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).

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Last Sunday, Erika Ehmsen, Johanna Silver, Amy Machnak, and I sat in a darkened theater at the Millennium Broadway Hotel, nerves tingling. As some of you know, we'd been nominated—along with fellow one-block-diet bloggers Elizabeth Jardina, Rick LaFrentz, and Margaret Sloan—for a James Beard Journalism award.

Since we were sitting at a table near the exit sign, way way at the back, I was sure we wouldn't win. After all, no one would put us here if we were actually meant to get to the stage in any reasonable amount of time. I gently suggested that everyone just relax and enjoy dinner and give up the dream of winning an award.

So we did, and got to know our tablemates—fellow nominee Hank Shaw; his wife, Holly; and his lovely mother--all come from Sacramento. Hank writes a very entertaining, knowledgeable, pull-no-punches blog called Hunter Angler Gardener Cook. Like us, he's trying to show how possible it is for you to make your own food — from scratch. He tends to hunt and forage, we tend to garden and make wine, but the intention is very much the same. We felt glad to be sharing our table with a kindred spirit.

Then Kelly Choi, announcing the winners for the award ahead of ours (for Audio Webcast or Radio Show), accidentally opened the wrong envelope. "Erika Ehmsen, Elizabeth..." Oh, my lord. She'd flubbed, but we knew we'd won. Whoever got the Audio Webcast award, well, sorry, dude, our screaming completely drowned out your moment. Then we ran to the stage. (Ok, Erika walked. She's pregnant and wise.)

Hank Shaw's mother very kindly took this picture of us accepting our award:

 

Left to right: Johanna, me, Amy, and Erika, beside ourselves with joy.

And moments later, in the lobby:

Courtesy Hanna Lee

The rest of the evening is a bit of a blur. Some very fine journalists won awards, including the multiple James-Beard award winner Alan Richman, of GQ magazine, and we cheered them all. For the full list, click here. Erika, bless her, was Tweeting like mad the entire time.

The next night, we put on our fanciest duds and went to the chef awards, at Lincoln Center. What a scene. We were quietly ushered around the red carpet, ah well. Amy's shoes deserved to have a prance before the papparazzi!

Amy's shoes. Actually, she had to mince, not prance.

The awards ceremony, which this year honored Women in Food, lasted three and a half hours, and although many deserving (and terrific) chefs won (including San Francisco's Nate Appleman and Maria Hines of Seattle), we were as famished as wolves by the time it was over. We dashed out and devoured tidbits put out by some of the top female chefs in the country (my favorite: Anita Lo's steak tartare with anchovy broth).

It was Quite a Scene. Besides the best and most celebrated chefs in the country, we spotted Salman Rushdie (we unabashedly had our pictures taken with him, on a camera that, alas, was lost at JFK).

Amy, Johanna, and me in the thick of it.                                   Top Chef Jeff McInnis and Erika.              

We had a very, very good time, piling happily into taxis for an after-party at Prune, Gabrielle Hamilton's tiny, excellent, jewel of a restaurant down in the East Village. (She'd been nominated for Best Chef New York City.) Gabrielle makes the best hamburgers EVER, intensely flavorful and so juicy they squirt.

I remember the clock saying 3:30 when I closed my eyes.

--------

Now, back we are at Sunset with all of us winners together, in front of the crazy-tall hops that we'll be using in an upcoming batch of beer:

Left to right, Sunset's Beard-winning bloggers: Elizabeth Jardina (with Honey), Rick LaFrentz, Amy Machnak, me (with Ophelia), Johanna Silver, Margaret Sloan, and Erika Ehmsen.

and because they were part of it too...the very patient Honey and Ophelia, representing the coop:

:

By Erika Ehmsen, Sunset copy chief

We’re looking over a four-leaf clover that Chicago’s French Pastry School sent to wish us luck at this Sunday’s James Beard Foundation Awards. (Thanks, guys!) Four of us are headed to New York for the ceremony, and we’re excited and nervous—and not just about what to wear!

Our One-Block project is in great company in the Best Food Blog category: Our fellow nominees are Bon Appétit columnist Andrew Knowlton’s The BA Foodist and Sacramento omnivore Hank Shaw’s Hunter Angler Gardener Cook, which takes locavore to a near-complete DIY level. We’re looking forward to swapping stories with Shaw, Knowlton, and all of the other food and wine writers we’ll be meeting this weekend.

Want to hear who we’re talking to and find out if we win? We’ll be posting live updates from the Media Awards ceremony on Sunset’s Twitter page. Sign up to follow us by clicking here—it’s free, easy, fun, and admittedly a bit addictive. Wish us luck, and see you on the Interweb!

Excuse us while we do a little crowing.

We've been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award! Yes, this very blog.

The category is: Blog Focusing on Food, Beverage, Restaurants, or Nutrition. (Yep, that sounds like us.) The winner will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on May 3.

And this is right on the heels of the news that our One-Block Feast story from August '08 was nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals award.

Spring is feeling very springy indeed.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Good news! Our print story last August about our summer one-block feast, We Had a Dream, has been nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) journalism award.

To read our story, click here.

We're thrilled about the nomination, since the IACP has thousands of members—and other nominees include such food-magazine luminaries as Gourmet, Saveur, and Food & Wine. The winners of the awards will be announced at a gala ceremony in Denver on April 4.

We'll let you know how we do!

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

We began with salad, wheatberry ciabatta, and homemade butter.

Our winter feast started with a happy accident.

Back in September, Team Kitchen and Team Garden drew up a list of cool-season crops that would do well in our area, and planned a menu around it. First we'd have a salad of Belgian endive and escarole, with a fresh poached egg on top and croutons from extremely homemade wheat bread (as in, we grew the wheat and ground it).

Well, the endive never sprouted. And we couldn't find escarole seeds. Who knew there'd be a run on escarole seeds?

Moral: Be flexible. Johanna, our test garden coordinator, had also planted some red butterhead lettuce and arugula, so Team Kitchen adapted.

It was easy; the lettuces were beautiful. We hardcooked the egg instead of poaching it, because a liquidy poached yolk, great on crisp endive and escarole, would've turned the tender lettuces into a sticky clump. We added small chunks of sweet, juicy tangerines from our tree, garlic-rubbed croutons, and a vinaigrette made with tangerine juice, our olive oil, and sea salt.

Red butterhead lettuce and arugula salad with tangerines and hard-cooked eggs.

We had plenty of wine to go with the food. The Syrah was in bottle at last and had recovered from its bottle-shock; it was back to its original blackberry suaveness. The Chardonnay still tasted fine—like a crisp green apple.

Sunset Chardonnay and Syrah, left; right, wine editor Sara Schneider sips the white as managing editor Alan Phinney tears off a chunk of ciabatta. (By the way, that construction site you see through the windows here will be a big outdoor kitchen, to be completed by June.
Come to our Celebration Weekend and see it for yourself.)

The stunning brassicas from the garden—cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, Savoy cabbage, kale, broccoli rabe, mustard greens—gave us our main courses: a winter vegetable chowder and spicy braised greens with preserved lemon.

Our chowder was packed with cauliflower, broccoli romanesco, and broccoli rabe,
plus a few potatoes saved from fall. On top: broccoli rabe flowers and purple rosemary blooms.

Braised Savoy cabbage, mustard greens, and
Tuscan kale with preserved lemon and chile.

The broccoli romanesco was so beautiful and strange that we used it as decor, too.

We ended not with our original dessert—olive oil tangerine cake, which turned out to be a total clunker given we were destroying the original recipe—but with something that arose naturally from our short list of available ingredients, which included honey, eggs, "imported" cream, and tangerines.

Tangerine honey crème caramel.

We had a very nice afternoon.

Recipe editor Amy Machnak and researcher Elizabeth Jardina.

Test garden coordinator Johanna Silver in the middle of
what must've been a vivid story.

Me (at left) and copy chief Erika Ehmsen.

SO WHERE ARE THE RECIPES?

They and the story of how we raised the ingredients for this winter menu will be showing up in larger form at some point in the months ahead—I promise.

For now, please have some salad. It's hearty enough to eat when it's cold, but bright and lively, too—which suits our California March, the month when winter slides into spring.

Red Butterhead Lettuce and Arugula Salad with Tangerines and Hard-Cooked Eggs

MAKES 6 to 8 servings TIME About 1 hour

We used our own chickens’ eggs, but we let them sit in the fridge for at least a week to let the air pocket inside each shell expand and make the eggs easier to peel.

6 to 8 eggs (not super-fresh)
2 tsp. fresh tangerine juice
1/2 tsp. each finely grated tangerine zest and sea salt
1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil, divided
3 to 4 thin slices wheatberry ciabatta or other whole wheat bread,
     cut into 1/2-in. dice (about 1 1/2 cups)
2 cloves garlic, mashed to a paste with 1/4 tsp. sea salt
5 loosely packed cups arugula leaves
6 loosely packed cups red butterhead lettuce leaves
     (about 1/2 small head)
2 large or 4 small tangerines

1. Preheat oven to 400°. Put eggs in a small pot and cover with about 1 in. of water. Bring to a boil; immediately lower heat to a simmer and cook 10 minutes. When eggs are finished, transfer to ice water; let cool 1 minute. Crack eggs all over on counter and return to ice water for 5 minutes. Peel under cold water. Set aside.
2. Meanwhile, whisk tangerine juice, zest, and salt together in a small bowl. Whisk in 1/4 cup olive oil. Set aside.
3. In a heatproof cup, microwave remaining 1/4 cup olive oil with mashed garlic for 10 seconds. Put bread cubes on a baking pan and drizzle with garlic oil, tossing to coat. Spread in a single layer and bake about 15 minutes, or until crisp, stirring once or twice. Set aside.
4. Rinse greens and dry twice in a salad spinner. Peel tangerines and remove thready white pith; then cut fruit crosswise into chunks, removing any seeds.
5. In a large bowl, toss greens gently but thoroughly with only enough dressing to coat. Add tangerines and croutons and toss just to mix. Divide salad among plates. Add a quartered egg to each plate and drizzle eggs with a little more dressing. Or pile it all on a platter if you like, so people can help themselves.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Four of our chicks at about two weeks old, back in August of 2007.

If you've been enjoying our blog posts about our various one-block feast projects, and don't yet know about our downloadable how-to guides for each, check them out by clicking on the one that interests you.

The Guides:

How to Raise Chickens

How to Make Beer

How to Make Olive Oil

How to Raise Honeybees

How to Make Wine

How to Make Vinegar

How to Make Salt

How to Grow Summer Crops

How We Made Cheese

How to Attract Beneficial Insects (we threw this one in just for fun, and because it's helpful)

Send us your comments, if you like...and stay tuned for the launch of new projects as we head into spring.

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

The last time I posted, I wrote about visiting UC Davis to learn about harvesting big olive trees (we have 21 lovely 40-foot giants here at Sunset, and we aren't so happy with the idea of teetering on ladder-tops). While I was there, Dan Flynn, director of the university's Olive Center, showed me a cool new project that has started me thinking about how much easier our picking could be: high-density olive trees.

UC Davis's new plantings of high-density olive trees.

They may not look like much now, but many growers think that these kinds of trees represent the future of the California olive oil industry. Commercial olive trees are usually planted about 18 feet apart, and these little guys only need 5 feet; they're also short (8 or 9 feet), and trained on trellises like wine grapes—meaning they can be harvested by the same (slightly modified) machines used to harvest grapes. Plus, they grow fast: Two or three years to maturity instead of seven. And they are more resistant to the olive fruit fly than normal-density trees.

California Olive Ranch, in Oroville, California, has been growing these tiny trees, developed in Spain, for several years—and getting great results: excellent Arbequina and Arbosana oils that can be sold for far less than imported oils of similar quality. (Koroneiki, a Greek varietal, is the third type available as a  high-density tree.)

High-density olive groves at California Olive Ranch
(photo by Mike Kepka, San Franscisco Chronicle)

What if we were to get a few of the little guys? So little space, such easy picking...

A girl can dream, can't she?

In the meantime, we'll try to use what our land already provides. We just have to win our war with the fruit flies.

(If you'd like to look for your own little high-density trees, try the Olive Source.)

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Here's what we're giving for Christmas this year:

Photograph by Spencer Toy

Yes! The fruits of our summer one-block diet.

Happy Holidays, everybody.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Team Olive is frustrated.

Our beautiful big olive trees are loaded with fruit again, tantalizing us with the promise of olive oil.




There's nothing we can do about it this year, though. That's because we decided —out of deference to Team Bee—not to treat the trees last spring for olive fruit-fly maggots (the spray may have killed the bees), so once again they're radically infested. It's a good thing our chickens snap them up like candy.

Any ideas about how to spray olive trees in a bee-safe way? It looks as though Spinosad is the most effective organic spray (we don't use pesticides), but we're not quite sure how to apply it so it doesn't doom Betty and Veronica. And we would really, really like to press our own olives next year.

The least we could do was figure out our other problem: How to harvest our giant trees. Most commercial growers top off their trees at around 9 feet to keep them easy to pick. Ours are probably 40 feet tall and surrounded by bushes, walls, and other lovely and totally inconvenient landscaping elements.

With no actual picking to do this year, we decided to at least learn something for next season. So, on Monday, I went as Team Olive's emissary off to UC Davis.

There, Dan Flynn, director of the Olive Center, heads a team of pickers that harvest the university's giant old trees. Every year, they turn what had been a liability--bikers skidding on slippery fallen olives--into really great UC Davis olive oil.

I met up with Dan in one of the groves.

Left: Two of UC Davis's 2,000 olive trees. (These are Rubra, a Spanish variety.)
Right: Dan talking to the crew.

With giant tarps spread beneath the trees to catch the falling olives, his crew was using 3 methods to pick: pneumatic rakes (which look sort of like Venus flytraps, and chew off the olives faster than the eye can see); regular garden rakes; and their hands.

Pneumatic rake.

This thing is just too heavy and expensive, I decided, to be useful to us. Then Dan showed me the regular rake method. "Just whack. You'll get about 30 olives off at once."

My technique left a lot to be desired, but some olives were coming off, anyway. Unfortunately, this rakeing business doesn't work so well when you're standing on a ladder. You feel like you're about to topple backwards.

So, in the end, I think the best route for us will be hand-picking, just like we did last year at Valencia Creek. This means we won't need tarps--just a couple of ladders, a few buckets, and our team, ready to pick. It's cheap, it's easy, and with a few of us working together, we ought to be able to get a few hundred pounds from the lower limbs of our trees.

Now if we can just get rid of the bugs...

By Amy Machnak, Sunset Food Writer

Summer is a wonderful time of year...unless you’re a bottle of olive oil.

As we discussed earlier, heat and light are bad for oil, so we've had to move our bottles to a cooler spot where they wouldn't be affected by long days of hot sunshine. Lucky for us, we have a wine cellar. A few members of team olive borrowed (read: hijacked) the mail cart and moved the boxes of filled bottles to the new, more temperate, location.

Here it will quietly sit until we use it all up.

by Elizabeth Jardina, Sunset researcher

It's started raining here in Northern California. Finally, two months after the calendar officially declared it autumn, it's feeling truly autumnal. Cloudy mornings, early sunsets.

We've overhauled the Test Garden somewhat in the past few months, pulling out some underperforming roses and planting a new flower bed from seed.

Only problem, of course, is that what's mostly taken root are volunteers—plants that in other circumstances would be welcome, but in the middle of my seeded bed are nothing but pests. Below, nasturtiums (on the left) and borage, whose cucumber-scented sprouts vigorously colonize any damp, well-composted piece of soil.

The other thing we have a lot of are olives, falling from a giant, decades-old tree that stretches over our chicken coop and part of the garden. Its fruit is raining down on us at this time of year, plump and black.

Don't they look beautiful? Yeah, that's an illusion. The reason that they're "ripening" on the tree so quickly is that we have olive fly, which our own oil-makers Team Olive discovered last year. Our infested fruit—a beautiful blue-black, with a lovely powdery blush—falls all over that half of the garden.

Luckily, the world provides, and our chickens eat. They are mad for the nasturtium sprouts—can't get enough of the borage—and they even love the maggot-infested olives. Check it out.

Last year, I was worried about them eating whole olive pits, but since then I've learned some things about the intricacies of chicken digestive systems. In short: Chickens have two stomachs, the glandular one called the proventriculus  and the mechanical one, the gizzard. Sometimes people call all animal entrails "the gizzards," but it's a real organ with a specific meaning. It's where the grit and small stones that chickens eat end up; they help grind up the hard seeds and other fibrous foods that are part of a healthy chicken's diet.

The garden gives, the chickens take. It's got a nice circle-of-life quality to it.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset Food Writer

The good news: My first try at curing olives is finished.
The bad news: I think I made botulism.

I let the olives soak in the brine liquid (1 gallon water to 1 cup salt) for 10 days. Then I rinsed.
Then I decreased the salt by half and waited another 10 days. Then I rinsed.

I waited for months and all the clues that I was watching for occurred: The olives turned an ugly brown color. They developed a black, thick, rubber-like skin on the surface (something that’s supposed to add flavor, I was told). But they still tasted too harsh to be ready. So I let them sit a little more. After waiting patiently for months, I did what any busy person with a short attention span would do. I forgot about them completely.

Now those olives that I put so much energy into are so ugly, I highly doubt their mother would love them. Puffed, mushy fruit, with skin that resembles a painful blister from a pair of new shoes.

I did take a bite of one of them. Okay, not a bite, but I cut one open and touched my tongue to it. It tasted like an olive, but the idea of having to get my stomach pumped if I ate more was reason enough to toss the lot.

If anyone is looking for me, I'll be at the farmer's market trying to score more fresh olives for round two.

At last, after much trial and error, we eat! See how our crops became a summer feast. | Jump to the recipes.

Coming up next: How we're eating from the garden every day.

Veggie-garden primer | Sunset guides to growing edibles

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

Finally our olive oil is ready to be bottled after sitting in darkness to let the sediment settle.

It took us a while to get started, but once we did we had quite the assembly line. Team Olive set up a spot behind the offices to transfer our olive oil from 20-gallon plastic jugs to individual 250-ml bottles. As we were getting started, we kept having to run into the kitchen to get another tool (we hadn’t quite thought things through). After we finally got all the required supplies and our line working smoothly, almost 2 hours had passed and we were barely 1 jug done with 3 more to go. We hadn’t really expected it to take us so long to pour from one container to the other, but it did. We eventually had to call it quits as the sun went down.

When we reconvened to finish our task, we made sure we had our equipment. Since having the right gear makes the process much faster, we have compiled a quick list for you before you start bottling yourself.

Supplies:
aprons, one per person
power drill fitted with a small bit (for making a ventilation hole in plastic jugs)
olive bottles and corks
funnel
towels or rags
mallet or small hammer
tarps to spread under area or over valuables
large drip pans (turkey roasting pan will do)
permanent marker for labeling
bucket of hot soapy water

Here’s how we did it:
We found it easier for one person to fill the bottles at each spigot (we had 2 going simultaneously) and for a third person to push/hammer in the corks. A fourth person wiped off the oil that inevitably dripped down the bottles’ sides with warm water and a rag, then put them into the boxes that the bottles came in.

Our labeled boxes of bottled oil are currently sitting in organized rows in our temperature controlled work shed. Before the weather warms, we’ll move them to the wine cellar to keep them cool and dark (heat and light are two enemies of oil). At some point, we’ll need to devise the best way to adhere (aka melt) the gold plastic seals over the top of each bottle.

Does anyone have a quality hair dryer we could borrow?

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

Left: Our just-pressed oil, back in late November.

The day after we'd picked and pressed our olives, we had a quick tasting of the new oil (often called by its Italian name, olio nuovo). It was a deep, bright green and thick with tiny flecks of olive, and we loved it. It tasted intensely of the fruit itself, without the nasty bitterness you get from biting into a raw olive.

Associate travel editor Rachel Levin, bravely eating an olive straight off the tree. "Yuck!"

It's practically miraculous how pressing can quickly transform nasty fruit into delicious oil.

Our oil was fairly peppery, too. Slurping a small spoonful on its own induced slight coughing. (This is considered a good thing in the extra-virgin olive oil world.) But it was nothing compared with the intensely pungent olio nuovo from a few other artisanal California producers, like, for instance, Pietra Santa (where we'd pressed our fruit). Theirs is very delicious, and VERY pungent, in true Tuscan style. A three-cough olive oil.

Why was ours relatively mild, even though we'd used Tuscan olives in our oil? It's because the olives had been grown in a cool, misty climate, just outside Santa Cruz. Hot weather develops the spicy flavors in an olive, just as it does in chiles (if you've ever tried to grow them in cool weather, you'll find out that they end up tasting grassy, not hot).

Mild Olio Nuovo: a future big disappointment?

Even though it tasted wonderful as olio nuovo, did our oil have enough character to withstand months of settling? Would we open up a bottle after three months, only to find something that tasted more like canola oil?

Our fears were groundless. We've just tasted the oil, and even though its color has gone from vibrant green to golden, it still has plenty of flavor—smooth, buttery, and peppery on the finish. It'll be just right for cooking our One-Block Feast.

Our oil today.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

Our delicious olive oil has been sitting in storage since the last week of November. According to our experts, that’s enough time to allow it to settle and the next step is to bottle it.

With 20 gallons of oil, distributed amongst 250ml bottles, we figure we’ll need 322 bottles (That is, if my 6th-grade math is correct.) We’ve been told that dark glass is better because it keeps out light and protects the oil, but surprisingly, it’s not that easy to find—especially now, when all the oil producers who pressed in the fall are hunting for it too. Many glass companies either don’t make green or amber glass in our desired size, or they were weeks away from having any in stock.

I asked Dan Flynn, director of the UC Davis Olive Center, where he gets his bottles from. He directed me to California Glass in Oakland. They had exactly what we wanted, in stock, and for a better price than any of their competitors. I ordered 300 bottles for the oil, figuring that we will keep a little for our own purposes in the test kitchen. Since California Glass has a minimum order of $500 I ordered several dozen clear bottles in the same size and shape for Team Vinegar to make a set. It should all arrive tomorrow and we will probably start bottling our tasty green liquid early next week.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

I have two separate batches of olives that I am trying to cure using different methods.

The first I started around Halloween, with olives from Pietra Santa Winery in a salt cure. The other olives are ones that Team Olive brought back from our harvest at Valencia Creek Farms in November. Those are in a brine solution (water and salt).

Both sets of olives are really unattractive at this point (revolting would be a more accurate word) and I am starting to worry that I have botched both techniques.

The salt-cured olives, which I was told would take 4 to 6 months to complete, are shriveled, dry, and taste of old wood. I don’t see how keeping them in salt a few more months is going to make any difference. I have an email in to my local “expert” (read: my Italian father-in-law) to see what I have done wrong and how to repair the damage if possible.

  The real disappointment are the olives in the brine solution. They started out bright green, plump, firm, and meaty. After only a few days, some started to change color and become brown and squishy. Now the brine solution has developed a thick film on the top, a color best described as baby-shower pink, and spots of gray fluffy mold spores. I have been told that this is normal (you have got to be kidding, right?) and that this in fact “adds to the flavor of the olives.”

If I am not willing to eat it myself, I don’t have the heart to ask anyone else to sample my science project. I can only hope at this point that what was naturally perfect in the beginning and has turned ugly over time will eventually be reincarnated as something deliciously edible. Maybe.

By Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

After picking olives at Valencia Farms, we drove two cars packed with olive-filled crates 30 miles south to Pietra Santa Winery in Hollister. The winery, located in the La Cienega valley, looks like an Italian red-bricked castle complete with a working bell tower and flanked on each side by two imposing palm trees.

Alessio Carli, their wine and olive oil maker, graciously allowed us to use his gorgeous Italian press to crush our olives. A charismatic man from Siena, Italy, with an infectious laugh and an obvious love of his two crafts, assures us that not only is olive pressing easy, but it’s also lots of fun. Looking around you can see why he is so tranquil. The surrounding property, with its miles of birds-eye views is breathtaking.

We arrived in the late afternoon with wide smiles,  evidence of our pride of having finally made it to this point of production. Alessio and his team went right to work unloading the just-picked olives from the backs of our vehicles into giant Jacuzzi-size bins.

Using a fork lift, he weighed all of it (turns out we had 1,000 pounds!) before dumping them into a pit on the side of the winery (but not before I snagged a pound or two to brine upon our return to the office). Then the olives were taken via a conveyor belt past a fan which  blows away leaves and were washed before being moved indoors.

Next came the actually pressing, although  mutilation might be a more accurate description. Enormous granite wheels weighting a mere 7,000 pounds turned around and around, rolling over our olives, skins, pits, and flesh included, until they look like what one member of Team Olive called “chopped liver.”

Although the olives weren’t so visually appealing at that point, the aroma filling the room was wonderful and you couldn’t help but be in awe of the size of the machinery and the high-level noise it made while turning our olives into what we could only dream would be the best olive oil ever made.

The circular crushing took almost 45 minutes; then our liver-like olive mush was on its way to the centrifuge. We all watched in amazement as the mixture was separated into bright green oil and ugly brown vegetable water, as Alessio, our trusted teacher, explained the process step by step.

After about two hours, the spigot at the end of the production line started to  pour a very thin stream of months’ worth of diligence by Team Olive.

Our goal of making olive oil from our own Sunset trees had been deemed impossible, but we persevered and with the help of some local friends, we finally have our very own green-oil gold. OK, so it’s not actual gold, but it is REALLY green, and most important, heavenly delicious.

Photos by Kimberley Burch, Sunset

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

We rolled up the dirt driveway toward Valencia Creek—and what’s gotta be the cutest little farmhouse in all of  Aptos, a quiet town just outside of Santa Cruz.

Surrounded by blooming flowers, fields of lavender, and 1800 olive trees, out comes Chris Banthien. Finally, a smiling face to all the phone calls! Clad in overalls and a pink sweatshirt, her blond hair blowing in the slight breeze, she was a full-on farmer living the good life. My first thought: What am I doing in San Francisco? My second thought: I want to run an olive farm!

“Welcome Team Olive!” said Chris. We introduced ourselves—a copy editor, a travel editor, a photographer, and a couple of food editors—here to help pick! (And, um, because we were short on time—to also purchase 800 pounds of olives for pressing later that afternoon.)

First, she led us to a row of trees where a  professional picker was hard at work, as Valenica Creek Farms was already on Day 3 of their week-long harvest. This guy was using an olive rake, which seemed to be moving a-mile-a-minute, removing the olives from their branches while magically leaving most of the leaves undisturbed. A large net covered the ground, catching the falling fruit.  Looked easy enough.

“I thought you guys would work over here,” Chris said, pointing to a group of Ascolano trees, each barely taller than my 5 feet-two inches. “Ascolano olives are bigger; easier to pick,” she said and handed us a bunch of buckets. “Go to it.”

“Is there any sort of technique we should know about?” asked one member of Team Olive. Good question, I thought. "Nope. You just pick," replied Chris with a laugh.

And that’s what we did. Scattering ourselves among the trees—glove-free and carefree, happy for such a beautiful day away from our desks.

At times we talked. But mostly we took advantage of the silence, plucking the perfectly smooth, green olives in peace; their oils naturally moisturizing our wintry, dry hands. “This is so meditative!” said Margo True, reading my mind. Of course what was a meditative exercise, might’ve turned monotonous had we spent all day picking the 800 pounds of olives we needed.

Instead, five of us amateurs harvested 70 pounds in one hour. Not bad. Luckily, Chris and her business partner, Bruce Golino, had kindly set aside 21 additional crates of olives for us—Tuscan varietals (Maurino, Leccino, Frantoio, Pendolino, and Ascolano) picked earlier that morning.

Due to oxidation, time was of the essence. And so, with a wave — and a lovely gift from Chris: bars of soap made from olive oil and lavender—we were off, rambling down the road with 22 crates of loose olives packed into the back of our two cars. Plus one additional 35-pound crate riding shotgun on Amy Machnak’s lap.

Destination: Pietra Santa Winery to press!

Photos by Kimberley Burch, Sunset

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

We’ve got a U-Haul, buckets, gloves, spigots—and coffee—for tomorrow’s early morning drive down to Santa Cruz. We’ll be happily picking olives alongside the folks at Valencia Creek Farms, who’ve been kind enough to sell us 800 pounds of their olives—and let us help out. With Sunset’s olive trees out of commission thanks to a serious olive fly infestation, we have no choice but to borrow.

Working on a bit of a time crunch, we’ll pick olives for only a couple of hours—and then cart our fruit over to Pietra Santa Winery, in nearby Hollister, for pressing. (Stopping along the way, of course, for a quick lunch at Cafe Sparrow, in Aptos.) After the press we’ll haul our oil back to a cool, dark corner here at Sunset, where our containers will sit for roughly 45 days. Stay tuned for more!

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

Our hearts had fallen along with our infested fruit—but thanks to Valencia Creek Farms, Team Olive lives on! Chris Banthien has offered to sell us 800 pounds of her Santa Cruz-grown Tuscan blend of olives, including Ascolano, Pendolino, Maurino, Taggiasca, Frantoio, and Leccino varietals.

If we can’t use our own olives, at least we’ve found the next best thing: fruit from just 30 miles south. A far cry from “one-block”—but what can you do? As we’re learning, eating locally has its challenges.

Once Chris gives us the heads-up on her harvest time—should be sometime in the next couple of weeks—we’ll head down to Valencia Creek Farms and start picking. “Bring as many folks as you like!” she says laughing. “We’ll take all the help we can get.”

It’s the least we can do.

by Amy Machnak, Sunset food writer

At first we thought our olives were just ripening very fast. They had turned color and were dropping from the trees in mid-October, weeks before we thought they would be ready. How naive we have been. Deborah Rogers, from The Olive Press, in Sonoma, has concluded—after we sent her samples from our trees—that we are infested with the infamous olive fly. Not only are all of our 21 olive trees riddled with olive-fly worms, but we are the proud owners of “the worst infestation” Rogers has ever seen.

Lucky us.

Our dreams of easily picking and pressing a wonderful olive oil from Sunset’s own back yard have been extinguished. But that’s not even the saddest part of our present situation. Evidently, if we ever hope to harvest the olives in the future, we need to pick all of this year’s crop of deformed, grotesque, and worm-rotted olives and destroy them. The irony here is that this year’s olives are the bumper crop of crops.

There are three ways to destroy the harvest we have. We can bury the olives, burn them, or bag them in large plastic sacks and set them in the sun for a few weeks to roast. This will encourage our olive trees to produce fruit in the spring right on schedule and also prevent the worms currently residing in the fruit from hibernating all winter only to reinfest in the spring. It will also make us a considerate neighbor to anyone in the area who may also be trying to rid their crops of the persistent insect.

If all goes well, we can start spraying our trees with an enzyme or good old-fashioned (and rather unsightly I am told) clay. Both of these organic materials discourage the olive fly and, with luck, will help ensure a decent crop next year. What we don’t know is how much money and time is that going to take. We’ve heard the sprays are expensive and need to be applied on a regular basis.

In the meantime, we need to find a local grower with an abundance of fruit to buy from and figure out the best way to crush those olives in the next few weeks before we miss the season altogether.

If anyone has an extra 800 pounds of high-quality olives lying around, let us know. At this point we have an unwavering need to make something. Too bad we can’t bottle determination, Team Olive would have a cash crop on its hands.

By Rachel Levin, Sunset associate travel editor

“Have you been sprayed for the olive fly?” asks Chris Banthien of Valencia Creek Farms, the Santa Cruz-based olive grower we’ve asked to help guide inexperienced-us through the olive oil making process.

“Mm, dunno,” I reply. “The olive fly?”

Here we are, happily surrounded by Sunset’s 21 olive trees, thinking all we have to do is wait patiently for just the right time to start picking... But two minutes into my first conversation with our new mentor and I realize there’s a lot we don’t know.

“Yep, the olive fly,” replies the veteran farmer who’s awaiting her seventh harvest from the 2,000 Northern Italian olive trees she planted a decade ago on her own 20-acre property. “They deposit their eggs into the fruit; turns into larvae. They eat their way out; they’re maggots.”

Yum.

“Yeah, it can be a real problem at pressing time. Especially here in California,” says Banthien, who along with business partner, Bruce Golino, sells Valencia Creek's extra-virgin olive oil, Olio delle Colline di Santa Cruz (pictured), at farmers markets around Santa Cruz County.

I highly doubt our olive trees have ever been sprayed. Why would they have? As far as I know, no one at Sunset has ever plucked an olive from our trees before! The evil olive fly. Our trees, although pretty, are no good? It can’t be!

I hang up the phone, ready to break the bad news to the others. Hey guys, guess we'll have to farm ourselves out to Team Chicken or Team Beer...

First, though, I put a frantic call into Rick LaFrentz, Sunset’s head gardener. “Nope, we don’t spray anything on anything,” he says laughing. “It’s okay, a little organic stuff never hurt anybody.”

Well, if Rick’s not worried, then, umm, neither are we... Onward Team Olive!

By Jess Chamberlain, Sunset home writer

Ever moved into a new-to-you residence and realized after a couple years that you have some knock-out blossoming shrubs in the corner of your lot that'd you'd never noticed before?

Well, last week Sunset’s landscape supervisor Rick LaFrentz took One Block Feast's Team Olive on a little field trip around Sunset's campus introducing us to the 21 (yes, twenty-one) fruit-bearing olive trees on the property.

As some of us shook our heads in bewilderment, shamefully realizing we don’t get up from our desks enough (how had we not appreciated these gigantic landmarks before?), team member (Sunset associate art director) Keith Whitney noted, “21....Almost a football game.” Indeed. We there committed ourselves to getting to know this seemingly under-appreciated food source on the property where we spend 5 days of our week. 

For our part in the local feast Team Olive will be making olive oil and curing olives from the goods in our own front yard.

Over the next couple months, as we watch and wait for our baby olives to grow (admittedly not quite as cute and cuddly as Team Chicken's subjects, but we did leave our field trip unscratched), we'll be updating you on our olive research and observations prior to our anticipated harvest October/November-ish.

First tackle: DNA testing our subjects to identify exactly what type of olives we’re dealing with. Yep, we'll be sending in sample cuttings for analysis. Expect nothing short of CSI amazement.

Until then, please share any olive knowledge, wisdom, or intrigue.

And we’re taking name suggestions for our all-star team line-up of olive trees.