Category Archives: Going Green and Sustainable

Inside the Cafe at Facebook Headquarters

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Employees of Facebook eat THIS for lunch.

Black mission figs with Serrano ham. Tiny beef meatballs with pine nuts and sweet yellow peaches. Tender braised rabbit with moscatel, cinnamon, and fresh cherries. And rich chocolate roulade cake shot through with rum.

That was only a small portion of my incredible Spanish lunch last week at the Palo Alto headquarters of Facebook. After all, social networking — and creating the tools to do it — sure does work up a hefty appetite. No one knows that better than Josef Desimone, Facebook’s “culinary overlord.” And yes, that is his real title.

The energetic, fast-talking, 40-year-old chef invited me to come for lunch to see how his kitchen staff of 50 turns out 2,300 meals a day for more than 800 Facebook employees. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks are provided to this hungry crew — all of it for free. Make friends with someone at Facebook, and you, too, can partake of the scrumptious offerings that change daily, as employees are allowed to bring guests to dine.

Facebook's ''culinary overlord.''

The food, by this former chef of Cafe de la Presse in San Francisco, is so delicious and of such high-quality, it rivals that of restaurants where you’d have to pay a pretty penny to eat. Kathleen Loughlin, a Facebook communications person, jokes that the food is so irresistible that she’s had to frequent the gym more since Desimone came on board a year ago. Job applicants are always invited to come interview near lunch time, too, Loughlin says, because Facebook is well aware that its cafe is a monster recruiting tool.

If Google set the bar for gourmet cafeterias on Silicon Valley high-tech corporate campuses, then Facebook is aiming to push it even higher. Desimone has the cred to do it, too. Back in the day, he was the second sous chef hired at Google by the search engine giant’s famous original executive chef, Charlie Ayers. It was Desimone who designed the layout for the kitchens at Google in Mountain View, and who did the same for Facebook, when it moved into its S. California Avenue building three months ago after outgrowing its 10 buildings scattered around downtown Palo Alto.

“I’d do the Pepsi Challenge with them any day,” Desimone says about Google’s culinary program. “Google was good, but all the original chefs are gone now. And I got my pick of the litter. Eighty percent of my staff came from Google. We work our asses off here. But we have fun doing it.”

Indeed, they do.

One of Hawaii’s most well known chefs, Sam Choy, has cooked here. Charles Phan of the Slanted Door in San Francisco, is scheduled to drop by later this year to do the same. So is New Orleans legend, Paul Prudhomme. They don’t get paid to do so. They just want to do it, because they’re friends with Desimone.

A tapa of rustic bread drizzled with dark chocolate, olive oil, and sea salt.

Marinated Idiazabal cheese with rosemary.

Squash blossoms for Castilian-style zucchini with eggplant and tomatoes.

Meals are structured around cultural or global themes, which change not only daily, but between lunch and dinner. For instance, lunch might be a southern barbecue, while dinner might center around Cuban food. Desimone mixes it all up, never repeating the exact same menu again. He’s so organized that he can tell you what is on the menu for June of next year and which chef is in charge of it.

Employees can make requests. Someone once asked for an all-chocolate menu. Desimone complied with a “Willy Wonka Menu” of chocolate ravioli with pepper ricotta, lamb with a chocolate rub, and mole, of course. Then there was the tribute to “The Simpsons” TV show, which featured deep-fried pork chop in honor of Homer Simpson, and brown rice in an homage to his straight-laced daughter, Lisa.

“We’ll take on any challenge,” Desimone says. “If someone asks me to do their mom’s chicken and dumplings recipe, I’ll do it.”

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Coffee That Aims to Brew World Change

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Coffee that could help better the lives of women in Zimbabwe.

Who knew a cup of Joe could hold the promise of bettering the lives of women in one of the most impoverished countries in the world?

But that’s what San Rafael-based Equator Coffees’ new “Chido’s Blend” aims to do.

The coffee, a blend of three African beans, is named for Chido Govero, a 23-year-old woman from Zimbabwe, who was relegated to an orphanage after her mother died of AIDS. At age 12, this bright, young girl was discovered by a scientist with the ZERI Foundation, an organization dedicated to using science to come up with sustainable solutions to world problems. The scientist helped mentor Govero, teaching her how to analyze tissue cultures of local, wild mushrooms.

Govero and her colleagues at the university discovered that these incredibly nutritious mushrooms might hold the key to helping stricken communities better feed themselves. Zimbabwe, a landlocked African nation the size of Montana, has been plundered by a controversial land redistribution campaign that has crippled domestic food production. A quarter of the population suffers from AIDS. The country also has more orphans per capita than any nation in the world. Girls, especially, face significant dangers in this climate of scarcity.

Who knew a bag of coffee could hold such promise?

Now, Govero is teaching girls to find native mushrooms in their local areas, and to cultivate them for food and income. In this way, she hopes to give them jobs and a brighter future.

The mushrooms are cultivated using mulch composed of discarded organic materials, including husks from coffee beans. The mushrooms also provide more than food for humans. Their spores transform mulch into fiber-rich feed, which can be fed to goats and other livestock. In turn, the animal manure is composted for raising additional crops. Additionally, the mulch prevents emissions of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, by utilizing the agriculture waste from coffee production. The end result is a remarkable ecosystem.

You may be familiar with Equator Coffees because they are served at the French Laundry, Bouchon Bistro, and Bouchon Bakery. What you might not know is that it’s also a woman-owned company known for its commitment to social responsibility.

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Fabulous Fish, Tribute to Pork, Julia Child Celebration, and More

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Wild Nunavat artic char. (Photo courtesy of Nunavut Development Corporation/Shannon George Photography)

The season is nearing its end for this year’s catch of wild Nunavut artic char. But you can experience this rich, complex tasting fish at a special dinner at Waterbar in San Francisco on Aug. 31.

The fish comes from Nunavut, Canada, near the Artic Circle. As you can imagine, the waters there are as pristine as can be, resulting in fish of incomparable quality.

For generations, the Inuit community there has caught the fish using traditional methods. To support the fishing community there, high-end restaurants across the country have started serving the fish. They include Daniel, Per Se, and Le Berndardin, all in New York.

Waterbar’s three-course dinner is $125 per person. It will feature the fish in spicy spring rolls, hot smoked over cedar, and baked with Pinot Noir gastrique.

To commemorate the late-Julia Child’s birthday on Aug. 20, Kepler’s book store in Menlo Park will host an open house, 6 p.m. to 9 p.m..

Champagne and cake will be served. All cookbooks also will be on sale for 20 percent off, and prizes will be raffled off.

To honor Julia’s birthday and the opening of the flick, “Julie & Julia,” the Grand Cafe in San Francisco will serve one of her iconic dishes, Beouf Bourguignon for half off during the month of August.

The special price of $13.50 is available at lunch or dinner. Just show your theater ticket stub to get the discounted price.

If you’re in an especially porky mood, you’ll want to head to Nob Hill Grille in San Francisco, Aug. 25 and Aug. 26, for a “Tribute to Pork.”

The four-course dinner is $40 per person. Wine pairings are an additional $15.

Dishes will include crispy braised pork belly with oyster mushroom risotto; and suckling pig roasted with rosemary, fresh lavender, and pork reduction.

The inaugural San Francisco Street Food Festival is coming up Aug. 22. Folsom Street, between 25th and 26th streets, will be transformed into a cornucopia of street food vendors offering specialties, none of which will be priced higher than $10.

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Organics on the Menu at Stanford Hospital

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Roasted red pepper soup with goat cheese.

Soup sure does a body good.

Stanford Hospital knows that. And if you’re a foodie ever in need of medical care, you might just want to make sure you end up there, because the renowned hospital has just launched a new all-organic, local, sustainable “Farm Fresh” menu option for inpatients. It’s centered around gourmet soups created in collaboration with Peninsula restaurateur and long-time champion of organics, Jesse Cool.

Right now, the organic option, which started a few weeks ago, is offered only at dinner time to patients on unrestricted diets. But plans are to eventually expand it to patients’ lunches, and to the cafeteria offerings.

The organic dinner tray for patients comes complete with your choice of soup with grass-fed meatballs.

If you opt for the organic menu, you get your choice of made-from-scratch chicken noodle soup or that day’s local vegetable soup. The latter might be cauliflower soup with rosemary, roasted sweet pepper with goat cheese, roasted tomato with herbs, potato leek, carrot ginger with curry, cream of spinach, or corn with basil and smoked cheddar.

Your tray also arrives with a small organic salad, organic whole grain bread, a dessert of either stuffed baked apple or seasonal fruit with honey yogurt sauce, and a beverage such as organic lemonade, green tea, organic ginger ale, or Starbucks organic free-trade coffee.

Your soup bowl contains your choice of protein — grass-fed meatballs, poached organic chicken, or smoked tofu. Your soup comes separately in a thermos carafe to keep it nice and warm. It gets poured table-side — or in this case, bed-side.

Hospital food never looked so appealing.

So in this dreary economy, in which cash-strapped consumers are buying less organic food, why is Stanford Hospital taking on the potentially added cost of providing an organic menu for patients?

With 450 patients in its hospital at any one time, administrators believe they will be able to negotiate purchasing agreements with local farmers, many within a 200-mile radius of Stanford, so that the organics menu will be cost-effective.

“We believe that part of the healing process for patients involves eating food as fresh as possible, in which nutrients are preserved,” says Shelley Hebert, executive director of public affairs for the hospital. “We also want to educate patients about healthful eating and cooking when they leave the hospital.”

To that end, the soup recipes are being made available on the hospital’s Web site.

Stanford Hospital Executive Chef Beni Velazquez and Flea Street Cafe restaurateur Jesse Cool.

Cool, who owns Flea Street Cafe in Menlo Park, worked on the soup recipes with the hospital’s Executive Chef Beni Velazquez, a certified instructor with the Culinary Institute of America and a former Ritz-Carlton Hotel chef.

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The Dish on Heirloom Veggies and Culinary Luminaries at SF Chefs Food Wine Extravaganza

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Rare gray shallots.

If you’ve ever needed proof of the value of saving and preserving heirloom seeds, just take a close look at the photo above.

That, my friend, is what a real, wild shallot looks like. It’s not big and purple, and encased in an easily removed papery shell like the commercially grown ones found at the supermarket here. No, this true shallot known as a gray shallot is much smaller and much more gnarly looking. You have to work to get at it, too, because its outer shell is quite hard to penetrate.

But your efforts are richly rewarded in the end with its beguiling fragrance and flavor that’s like that of a fine truffle.

Now, aren’t you just itching to get your hands on one? Unfortunately, it’s grown only in France now. Like so many varieties of heirloom produce (ones that have been propagated for at least 50 years and are not hybrids), they fell out of popularity after World War II, when our food became much more homogenized and industrialized. But nowadays, chefs and small-scale farmers are rediscovering these heritage fruits and vegetables, and finding inspiration in the stories and flavors they hold.

That was the theme of a Sunday cooking seminar at the SF Chefs Food Wine extravaganza in San Francisco, hosted by Chef Daniel Patterson of Coi in San Francisco, Laurence Jossel of Nopa in San Francisco, and Craig Lindquist, a Sonoma seed preservationist.

Chef Daniel Patterson of Coi snips edible wild flowers for his heirloom potato dish.

“These old varieties were woven into people’s lives,” Patterson says. “You used to save the seeds of the plants you liked. Over time, the plants adapted to where they were grown, so they took on the flavor characteristics of the place. We’ve lost a lot of that now.”

Chef Laurence Jossel of Nopa prepares pork chile with heirloom smoked peppers.

Flavor is front and center with these imperfect looking, finicky growing heirlooms. They may win no beauty contests, but they will win you over with their taste. One spoonful of Jossel’s bold pork chile, made with heirloom peppers that were dried and smoked, will make you a convert. One sip of Patterson’s onion soup with Parmigiana foam, will leave you wondering how it could taste so sweet from just onions and no added sugar.

Rose Finn fingerling potatoes.

This Rose Finn potato was grown in England in the 1700s. It was the favorite potato of organic gardening pioneer Alan Chadwick, who supposedly smuggled it back to Santa Cruz, where he grew them, Lindquist says. Nowadays, you can find them occasionally for sale at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market, or served in season at the venerable Chez Panisse in Berkeley.

This fingerling potato fell out of favor because of its little bumps (secondary growth sites), Lindquist says. Consumers want uniform, pretty looking potatoes, not ones with little nubs all over them.

Patterson can’t get enough of potatoes like this, though. He loves their creamy, almost sweet flavor. He steams them, then serves them with salsa verde and edible blooms, or just a little drizzle of olive oil and sea salt.

Patterson's new potatoes with salsa verde and edible flowers.

“Maintaining diversity is very important,” Lindquist says. “These products have unique flavors. And heirlooms give us an experience we just don’t get elsewhere.”

Find out more about heirloom seeds at Seed Savers Exchange, a non-profit dedicated to saving and sharing them.

Chefs Charles Phan (left), Thomas Keller (center), and Douglas Keane (right).

Big-name chefs were also on the marquee at another session of SF Chefs Food Wine on Sunday. Indeed, they don’t come much bigger than Thomas Keller of the French Laundry in Yountville, Douglas Keane of Cyrus in Healdsburg, and Charles Phan of the Slanted Door in San Francisco.

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