David Winsberg of Happy Quail Farms and Todd Champagne of Happy Girl Kitchen
Saturday, January 16, 2016, 12:00 pm - 12:45 pm
Stop by the CUESA Classroom for a cooking demo featuring the seasonal bounty of the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. In conjunction with the Good Food Awards, this Market to Table demo will highlight two of our market sellers who are finalists. Congratulations, David and Todd!
Farming became a full-time profession for David Winsberg of Happy Quail Farms shortly after he moved to the Bay Area in 1978. The farm (originally a hobby quail farm) has evolved into an “artisanal specialty urban micro-farm.” David has found his niche in specialty peppers and now produces over 30 varieties of sweet and hot peppers. The farm uses eight of their pepper varieties to make paprika by sun drying, dehydrating, and then grinding them in a corn mill. Climate-controlled farming allows David the ability to produce peppers long before and after they can be produced in the field. His greenhouses are heated in the early spring and the late fall using natural gas in a radiant heat system—the most efficient heating source available for greenhouse production. David also grows crops outdoors, including South African gem squash, summer squash, and a few unusual products such as rhubarb and horseradish. Happy Quail Farms was the first farm to use a retractable roof crop protection system to enable early and late pepper production.
Todd and Jordan of Happy Girl Kitchen were first introduced to food preservation when they worked together on a farm in Norway in 1999. Back in the States, living on California’s Central Coast, they saw the need to preserve the regional harvest so people could eat a diversity of local produce year-round. These days, Todd and Jordan keep busy throughout the year using hot-water bath canning techniques to put up pickles, jams, tomatoes, shrubs, marmalades, jellies, juices, and fresh ferments. Everything is made by hand and sold in reusable and returnable glass mason jars. Customers can watch the action while eating at Happy Girl’s café and cannery open every day in Pacific Grove, just blocks from the Monterey Bay Aquarium.
All demos take place in the CUESA Classroom (under the white tents in front of the Ferry Building) and are free to the public, with recipes and samples for all.