Meat Marketing

The John Ford Ranch is right here in Little Lake Valley, and makes the beef they raise available locally, with their name right on it (the package on the right). Willits is a good place to be if you value knowing exactly where your food is coming from. The cattle take a detour to Eureka up in Humboldt county, where the nearest licensed slaughterhouse is located. But the food comes back here, and I am reassured that I can talk to the Fords, see the cattle in the pastures, and trust the environment they have been in.

We can also get American Bison meat, raised near the Ukiah Valley just 25 miles south of us, from the J Bar S Ranch (the packages on the left). Nearly driven to extinction in the 19th century, they've made a comeback as a marketable food source. I've never tried the meat, but it is said to be low in fat, so appeals to calorie-conscious diners.

Back at the Diner

Great news to report: the Ardella's crew is back in action after their long winter vacation! I couldn't even wait for my food to arrive - I had to take a celebratory picture. It's the beautifully reflective black granite counter top that has me whipping out my camera every time.

Rosehips

A splendid load of rosehips awaits the landowner's harvest near a roadside in the valley. Like most plants in the rose family (apples, blackberries), the fruit of roses is a useful addition to the human diet. While difficult to eat raw (apparently hard and sour), rosehips are loaded with vitamin C, iron, and anti-oxidants. When dried they make a fine addition to herbal tea mixtures, or steeped on their own. They can also be cooked into jams and pies - especially good mixed with other fruit. Of course, they are also pretty just left on the vine.

Latte No Foam

After the photo safari to the valley brought very few photos to bank in my computer the other day, I went for warm refuge in Mendonesia, housed in the former Bank of Willits building. With compassion and efficiency, the kindly crew simultaneously whipped up a latte and a Pine Mountain sandwich for my tired soul.

An Open Face

With all this arctic air numbing our toes and crusting our windshields, it's high time we found refuge indoors. A warm, comforting meatloaf on a gravy-smothered, open-faced sandwich (with side salad) at Ardella's is just the thing in this weather. Good news for the owners and staff: they will be taking their winter break from December 21 to January 7. For the rest of us: bad news. But they have earned it.

More Comfort Food

After all the running around of Thanksgiving week, I needed to get some laundry done. Which put me in Evergreen Shopping Center, which put me just a wander away from the Super Taco restaurant while my clothes dried. After so much turkey and potatoes and gravy, it was nice to sit down to a pretty dish of another kind of comfort food: tamales.

There are lots of circles in this picture, but it is not yet theme day... just a hint to absent-minded City Daily Photo Bloggers to be ready to go tomorrow!

Autumn Patio Lunch

Afternoon temperatures have started to rise into the upper 70s Fahrenheit, and the skies have cleared a bit. Lunch on the patio at the Purple Thistle can include fried wontons filled with roasted garlic and sundried tomato goat cheese, with a raspberry coulee. Oh, how we suffer in Willits!

WiFi at the Pub

I've never been one for much hanging out at bars and pubs, but the night after the election I ventured over to Shanachie's. I was able to get the last serving of sparkling wine, since they had depleted their supply in the celebrations the night before, and could chat with some friendly people. The WiFi connection is available until 8pm, so this pair enjoyed a pitcher of beer along with their web surfing on the quieter side of the room.

Loose Garlic

With the end of the traditional Farmer's Market season, we recently learned that it will continue, for the first time, indoors each Thursday afternoon at the Community Center. But I'll miss the beautiful light that filtered through the towering trees of City Park.

Sweet Treats

Sara N. of Mashhad, Iran, has given me the Blogging Friends Forever award. She is always so kind, and I am grateful for her friendship through our shared interest in City Daily Photo Blogging. And dear Meead, now of Portland, Oregon, has given me the same honor. He is a prince among men, and was the first to introduce me to his country. Now his challenge is to comprehend mine, and I wish him many angels in his adventure here.

Now it is my turn to give the award to five other bloggers, according to the following rules:
1. Only five people are allowed
2. Four have to be dedicated followers of your blog
3. One has to be someone new or recently new to your blog and live in another part of the world
4. You must link back to whoever gave you the award

My five are invited to pass this award along, if they choose to do so. (Even if they do not, I hope people will visit their blogs. Some visit Willits DP silently, others with many kind comments.):

1) Kelly of Geneva, Illinois
2) Babzy of France/Iceland
3) Afyon of Afyonkarahisar, Turkey
4) Hilda of Manila, Philippines
5) Petrea of Pasadena, California

In addition to the sweet treat of blogging friends, the organic treats in the photo above can be found at Mendonesia Cafe in the heart of Willits.

City Daily Photo bloggers have just been informed by a much admired Turkish blogger that "access to Blogspot/Blogger websites has been suspended in accordance with decision of Criminal Court of Peace in Turkey." This means that their blogs remain visible to the rest of us, but that they themselves are prohibited from logging on to those pages. This is frightening news.

Grilled Chicken Salad

I've been pretty busy these last few days, and haven't been in the mood to cook. Here's a plate of Ardella's grilled chicken salad, with ranch dressing on the side. Nothing fancy, but plenty of it. I'll share.

I should be back on schedule by Sunday. Cheers!

Harvest Festival #4: Fruit Press

Part of the day-long preparations for the Harvest Festival Dinner was the production of grape and apple juice for the diners. Here, a Grange member adds organic grapes, supplied by Frey Vineyards of Redwood Valley, into the hopper for pressing. Such a process was more commonplace a century ago, but with the convenience of prepared juices, it is now something to be rediscovered for those who seek more self-sufficiency. I saw many of these presses used by families in Hungary a decade ago. They are way ahead of us here. More images of this process are on my Overflow blog.

Lovely Surprises

Some readers of this blog may recall a post I did in August, where I finally scrambled after a horse and rider who I very often saw on weekends downtown, and was able to photograph a few times on its steady trek through our fair summer streets. Yet, the photo I really had in mind still eluded me.

It would be through the window of Ardella's Downtown Diner, as I had seen it so many times before, but passing too quickly to turn on the camera, frame the shot, hold still, and press the button, all in time for it to be directly opposite from me at the dining counter. I had told the diner owners, who had told the staff, what my vision entailed. So for months, they would share a chuckle every time the horse went by and I wasn't there, or even better, after I had just left. But I blogged what I got, and had pretty much forgotten about it.

Then, on a recent Sunday, I had finished my late breakfast and lingered over coffee even as the "Closed" sign was turned, and the table settings put away. The boss always keeps everything sparkling clean, and I suddenly noticed the interesting effect of the lights reflected on the black granite she had just wiped down. She has gotten used to me taking pictures of my food, or other people's food (yes, I ask first... mostly), so it was unremarkable that I was once again taking more pictures inside her establishment. The waitresses were tallying up their tickets and counting their tips and catching their final meals before heading home.

And then, like a miracle, the horse appeared, and I was ready. Completely unplanned, but there it was. We probably gasped, and said a few disbelieving "Nooooh"s. And as if to give me even more time, the horse balked as it started to pass, so the rider had to turn it back out of view before insisting that it proceed back to the south past our window. I snapped her riding away, thinking that would be as good a view as would be coming. But as she came back around, I tracked her progress with my viewfinder, saw her appear in the targeted window, and pressed the shutter button.

"I got it," I said. "I think I got it."

I never know for sure with any of my pictures if they turned out well on the spot, because I can't really make out the quality of the focus on the tiny screen on the camera. So the true test would be how it would look on my computer screen. I paid my tab, and hurried home.

The problem with pictures that are imagined is they usually can't be created by an amateur like me. The contrasting light between the outdoors and the indoors leaves you sacrificing one for the other, or compromising both. I could see that I got the shot, but realized the horse and rider didn't loom quite as large as I thought they would, and the signs and back window reflections interfered more than I anticipated, and the background was all overexposed. But when I looked at the photo before me, I adored it. Not for what was outside, but for what I wasn't even paying attention to on the inside. Not only had they cheered me on, but some of the staff were right there in my picture frame! Completely absorbed in the culmination of my quest, I was oblivious as they looked on in wonder, knowing how much I had wanted that moment! Their faces tell the story. That's why I love this shot.



Hi, my name's Elaine, and I'm a City Daily Photo Blogger. This is my town.

Harvest Festival #3: Community Supported Agriculture

Even as the summer harvest peaks, with sunflowers and peppers and a rich variety of other vegetables, it's time for farmers to plan ahead. A winter produce CSA farm, Mendocino Organics, is accepting subscribers to its winter season produce harvests. I explained more about the concept of Community Supported Agriculture in an earlier post, linked here, and here, and even here, about my summer season membership in Live Power Farm. Most of California is fortunate to have a climate suitable for growing so much food for so much of the year, but anywhere you have farming, people can come together with a farmer, and ask to support his or her growing of an array of vegetables and fruit as dividends for the supporters throughout the growing season.

Harvest Festival: Dinner

Saturday was a beautiful, clean, crisp, after-the-rain day for the annual Harvest Festival hosted by the Little Lake Grange. The focus was on locally produced food of every sort, with the highlight being a community banquet using only food from within about a fifty mile radius of Willits. Throughout the day, local food vendors, growers, inventors, and home food preservation crafters displayed their ideas, and taught useful skills to visitors. In the photo above, volunteer cooks seasoned root vegetables before roasting them for the evening dinner. Even the salt and marinades were completely locally sourced, from the ground (or sea) up! There are some more pre-dinner pictures on my Overflow blog.

There were so many aspects to this event, I may just succumb to another series of posts, concurrent with the Roots Steam Up series, and the Miracle Mile series, both of which aren't finished yet. Plus, there's all the plain old pictures I want to slip into the blog now and then. Who knew such a quiet, tiny little city of no particular importance would be such a challenge to cram in to an ongoing blog! The mind, uh, bloggles!

Peppers, Tomatoes, Basil

I needed to pause for some refreshment at the farmer's market after all that driving around on the Miracle Mile. My point and shoot camera does different things with the light there, depending on how I tilt it, or where I center it. I like what it did to these late summer vegetables.

PeppersTomatoesBasil Jigsaw Puzzle

Ice Cream Remedy

It has been hot, hot, hot in Willits (107F) for the last few days, so a salubrious visit to JD Redhouse for some ice cream is just the relief anyone could need. Sweets, pet supplies, blue jeans, and horse tack, all in one place. I found a nice little tooled leather billfold that I just had to have, and then settled down for some deliciously zippy ginger ice cream. Here's the Animoto of more pictures.

Year of the Potato

I'm not kidding. The United Nations declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato. I've known it for a while, because before I had this blog, I used to read a lot more of the eclectic articles vetted by Arts & Letters Daily. There are thousands of varieties, and they all started as wild plants in Peru and the surrounding mountainous countries of South America. As for this picture, well, I was just enjoying that dappled light at the farmer's market.

Blueberry Days

Watchful neighbors of City Park will notice some evenings when an odd assemblage of grown men and women just seem to "turn up" at one edge, some sitting in their cars, or standing in solitude several yards from each other. Several might gather along a particular fence rail, fewer still on the picnic table bench across the street. Are these kidnappers planning their next move? Or maybe undercover agents on a stakeout? Or a strange religious cult in meditation? The names of the folks pictured here rhyme with Ursula, Greg, and Mary.

No, I can tell you, these people are actually waiting for the delivery van carrying the much longed-for blueberries they ordered for the summer, back when the bees hadn't even touched the flowers. Gloria, our farmer, brings our vegetables down from Covelo, then continues south to Ukiah, drops off more veg to subscribers there while she meets up with the blueberry producer from Boonville, then comes back up to Willits with our shares of the berries on a second "drop". Don't tell Gloria, but sometimes when she's late coming back, the motley crew of farm sustainers has a little more reason to chat. "Is she supposed to be here at eight?" and "I hope she's okay." See an Animoto visual show of the action when Gloria finally arrives, and we reach to receive our food from the hand of the farmer.

Time for Breakfast

Early day visitors to this blog may remember a bowl of soup at Ardella's. Then there was the divine eggs benedict presentation at Ardella's. We are due for another plate, and what could be more interesting than the food someone else is eating. This has all the fixings of a casual California breakfast in a diner at its best: eggs scrambled with spinach and smoked salmon, fried potatoes, a split and toasted English muffin with raspberry jam smeared on (do the English eat English muffins?), tea with a small pot for refills, and little sealed shots of cream for the tea or coffee. Also on the table is a bottle of ketchup (sometimes spelled catsup), which she wisely doesn't use. There are people out there who never eat eggs without ketchup or Tabasco sauce, but the habit mystifies me. I missed including the salt and pepper shakers in the photo (bad blogger, bad, bad). The bill/check for the meal is already on the table, so they must have asked for it early. Have I mentioned that Ardella's is a good place to eat?

Hey! The Blogger dashboard tells me this is post number 150 for Willits Daily Photo!