mark, a close friend of Michael’s, we headed to the bar to taste some of their meads.  Rabbit’s Foot makes five different meads and a variety of honey beers, ciders, and braggot.  Sadly, we were only there for the meads, but another trip for the beers is certainly in order. 

First we sampled their Dry Mead.  When most people think of mead (if they think of it at all), they think of it as syrupy and overly sweet, but this was quite the contrary.  The fragrance was reminiscent of floral bourbon and the taste was dry, buttery, and delicious.  We moved onto the Sweet Mead, which was perfectly delightful in its simplicity.  Water, honey, and yeast.  That’s it.  No spices or juices added to it, just the luscious flavor of the honey shining through.  This was exactly the type of recipe we were looking for.  

After Margaret, Kimberley, and I mulled the idea over a few more glasses of Apple Cyser, Raspberry Mead, and Melia (pure orange blossom honey mead, which rang true to the title of “Nectar of the Gods”), we made a very important decision for the One-Block Diet.

With this post, I would like to formally announce the founding of Team Mead in co-op with Team Bee. 

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

Oakland is where it's at: Apparently our peeps in Oakland (just across the bay from us here in Menlo Park) have got the urban homesteading thing down. The New York Times says so. And we quote: In Oakland, where backyard menageries and D.I.Y. charcuterie are the new garage band, the term “urban homesteading” doesn’t need an explanation. “It fits into the Oakland sort of self-defined vibe or aesthetic of doing things from scratch and being kind of hard-core,” she said, tugging at the false eyelashes she hadn’t had a chance to remove since judging “Iron Chef” in Los Angeles the night before.

Of course, we knew that, what with Oakland being the home of one of One-Block's favorite urban homesteaders, Novella Carpenter, author of the excellent new book Farm City.

Paging the James Beard Foundation: Props to the vegan blogger Quarrygirl, who launched a serious investigation of whether so-called vegan restaurants in Los Angeles were actually, you know, vegan. (Spoiler alert: They're not all vegan!) Part of our mission here at the One-Block feast is to know where your food comes from, and I've never read anything quite so precise about this issue.

Delicious pests: Yeah, we ate some snails from the Sunset test garden. In that vein, I was charmed by this post from commenter Chile Chews's blog about pests and how to eat them. I'll never think of pigeons in quite the same way.

Wild-collected cuppa: Over at the Daily Kos, their foraging series continues, this time with a search for foraged herbal teas. The writer of this series lives in New York City, so it's not exactly Western, but I'm enjoying the way I look at the world after I think about perhaps brewing up a cup of warm pine tea. (Hint: I'm not actually going to do that. I just like to think about it.)

A contrarian view of edible gardening: I cannot lie to you: I love Roy Blount Jr., and I am intrigued by the magazine called (not making this up) Garden & Gun. So when I read this article in the July issue in defense of the lawn, I have to say  I enjoyed it: You’re supposed to eat your yard now. That’s the new thing: “the edible landscape.” Plant broccoli instead of a lush green lawn that sucks up incalculable scarce water and expensive time—for what? ... I would follow Michelle Obama anywhere. If she’s out there on the White House lawn ripping up zoysia and planting root vegetables, I’ll get with the program. My green-thumb wife and I have already devoted a good third of our yard to vegetables (and flowers, trees, bushes, rock cairns, a concrete frog, and a bottle tree). I wouldn’t be surprised to find that we have put in a crop of soybeans on the roof.

I've still got my eye on the rest of my lawn, though. Sooner or later, I'll plant it all with lettuces and peas and tomatoes and crisp, bitter endives and glorious herbs ...

by Rick La Frentz, Sunset beerless leader

While team beer contemplates what style of brew to produce for the next One Block Feast, we are anxiously following the development of our hops that we planted last year. As we expected, the first year we achieved very little hop production but an abundance of plant growth. This year is quite a different story. There are plenty of hop flowers developing on the vines, so many in fact that we may have to get inventive with the left over bounty. We are currently growing 2 varieties of hops, 'Nugget' and 'Centennial'. Both are excellent choices for our climate. 

It was the Romans who first used hops but it was as a food source. Apparently they used the new tender shoots and leaves in salads. On their conquest to the north they introduced hops to England, and in the mid-fourteenth century there was mention of hops being used in beer. Hops were introduced to the United States from England in 1629. Prior to that, in place of hops, beer was made with herbs and spices producing a drink called gruit. If you think some of the beers on the market today are bad, you can imagine what this stuff must have tasted like. Whoever introduced hops to beer for the first time found that there were a preserving quality to the addition. Prior to that the gruit didn't have much of a shelf life and would readily spoil. good example of hops used as a preservative is the India Pale Ale. When the British shipped beer to the colonists in India, they would add extra hops to the casks of beer to preserve the flavor for the long journey. The beer would achieve an extra hop aroma and bitterness but would not spoil, thus the origin of today’s IPAs.

Fibers from the hop vines were used as a flax substitute and also used to make baskets. The young shoots can be eaten as a boiled vegetable. The spent hops used in the brewing process are used as a food source for sheep, and then there is the insomniac's dream: the hop pillow.

Of our two hop plants, the 'Nugget' is performing best. After doing some research on how to manage our plants when the rhizomes started to produce shoots or bines, I decided to remove all but five of the shoots from our 'Centennial' hop plant, of which there were many. Apparently this is supposed to eliminate a lot of unwanted growth and make it easier to harvest our bounty. Also, the source said to remove the bottom leaves off of the stems a couple of feet above the ground to help prevent the spread of disease like downy mildew and insect pests. Well, as the photograph shows, something went terribly wrong because we lost most of the plant to some sort of die back; perhaps verticillium wilt. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. The 'Nugget', which we didn’t tinker with, is thriving beautifully and will be the hop used in our next beer.

When we planted our hop rhizomes there was a wire grid attached to the fence behind our planting area which provided us with a structure for the plants to climb up. On each end of the grid we attached a round wooden pole that extended about 7 feet higher then the fence. We secured several eye screws to the poles at 1-foot intervals and ran wire from one post to the other. This gave us plenty of room for the hops to grow upward. Hop vines climb in a clockwise manner and can grow as high as 40 feet. “Feed me Seymour”.

The vast majority of hops on the market today are grown in the Yakima Valley in Washington State and the production of beer uses 98 percent of the world’s hops. Hops are added to beer to achieve flavor, aroma, to help with the preservation of the beer and to add a balance to the malt flavor. Some of the flavors and aromas that are expressed by hops are flowery, spicy, grapefruit, citrus, pungent and woody. When making our beer we prefer to add whole hops to our boil so that when they move through the wort the bracts that make up the hop flower will pick up proteins that may cloud our final product plus whole hop flowers are easier to remove through filtering.

Hops are measured in bittering units called Alpha Acid. Though all hops have a distinct flavor and aroma they all contain a product called lupulin that basically are very small yellow balls of resin located at the base of hop flower bracts. The alpha acids in the resin contribute to the bitterness of beer. The lupulins vary in color from a pale to a deep yellow. Nuggets tend to have alpha acids in the 10 to 14 % range, which is on the high, bitter end. They will provide a spicy herbal quality to beer.

Lupulins

Hops in wort

As with anything there is a great deal of chemistry involved in the breakdown of hops in the brewing process. Hops create a sedative value, humulone and lupulone (chemicals found in hops) have anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties and help to preserve beer. They are also said to produce a calming effect. Heck, I always thought it was the alcohol.

If you are interested in trying to grow your own hops you can purchase the rhizomes (roots) in the spring. Pay a visit to your local brewing supply store and they can set you up, but you might find more variety shopping online. Perhaps you might know someone who is presently growing hops who would give you a root cutting in the dormant season. Hops rhizomes should be thinned annually to avoid excess plant growth the following year.

By Lindsey Hoshaw, Sunset intern 

I’m no stranger to Africanized honeybees.A few years ago my dad was attacked in Tucson while watering the plants in our backyard. Even after he frantically ran inside, more than thirty bees followed him, and my entire family had to swat for nearly ten minutes to get rid of them. He was stung more than thirty times. 

The year before an inspector told us they were Africanized bees, but we’d never had a problem until that day.

Most people know Africanized bees as killer bees, a term UC Davis entomologist Eric Mussen says is misleading. “They were called assassin bees in Brazil because the bees go into European honeybee colonies and wipe out the other bees, not because they kill humans.” They do pose a more serious threat than European bees though. While you might receive up to 200 stings from a honeybee attack you could receive up to 2,000 from Africanized honeybees, something virtually no one can withstand. Genetically, AHB are more aggressive in guarding the hive—they’ll follow you for up to 30 minutes and thus you’re more likely to be stung.

In the past ten years, AHB have gradually been moving north; so far they’ve been located as far north as central Nevada. But Mussen says that trend is slowing and that no new migration has been recorded in recent months. “It appears as though the Northwest expansion has slowed down to a trickle, if not stopped,” Mussen said. “We were predicting they’d be in the Bay Area by now, but for some reason they didn’t make it.” There’s enough pollen and NorCal has the right climate, so entomologists don’t really know why the bees aren’t migrating.

The good news is, beekeepers have learned how to mitigate aggressive AHB colonies by introducing European honeybee queens, which then cross-breed and produce gentler offspring. If only I’d had beekeeping skills back then and could have re-queened the hive outside our house. Ok, you’re right, I probably wouldn’t have had the gusto to suit up and try to reengineer an entire hive. That’s something I’d happily leave up to a professional!

In the end, my dad was fine and never had to go to the hospital. But he’s jumpy around bees now and even the sound of a fly makes the hairs on his arms stand up. It’s too bad he never got the chance to meet Sunset’s bees. Even though they have their feisty moments, they’ve completely won me over.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

If there was ever a moment of ill-preparedness, this was it. 

Johanna Silver, test garden coordinator-extraordinaire, told me that I needed to cook the escargots TODAY, because they were on the verge of kicking the snail bucket, so to speak. 

The timing couldn’t have been worse. I was up to my elbows in recipe testing for the magazine and I couldn’t possibly cook them. I hadn’t had time to research the books. I didn’t even know if we had parsley. 

But I had no choice. We had been torturing and fattening these little guys for days now, and it was only respectful that we follow through with the project as intended. The alternative would be wasteful, not to mention downright cruel. 

I did the quick Internet search and found a few recipes that, as I had hoped, called for butter, garlic, and parsley. But they mentioned packing the shells and then putting the snails back into them. Huh? How was I suppose to get them out, let alone back in? Why didn’t it mention how long to cook them? 

Never mind, I thought to myself. It can’t be rocket science. I’m an accomplished cook, and I just don’t have any other options.

I melted about 4 tbsp. of unsalted butter in a large skillet and then tossed in our snails and a minced garlic clove. I cooked them for about 3 minutes, stirring occasionally, then finished with chopped fresh parsley and a sprinkle of kosher salt. Voilà.

We called in the official tasters (whoever was willing and interested).

Due to our professionalism and total respect for our food editor, Margo True, we waited for her to have the first taste. (Okay, so we were all too scared to take the first bite and made her do it, but hey, what do you expect? We may be adventurous, but we’re not completely nuts, as evidenced by Elizabeth’s doubtful expression.) Margo popped the end of her toothpick into her mouth, gave a few chews and then proclaimed with a wrinkled nose: “It’s kinda...mucusy." 

EEEWWWW! I decided that these were not an item that should be served medium rare. Back into the pan they went for a thorough cooking over high heat. About 10 minutes later, now with the butter and herbs both very brown, we gave it another go. 

“Oh, that’s much better,” said Ms. True. Then Elizabeth and Johanna had a taste. Not bad. Kind of chewy, but not tough. Overall, not disgusting and definitely resembling the stuff you get for $24 at a fancy French place in the city. My taste was fine, but I knew I could do much better than this on the execution.

Next: cooking escargot part deux. Just as soon as I locate our copy of Escoffier.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Two summers ago, when we started this one-block diet, I dreamed of growing something I'd had from a street vendor in Turkey: fresh chickpeas. He sold them off the back of a little wagon, a huge bundle festooned with pods. I sat and popped them open, one by one, gobbling the sweet, almost peanut-like morsels inside.

So we tried. Dismal failure. 

And then this summer, we tried again. Success! Why? Because this time, we planted them in spring, before scorching weather set in. 

Team Kitchen harvested a few and tried them (that's Stephanie Dean, our test kitchen coordinator on the left, and Amy Machnak, our recipe editor, on the right). 

We didn't have many, but they tasted nearly as sweet and fresh as I remembered. 

However, I don't remember them looking like tiny green brains (see below). Maybe I'd been eating them too fast.

If you're curious and would like to try these little nuggets, look for them at Mexican and Indian markets starting in early summer. Or grow them yourself! As long as you plant them early, they're really not so hard to get going.

By Johanna Silver, Sunset test garden coordinator

Cipollini onions are on the menu for the fall feast. We ordered plants from Territorial Seed Company last April, and they arrived as baby plants. They were maybe three inches long, rubber-banded together and packed in a box.

I'm horrified to admit this, but I stashed them in the tool shed and accidentally forgot about them in the midst of all the Celebration Weekend prepations.

I uncovered them two weeks ago, shriveled and dry, still rubber-banded in that little box. There was just a bit of green in some of the stalks, so I figured I would put them in soil, give them some love, and see if they would possibly come back to life.

Here's how they look now:

I'm totally shocked that they survived after a two month stint in the shed! I'm going to plop them into the soil and see if they'll continue to behave and bulb up properly.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset recipe editor

I feel confident that I can cook anything. And when given the opportunity to cook something new or unusal, the result falls somewhere between fair and outstanding.

An elk my Dad shot and then butchered in the garage? Check.

Morning glory leaves from a street market in Vietnam? check, check.

Wedding cake for 500 people that looks like it’s destined for the Mad Hatter’s tea party? No problem.

But when our resident test garden gal, Johanna Silver, asked me to cook a few snails that she pulled out of our garden, I became a little...well, intimidated.

I’ve eaten escargot plenty of times. After foie gras and sweet breads, it’s generally a sure thing order for me when I see it on menu. But I’ve never actually cooked it. At least not the fresh ones, still alive and sitting in a tray in our kitchen, living on a cornmeal diet to fatten them up.

Here’s my first dilema: What exactly is a snail? Is it like abalone (which I just learned is a type of sea snail), which cooks very quickly? Or is it more like octopus, which is better cooked longer, to soften the proteins?

I know that I want to cook our snails with the traditional butter, garlic, parsley, etc. and serve them with a nice crusty French baguette. But should I cook them slow and long? Hot and fast? Should they be baked? broiled? sautéed?

I think research in one of those old, dusty, classical French cookbooks on our shelves is called for.

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Everyone wants to help the bees. Suddenly honey bees are the new chickens: backyard hives are sexy. They're trendy. Ed Wagner of  Mannlake Ltd. says there’s no question about it, sales of beekeeping supplies to new customers are up, and suppliers of package bees have been selling out all over the country. After years of unpopularity, bees, it seems, are becoming fashionable pets.

Trendiness involving animals always sets off cries of alarm from my inner animal-rights activist. I wonder if now that we’ve kindled an interest in bees and beekeeping, could we be in danger of loving the girls to death? Can there be too many hives in an urban area? Will all those extra bees have to compete for a finite amount of nectar and pollen? I know, I know, my concern is not completely altruistic, but will our bees make less honey for us?

I called Kim Flottum, editor of Bee Culture Magazine and the Beekeeper blogger at thedailygreen.com to ask him how many bees could fit in a neighborhood.

He wasn’t worried about them finding enough food. “The carrying capacity of a city can be phenomenal,” he said. “You’ve got parks and roadside plantings. Draw a circle 2 miles around a hive, you’ll find backyards with flowers and weeds.” You’re not likely to run out of forage in most areas.

Kim thinks water—especially in our drought prone Western states—may be more of an issue than lack of forage. “The urban area is all cement. So where will the bees find water? If you’re in the backyard watering, bees will find you.” Swimming pools can be troublesome he said. “The chlorine cloud attracts bees. They love it.”

We all know what it’s like to come nose to proboscis with a floating bee in a swimming pool. And while some cities are changing their zoning codes to allow bees—Denver recently decriminalized keeping bees, and their municipal code declares that domestic honey bees are not “wild or dangerous animals"—bees can and will sting if threatened or scared. And we humans, when we see a bee, tend to flail and shriek and scare the bee.

As more people take on beekeeping in urban areas, the bee-human interface will become the most important issue bees and beekeepers face. I hope we can help the bees can win this one.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Camellia sinensis (a.k.a. tea).

By Margaret Sloan, Sunset production coordinator

Whew, I'm tired. We spent today going through our three hives. It was the first full inspection we've done since April. Everything seems to be going well in Veronica. She has lots of brood, larvae, and eggs. Midge we're worried about. She has fewer brood cells, not much larvae, and no eggs. We never did see the queen bee, But we did spot her two weeks ago; perhaps we just missed her today.

However, there were many queen cells in Midge, and some were capped—you can see two in the photo at right (click the photo to see a larger image). One looks like a queen has emerged. Does this mean Midge is about to swarm again? Or perhaps she's swarmed and we missed it?  Or this queen cell could be left over from when she swarmed this spring.

Califia is a strong hive and has filled the top bar hive with brood and honey. She's also kind of testy, and more defensive than the other two hives. She tries to chase us away whenever we are near the hives; she gets positively riled into a blue rage when we open her up. Perhaps naming her after an Amazonian warrior queen was not such a good idea.

Actually, all the girls were unhappy with us today, and stung skin, gloves, and suits numerous times. But we were tearing apart the hives, so we did deserve it. And we stole—I mean, harvested—honey. Lots of honey, and each frame has honey of a different flavor. Yum.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Hank Shaw in his garden, in front of a gigantic cardoon.

Handmade boar salami....home-cured olives...wine grown in the back yard....fat, juicy venison sausages.

We ate this—and much, much more—on Saturday at the home of Hank Shaw, a political writer, and his partner, Holly Heyser, a journalism professor at Sacramento State.

Hank was also nominated for the James Beard blog award this year. We shared a table with him and Holly and his mom at the awards ceremony in New York back in May, and really enjoyed their company and like-mindedness. Hank writes fascinating accounts of making food from scratch, which in his case involves hunting and fishing as well as gardening. Holly grew up hunting in Minnesota and has a blog of her own about, as she says, "acquiring food the hard way."

Talk about a gracious guy. Even though he lost to us, he invited us to a cookout at his place on the east side of Sacramento. 

Dinner fell on what turned out to be a fearsomely scorching day in his neighborhood—as in, 108 F°. Nonetheless, a small group of us One-Blockers left our cool coastal habitat behind, lured by his promise of wild game.

A Wild Feast

The minute we walked in the door, Hank had his homemade and very respectable sangiovese ready for pouring, and a glistening array of things to eat:

* Good home-cured olives, which I found impressive since we've tried to make them ourselves, without success (yet!)
* Hank's own pickled beets, carrots, and sunchokes
* Totally delicious shad rillettes—a sort of loose pâté, traditionally made with pork or rabbit but here with  tasty local shad that Hank caught with his dad recently on the American River. I had no idea that shad existed in the West. I thought they were strictly an East Coast species. Now I'm hankering to catch some shad myself. (Their roe are particularly amazing, fyi.)
* Excellent saucisson sec, a dry salami from a wild boar Hank bagged in Monterey County. Secret ingredient: 1974 Heitz Cellars Angelica, made from Mission grapes. This fortified wine was the first wine made in California back in the 1700s.
* Lonzino, air-cured from the loin of above boar—more delicate and thinly sliced, so it looked like rose petals
* Fennel- and ouzo-cured salmon, made with an Alaskan pink salmon caught by one of Hank's friends

Bear in mind, these were just the appetizers. I hadn't seen snacks so hefty since my New Year's in Moscow, when I noshed on an enormous spread of zakuski.

After a fully appreciating all that was on the table, we presented Hank with a couple of just-baked fruit pies, plus gifts from the One-Block Diet: last year's honey from hive Veronica and this spring's honey from Midge, plus a bottle of red-wine vinegar and some fresh eggs from the flock.

Then he took us on a tour of their abode.

The Tour

The first guided look-around of a person's house is always fun, isn't it? It's especially interesting when the place is full of strange and quirky stuff. Hank and Holly live in that kind of house, and seeing how Hank makes his food only increased our pleasure in eating it.

Hank's homemade wine, hanging out with the books.
Each carboy holds one varietal; included here are
Tempranillo, Sangiovese, and deep, dark
Portuguese Touriga.The two tiny carboys in back are
Zinfandel, which Hank made from his own grapes
(the rest used grapes he bought).

The garden, where Hank grows everything from beets
to heat-resistant romaine to salsify. 

It occupies a chunk of their 1/4-acre back yard,
but there's plenty of space to grow more stuff. We
semi-seriously suggested he try growing wheat—
since he actually has the space for it.

A few of Hank's vines (I think these are mainly Zinfandel).
More grapes grow against a far wall.

In the garage, garden zucchini dry on a rack.
Several ripe figs were set out to dry on a work
surface nearby.

And best of all...

The "curing fridge"—a battered but useful appliance
in the garage, equipped with a thermostat control
and a teeny humidifier (at bottom right).

Hank at the grill while we gab under the tree.

Hank slowly and tenderly grilled a slew of those venison sausages until they were shiny, taut, and on the verge of bursting. The rest of us sat around under the big shady tree just beyond and gabbed for a while.

The Dinner

We went indoors—merciful air conditioning!—and feasted on those sausages, stuffed into giant buns with homemade pickles; firm, meaty marinated octopus liberally seasoned with paprika; two pasta salads—one with the couscous-like Sardinian pasta called fregola, studded with bocconcini (tiny fresh mozzarella balls), and the other with barley and sundried tomatoes—and a lovely, simple little beet salad with feta cheese and lovage. So much care and generosity went into this dinner. Hank even made the paprika. As in, he grew the peppers, dried them, and ground them. Having made our own salt, we knew this wasn't as crazy as it sounds. These kinds of things are worth doing, if for no other reason that it makes you really, really appreciate paprika and salt.

Hank served his honey lemon-verbena ice cream, I cut up the pies, and we chewed our last bites in a semi-stupor. Hank brought out some little glasses filled with that precious 1974 Heitz Angelica, which tasted surprisingly similar to Italian nocino, a walnut liqueur. Delicious. 

Then Hank and Holly, pied pipers that they are, ushered us into what they proudly call their Opium Den. It's a library with deep pink walls, a comfy sofa, a fireplace, and a mantle adorned with bare skulls of past game. As we sank into the sofa, Hank plied us with homemade absinthe. Yow. You could practically see the fumes emerging from our lips as we tried it. It only took a couple of sips to finish us off.

We eased into our cars and drove home, sated from head to toe and marveling at all that Hank and Holly do. Before we left, they accepted our invitation to munch freshly baked pizzas from our brand-new wood-fired oven, topped, naturally, with whatever will be ripest and most flavorful in the One-Block garden. Coming soon.

UPDATE: Here's what Hank wrote about the evening (and you can see the food he made, too).