Farm Store

We first encountered this business...Tierra Vegetables...at the Embarcadero Farmers' Market in San Francisco. They specialize in a million varieties of peppers and beans. We bought their bag of dried peppers which came with directions for making mole. We even did it once...a daylong adventure involving many ingredients and much simmering. 

There is a great story that goes with the making of mole, a delicious complex sauce. I quote from Helen Brown's West Coast Cookbook ,which was a favorite of my parents, the pages of their  often made dishes well marked with splatters and blotches.

The story goes that this complicated dish was evolved by some Mexican nuns who wanted to give their all to a visiting church dignitary. Their all was everything in their kitchen, including three kinds of chili peppers and innumerable spices and chocolate. Elena Zelayata, an expert on Mexican cooking has a wonderful recipe for it. At the end of the recipe, she adds, "P.S.. If this seems too much trouble, you can buy canned mole sauce at Mexican food stores!"

A few years ago, we were quite excited to discover Tierra Veggies  in a humble little shed in Santa Rosa which we ran across by accident on one of the numerous trips we made to the foot surgeon down the road.

At some point all the pieces of this great barn, carefully labeled, appeared in the field next to the little shed. It took a few years for the couple (brother and sister) to raise the money to raise the barn, but somehow everything came together and now they have storage, a shop and outdoor bins of everything from carrots and cabbage to eggs, chili jam and big vats of dried beans and, of course mole mix. Those are onions drying in the upstairs window of the barn.

I should have taken a picture of the enormous carrots next to some cabbages. That, in turn, reminded us of corned beef and cabbage although it's still pretty warm here. We decided on a summer version...corned beef and coleslaw, and stopped off at the market on the way home for the corned beef.