0923 North Bay Bohemian

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6>DA<4C C> 6> Chef Mateo Granados helped raise the bar on prepared plates at area farm markets.

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AXRWTb 8]STTS Farm-market season is in full swing, and the prepared foods have never been better By Carey Sweet

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t’s stomach season, so we’re clearing out inventory.� So says chef Mateo Granados as he dishes up a heaping scoop of embutido de chito, his Yucatan family recipe of baby goat stomach that’s stuffed with blood, heart and kidney, then aged for three weeks into an inky black loaf. Baby goat meat is a delicacy in the late spring, he explains, and he doesn’t want to waste the tasty offal that other chefs might throw away. “People love it,� he grins, as another customer grabs a plate and hustles over to the shaded picnic table next to his booth at the Sebastopol farmers market. A few feet away, chef John Franchetti feeds pizzas into a roaring wood-fired oven built onto a portable trailer. Minutes later, he pulls out a crispy, cracker-thin Margherita model laced with pepperoni and roasted mushroom. It looks and tastes just like the exquisite pies produced at his Rosso Pizzeria & Wine Bar in Santa Rosa.

“Paella!� shriek a gaggle of teenage girls suddenly, converging with flyers to promote Gerard’s paella, that Gerard being, of course, chef Nebesky of Occidental, who bested Bobby Flay on Throwdown on the Food Network and now cooks the Spanish rice dish in wading-pool-size pans at North Bay events. From his booth nearby waft the enticing aromas of seafood, chicken and sausage steaming with deeply fragrant spices. This is all pretty fancy stuff to be eating in a parking lot. Yet it’s the start of the North Bay’s 2009 farmers market season, and a recent tour of our larger gatherings found that more and more, dining here is no afterthought. While in years past, market-goers might have been content to snack on taco truck– or sandwich-style fare, these days, they’re snapping up specialty savories and sweets. Indeed, today’s temptations are the kind of dishes we might find in a real restaurant, and are often prepared on site by the chef himself. It’s easy to credit Granados with the revolution. After leaving a high-profile position

as executive chef at Healdsburg’s Dry Creek Kitchen in 2004, he set up a booth at the Santa Rosa Downtown Market, plying us with Yucatan tamales stuffed with slow-roasted suckling pig, Rosie organic chicken, CK Lamb, roasted local vegetables and Bodega Bay goat cheese. He’s now branched out into full meals, offered at three of the major markets around town and sometimes served on china with real silverware. Working with a professional Wolf range outfitted with wheels, Granados sends out a quesadilla brimming with Black Sheep Farm beef, picadillo, Tierra vegetables, grilled cactus, jack cheese and smoked tomatillo sauce alongside a Ridgeview Farm arugula salad. Another popular new offering is a relleno negro of Yucatan-style black mole, Black Sheep Farms meatballs, Salmon Creek Ranch hard boiled duck eggs, fresh favas and La Bonne Terre peppercress piled on madefrom-scratch tortillas. Lately, though, Granados has competition. Rosso’s Franchetti and crew just debuted their portable, faux brick-faced pizza oven &THE BOHEMIAN

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