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Anti-Racism Resources

By SHED | June 8, 2020

Activist and filmmaker Sarah Sophie Flicker and writer Alyssa Kl compiled this document in May 2020. They encourage everyone to circulate it on social media and with your friends, family, and colleagues, and we do too.

Resources for white parents to raise anti-racist children:

Articles to read:

Videos to watch:

Podcasts to subscribe to:

Books to read:

Films and TV series to watch:

  • 13th (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix
  • American Son (Kenny Leon) — Netflix
  • Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 — Available to rent
  • Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) — Available to rent
  • Dear White People (Justin Simien) — Netflix
  • Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler) — Available to rent
  • I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc) — Available to rent or on Kanopy
  • If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) — Hulu
  • Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton) — Available to rent
  • King In The Wilderness  — HBO
  • See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol) — Netflix
  • Selma (Ava DuVernay) — Available to rent
  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — Available to rent
  • The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.) — Hulu with Cinemax
  • When They See Us (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix

Organizations to follow on social media:

More anti-racism resources to check out:

Eat Good Food

Best Baking Tips for the Holidays

By SHED | December 13, 2018

When it comes to holiday baking, everyone tends to bite off a little more than they can chew. With good reason: we all have access to a world full of holiday baking tradition, just an internet search away. From German lebkuchen to Swedish pepparkakor, Austrian linzers and Argentinian alfajores, British brandy snaps to Filipino polvorónes, we’re not wanting for inspiration.  That’s why even the oven-phobic and flour-averse among us attempt ambitious, fussy recipes once December rolls around—with admittedly mixed results.

But holiday baking needn’t be a headache. It can even be (dare we say!) fun. With just a pinch of planning and a spoonful of technique, Christmas cookies can be more than delicious enough to justify a bit of effort. Here are our favorite tips, tricks, and techniques to help your holiday baking go off without a hitch—no matter how ambitious.

Choose your cookies wisely

As with all things, planning is half the battle. If you’re looking to make a wide variety of treats for a plentiful platter, pick cookies that can be shaped from the same versatile dough. For example, the rich, almondy dough of a linzer cookie can also be rolled out and cut into sugar cookies, or shaped into a slice-and-bake log. Once you have your basic dough squared away, choose recipes with a variety of flavors, textures, and shapes. Balancing chocolatey, minty, buttery, sweet, and salty flavors will provide something for everyone.

When mixing doughs, time and temperature are key

Nearly all sugar cookie-based doughs start with the same technique: creaming butter and sugar together. Most recipes, though, woefully underestimate the amount of mixing it takes to cream butter and sugar. You aren’t just looking for a uniform texture—creamed butter has air whipped into it, providing lift and lightness that are essential to the finished cookie’s texture. When creaming butter and sugar, time and temperature are the most important factors. For most doughs, 5 minutes in a stand mixer set to medium-high should get you where you’re trying to go. (Don’t forget to scrape the bowl often to ensure a uniform texture!)

The directive to ‘soften’ butter for creaming is equally misleading. Over-softened butter will never whip up to the correct texture—it’s too melty and slack. It’s better for butter to be a bit too firm than a bit too soft. If you’re impatient to get started, cut your butter into chunks and beat it in your stand mixer on low for about 30 seconds to break it up. Let the bowl sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes until butter has softened. To speed up the process, turn on the mixer for a few seconds every 5 minutes. Once butter is soft, proceed with your recipe.

Rested dough = rested baker

In most cases, resting your cookie dough in the refrigerator for a few hours, or even days, will make the dough easier to work with and even tastier. Dough that’s allowed to cool is easier to roll out, less prone to sticking, and keeps its shape better during baking. It’ll also give you a welcome break between the work of preparing the doughs and the work of shaping and baking. But it’s not all about ease—giving dough time in the refrigerator allows the moisture from the wet ingredients to fully penetrate the grains of flour, creating a tender texture and more developed flavor.

Store your cookies wisely

Don’t go to the trouble of achieving the perfect texture only to ruin it through improper storage. A good rule of thumb when storing crunchy and chewy cookies is to keep like with like. Chewy cookies should be kept in an airtight container. Try storing them with an apple wedge to preserve softness. Cookies with strong flavors, like peppermint, should be stored on their own so their milder brethren don’t absorb odors. Keep crisp cookies in a semi-airtight container, like a cookie jar.

Eat Good Food

Heirloom Popcorn (plus a popcorn balls recipe!)

By SHED | December 10, 2018

Popcorn is irresistible and so it has been for some time. Long before movie night microwave bags, popcorn was a savory snack and cultural symbol throughout the Americas. Domesticated by Pre-Columbian indigenous peoples in 5,000 B.C.E., popcorn is one of the oldest corns still cultivated today. Archeologists have even unearthed intact popped kernels in a New Mexican cave that date back 4,000 years!

“Pop” is one of six types of corn. Its small, dense kernels are full of flavor and “pop” when heated. Since the introduction of Orville Redenbacher’s “Gourmet Popping Corn” in the 1960s, most commercial popcorns are hybrid varieties. Heirloom popcorn varieties are strains of popcorn whose traits have been maintained over time. These varieties safeguard unique flavors and textures that otherwise would have been lost to commercialization.

Eating heirloom popcorn is a way to connect to history. The multicolor kernels are the visual signs that the popcorn will taste different. Although they still pop into white, fluffy morsels, heirloom varieties have complex flavors. Of course, you can still add butter, but it is also refreshing to taste the specialty snack with a diversity of seasonings.

Once you’ve made heirloom popcorn at home, try this simple recipe for popcorn balls featuring Steen’s Cane Syrup.

Steen’s Popcorn Balls
Yields 3 dozen

1  cup sugar
1 ⅓  cups Steen’s cane syrup
2 tablespoons white vinegar
1 teaspoon salt
3 to 4 quarts popped corn, lightly salted (try SHED Heirloom Popcorn)
¾  cup roasted salted peanuts (optional)
2 tablespoons butter
¼  teaspoon baking soda

Prepare your work surface with waxed or parchment paper. Combine popcorn and peanuts and large bowl and set aside.

Melt sugar, syrup, ⅔ cup water, vinegar, and salt over medium heat in a saucepan. Cook for 5 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally. Cook until mixture reaches 260 degrees (use a candy thermometer) and be sure it does not boil over. Remove from heat and stir in butter and baking soda. The mixture will foam.

Pour  ⅔ of syrup over popcorn mixture (set remaining ⅓ of syrup on very low heat) and mix well with a wooden spoon. Lather hands with butter and form mixture into balls, working quickly before the syrup hardens. Stir in remaining syrup if the balls do not hold together

Set popcorn balls on prepared surface and let cool. Serve once cooled, or wrap individually in waxed paper and enjoy later.

Recipe adapted from Julia Moskin and Kim Severson’s recipe on cooking.nytimes.com.

Field Notes, Healdsburg

Healdsburg Store Closing: FAQ

By SHED | December 10, 2018
Healdsburg Store Closing

It is with great sadness that we announce that our Healdsburg store is closing at the end of December 2018. Our last full day operating the Café and Fermentation Bar, Larder and Pantry, Housewares and Garden will be Monday, Dec. 31. We will be open daily from 8am to 6pm until then.

We will reopen briefly in 2019 on January 9th to 27th just for Coffee Bar service and for customers to shop our retail floor. Our online store operations at healdsburgshed.com will remain unchanged.

Closing the Healdsburg store was a hard decision for owners Doug Lipton and Cindy Daniel to make. “After much consideration and experiencing a tough retail year following the 2017 Sonoma County fires, we have made the very difficult decision to close the Healdsburg brick-and-mortar version of SHED,” Doug said.

Cindy adds, “We’re proud of what we’ve accomplished with our community and thankful to the residents of Healdsburg who have been so supportive over the past five-and-a-half years. We are truly grateful for our incredible employees who have been integral to creating and sharing all aspects of SHED with visitors and customers.”

Healdsburg SHED opened in April 2013 to celebrate good farming, good cooking, and good eating. That ethos and the products that support it will remain online. Only the Healdsburg brick-and-mortar business will shutter.

Change brings questions. We’ve tried to anticipate some of yours here. 

I have tickets for an event in 2019. Will the event still be held?

No, all of the public events in our Modern Grange for 2019 have been canceled. You should have been contacted by now and given a full refund. Our apologies for the inconvenience!

I had been planning to host a private event at Healdsburg SHED in 2019. Will you be able to accommodate me?

We’re sorry, but all private events scheduled on or after Feb. 1, 2019, are canceled. Our events manager will be in touch to refund any deposits or other monies as appropriate and to make recommendations to help you rearrange your event elsewhere.

I have a SHED gift card. Will it still be honored?

Absolutely! Physical gift cards are available for in-store redemption through Dec. 31, 2018. If you have a remaining gift card balance, it will be transferred to a digital store credit and available for online use after Feb. 15, 2019.

If you have an online SHED gift card, please continue to simply shop online with us. While our brick-and-mortar Northern California store will close, our online store will remain stocked and open.

I’ve ordered holiday gifts from your store for out-of-town friends and relatives. Will those gifts still be shipped and delivered?

Yes! If you bought your gifts from our Healdsburg store and arranged to have them shipped, they will be unaffected by our change. Gifts purchased online will be unaffected by the Healdsburg store’s closure.

What if a gift I give needs to be returned? Can the recipient handle this via your website when your Healdsburg store is closed?

Of course. We will accept gift returns for an online store credit, and all other general product returns within 14 days of receipt of the item. Unless your item has been received damaged or broken due to misshipment and packaging, we do not at this time cover the cost for return shipments.

I have reservations for your Café in December. Will they be honored?

We look forward to welcoming your party to our Café in December. All operations will remain active through the end of business on Monday, Dec. 31.

I have reservations for your Café after December 2018. Will they be honored?

Our Café will close permanently after service ends on Dec. 31, 2018. Reservations for 2019 are suspended. Our apologies for the inconvenience. Please give us a call if you’d like suggestions for other places to dine in Healdsburg. Our community is fortunate to have excellent eateries at every price point.

I love the fresh selections in your produce section. Where will I be able to find this kind of food now?

Thank you for wanting to support farmers! It’s so important to us. Locally, the Santa Rosa Original Certified Farmers’ Market at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts is year-round, rain or shine, on Wednesday and Saturday mornings until 1pm. Our own beloved Healdsburg Farmers’ Market runs  Saturdays, May 5-Nov. 24, 2019, at the parking lot across from our store and on Tuesdays, from May 29, 2019, on the Healdsburg Plaza.

I purchased just two settings of your stoneware dinnerware for my son and his new wife, intending to add to their set over the years. Will I still be able to find it?

Yes! In addition to our carefully curated retail collection from around the world, we will continue to offer such legacy and proprietary merchandise as the SHED dinnerware set and our Pantry line of house-made spices and salts.

I have enrolled in your registry and my wedding isn’t until June of 2019. Will my guests be able to shop our requested items?

Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials! And worry not: Our registry already lives online and nothing about it will change.

How will I know when you have new items or have a sale or otherwise update your online inventory?

Please sign up for our newsletter. We’ll keep you apprised of sales and new items and you can make purchases directly from the links within it.

I’ve always enjoyed your blog posts and recipes, interviews and profiles. Will those go away, too?

We love our blog and Learn sections, too! Education is an incredibly important component of what we do, and we are committed to continuing to create fresh content for our website. Subscribing to our newsletter will alert you to new posts.

Have a question we haven’t anticipated? Email us and we’ll do our best to get it answered!

Meet the Makers

Ethic Ciders and the Amazing Regenerative Orchard

By SHED | December 6, 2018
apples

While some 15,000 acres of apples covered Sonoma County in the 1940s, that number was halved by the 1980s and in the low thousands by 2016. Homes and wine grapes have mostly absorbed our old orchard land.

Just in the nick of time, a new type of apple evangelist has come to Sonoma County, one as content to cultivate what’s already there as to plant for new. In fact it’s fair to say that this is the era of the orchardist.

Ned Lawton, his wife Michelle Lawton, and their partner Ryan Johnston are orchardists who comprise the team at Ethic Ciders. Dedicated to regenerating their land, the team at Ethic makes cider by growing soil.

On a recent morning, Ned Lawton and farmer/cider maker Ryan Johnston took a visitor around the orchard to see how their dedication to regenerative agriculture is doing. Having won a prestigious 2018 Good Food Award for their Golden Rule cider, the agreement seems to be that it’s resulting in a superior product.

Naming their company after a set of moral principles keeps the Lawtons and Johnston honest. Ethics speak to conduct; Ethic Ciders speaks to what the land needs. The results are delicious, but the name could feel like a burden.

Not to Lawton. “There’s an ethic in our cider-making, and the way that we allow the fruit to express itself,” he explains. “’Ethic’ holds us to a very high standard, which is good because it causes us to ask what the right thing to do is. How do we treat our supplier relationships, how do we make the cider, how do we communicate the right thing to the consumer?”

Johnston adds that, for him, the name denotes that they “stand for something good and can lead by example.”

Whether he’s leading by example or merely doing what’s best for his land,  Johnston spends much of his time coaxing nutrients back into the orchard’s sandy soil. Farmed for decades without maintainance, the orchard was sorely in need of some TLC and nutrients. By tending to it with the attention of a parent, Johnston has been able to coax this hillside back to life.

By regenerating the land through carbon retention in the soil, Lawton and Johnston have changed its course so significantly that  the orchard is now certified organic, tilled and watered only when needed, and cover-cropped each winter. To grow better apples and make better cider, bluebird boxes have been added and hedgerows planted.

Ethic’s orchard is one of the first in Sonoma County to complete an Orchard Carbon Farm Plan in conjunction with the Gold Ridge Resource Conservation District and an arm of the USDA. This dovetails into a 2017 California Initiative, the Healthy Soils Program, that offers grants to farmers who are willing to change their land practice methods to honor the very ground on which they grow.

The Lawtons and Johnston are betting that the results are worth the extra expense and effort. They’re discovering it to be true.

“Once consumers taste it, we’ve got them,” Ned Lawton says. “Most of the orchard-based cider makers in the U.S. are making dry ciders. That’s changing people’s perception.”

He adds, “We’re basically making wine with apples. That’s the intrigue, the interest, and the longevity of the business. Once the consumer understands the dynamism of it, it will bring the cider industry to a whole new level.”

This article adapted from one originally published in the September/October 2018 issue of Made Local Magazine.

Meet the Makers

Diaspora Co. Is Here to Decolonize Your Turmeric Latte

By SHED | October 18, 2018

Photo: Amira Maxwell

About four years after Sana Javeri Kadri moved to the United States to attend Pomona College, she noticed something odd. Turmeric—that golden-yellow spice native to Javeri Kadri’s home country, India—was suddenly everywhere, from lattes to crackers to chocolate. And she had a sneaking suspicion that the people actually growing it weren’t the ones profiting from turmeric’s popularity.

She was right. The modern spice trade is still heavily shaped by its colonialist origins. Farmers in the global South still earn pennies per pound to grow commodity spices, which US–based spice wholesalers sell at astronomical markups. If turmeric was going to be a trend, she reasoned, she wanted Indian farmers to make as much money off of that trend as possible.

That’s how, in August 2017, then 23-year-old Javeri Kadri founded Diaspora Co. Her Oakland-based company seeks to decolonize the spice industry through direct trade and transparency, one turmeric latte at a time. Staring down the history-shaping beast that is the spice industry is no easy feat, and Javeri Kadri’s life has been a crash course in business ownership ever since.

Thankfully, there was some precedent for what she was trying to do. Like spices, coffee and chocolate are both predominantly grown in the global South. Until recently, they were also untraceable, unremarkable commodity crops. Origin-specific sourcing and direct trade have changed people’s perceptions of what coffee and cocoa can taste like. They’ve also helped farmers to receive a modicum of recognition and compensation for growing the world’s favorite foods, though Javeri Kadri notes that there’s still a long way to go.

Javeri Kadri’s deep dive into Indian turmeric production brought her to the Indian Institute of Spice Research in Kerala. It was there that she learned about Pragati turmeric, an heirloom cultivar with a high curcumin content and a short growing season. It’s the best turmeric in the world, but in an industry dominated by cheap commodity production, nobody wanted to buy it. Except for her.

For the past two growing seasons Diaspora has had a direct purchasing relationship with Prabhu Kumar Kasaraneni, a farmer growing Pragati turmeric in northern Andhra Pradesh. Diaspora pays Mr. Prabhu $3.50 per kilogram of his turmeric, about 10 times the average market price. Diaspora’s turmeric costs more than commodity, but they’ve found an audience selling directly to consumers and to mission-driven businesses who believe in what they do.

Not only is she open and transparent about her purchasing relationships, Javeri Kadri has intentionally centered her personal story as part of Diaspora’s identity. As a young, queer woman of color, she knows her visibility as a business owner matters.

“As a young person it’s hard to command authority, so I’ve had to learn how to be a boss” Javeri Kadri said on a phone call from India, where she’s been researching new products for Diaspora’s lineup (cardamom, cumin, coffee, and tea are all contenders). “Honestly, if I had known then everything I know now, I probably wouldn’t have done this. But I’m also very grateful that I did.”