We just returned from a week-long trip to San Francisco and as you may have noticed, I don’t quite have the whole blogging-while-traveling thing down. Since the Boulder Market is now officially closed, it was nice to head to California where the markets stay open all year long. Susie Wyshak, a fellow foodie who’s helping us discover new producers for Foodzie, gave us the grand tour of the Ferry Building Farmers Market. If you’ve been to San Francisco or flipped through a Food & Wine, Saveur or Bon Appetit magazine you’re probably familiar with a bunch of the producers we bumped into - many that could be considered celebrities in this town!

I’ve been a fan of June Taylor ever since I discovered her in the Silver Lake Cheese Shop in LA and fell in love with her apricot conserve. It was nice to meet her in person and I truly enjoyed my chat with her about cooking and the idea of expanding our jam horizon beyond just jam and toast. (why not duck, fish, cheese…) June’s a producer of artisan jams, syrups and occasionally, if you’re lucky, she’ll craft her famous shortbread or Christmas Cake. June still makes each flavor just one teeny tiny batch at a time (the jams are cooked on her stovetop). She hand labels each jar and even hand-dyed the tissue paper she wrapped her Christmas Cakes in this year. If you want to get a sense for artisan, just talk to June - she defines it in its purest form.

I just mentioned Steve Sando and Rancho Gordo heirloom beans in my recent post about the Obama Bean Art. I was able to pick up a few bags of his beans, the Mayacoba, Brown Tepary, and Christmas Lima, which will most likely accompany my Heritage Turkey for Thanksgiving dinner this year. He was featured in Food & Wine this month and shares some sophisticated recipes that bring out the best in his beans. The Rancho Gordo brand embodies Steve’s colorful and fun personality that I was able to enjoy first-hand at the market. He’s got a basket of beans out on display that shows off the stunning color variations in the heirloom varieties. I couldn’t help but dig my hands in and play with the beans!

We also got to hang with the guys and gals at La Cocina and I fortunately (or unfortunately now that I am totally addicted…) got to try the famous Clare’s Squares. They are seriously sinful, starting with a buttery, crumbly shortbread cookie base and topped with silky caramel and a crisp layer of dark chocolate. I also got to meet the famous Christina from Kika’s Treats, munch on Gabrielle’s Delights and sip on Morning Glory Chai - all La Cocina producers.

Some like to rag on the Ferry Building Farmers Market, that it’s not a REAL farmers market. Although, yes I will admit - many of the producers are more sophisticated than those that fill other farmers markets at the end of the day, they are still real people, making really good food that they are really, really passionate about. 

Beans, beans they’re good for the heart…and wouldn’t ya know it, they’re good for art! I stumbled upon this masterpiece while catching up on the blog over at Rancho Gordo. Rancho Gordo by the way is an incredible heirloom bean producer. They grow the tastiest varieties of beans. Honestly, they are packed with so much flavor you won’t believe the difference from the mediocre beans that get crammed in cans and slapped on the shelf that the majority of us eat. This is what beans used to taste like until we decided to pay more attention to things like size, yield and disease resistance over flavor. 

I don’t think this mural was made with Rancho Gordo beans, but nonetheless it was made with beans, which just blew me away. Talk about some talent. One of the community members on crafster.org posted this project that took about 2 1/2 pounds of beans, lots of gluing and lots of time. 

Oh and if you think I’m trying to send a subliminal message now that we are just 5 days away from election day…I am. Go vote. 

Photo Courtesy of Crafster.org

According to a survey done by the National Confectioners Association (NCA), consumers are expected to spend about $2.18 billion on candy for Halloween. Looks like we’ve got the candy category covered.

But what are some other goolish goodies you can get your hands on this year? From pancakes, to brownies to spiced pumpkin seeds, check out these halloween-inspired foods, delicious now or any time of the year. 

Frankenstein Mills - Aretha Frankenstein’s made from scratch recipe for light, fluffy pancakes. They claim these flapjacks are to die for. 

Fat Witch - Scary good brownies that come in flavors like Red Witch (brownie with dried cherries), White Witch (white chocolate brownie), and Breakfast Witch (oatmeal, walnut and coffee on a little bit of brownie).

Superseedz - No carving or messy hands required. These punkin’ seeds are ready for munchin’. To satisfy both your sweet and savory tooth, they offer flavors like Sea Salt, Somewhat Spicy, Original Curry, and Sugar & Cinnamon. 

When I first learned about the La Cocina food incubator program, I thought to myself, man…what a good idea, why isn’t anyone else doing this? I guess I just wasn’t looking hard enough. After a little bit of research, I was pumped to find plenty of other food incubators that have popped up across the country to help small producers get off the ground.

From Texas to Vermont to Colorado, here are some of the incubators I stumbled across.

Chef’s Kitchens Los Angeles, CA

Kitchen Incubator Houston, TX

Western Mass Food Center Greenfield, MA

The Starting Block Kitchen Incubator Hart, MI

Vermont Food Venture Center St Albans, VT

Northern Colorado Food Incubator Fort Collins, CO

Last month at the Web 2.0 Expo, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media, gave a sobering keynote about the vacuity of Web 2.0. After pointing out some of the most pressing issues facing our country, he chided that some of our best and brightest are working on web applications like SuperPoke and iBeer. O’Reilly went on to talk about companies that are leveraging technology to take on social and political challenges, while urging many more to ask the question of whether we’re working on the right things.

Here at Foodzie we’re working diligently to build a platform that provides every artisan food producer the opportunity to connect with their customer and make a living selling their food. 

Artisan producers and foodies need a better way to connect. There are thousands of small food producers across the country who are incredibly skilled at making their products. Their challenge, however, is marketing their product to a wide range of consumers while still maintaining control of the growth of their business. For many of these producers, selling their products through a retailer means scaling up production in order to facilitate retail distribution requirements. This is in direct conflict with the way artisan foods are produced: with extremely high-quality ingredients, in small batches, with a great deal of personal attention. Selling through a middle man also means that there is one more person between the producer of the food and its consumer, which doesn’t always allow the consumer to understand where it comes from, who makes it, and how it’s connected to the world at large.

We’re really passionate about the future of food and we hope that our impact extends beyond the web and into the lives of many independent producers and growers.

*On a side note, O’Reilly Media is organizing the 5th Annual Web 2.0 Summit. This year’s conference will focus on opportunities where the web meets the real world to solve some of our most pressing issues. Speakers include Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Michael Pollan and many other thought leaders.

Election day is right around the corner and instead of slammin’ a shot for every time the McCain camp says “Maverick”, why not indulge in a truffle? Check out these election-inspired chocolates from Moonstruck, an artisan chocolate maker in Portland, Oregon and the clever write-up about them on the Candy Blog.

There’s an inspiring story in the New York Times today entitled Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town. Years ago the granite companies that supplied many jobs in Hardwick, VT decided to pick up and leave. But instead of letting the town fall apart, they’ve rallied together and determined that food is the future. They’ve collaborated to create new businesses and 75 to 100 new jobs.

There has been so much doom and gloom over the past few weeks with all the discussions about the future of our economy that it was a welcome change of pace to read about something so positive. I truly believe small businesses are the future and when they work together each business has a greater likelihood to succeed. The sum is undoubtedly greater than its parts.

I started thinking about many of the producers I’ve met that have that same collaborative attitude as the folks in Hardwick. Adam from Grafton Village Cheese wants to figure out a way to help promote other small producers in Vermont by shipping their products out of one location to help boost individual orders from multiple Vermont vendors. Christina from Kika’s Treats helps to promote other small producers in California by using their ingredients in her graham cracker treats and lists them all out on her site to give them the props they deserve.

Enabling these same type of actions in the digital world is important to us; we want to allow producers to collaborate on Foodzie and share their collective wisdom. Whether it’s sharing tips on where to source ingredients and shipping supplies or promoting other producer’s products that are complimentary to their own, I believe they will all be more successful if we provide them a way within our marketplace to do much of what they are already doing…and that’s working together.

It didn’t take long after landing in Boulder before I began riding my bike to work and became camouflaged among the Boulderites. You can’t beat it as a form of transportation. You get to blaze by the morning rush hour traffic, lower your carbon footprint, and all the while get in shape.

As we’ve traveled and talked to small producers, I’ve found a growing number who are conscious of their impact on the environment and thus have figured out a way to make their local deliveries by bicycle.

This bike belongs to De La Paz Coffee in San Francisco. The wood-tray contraption affixed to the front of the bike allows Jason to pile up the fresh roasted coffee and make deliveries around town. And with those hills…Jason not only has zero impact on mother earth, but also gets a killer workout.

Other producers taking the bicycle route include Fiona’s Granola in Boulder, CO and Taza Chocolate in Somerville, MA.

Artisan, not sure. But delicious…I am certain. As I was catching up on all my food blogs this weekend, I came across a post on Serious Eats about Old Bay. Maybe my thoughts on the spice blend are wrapped up in nostalgia for my home state of Maryland, rather than good taste. But after one glance of that old classic tin, I was salivating at the thought of Old Bay caked onto fresh steamed crabs or smothered on tender, juicy shrimp. If you’ve never tried it, give it a whirl. There’s a nice recommendation for a Classic Shrimp Scampi recipe in the post.

It’s been over a month since we launched a new store. We launched the first three to test our site and to work with both producers and our customers to see what they liked and what they didn’t. We have many other producers waiting in the wings, but we’ve held off on launching them all until we finish the development of the front end of the marketplace, so it’s easy to search for and discover products.

If you’ve visited the site in the past week you may have noticed we broke that rule to add a new producer to the Foodzie family. Our fourth producer is Dough-Nut and no, they don’t actually make doughnuts, they are just really “nutty” about making the best cookie dough.

I have to admit adding the Dough-Nut was somewhat of a selfish move for us. We had discovered these cookies when we lived back in Greensboro, NC and were smitten with them ever since. We were desperate for a way to get our hands on them and of course share the goodness with all our customers.

Mary Jean Taylor, the founder and baker at The Dough-Nut, just loved making cookies growing up. Her mom was a homemaker and her dad was an FBI agent. She took the agent path and became a fed for the Office of Labor Racketeering in Chicago, IL. She did this for seven years until she had her first son. She always made cookies for the “guys” in her office and they went crazy for them (much like we did!). After leaving to have kids and realizing she was not going back to law enforcement, she decided to follow her passion and start baking cookies. People that tasted her cookies quickly were addicted, so she decided to sell them full time. Each order is made from scratch, one batch at a time. And she uses her grandmothers scoop to make just the right size cookie.

Mary Jean nails everything from appearance to flavor to texture, which is directly related to her obsession with including only the best ingredients in her cookies. So which cookies are our favorites? Rob aka “cookie monster”, goes crazy over all her cookies but gets particularly excited about the oatmeal peanut butter chocolate chip for its heartiness and rich combination of PB and chocolate. Nik loves the classic Chocolate Chip, especially after a quick 10-second zap in the microwave (but if he was stranded on a desert island with no microwave, the Swedish Ginger would be the clear choice!). I on the other-hand am partial to the Swedish Ginger anytime…it’s soft and chewy and goes down easy with a big tall glass of milk. Hungry yet? Ok…go check out her store already!