Have you ever gazed out at your backyard and wished you had the time to install and tend an organic vegetable garden (but your busy life prevents you from making the initial investment of energy)? If you're in the Bay Area, you can now outsource your vegetable gardening needs. A new business has started recently, called MyFarm, which will come out to your house, scope out your available space and amount of sun and create a personalized vegetable garden to suite your needs.
The initial installation runs between $600 - $1,000 and then you pay a weekly service charge for maintenance (depending on the size of your yard). They'll also leave a basket of freshly harvested veggies on your doorstep for you (that will often include produce from other, abundantly producing backyards). For those folks who don't know where to begin in creating their own organic vegetable garden, I can see how this could be a valuable service, especially in these days when it's important to know just where your veggies are coming from (they'll even manage your compost pile for you).
The Baja meets the Bayou with fish tacos and accompanying fiery salsas, beets get an undeserved bad rap, the Roving Feast goes to Berlin for Potato Salad and Big Meatballs, and a Hae-muhl Pah-jun, Korean seafood "pancake," pairs well with wine.
We're no strangers to blends, but we're probably far more familiar with wines that have been made from blending different grapes in the fermentation tank. However, wines made from different grapes that were grown together in the field, called field-blends, are "aromatic, seamless...more than just the sum of its parts."
The Wine Selection of the Week is Sauvignon Blanc from the Sonoma County. The highest rated of the bunch is 2005 Gary Farrell Redwood Ranch Sonoma County Sauvignon Blanc ($25), which received three out of four stars (***).
A summery gazpacho uses up the tomato harvest and pairs well with Sauvignon Blanc. Smoky Italian cheese, Scamorza, is a good stand-in for mozzarella.
Bret Lopez names his Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon "Scarecrow" in honor of his grandfather Joseph Judson Cohn, who oversaw production of "The Wizard of Oz" as an executive at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Cohn planted the original vineyard that supplies the grape for the wine.
The cupcakes don't use Samoas
cookies, so there's no need to track down your favorite little Girl Scout. The brown suagr/butter cupcakes
that have a chocolate ganache filling and a caramelized coconut frosting just look and taste like the decadent
chocolatey, caramel-y, coconutty cookie.
The feature story this week is on the 
We're no strangers to blends, but we're probably far more familiar with wines that have been made from blending different grapes in the fermentation tank. However, wines made from different grapes that were grown together in the field, called 
Bret Lopez names his 
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