Finding New Sources

by Birdsong

This weekend, I had a great time attending the 16th Annual Taylorsville Solar Cook-off, which features lots of great blues music.  There were at least three dozen different cookers in operation, working on dinner for some of the campers and vendors.  The event is sponsored by Blackhawk Solar of Quincy, California, and takes place in the beautiful Indian Valley.

I was delighted to find that among the more usual crafts vendors, there were two local food resources (well, near the edges of my 100-mile radius, but still within it) that were new to me.

The first was Tehama Gold, producers of organic, extra-virgin olive oil since 1982.  They had samples available for tasting, and their oil is amongst the greenest and freshest I have ever sipped.  Sue has also created several therapeutic blends, her special olive oil infused with medicinal herbs, including lavender.  I thought that lavender-infused olive oil sounded lovely for a special salad, but Dean, her son-in-law, warned me that adding bitter essential oils such as lavender affects the taste, although good for rubbing into the skin.  He suggested that flavoring the olive oil by briefly steeping crushed rosemary in it would provide the culinary highlight I had in mind.  Tehama Gold's olive oil can be purchased at the Chico Thursday Night Market throughout the summer, or ordered directly from their website.

The other great find was Mountain Meadows Mead, from Westwood, on the east side of Lake Almanor, near Lassen National Park.  Ron Lunder and Peggy Fulder were squeezing fresh lemonade and also selling tastings and bottles of their eight different kinds of mead, which is wine made with honey rather than sugar.  From their brochure:

Cherry Mead - smooth red tablewine similar to Zinfandel
Trickster's Treat Agave Mead - a drier mead made with organic Agave nectar, this mead was awarded a Silver Medal at the 2003 Boulder International Mead Fest.
Sierra Nectar Wildflower Mead - light and semi-sweet, comparable to a Reisling
Peach Mead - semi-sweet and made from organic peaches
Spice Nectar - mulled with ginger and tropical spices, this mead won Best Spice Mead at the 2002 Chicago International Mead Festival.
Cranberry Nectar - sweet and tart, made from Oregon cranberries (another new thing I learned was that cranberries are raised closer to me than I thought), and winner of a Silver Medal at the 2002 Chicago International Mead Festival.
Apricot Mead - a light dessert wine that can also be mixed with club soda for a wine cooler
Honeymoon Nectar Sweet Honeywine - comparable to a late-harvest Reisling, this wine won Best Traditional Mead at the 2002 Chicago International Mead Festival.

Now, I have made fruit wines in the past and greatly admire any winemaker who gets to the advanced, medal-winning stage, but particularly those who decide to do it with honey.  Peggy and I discussed the fact that her mead used to be available at my local market, Downieville Grocery, and agreed that between the two of us, we would press the owners to place another order.  I was delighted to locate two new-to-me sources while having such a great time.  I have not included any information about solar cooking, however there is more on my personal blog, as well as a few handy links if you want to further reduce your ecological footprint by giving solar cooking a try this summer.

Birdsong lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California, where she blogs about her passions at A View from Sierra County.

Comments

[SuzanneM]

There's always more local foods to discover. I've never tried mead and have been interested in it since reading Full Moon Feast. I just emailed Mountain Meadows to see if there's a retailer who sells their mead in Davis or Sacramento.

Mead may be our oldest fermented drink and Ethiopians have been drinking a honey wine called tej for a very long time.