Tierra Veggie Lady

The story of our relationship with Tierra Vegetables goes back a long way. About ten years ago we went to the Ferry Building Farmer's Market in San Francisco. It was late in the year and there weren't a lot of fresh veggies around, but we bought a mix of dried peppers called Mole MIx from Tierra. It came with a recipe for making the mole and I decided to try it.

Mole is a classic South American sauce, rich and chocolatey colored. As I embarked on the recipe I realized that it has many unlikely ingredients, including chocolate, and takes all day to make. I think the story behind its creation, which I dug out of Helen Brown's West Coast Cookbook ,is delightful although most probably apocryphal.

It seems that with very little advance notice to procure more worthy ingredients, a group of nuns found out that the priest was coming for dinner. There was nothing for it but to combine everything they had in the convent into a single sauce. The result was delicious and undoubtedly made with love, a far more potent ingredient than the finest spices.

Some years later I found myself in the position of having to have surgery on my foot and the best doctor to do it was in Santa Rosa. Since I couldn't drive myself, OilMan would drive me to appointments and we would have lunch at our favorite restaurant before driving home. (A rather nice treat in an otherwise very boring two months on crutches)

One day we were driving to the restaurant and passed the Tierra Vegetable stand--a cheerful little yellow shack next to a gravel parking lot. This is where we met Evie, the Tierra Veggie Lady, and discovered a huge variety of fresh peppers, shell beans and other vegetables and a delicious mix in a jar called Chili Jam (sweet, hot, piquant, good on almost anything) to which we have become addicted. It gives a whole new meaning to the word "tacos".

Over the years the stand has morphed into a huge white barn, which was carefully restored just a few yards away from the original stand. (We saw all its parts stacked and carefully numbered awaiting the raising of sufficient funds to put it all back together again). Evie and about five dogs, can still be found in the the new farm stand at the front of the barn and she is a font of stories, local lore and cooking advice. She is one of the many people whose friendliness and helpfulness has a lot to do with why we have fallen in love with this part of the world. We always look forward to our visits there.