one of the perks to living here in cali is the access we have to incredible, mind-blowing food stuffs. the produce is the best i've seen & meats & fish are either farmed locally or flown in on a daily basis. we're not talking specialty shops here. we're talking full blown grocery stores stocked w/victuals beyond anyone's imagination who hasn't lived & shopped here for years. i mean it, if you haven't been here & seen what's available on a daily basis, it would astonish you.
when i took over at the nyingma institute as head cook, i shopped at one place(monterrey market)once a week. i was encouraged to buy from their discount shelves, where the produce was marked down because it was turning. trust me when i tell you, these guys waited until the last second to put food up on the discount shelves. for the first two years, i made do. i remember talking w/another cook from another buddhist meditation center(spirit rock) up in marin who shopped at monterrey market. he asked me how much i was allowed to spend on each person. his budget was 95cents for each person. i couldn't tell him off the top of my head but once i reckoned it, in the first two years at nyingma i was spending 80cents a person per meal. that's $9.60 a week.
a new dean regime came in during my second year at nyingma. one of the new deans was a former economics prof at berkeley who'd gone from there to nobel prize candidate & multi-millionaire. i began to stretch my budget because he made more money available. most of the money raised at the nyingma institute goes to paying for the sacred book projects(that send books printed by the nyingma press to the exiled tibetan monks in india & elsewhere)or the various sacred projects at the odiyan monastery. somewhere along the way my cooking had aroused enough interest that the powers that be decided it was actually bringing people up to the institute. the food budget was increased & i began to spend more at monterrey market(& not on the discount veggies)& elsewhere too.
[ grilled soft shelled crabs from berkeley bowl west]
i'd heard of berkeley bowl(the folks at dharma house, a subsidiary of our organization, bought their food there)but didn't start shopping there until my 3rd or 4th year at the institute. for the most part, they were more expensive than monterrey market but they had more variety & were better organized. i couldn't(& still can't)imagine not being able to find something i need there. this was the place i first saw ramps & fiddlehead ferns & buddha hands & mache. when i saw something new, i'd research it & then try it out on the folks at the institute. (elisabeth scheider's vegetables from amaranth to zucchini is a great source for inspiration.) i can imagine someone who embodies the smug north california foodie ethos not finding a specific brand of an arcane specific product(say, squid brand fish sauce)& dismissing the place outright. these folks can be so precious while being so absurd & it's mostly their own ignorance or lack of experience which hemmed them in to begin with. i can say from experience that they'll have 98.5% of whatever's on your shopping list & that other 1.5% can be bought at some of the very narrowly focused ethnic markets, like ranch 99(asian)or mi tierra foods(hispanic)or vik's(indian). one of the great leisures the extra money in the food budget afforded was being able to explore all the smaller markets in the east bay.
[perfect strawberries from berkeley farmers market & dry rubbed short ribs ready for the grill]
it also afforded me time for the farmer's markets, both our berkeley version & the one over in sf at the ferry building. all of this new abundance obviously enabled me to do dinners where they had a very wide selection of entrees & side dishes & salads from which to choose. beyond that, putting food on the table that had just been dug out of the earth only hours earlier gave a vibrancy to the dishes that could literally be tasted.
the new berkeley bowl west feels more spacious than the old place. apparently, the floor size is nearly the same but it felt more open & brighter. i guess these folks consulted a feng shui expert. the produce section is divided into organic & regular & both seem much larger than the old place. the aisles in parts of the store are much wider(tho the central area where dry goods are sold is still pretty narrow). on saturday, i bought soft shelled crabs & porcini mushrooms(real ones)& japanese cucumbers & baby ginger root & short ribs & ramps. they had la tur cheese from italy & adagia cheese from up north in sonoma. i got wheat berries for a salad & italian specialty "00" flour for more grilled pizzas. just walking through this new space dedicated to providing the best of most everything that can be eaten was thrilling & who needs to worry about lists when there's so much here to play with. they haven't gotten in this year's shad roe yet. that was ok. the crabs were $3 apiece & as the guy was wrapping them up for me, he said, "that's a mighty fine meal for just $9." i just nodded my head & said, "you got that right."
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