I have to share an amazing experience I had.  In addition to writing for Sunday Dish, I also write for a small local newspaper called The Sun Community Newspaper.  I’ve been writing restaurant reviews and other food related articles for them, for about a year now.   I love it, I’m a journalist at heart, and I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, I love food!

I had a chance recently to visit a local bee keeper working here in the San Fernando Valley.  Bill Lewis works at the far reaches of the Valley in Lake View Terrace.  

Bill took me on a personal tour of the bee farm (as I learned, it’s called an apiary) and was just about the friendliest, easy going guy I’ve met in awhile.  I learned so much that day and have been telling everyone I know what I found out about bees.  The story ran Saturday in the paper, and I’m reprinting it here along with some of the photos I took on my tour.  I hope you enjoy the story, as much as I enjoyed spending the morning with Bill Lewis and his bees.

The Bee Keeper of the Valley:

Bill Lewis spends his days with his head stuck in a beehive. It’s the unusual nature of working with bees that’s drawn this beekeeper to the job he’s doing doing for close to 20 years.

“Not everyone would do this kind of work; I guess that’s part of what attracts me.”

This affable beekeeper, owner of Bill’s Bees in Lake View Terrace, got his start in apiculture, that’s the formal name for beekeeping, growing up in Wisconsin while working towards a Boy Scouts merit badge.  His neighbor, who kept bees, agreed to teach Bill.  “I thought it was something different that most guys wouldn’t do.  I kept the bees for a season, and earned my badge.”

That was 40 years ago and Lewis has been fascinated by bees ever since.

On the day I visited Lewis, he was busy working with new queen bees.  The first order of business?  Marking the queens to keep track of when they were introduced to a colony.  Wearing no gloves, he gently removed the queen from a small wooden container and placed a tiny dot of paint on her head.  “Each year has a color, 2008 is red, ” Lewis told me.  He uses the queen to establish new colonies or when a colony loses its queen.  That can happen for a variety of reasons including illness and old age.

I was struck at how relaxed Lewis was with the bees.  It put me immediately at ease.  “I’ve always been comfortable around bees, probably because I was introduced to them fairly young” he said, “I did get stung but it was usually because of something stupid I did.”

Locally, he’s been keeping bees since 1991.  After moving in he found a colony of bees living in the walls of his new house.  Upon further investigation, he discovered several abandoned hives on a neighboring property.  Lewis adopted the bees, about 11 hives in all, and moved them to his land.  Since then, the number of hives he tends to has grown from 11 to about 180.

After marking the queens, Lewis and I headed down the road to the apiary, or bee yard.

We stopped along the road, so he could point out some of the local plants which the bees like to gather nectar and pollen from.  I realized that keeping bees also requires him to be an amateur botanist.  “I definitely study the plants in the area.  I better know something about which ones make honey and which don’t.”

Lewis wasn’t always a beekeeper or and amateur botanist.  For years he worked as an engineer, but found he wasn’t cut out for sitting behind a desk every day.  “I spend most of my time trying not to fall asleep, ” he admitted.

These days, he makes his own hours, and though he may work 12 hours a day, Lewis says “the only one I have to answer to now, is me, and the bees.”

Once we arrived at the apiary, Bill  gathered his supplies, along with the new queens, and then helped me into my bee suit, complete with helmet, veil and elbow length gloves.

As I was being suited up, I noticed a strange noise coming from the boxes containing the queens.  I crouched down, putting my ear close to the box.  The sound was beautiful and melodic, like no sound I’d ever heard a bee make before.

“They’re piping”  Lewis told me in regards to the sound the queens were making.  “Queens are pretty territorial  When you get a bunch of them that close to one another, that’s how they let the others know they’re there.  They’re ’squaring off’ so to speak.”  It was one of the many fascinating things I would learn about bees that day.

Another thing I learned, and something Lewis is passionate about, is how vital the bee community is to our local habitat.  “As the bee population dwindles, prices on all the food we eat will go up.  If the bees don’t pollinate, the plants, fruits and vegetables don’t grow as well.  It would affect up to 70 percent of all the food we eat, in some way.”

As I stood, protectively ensconced in my bee suit, I learned something even more interesting.  Bees are not the aggressive insects some think they are.  In fact, as Lewis worked with the hives, I was within four feet of thousands of bees.  In that time, only one bee landed on me.

“She’s just resting,”  Lewis told me, “if you leave her alone she won’t try to sting you.” 

Most of the bees you see at the park or in your backyard are worker bees, all of them female, out collecting nectar and pollen.  The male bees, or drones, exist solely to mate with the queen.

Lewis told me that these worker bees are at their least aggressive when away from the hive.  “There is no queen and no babies to protect, so they are pretty relaxed.”

While in the bee yard, he showed me how the colony tends to the eggs and how they make honey.

“Bees have two parts to their stomach, one for pollen and one for nectar.  The nectar mixes with the enzymes in the bees stomach and is then deposited into the cells of the hive.

When it’s deposited it’s watery, so the bees bring air into the hive and drive the moisture down which thickens the honey up. ”

Lewis’s bees produce about 15 to 20 thousand bottles of honey a year.  To put that in context, a commercial honey maker may make up to 2 million bottles a year.

But there are a few things that set this beekeeper’s honey apart from the kind you’ll find in the plastic bear sitting on your grocers shelf. 

For one thing, raw honey, the kind Lewis sells, has not been heated or filtered.  It’s full of live enzymes that the bees naturally put in the honey, along with tiny grains of pollen.  The enzymes, according to Lewis, are good for your digestive system.  Some feel that pollen is good for people suffering from allergies to local pollen.  “The theory is that by eating locally harvested honey, you can build a tolerance to pollens in your area.”

Commercial honey is heated to extremely high temperatures so that it will stay clear on the shelf for a long time.  The down side?  This very process destroys all the things that make raw honey so good for you.

Another good thing about raw honey is that the consumer gets a bigger variety.  Lewis sells Black Sage, Buckwheat and Orange Blossom varieties, among others. 

Each takes on a different color and flavor depending on which flowers the bees are attracted to.  “You won’t get that with commercial honey because producers mix all the honeys together, so they all taste the same.” says Lewis.

Bill Lewis sells his honey, along with things his wife makes from the honeycomb, like candles, soap and lip balm, directly to consumers at local farmers markets.

It’s this part of his job that Lewis finds the easiest and most enjoyable.  “People have alot of questions about the bees and the honey, and I don’t mind answering them.”

The most difficult part of his job is finding enough land to expand the number of hives.   ”People don’t want the bees near the city, they are fearful of them.  But we need them;  we need them for our food supply.”

Eventually, he’d like to buy some land where he can keep his bees and build a honey processing and packaging plant.  In the meantime he’ll spend his days with his head in a hive and as he says: “letting the bees drive my schedule.”

Why do I love asparagus? Nothing else tastes quite like it, for starters. It’s sweet, it’s tangy, it’s pungent, it’s fresh, it’s savory, all in one vegetable! It’s like a complete food that way, needing little more than salt and pepper to enliven the senses. Sure, it has its classic pairings, such as hollandaise sauce, morels, or bacon, but for this grad-student epicure, usually just a quick steam, boil, or saute is enough to bring out their full glory.

This season I have been eating a lot of Zuckerman Farms’ jumbo asparagus (South Pasadena farmer’s market, Hollywood farmer’s market) — I would recommend buying the thickest stalks you can afford, and maximize that volume-to-surface area ratio. Here’s why: skins just don’t have that much flavor. So while the thin asparagus may be more tender, resulting in less trim loss, there is no way they can compare with the jumbos in flavor. Jumbos are also a lot more convenient to clean and prep, because there are fewer of them in a batch, and because they keep well in some water. Avoid being suckered into paying more for asparagus “tips”? too — usually they are just old tips trimmed off of woody stems (you can tell by examining the tips for dried out “leaves”), and not at all a premium product.

So here I offer you my modular technique for making boiled asparagus, sauteed asparagus, and asparagus soup. I love this method because each technique builds on the last, so they’re easier to remember. You only need a couple things, though to enjoy this spring bounty: a knife, a cutting board, a fruit/vegetable peeler, some pots and pans, kitchen tongs, and a blender if you’re making soup. As for other ingredients, this calls only for salt, pepper, olive oil, butter, cream and vegetable/chicken stock — homemade is best, but try to get the no-sodium stuff so you can adjust the seasoning to your taste.

To prep: Wash and dry the asparagus. Take one stalk into both your hands, and, starting at the rigid base end, feel where the stalk just starts to become more flexible. Move up the stalk about another ¼” and slice the asparagus with a sharp knife. The ease of the cut should be an indication of how well you gauged the transition point. I prefer this method to the oft-used bend-and-snap because this way you don’t end up throwing away 50% of your ingredient, most of which is perfectly fine! The only step left is to peel the skin around the asparagus from about three inches from the tip to the base. It’s entirely optional, but it certainly helps cover up any trimming mistakes!

To boil/blanche: Put a medium-sized pot of salted water to an uproarious boil. You want the water to be as hot as you can get it, because anything less will rob you of that precious green color. Drop the tip-ends in first and let the water come back up to a full-boil for 1 or 2 minutes. The muted green color of the raw asparagus should now be a vibrant, sun-shining-through-the-clouds-onto-a-baseball-field green. Now use a set of tongs to turn the whole lot over so that the bases are now soaking. Let the water come up to a full boil for another minute (the stalks generally take less time to cook). Next, liberate them from their hot spring, plate, season with salt, pepper, and a touch of olive oil, and serve.

To saute: While your asparagus are blanching, gently melt 2-3 tablespoons of butter in a large saute pan. When blanching is complete, place the asparagus into the pan and saute gently (a very light sizzle) for 5-8 minutes, flipping them once during the process. During this time the tips should soften considerably, and their color will dip towards a deeper, forest green. Season and serve.

To make soup: Heat some vegetable/chicken stock (1.5 cups per “package” of asparagus) to a gentle boil. After the saute step, remove the asparagus from the pan and slice off some tips for garnish. Slice up the rest of the stalk and place into the boiling stock. Using an immersion blender (or standard blender), puree the soup together until smooth. Blend in some heavy cream (start with ¼ cup) to enrich the flavor and the texture, and season well with salt. To serve, place some asparagus tips in the center of a soup bowl and ladle soup around them. Garnish with some olive oil, truffle oil, or some pepper.

P.S. using thinner, unpeeled asparagus will result in a greener, grittier soup.

Thanks to BoingBoing and the Washington Post, I came across two articles today of particular interest to Locavores, Slow Foodies, and hedonists like myself. Putting these two next to each other seems to highlight also the inherent conflict of interest in which we seem to have found ourselves amidst aggressive marketing campaigns-of-the-moment.

The first is a rather cunning insight on the ironies of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food Movement:

For the foodstuff artisan (commonly dirt poor and neglected somewhere in the planet’s backwoods), Slow Food has a strong value proposal. It is, among its many other roles, a potent promotion machine. Transforming local rarities into fodder for global gourmets is, of course, profitable. And although he’s no capitalist, the much honored Petrini is more justly described as a major cultural figure; he was among the first to realize that as an economic system globalization destroys certain valuable goods and services that rich people very much want to buy. In a globalized “flat world,” the remaining peaks soar in value and become natural clusters for a planetary elite.

The second, and perhaps more important article, alerts us to the fact that the fast-food chain Chipotle, among others, has started to move towards local producers like Joel Salatin of PolyFace Farms:

There was no fanfare or official announcement. Even when the pork turned up in the first carnitas burrito last summer, no change was made to the menu or the $5.75 price. It wasn’t until last fall, two months after Polyface Farm’s pork made its debut, that a sign was posted on the days it was available. “We wanted to start slow, for us and for them,” says Phil Petrilli, Chipotle’s operations director for the northeast region. “This is a farm that’s used to dropping off 12 chickens at the local restaurant.” One of the fastest-growing chains in the nation, Chipotle serves about 350 pounds of pork per week in Charlottesville alone and more than 5 million pounds annually at its 700 restaurants.

This month, Chipotle hopes to serve 100 percent Polyface pork in Charlottesville. But that success comes after 17 months of complex negotiations and logistics, including buying extra cooking equipment, developing new recipes, adjusting work schedules and investing in temperature-monitoring technology for Polyface’s delivery van. In recent months, Petrilli has visited the Charlottesville outlet about every two weeks, four times as often as he visits other restaurants in the region.

I’ll be welcoming changes like this with open arms, because, in the words of George Orwell, “you see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market-gardeners.” Isn’t it about time?