This is a great addition to the neighborhood, I am stoked about watching it develop.

But if you fall in with the wrong people, you may find yourself looking at a grill full of preformed hockey-puck JBS Swiftburgers, factory chickens dry as the Mojave, and cheapo tubesteaks of unknown origin. If that happens, feel free to skip dinner and get all your needed nutrition from Tecate and potato salad. ‘Cause in a few short hours, we’ll have you covered.

At noon on the 5th, we’ll commence Makeup Smokehouse Sunday, the “Unused Ticket Night” of barbecue: save your appetite ’cause we’ll do it right.

Max, Joel and the gang will have grass-fed beef from Spanish Oak Ranches, pastured Berkshire pork from Kelly Biensen, local pastured chickens from Curtis Womach, and house made hot links, all slow-cooking over local oak. Noon to 11:30pm.

Happy Fourth! If you’re near Bird Park on Saturday, please come say hi.

The mission of Rolling Readers is to inspire all children to love reading through experience with read-aloud volunteers and new book ownership. Without literacy, which is the gateway skill for success in every arena, children are all but assured a future of low wages and limited opportunities. Today, one in five Southern California residents possess below basic literacy skills, which means they cannot complete even the most basic tasks, such as reading instructions or completing forms. Rolling Readers’ volunteers, which currently number more than 350 individuals serving over 10,000 children each week, are committed to changing the futures of the children in our communities by fostering a love of reading, thereby breaking the cycles of poverty and hopelessness that plague those with low-literacy skills. Our programs are focused on Southern California, with a special emphasis on the children of San Diego County, particularly the economically and socially disadvantaged.

I find that being able to read well helps me professionally as well as in most everyday tasks, so I’m totally down with this program. And helping the kids is where it’s at.

Please welcome to our menu: Kettle-fried, sweet battered chicken noggins, 5 bucks for 2 heads and many minutes of enjoyment.

This week, look for fried chicken and biscuit with collard greens.

This Thursday has a summery theme, as befits the Fourth of July week.

Cask-conditioned Green Flash Summer Saison paired with taco of mini summer squash from La Milpa Organica and pastured Spring lamb (how’d that get in there) from Rinconada Dairy in Santa Margarita.

Cask-conditioned Alesmith Summer Yule paired with fritter of uni and corn with pickled carrot.

Thursday, from 5:30pm to 11:30pm.

Naturally, one of the most fun things about planning the cookout is deciding what to cook. Because we’re eating the food ourselves instead of selling it, it’s one of the only times we get to explore things in real depth and not be subject to USDA regulations and so forth.

This year, in planning the meal, we found ourselves in very good fortune. Our friend Albert Lewis, who operates the only grass-based livestock farm I know of in Southern California, had a couple delinquent goats that he needed to cull from his herd: Cooler Kings who kept escaping the moveable electric pen which controls grazing on the pasture. And our colleague Martín had, as a child, learned from his father the traditional art of butchering and dressing a goat.

So yesterday we went to Albert’s farm in Wynola and got ourselves educated in how a live goat is crafted into goat meat. It was, unsuprisingly, awesome, in the literal sense of the word.

We took a lot of pictures so we could share it with you, but I wish I could better capture the fluidity and naturalness of the dance between the carver and the goat. Stills don’t do it justice, but that’s what we have.

So, as best as I can relate, here’s how to kill and dress a goat on the farm. If you’ll look closely, you’ll notice that I’ve interleaved pictures from the butchering of two goats, so that I can articulate the process sequentially.

Here’s the goats, in their moveable pen on natural pasture.

The Lewises raise their goats with love, and so the goats are comfortable interacting with people.

The kill itself was swift, almost casual. Martín was walking the goat and put a knife in its back, and then bled it from the neck.

We saved the blood to make, along with the stomach and some of the tripe, a salumi-like item called pancita.

After 3 hooves are removed, the head is skinned. The 4th hoof was left on until the animal was hung, that way the leg could stay in contact with the ground and the meat wouldn’t get dirty.

The head is removed and saved also for many possible dishes, or you can use the brain to tan the hide. We’re going to make food with it.

Albert, naturally, was very interested in the process and helped out.

Ethan, like all of us, was pretty transfixed.

The man carrying the goat is chicken farmer Curtis Womach, whose chickens share the pasture with Albert’s goats.

The skinning, like any skilled craft in action, was marvelous to watch.

Once the animal was skinned, it was time to gut it.

There is a system for cleaning and pulling the intestines (for sausages, of course), the pluck (destined for haggis), the stomach, everything. And everything was used. Even the contents of the rumen were saved to be returned to the pasture.

When the goat was totally cut, we put it in the ice chest.

That wasn’t all, though, there was still the matter of the hide. Nothing should go to waste.

Steph helped out with the salting. We are going to put the hide away and learn how to tan it. With all the talented people here (I’m looking at you, Reese) I’m sure once it is tanned it will be crafted into something very worthy.

In the age of industrial farming, so many of us have grown up in a world where animals are treated like protein machines, mindlessly killed for just one small part of their meat like their loin, and the rest of them is discarded. The waste and tragedy of that process, repeated millions and millions of times, is tragic.

To see the opposite of that, to me, offers so much hope. Animals which are respected and loved when alive, and respected in death through the skilled touch of a human hand, and through using every part of the animal for something valuable and meaningful.

Giving this kind of individual attention and skill to each animal we eat would make meat crazy expensive. But, if that kept us attuned to the preciousness of life and the value of each being, maybe it would be a good thing. Maybe it would be the best thing.

So while we’ve kept chicken on our menu for the pollovores, we’ve been waiting to feature it prominently until we could get the best.

And you can guess why I’m writing this post.

Finally, after a lot of waiting and ironing out the logistics and regulatory issues, we are now getting local, pastured chickens from Curtis Womach of Womach Ranch.

Curtis raises a few breeds of chickens in Wynola, on Albert Lewis’ goat ranch. They share the pasture with the goats and eat the grass and bugs that grow there, and when their feed needs to be supplemented, it’s with only organic grain.

As background, industrial chicken (i.e., 99.99% of all chicken you can get in the US) is so disgusting I won’t even describe it here. “Free range organic” chickens dispense with those practices, and the chickens are raised entirely on organic feed, no pasture or live feed. “Free range organic” chickens are also raised almost entirely indoors, and don’t exercise a lot — “free range” just means they aren’t in cages and their barn has a patio they can walk onto if they want.

“Pastured chicken” means the chickens live like chickens did before industrial farming, on pasture, ideally along with other livestock. They get lots of exercise and eat a varied and live diet, both of which improve the flavor of their meat adn their eggs. Of course raising chickens this way is very expensive compared to treating them like protein machines, and since few Americans have ever experienced real chicken, up until recently a lot of people weren’t ready to pay the cost of real chicken. But as word gets out about chicken, that’s changing.

The last few weeks we’ve been eating a lot of Womach chickens at home (my favorite was a Tecate-beer-can version that Max slow cooked to medium rare over Coastal Live Oak on my grandfather’s homemade grill). I can say that if you’ve never eaten pastured chicken before, you will find that it is unlike, and way better than, any chicken you’ve ever eaten. You can find Curtis selling his chickens at the Little Italy Mercato on Saturdays, and the Hillcrest Farmers Market on Sundays.

And what does this mean to your menu when you dine with us? Well, tonite our menu includes:

* Chicken tortilla soup.
* Chicken flatbread
* A Linkery take on Buffalo wings
* Fritanga of chicken liver, hearts, and feet
* Fried Chicken noggins

Come on in, don’t be a chicken!

P.S. Come November we’ll be having some of these guys, too.

On this trip I was lucky enough to be accompanied by my wife, an avid coffee drinker / geek  whom I could share the awesomeness with. After leaving the SMFM we drove a few miles south down into Venice Beach and arrived at the 3 week opened, Intelligentsia coffeebar. We met up with Nick Griffith, sales account manager / 2nd place barista at the nationals, whom gave us the tour of the place. In case you have not heard of Intelligentsia coffee they are hands down the next best thing to happen to coffee.

To get a job at Intelligentsia you have to be more than passionate about coffee, you have to know that that is what you want to do as a career. They will turn down anyone with coffee experience, because they want people who will be able to adapt to their environment. If you are lucky to get hired you then  start as a barback and begin your barista training which usually will take about 1 year. Yes, 1 year to become a barista. It goes to show you how much time, effort, passion, and the level of purism they have towards coffee. Here you see the cafe, very industrial looking with exposed piping, red bricks, and in the middle of it all are the beautifully impeccable espresso machines, pastry case, and the slow bar.

When you get there you order thru one of 4 baristas, whom each of them has their own station with an espresso machine that adjusts up and down to their height level, their own supply of the ever-so-cool looking Strauss milk glass bottles. There are daily printed menus that showcase the fresh roasted coffee. You can order an espresso beverage, a drip brewed coffee, or through the slow bar.

Here is our barista making us a single origin El Salvador espresso shot, then he made us a cappuccino, and we had some of their decadent pastry offerings made by LA baker, Comme Ca.

The slow bar was what I was waiting for. Basically, you gotta be the “man” or as they say in Mexico “el mero mero” to lay your hands on this station. The slow bar is a siphon brewer were basically you heat up the water in the glass beaker at the bottom, then the ground coffee is poured on the top part and when the water reaches a certain temperature it will rise to the top beaker where it will brew the coffee and right before it drains itself back into the bottom beaker the barista applies a stirring technique that puts the finishing touch. I had used a home version of this before, which they sell there, but I had never seen the level of techniques nor the attention to detail that goes into it. Um, wow?

Here you see whats left of the coffee being brewed in the top part  as it makes its way back down where it is brewed and ready to serve. We had a single origin Kenya, which was perfect with the lemon tart. The coffee’s grapefruit notes and crisp, juicy acidity where balanced by the clean  and light body that you get from the siphon’s brewing method.

I have worked with coffee for 8 years, have had exposure and training to the many levels and complexities that it takes to get coffee from origin to your cup, have tasted many coffees, and I have not met anyone as knowledgeable as the people at Intelligentsia. Nick really took care of us, he explained all the machine specifications, the challenges of opening the store, the experiences/training that everyone goes through, and we left there completely speechless. I can almost guarantee that once you go here, drinking coffee at your favorite coffee shop wont even come close. Hmm, maybe you shouldn’t  go here as nothing will ever live up to it. I asked Nick, “When is the San Diego store opening?” He just laughed! Another fun day at work.

So there just hasn’t been too much I’ve thought to blog about. A couple things are coming up, in particular the introduction of local pastured chicken, about which more later. I’d also like to start talking more about our wine, about which Bobby and I are really stoked.

And on the weekends, I try to get out and about, and there’s just so much to enjoy living here. So in the interest of sharing cool stuff, here’s some of the things I did the last few weeks:

* Got away on the bike for mini-tours on the Bayshore Bikeway and to the Old Point Loma lighthouse.

* With a tip of the gorra to Masa, enjoyed visits to Erizo Cebicheria, Tacos El Mazateno, and Cocedora De Langosta Ensenada. Seriously, Masa’s blog is probably my most treasured culinary resource these days, and is a constant reminder of how lucky we are in San Diego to be part of a vibrant international region.

* Also in our extended neighborhood, enjoyed yet another wonderful meal at Laja, and the fantastic bar at the new Manzanilla.

* Ate several of Curtis’ chickens, which are delicious. Combining Ruhlman’s sugar-salt brine and the trusted beer can method, while cooking over local oak, seemed to deliver quite agreeable results.

* Thanks to Juan’s leadership, saw (and loved) Café Tacuba on their 20th Anniversary tour stop at the beach bullring.

OK, culinary-specific stuff coming up before too long. And pictures.

This Thursday we’re featuring a couple cask-conditioned strong ales which are not often available in cask in San Diego:
1) Maharaja IIPA, by Avery Brewing in Boulder, Colorado
2) Sculpin IPA by Ballast Point here in San Diego

While both beers are quite hoppy, the Sculpin is quite light in a way you wouldn’t expect from a 7.0% ABV beer, while the Maharaja balances rich hops and malt at a whopping 9.9% ABV. Watch out for that, it’s boozier than a lot of white wines, though it drinks like a beer.

For each beer we’ll offer a half pour off the cask and a specially paired small plate of food, together for $8.

The dishes:

Sculpin IPA paired with Snow Brite peach gazpacho, Baja Kumamoto oyster, and smoked cinammon

Maharaja IIPA paired with small gyro of harissa rubbed pastured spring lamb, house made yogurt, house baked flatbread, and fixins.

Again, each pairing is $8 for the beer and the “tapas” size plate together. Starts at 5:30pm and goes until 11:30pm or when the food runs out.

As for the future, our beer event calendar for the summer is still coming together. Here’s a few that are confirmed so far:

New Belgium, July 16th
The Bruery, August 13th
AleSmith, August 20th
Airdale, August 27th

It turns out, however, that there is no Gold Fork. Instead, the Silver Fork was awarded to 17 local restaurants that the magazine considers “extraordinary”. We are grateful to be so considered!

Big ups to our neighbors Urban Solace and Rancho’s Cocina who were also on the list — giving it a definite 30th Street flair.

I didn’t get to taste this roaster on Sunday but Max thoughtfully saved some of the head for me for lunch tacos yesterday (the perquisites of proprietorship).

This Sunday we keep on rocking the roti: grass fed beef round from Spanish Oak Ranches in San Luis Obispo, pastured lamb from Rinconada Dairy in Santa Margarita, house made hot links, and whetever else we come up with in the next few days.

This Sunday it starts at noon and goes till 11:30pm or until we run out of meat, whichever comes first.

(PS We’re also having a super secret-squirrel Smokehouse Saturday, aka S^5, this weekend.) Apparently it was so secret even the kitchen didn’t know about it. My bad. Sunday it is.

The next frontier: Swedish hot dog, Zaki style.

The final frontier: Lardo ice cream sandwich, Zaki style.

On the menu tonite starting at 5:30. Hand cut purple potatoes from Weiser Farms, grass fed beef short rib from Spanish Oak Ranches in San Luis Obispo, and grass-fed Jersey cow’s milk cheddar from Spring Hill Cheese Co in Petaluma. It’s a starter so you can still chase it with a Berkshire pork chop.