"san francisco" news and stories

Diane Campbell wore many hats before donning the metaphorical purple stovepipe to become the Willy Wonka of San Francisco's Russian Hill neighborhood: She was a cook, a fundraiser, and a marketer for a dot-com, among other things. Her passion, however, has always been candy. As a little girl growing up on Long Island, she used to buy big sacks of the sweet stuff from the supermarket, carry her haul home on her bike, and repackage the candy into goodie bags for her family and friends. She turned this lifelong love of candy into a career five years ago when she and her husband opened what has since become the city's premier sweet shop, known simply as The Candy Store.

Read more about Diane and The Candy Store after the jump...

Each week, we round up a selection of scrumptious links from our friends over at YumSugar. Here's what they've got cooking this week:

• These cocktails practically have a heart beat.
• Old Bay, a crab's kissing cousin, is finally demystified.
• Some City by the Bay brunch spots that score a perfect 10.
• Bet you didn't know adding sea salt to a brownie makes it better.
• Canning, pickling and fermenting -- oh my! -- allow you to time travel.
• Fall is upon us, as are these 10 recipes.

If the locavore movement is trying to shed its elitist image as an exclusive province for those who can afford $5 for a handful of locally grown strawberries, then it's not getting much help from the Wall Street Journal.

A recent article on WSJ.com focused on the two-month-old Foodshed Project in San Francisco. The project's goals are laudable: each year, farms within 100 miles of San Francisco produce $10 billion worth of food; the Foodshed Project is trying to get more of that food to local tables rather than having it shipped all across the country.

But it seems that the movement that's all about cutting out the middleman and connecting eaters with the source of what they eat is discovering the importance of, well, middlemen.

As the Journal puts it: "In the Foodshed program, a few dozen farms sell their produce via Ben and Annie Ratto, a husband-and-wife team who act as middlemen between farms and food distributors. Those distributors...pick up produce from small farms at the Rattos' warehouse in Oakland and deliver it to customers. Mr. Ratto and the distributors each charge a markup -- typically 10% to 15% for Mr. Ratto, while the distributors add a charge, currently $5 per case of produce."

If all those markups seem destined to put the label of "locally grown" on par with "luxury," then take a look at Foodshed's nascent client list, which includes high-end Bay Area catering company, Living Room Events, and the epitome of luxury itself, the Ritz-Carlton, where locally grown strawberries "typically end up in guests' continental breakfasts."

As Marie Antoinette might have put it today: "Let them eat Chilean blueberries!"

San Francisco officials say the city's fast-food litter has gotten out of control. Thousands of impromptu picnics on bus benches, in public parks, and on city sidewalks have left the landscape riddled with abandoned wrappers, napkins and bags.

The question is, who should pay to clean it all up? San Francisco politicians want to add a fee at the restaurant register to cover the costs of fast-food trash removal. It's a potentially lucrative proposal: A similar tax on cigarettes of 20 cents a pack was added to offset the cost of cleaning up cigarette litter, and that fee will generate about $2.5 million during the fiscal year -- not exactly chump change.

"Fast-food wrappers are really the next biggest identifiable source [of litter]," Department of Public Works Director Ed Reiskin told the Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Committee in a report published in the San Francisco Examiner. The proposal will be considered in the next few months, officials say.

If New York has given it up for whoopie pies, San Francisco is a city that has sold its soul for a box of macaroons. And I don't mean the coconut kind that get stuck in your teeth – I mean French-style macaroons (often called macarons); little, round, pastel-colored puffs of perfection. If you've ever fantasized going to San Francisco with some flowers in your hair long after the Summer of Love turned to fall, I'm here to tell you: This is where the magic went. Tune in; turn on; add ten pounds.

Like the whoopie pie in NYC, French macaroons have been dubbed "the next cupcake" here, though I don't think the fair cupcake has to pack her bag quite yet. Macaroons are cookie sandwiches made with almond meal (or flour), powdered sugar, egg whites and food coloring, surrounding a filling of buttercream, ganache or jelly. Compared to the humble cupcake, the macaroon is rarefied – and at $1.60 each, they still go faster than Oreos, and are not the kind of snack you'll be buying for your ten-year-old's birthday party.

But forget the children for a moment, and get over your French-bashing and savor the flavor of these macaroons from Paulette San Francisco. First, dig the pretty colors, man. Caribbean chocolate, lemon, Sicilian pistachio, violet cassis – each box is like a rainbow, and lasts about as long. I brought six of them to the movies with me (The Blind Side) and had to stop myself from eating the whole sample set before the film was over. (And yes, I could discern the flavors in the dark.)