"Sideways" turns 20, Iranian wine, Arizona water

KCRW sponsors include Universal Pictures.

On September 13th, James McAvoy will scare you speechless.

From Blumhouse, producer of The Invisible Man,

comes Speak No Evil,

filled with teeth-clenching, seat-clawing suspense.

Speak No Evil, rated R, only in theaters September 13th.

From KCRW, I'm Evan Kleiman,

and you're listening to Good Food.

Do not sabotage me.

If you want to be a f***ing lightweight,

then that's your call, but do not sabotage me.

Oh, aye, aye, Captain, you got it.

And if they want to drink Merlot,

we're drinking Merlot.

No, if anybody orders Merlot, I'm leaving.

I am not drinking any f***ing Merlot!

Okay, okay, relax, Miles.

Jesus, no Merlot.

Did you bring your Xanax?

Sideways, a buddy road trip movie

with notes of sophistication and self-doubt,

celebrates its 20th anniversary this year.

The characters of Miles and Jack

tool around the Santa Ynez Valley

in a wine-colored sob

before Jack's character

plays a role in the movie.

The movie, played by Thomas Hayden Church,

is slated to get married.

On this week's In the Weeds,

Frank Ostini, the chef and owner

behind The Hitching Post 2,

where much of the film takes place,

looks back at the two decades

of this legendary California wine region

and how director Alexander Payne's movie

changed everything.

I'm Frank Ostini.

I'm chef winemaker

of The Hitching Post restaurant

in Bealton, California,

and Hitching Post Wines.

Bealton, California.

So I, of course, was born into

the family business, 1952,

and worked there

since I was like five years old.

I would go out with my dad.

I never wanted to be in the business.

I saw my parents working too hard.

They were not having fun.

It was a hard, hard business.

Of course, it always is a hard business.

But it wasn't until I came back from college,

my brother Bill,

asked me to come and help him run

The Hitching Post in Casamalia,

the original Hitching Post.

That restaurant, of course, started in 19...

Actually, in 1947,

as the steakhouse, The Hitching Post.

My parents bought it in 1952.

And in 1976, I came back from college.

Actually fell in love with wine.

That's what made me fall in love

with the restaurant business.

Well, we were restaurants.

Since 1986, here in Buellton.

And the author of the book, Sideways,

it wasn't a book until after the movie was made.

But the man writing it, Rex Pickett,

was coming to our bar.

He befriended a bartender.

He had a crush on a waitress.

He told them he was writing them into his book.

We thought it would go nowhere.

He came back a year later, said he had sold it,

showed us a Hollywood report,

or I've sold this to this guy, Alexander Payne,

as a screenplay.

So I sold the movie rights.

We all thought, well, sold the movie rights.

He didn't even publish the book.

Years went by.

We didn't have any idea

there was going to actually be a movie

until the location scouts came around

in the summer of 2003,

looking for locations,

not knowing that Alexander Payne

had lived in our area for six months already.

He had picked out everything he wanted to be in the movie,

and we were lucky enough to be one of those locations.

So they filmed the movie sideways

over a six-week period in our region,

and they were in my restaurant, The Hitching Post,

for three days of filming.

And they had a glorious time filming.

They had such a good time.

It was like a party.

It came and it went,

and we thought it would never come back again.

When the movie came out,

the movie was finally made to be released,

ready to be released.

A year later, they invited all the Vintners

to a screening at the Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara.

And this was the American premiere of Sideways

at Arlington Theater in Santa Barbara.

So we have no idea what we're going to see.

And I was shell-shocked.

I was stunned how well we were shown,

how much we were shown,

how much the Santa Barbara, the wine of Santa Barbara,

the whole story of everything we had been doing for 20 years,

how that was in the background of this movie

in such a wonderful way.

We still, at that point, had no idea

if anybody was going to see it.

So after we saw it in September of 2004,

we still didn't know anybody was going to ever see this movie.

We were invited to the New York Film Festival

by Searchlight and the film,

The Alexander Pan.

To show wine around the showing of the movie

at the New York Film Festival.

So it was the closing act,

the closing movie of that festival

at Lincoln Center.

And there was over 2,000 people in the audience.

And I was in the balcony in the back.

I'll never forget it.

People were basically rolling in the aisles.

And it was that point we went,

my God, they like it.

Because we couldn't tell.

I mean, it was all so much about us.

We couldn't tell if it was really something

that made sense to anybody else.

It did to us.

And then that's when we knew

it was going to happen.

And it had the most organic, slow build.

It got critical acclaim, won a few awards,

and then it was up for the Academy Award,

won Best Adapted Screenplay.

And it just kept growing.

Every month,

it grew.

I think our business at the restaurant

grew 5% a month for eight months

and increased by 40%.

And we just couldn't do anymore.

And we kept that constant for many years.

But seeing 2,000 people loving that movie,

we knew it was going to happen.

The whole thing scared me a whole bunch.

Success.

Like, I didn't know how I would approach it.

I actually fell back to my parents.

And when they were in the most difficult time,

what they focused on, back to the basics,

really high-quality food, really good value,

and real hospitality, just make people feel good.

So what worked in the worst of times,

I thought would be key to work in the best of times.

And that's how we kept our heads on straight.

We'd been in the business, you know,

almost 30 years already.

And, of course, my family in it for longer.

My dad did it for 25 years.

And, gosh, those last 20 years since Sideways,

it's like a blur.

In the old days before Sideways,

I mean, we had wine geeks that came to Santa Barbara

and a lot of older wine drinkers knew about Santa Barbara.

The young, hip people did not know about it.

But this brought all these young people,

people to the region to enjoy Pinot Noir.

And, you know, our brands of Pinot increased from,

I don't know, 20 or 30 of them before the movie

to hundreds, hundreds of Pinot Noirs in Santa Barbara now.

And now we have younger winemakers starting in the business

and they want to make natural wine.

They want to do skin contact white wines,

orange wines.

They want to do pet nets.

They, biodynamic farming.

There's a movement to make everything better.

But, you know, we're still a rural part of California.

If you go north of Santa Barbara,

it's cattle country and vineyards, wide open spaces.

We hope to preserve that country atmosphere

that we've always had and enjoy it as long as we can.

We don't have massive overdevelopment or anything.

Santa Barbara has always controlled,

you know, growth and, and so we can still enjoy

a really pastoral atmosphere here,

here in our part of the St. Nez Valley.

That was Frank Ostini, chef owner of Hitching Post 2.

For a listing of events in the Santa Ynez Valley commemorating

the 20th anniversary of Sideways,

visit our website, kcrw.com slash good food and be sure to

catch the film on Hulu this fall.

Coming up, a wine road trip of a different flavor.

We follow an Armenian winemaker into the hillsides of neighboring Iran

in search of ancient varietals unknown to the modern world.

Stay with us.

Welcome back to Good Food.

Bulletproof vests and bomb-proof wine cellars are generally not standard

requirements for winemaking, but for Vahe Koshkourian,

they sometimes come with the territory.

He's resurrected winemaking in Armenia and with the support of his daughter

and business partner, Amy, Vahe made an expedition into Iran,

a region that hasn't produced wine since the Islamic revolution in 1979.

In Cup of Salvation, filmmaker,

Jason Wise follows Vahe into the mountains of Kurdistan on his quest

to hunt down ancient varietals.

Hi, gentlemen.

Hi.

Hi there.

It's just so great to have you both with me.

It's such a terrific story and a great film.

Vahe, you fell in love with wine in Italy at the age of 19.

When did you make it your mission to focus on Armenia and bring viticulture back there?

Oh.

Actually, it was by chance.

It wasn't planned.

A friend of mine was going to Armenia.

This was in 97.

You know, Armenia had been independent for a few years

and just coming out of communist background and history.

So we went there and that's where I discovered that through talking to winemakers,

knowledgeable people, that they told me that's where viticulture started.

And that kind of...

statement, once it gets into someone like me, who's a by nature adventure seeker,

you know, I can't do something normal.

I have to do something exciting and wonderful.

So it got in me like a bug.

And then two years later, I went, got land and planted.

Because the whole narrative of your home, your country, your background,

your being the birthplace of the wine is just too much to pass on.

And that's what happened.

And then a few years later, I went back and started winemaking.

So it was by chance, honestly.

I didn't know what I was doing.

And it turned out to kind of foster the Renaissance or the rebirth of winemaking

in Armenia over the last 12, 13, 14 years.

That's amazing.

What grapes are you cultivating and which are best grown in the region?

And then what distinguishes this particular grape?

Yeah.

And what does it mean for winemaking in Armenia?

At some point, we focus, I focus strictly on indigenous varieties,

means varieties that are native there.

And we have over a few hundred of them because over 11,000 years of viticulture,

that's, I mean, that's the history of it.

And probably systematically 6,000, for 6,000 years, we've been making systematic winemaking,

having the oldest winemaking.

We have the oldest winery in the world in a cave.

But during Soviet times, a lot of it was vanished, discarded because they weren't productive enough.

And so we tried to revive those.

One of the varieties, which pretty much now everyone agrees, is the Arani variety for red.

And that is the primary variety.

I make wine from other varieties also, just to see if we have a gem, something hidden that we can take

and revive.

But Arani is the cave variety.

It isn't comparable.

Let's say we don't compare it to Malbec or Cabernet or other varieties.

If we have to, we bring it close to a Pinot Noir stylistically because it's elegant in style.

It's not tannic and it has incredible fruit characteristic.

But the question you ask, which is very pertinent, is that it is the terroir that decides,

the variety, the farmers selected these varieties because of the terroir that they have.

Because we also have experience of imported varieties in Armenia.

And most of them don't do well or as well because they weren't selected for what we have,

which is high elevation vineyards and volcanic soil.

The flowering has to be late to avoid the spring frost.

And the hang time has to be long so that we can harvest in November, let's say.

Because at 3,000, 4,000, up to 6,000 feet vineyards, it's a different game altogether.

Before we move into your desire to produce a wine using Iranian grapes,

I wanted to ask you about the 2020 vintage.

You recruited your daughter, Amy, to work with you.

And early in the film, we find you building a bomb-proof cellar approximately 1,500 meters

from the Esbjerg.

This is the Esbjerg border.

Conflict broke out between Armenia and Azerbaijan just before harvest.

And you and Amy had to make a difficult decision to sacrifice the grapes or proceed.

Explain how you weighed your decision and then the outcome.

Well, we, during the war, it is really, it is on the wall.

So no one knew, let's say, Azerbaijan would attack.

Because this one was a siege.

This undertaking, it wasn't a skirmish.

It wasn't two drunk soldiers shooting at each other.

This was a real war with drones and everything.

And being that close, we had to make, the decision was, you know, because it's the farmer's income.

And apart from the financial aspect of it, the revenue, it would be a shame to leave the fruit of the labor hanging on the plant and then withering away.

Right.

We met with the mayor, with the village people.

We made decisions.

And we took a decision that we would harvest kind of rotating so that we went to one vineyard, harvested the whole thing.

And then later on the next day or something, we went to the next vineyard.

And we harvested all of it.

And nothing happened on that front.

Let's put it that way.

So it was a safe harvest.

Jason, if we could, let's focus now on our attention on Vahe.

Vahe's plan to get into Iran and bring back grapes into Armenia.

Give us a little bit of background about producing wine in both Armenia and Iran.

How many active wineries were in Iran prior to 1979?

Well, Iran, you know, a lot of people don't think about this, but Iran was a center of grape growing going back thousands and thousands of years, going back to Cyrus the Great, the Persian Empire, all the way until, you know, the mid-70s.

I mean, the French were investing there.

There were, it's debatable how many actual wineries there were, but somewhere between 300 and 500 real wineries existed in Iran.

And so it's a place that has always continuously had wine.

And there's something Vahe says in the film, particularly, a place cannot make wine for thousands of years and not have something special.

So I think that's what, you know, when I first was in Armenia, Vahe told me, he just casually mentioned to me when I was interviewing him, that we were just mere kilometers from the border of Iran.

Now, I'm from Afghanistan.

And for me, Iran was sort of the moon.

And so when he said that, I asked him what happened to the grapes.

And he mentioned to me casually, I would love to know.

And it planted a seed in my mind, and I know that it already had been planted in Vahe's mind, that he wanted to know what happened to all these grapes after the Islamic Revolution, when a lot of them were probably ripped out.

Are they still there?

Are people farming them?

Are they table grapes?

What species are they?

There's been no genetic research.

I mean, it is the holy grail of viticulture.

And grape growing, probably in the world, unless there's grapes in North Korea that I'm unaware of.

And so, you know, that's sort of how it happened.

And over time, Vahe and I kept talking about it and kept talking.

And after the war, Vahe gave me a call, and he sort of said, I need something beautiful in my life.

And if we were to figure out how to get into Iran and get those grapes or see if they even have grapes still, what would you do?

And that's how it happened.

So, Vahe, you end up making this.

You make this decision in the process of having conversations with Jason.

Jason kind of is a sounding board.

And your intention to go to Iran and see if you can find grapes becomes crystallized.

How did you negotiate getting the plant material out of the country?

Let's see.

We brought the fruit itself.

We brought the grapes, not the plant material per se.

I had to go into Iran pretty much blind.

I didn't know where.

Roughly, I knew that I would choose around Kurdistan.

Having done some research, it looked like that's the way.

Sardash, Kermanshah, Mehrivan, those are the regions where, because it's mountainous also,

and it's almost similar to our terroir, high elevation.

But we didn't know where the grapes were.

And it wasn't planned.

So, when you look at it, when you look at it, it wasn't planned.

When you watch the movie, it unfolds in real time.

The motorcycle scene where this guy takes me to vineyards supposedly and there were none

because they don't understand the concept of vineyard.

They understand plants.

So, he was taking me to someone he knows has a plant, grape plant.

But it made for a good movie, but it was unnerving for me.

Then we drove, kept driving, and I'm not seeing vineyards because our eyes,

our vision.

We're used to vineyards, extensions of vineyards, of hectares and, you know, like Napa, let's

say, or Tuscany or anywhere else, Champaign, you see hectare after hectare after hectare

of vineyards.

And I'm waiting to go to some valley where I will have that site.

And then there wasn't.

And then slowly, I started seeing patches of vineyards perched on top of mountains where

you access with mules and donkeys, that kind of stuff.

And the ones that...

That were left on top of the hill were probably wine varieties that kind of survived.

I'm not sure why the farmers continued farming, but they did, which is good for us.

And it turned out that I am guessing there was some in-home winemaking, very primitive,

crush the grape, let it ferment, and we can get drunk kind of thing.

So, that's what I think it is happening.

There were other varieties.

Actually, I was very relieved because I had to answer to Jason on a wild goose chase,

which I hadn't done.

But at the end, it all turned out to be...

You were afraid of me in Iran?

You were in Iran worried about me?

Yes, of course I was.

I know, because you trusted me to go there, find grapes, make wine.

It all sounds, you know, kind of basic.

But that was more of my worry than, you know, even doing stuff in Iran.

Yeah, you were afraid of disappointing the narrative.

You were afraid of the work of the story, of the film.

Yes, yes.

He was really only nervous when he had to take the wine and have professionals taste it in New York City.

That's the only time I ever saw the guy nervous in the entire movie, filming for years.

He's an oddball.

He's like a real-life Indiana Jones.

I'm serious.

Well, congratulations to both of you.

You won the James Beard Award this year with your movie, Cup of Salvation.

We were so pleased when that happened at the award.

Thank you, both of you, for joining us.

Thank you.

It's such a pleasure to be on.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

That was filmmaker Jason Wise and winemaker Vahe Kushgarian.

And yes, Vahe did make wine with those Iranian grapes.

Want to know how it went?

You'll just have to watch the movie and find out.

Cup of Salvation is available now on SOM TV.

Some people farm grapes.

Others farm water.

In the tiny town of Cibola, Arizona, water is more valuable than oil.

Nearly a decade ago, a private firm bought almost 500 acres of agricultural land in the area.

Recently, the company sold the water rights tied to the land to Queen Creek,

a Phoenix suburb more than 200 miles away.

Greenstone Resource Partners is the only company doing this,

and experts think this practice will become more common in drought-stricken regions across the West,

especially as climate change and chronic overuse continue to sap the Colorado River watershed.

West Coast reporter Manvi Singh has been covering the issue for The Guardian.

Hi, Manvi.

Hi.

I keep thinking about the final text card on the screen of the movie, The Big Short.

It read that the main character, Mark Baum's, next investment choice after he'd made billions on the mortgage crisis was water.

I just feel like this is an inevitability.

Tell us first about Cibola, Arizona.

Where is it?

What's it like?

Is it a large agricultural region?

So Cibola is actually this, like,

tiny little rural town right next to the Colorado River,

right across the border from California.

And it's basically sort of in the middle of these fields and fields of alfalfa and cotton

and sort of divided by these dusty roads.

And there's a little nature preserve there as well.

It has about 200 people who live there full time

and then a number of people who come over to fish and hunt and boat on the weekends.

It's like this sort of place where you can find a lot of people.

It's a place where everyone knows each other.

And those fields of alfalfa and cotton, they're irrigated from the Colorado River?

They're both irrigated with groundwater and water from the Colorado River.

But an interesting note about Cibola is that not only do you have all these fields irrigated with Colorado River water,

but it's actually surrounded by these even more massive fields of alfalfa that are irrigated with groundwater.

And a lot of those are...

These fields are owned by, or were owned by a Saudi Arabian company

that was growing alfalfa to then import back to Saudi Arabia.

And so this is sort of a region that is, you know, for many reasons,

really weary of big corporations coming in and exploiting their resources.

Yeah, a lot of people would say that growing alfalfa for export is another way of exporting water.

When did greenstone first arrive in Cibola?

And what's...

What did they do?

Were alarm bells kind of set off immediately?

So greenstone arrived in Cibola about a decade ago.

But yeah, it didn't set off any alarm bells.

It bought this parcel of land via a subsidiary that was called GSC Farm.

You know, to most people, that's just like, oh, there we go.

Another farm that wants to grow alfalfa and cotton in this region.

No big deal.

And for a while, they...

They actually just leased that land right back to farmers.

And so nothing really looked amiss.

And when did that change?

So in 2018, that was when they made a deal with the town of Queen Creek,

which is this like really fast growing suburb outside of Phoenix,

to sell the water that was being used to irrigate that farmland.

They had bought the land for less than $10 million.

And they ended up selling the water rights.

For about $24 million.

And I'm very curious, once they do that, once they sell off the water rights,

they still own the land itself.

Is the land still worth anything?

Yeah.

I mean, the land still has value as land.

You know, they could use that for some sort of development.

They obviously retained like a tiny bit of their water rights

to use for maybe basic things they might want to do with that land.

But really, this is like land that was zoned for farming.

And after they sold the water, the land was just fallowed.

And so you just ended up with these kind of dry, cracked fields.

And how did the government of Cibola respond?

Were there immediate legal challenges?

Yeah.

Cibola is a super tiny, like unincorporated census designated town.

It's overseen by the county.

And even, you know, the challenges weren't immediate in part because

it...

It took people a while to notice.

You know, I interviewed a council member for the county

who actually lives in Cibola right near that Greenstone property.

And she told me she didn't even realize what was happening

until she got notice from the state government that this deal was underway.

You know, eventually, the more she found out about it,

the more some other people in the county found out about it.

That's when they decided to challenge it.

I'm kind of fascinated.

I'm fascinated by the nuts and bolts of how this works.

So the Cibola water is now flowing to Queen Creek.

Did pipes already exist?

Did they have to put in this whole new infrastructure in order for that to happen?

Yeah.

So the pipes already existed.

You know, as you know, the Colorado River, it supplies a lot of people across the West.

The water from the river is moved through...

Through these massive infrastructure projects in California and Arizona

and, you know, all of these different states that depend on the water.

And so when that deal happened, what basically occurs after is that instead of, right,

like flowing downstream to Cibola, this amount of water now instead is diverted

via the Central Arizona Project, which is the Bureau of Reclamation project

that manages water infrastructure.

Through the Colorado River, and it flows towards the Phoenix metro area

rather than to this farm.

And when did the water actually start flowing to Queen Creek

despite these legal challenges?

So that happened last summer in July of last year.

I mean, the residents of Cibola and the government officials

must have still felt somewhat betrayed.

Yeah.

So, you know,

their big concern was not even about this little farm

or about this amount of water that was no longer going to, you know,

be put to use in Cibola.

They were more worried because they thought that this was going to set a precedent.

They thought, you know, now that this has been allowed to happen, what's next?

Is this going to mean that there's going to be water speculation all across their region?

And one by one,

you know, maybe farm owners are going to realize that it's more profitable

to sell their water than to continue in their farming.

And that's going to leave sort of a dust bowl.

People kept referring to the movie Chinatown.

Wow.

Yeah.

Tell us about Greenstone.

What kind of company is it?

Who owns it?

And I understand that GSC Farm,

which many people in Cibola,

thought was a farming company,

is just one of Greenstone's many subsidiaries or affiliates.

Yeah, exactly.

Greenstone is essentially a water broker.

So they specialize in getting water to communities and businesses who want it

from regions who are interested in sort of selling that off.

And so they buy land that comes with water rights,

whether that's rights to groundwater or water in the Colorado River or Rio Grande,

and then they sell that water wherever that's needed.

What happened in Cibola was actually their first deal off the Colorado River,

it seems,

and also what we think is like the first major sort of broker transaction of

water rights off the Colorado River as well.

So people should be aware that,

you know,

public pension funds,

different kind of mutual funds.

This is what is funded.

These kinds of deals,

right?

Yeah.

So what we basically found out is that pension funds as well as the global investment firm,

Mass Mutual and its subsidiary bearings are backing Greenstone financially.

You know,

it's been financed by a subsidiary of a Dutch multinational banking and financial services company that does agricultural financing.

There is big money behind this.

Even though this single deal may not really concern,

you know,

in the end of the day that much water and it concerns really just this tiny farming town.

I think there are many reasons for which residents are really concerned that this is going to really be the first of many such transactions.

I just think how similar this is in a way to the mortgage crisis in that these kind of investments,

in water.

It's just for many,

for the people who are interested in acquiring wealth is a place to park their money and make it work for them and make a profit

But,

what is so disturbing to me and to many is that it's water.

Why isn't water protected?

Why is this allowed to happen to a resource that humans need to live?

I think a lot of that is like,

I think,

has to do with just how dense and complicated the way that water rights allocations work in the West.

Just the entire system is set up to be quite obscure, difficult to access with just tons and

tons of stipulations. You know, to a great extent, there are a lot of rules over how you can transfer

water, but there's also a lot of leeway that landowners get, especially those that have

highly valuable first, second, third, and fourth priority water rights to the Colorado River.

As you discovered in your reporting, Greenstone has been acquiring thousands of acres of farmland,

not only in Cibola, but across Arizona. Tell us about that. And I mean, I can't imagine they're

the only company doing this. Yeah, they are one of several major companies that are investing in

water in this way.

The other big ones are called Vidler, and there's also Water Asset Management. And they have slightly

different, but, you know, kind of similar business models. And actually, the CEO of Greenstone

previously worked for Vidler. The company's vice president was a former realtor who has really

emphasized his connections to the development community. And so basically, you know, the

Greenstone executives between them have both experience with buying and selling water and then

property development, the know-how and clients to both get water and find those who want water.

So I understand that Cibola is fighting back and that in 2022, La Paz, Yuma, and Mojave counties in

Arizona sued the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, arguing that the agency didn't consider the

long-term implications when it approved the deal. Where does that stand?

What stands right now is the judge overseeing that case ruled that the environmental review

for this Cibola-Queen Creek transfer had been inadequate. And that was really major. That is

basically what these river communities, what these counties had been arguing the whole time

was that there was this lack of consideration of the precedent that this deal would set for

future water sales. Now we're in the stage where the,

Bureau of Reclamation and counties are trying to work out what to do.

It's very complicated because like I said, the water is already flowing through the taps in

Queen Creek, right? This is done. It's literally a done deal. And so it's kind of odd to retroactively

say that there was inadequate environmental review, because if it's determined that like,

yeah, the environmental impacts are actually quite bad, you know, what are you going to do?

The water's already going there. And so right now the parties are really,

really trying to figure out what to do, what sort of compromise or deal that they could reach.

And the ultimate details of that and any further environmental review in that case,

that could sort of dampen the appetite for this business, or it might not, that still remains

unclear. So that's what we're waiting and watching. Thank you so much. I mean, we all loved your

article and we're so happy to be able to share its content with our listeners.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for having me.

That was West Coast reporter Manvi Singh for The Guardian. For a link to her stories about

private firms buying up land in Arizona and selling off the water rights,

head to our website, kcrw.com slash good food.

In a minute, how do you explain your food to someone when you're a third culture kid?

For Keanu Moju, who is of Nigerian and Kenyan descent, but grew up in California,

the answer was to write a

cookbook. We find out what Afrikali means to her next.

You're listening to Good Food on KCRW. I'm Evan Kleinman.

During the week, Keanu Moju would eat pop tarts, bean and cheese burritos,

and maybe some takeout from a nearby restaurant. In other words, pretty typical American fare.

On the weekends, her family might enjoy ugali, a Kenyan dish that's similar to grits,

or Nigerian jollof rice, or the sauteed collard greens known as

sukuma wiki or moin moin, steamed bean cakes. Born to a Kenyan mother and a Nigerian father

and raised in Northern California, Keanu grew up with roots in multiple cultures.

She parlayed her love of cooking into a successful career as a creator of recipe videos for BuzzFeed,

and now she's melded her African heritage and California vibes into a cookbook,

Afrikali.

Recipes from my Jikoni. Hi, Keanu.

Hi, Evan.

I love that you got interested in cooking from a pretty young age.

Can you tell us how that happened and who guided you?

My mother, she nurtured the interest. She is someone who cooks out of necessity,

not out of joy. So once she saw me be curious and want to hang out in the kitchen with her,

she was like, okay, someone will teach you cooking, but it's

not.

It's not going to be me. So she put me in cooking camp when I was like, I think six or seven years

old.

That's incredible.

Yeah, it was fun. It was probably, it's incredibly informal. It was in Berkeley in the East Bay area.

The first camp I did, these two ladies, they had a house and they just taught us,

I think it was pretty international food. I was so young. The only thing I remember

distinctly making was like agua fresca.

I love that.

Like,

So many people who are the children of immigrants or who are immigrants themselves,

you grew up with multiple identities that you hold.

I wonder how that shaped your perception of food and your approach to cooking.

Yeah, I think having parents from two different countries, not just two different countries, but

opposite corners of African continent, the food I grew up with was vastly

ranged.

My mom's family are pastoralists. So my grandparents have a ranch where we raise cows,

goats, sheep, chicken. And then my dad's family in Nigeria grew up alongside a river.

And I tell you, if I bring seafood into my mother's family's house, they want it out.

No one wants to hear about it. They don't want to see it. So all the cuisines, whether it's from

my heritage or the foods I grew up eating in the East Bay area, they've always been present.

And I think as I was learning how to cook,

the intermarrying between certain ingredients or certain flavor combinations was just very natural

because I was just cooking what I was around and what was new to me. It maybe wasn't until I

started professionally writing recipes, I started isolating and picking things apart about what

comes from where.

I feel like everyone who decides they're going to write a cookbook has different motives,

different ideas of what they want.

From the experience of writing it, what was the goal of the cookbook for you?

Having come from such a mixed cultured background and then now professionally working in food,

I was asked pretty frequently, what is my culinary identity? What type of food do you cook?

And I never had anything concrete to refer people to. It was always like a little list. I'm like,

it's a bit of this and a bit of that. And,

and Africalia as a book is kind of my answer to it. It puts the flavors I grew up with from

my heritage and from the Bay all into something together. And the biggest and most important thing

for me was to really focus in on those African flavors that are accessible and I can put into

my everyday cooking.

Um,

and sharing that for folks, as we talk about like third culture folks, folks who really are either

interested or grew up with those foods, but don't necessarily want it to feel so far away and

distant.

And, and where does the Californian-ness come into it? California cuisine can mean so many

things. Can you give us an example in a recipe where, um, where we can see California within

your construct?

Yeah. So I think the Californian-ness is two things. One is the cultures that we have here

in the state. Um, especially for me growing up in the East Bay area, I was very lucky where

we ate globally on a regular basis just because that was a food around us. Um, so some of the

recipes take that influence, um, where I have a Thai style green curry that I grew up having

and I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to make this. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to make this.

And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to make this. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to have to make this.

And they would always put like squash in it. Um, squash is one of those vegetables that I greatly

detest cutting. It is such a pain. It's, it's, it's a hurdle in my mind to be like, oh, do I really

want to go and chop that? But then I was thinking of like, okay, well, what brings it similar flavor?

I'm like, oh, I always have plantain in my house. It's my favorite food. So substituting something

like that of putting green plantains in the curry that I grew up loving is a way that shows up in

the book.

Um, but it's also California, we're agricultural state, we love produce. And so it's looking at

some of those maybe heavier dishes that, especially from the West African side

and figuring out more ways to incorporate produce, or can I have little toppings and

condiments in there that can like lighten and brighten those dishes up?

I love your peri-peri fried mushrooms. Tell us about the origins.

Of peri-peri and how you use it with this dish.

So peri-peri, it just means chili. It just means spicy. We like to say it twice, just so

you don't forget. Um, it originates from the Swahili term pili-pili, which also just means

spicy chili. And that origin is a product of colonialism because chilies came from the

Americas and were brought over. Um, in this case,

the peri-peri chili by the Portuguese to Southern Africa. Um, and that bird's eye chili, it,

it has some fire and it has a real kick to it. And so crispy mushrooms, mushrooms in general

are a big part of what I shop in my regular groceries. And so thinking of how I can use

that spice for a fun little snack, like those fried mushrooms, which are in a very,

airy batter, kind of like a beer batter type thing. Um, it's just a really great way to

incorporate that chili, um, in something that is really built itself as an iconic

dish from Southern Africa into a fun snack.

Mm. My mouth is actually watering.

I know, but it's, it's not for the lighthearted. And I, I intentionally did that because I

personally,

can handle my chili medium. And so if food is spicy, I like for it to look spicy. So you know

what you're in for. So when you look at those mushrooms, you know, they're going to be hot.

So, you know, for 30 years, as long as I had my restaurant every day, I was making potato

croquettes. I have great fondness for croquettes of all kinds. So I'm intrigued by your Mukimo

croquettes. Um, what is Mukimo and how have you updated it?

It's one of those,

the best way I can say it is it's a classic Kenyan dish for those who probably grew up in

the Kenyan school system. See it as like a school food as well. I spent a lot of summers in Kenya

growing up. So it was one of those like love, hate dishes. It's mashed potatoes with, um,

it's like a green leaf. Some people vary. Some people will use leaves from different like pumpkins

and squashes.

Um, and it has pieces of cooked maize. It's another new world ingredient that is really

strong presence in Kenyan cooking. And so it's mashed potatoes, green mashed potatoes with maize

and the pieces of maize tormented me as a child.

I need to ask you, when you say maize, are you talking about a type of corn that isn't as sweet

as what we're familiar with?

Exactly. So it's,

I was like big, it's a full, um, usually sold in the full ears of the maize, but it's that harder,

larger kernels. So it's not sweet corn where you have to cook it for a very, very long time.

Otherwise it will stay quite hard.

So interesting.

Yeah. It's a staple. My grandmother's always had a big storehouse of maize on her ranch.

So did you decide to substitute the maize for your, your, your dish?

Absolutely. Maize here in that form is pretty hard to get your hands on, but also very time

intensive to cook. Um, and I feel like more or less people get impatient with it. And just

thinking of a creamy mashed potato with hard little chunks of corn in it are not fun for me

today or when I was a kid. So I substitute them with peas, frozen peas. They bring in that same

sweetness, but they require basically near no additional cooking. So you still get that

balance of flavor without all the labor of cooking down a whole ear of maize.

Could you talk a bit about East African curries and how they differ from the curries of Thailand

and India?

Yeah. So curries, particularly in Eastern Africa, you're going to find those on the coast.

Kenya sits on the Indian ocean.

And so there's a huge spice trade influenced by India and the Middle East. And so those curries,

they're gonna have those very forward spices that are balanced out by coconut milk,

but also have a really strong presence of aromatics, which are, you, you would find a

lot in Thai style curries. So it's going to be a lot of garlic, a lot of ginger. And those two

play together.

Where the spices are there, but maybe not as forward as an Indian style curry.

And one of yours that you do are chickpeas in coconut sauce.

I use chickpeas, but you can use lentils or beans where you have this gentle spice coconut

sauce with loads of aromatics. But really the main thing with that curry is the pairing.

You have to serve it with warm flatbread. We like using chapati, but it's that combination.

Having something cozy, but something saucy enough that you can dip your bread into.

It's that experience together that makes the curry really special.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

That was Keanu Moju, author of AfriKali, Recipes for My Jikoni. She also founded the Jikoni Recipe

Archive, a nonprofit that documents African cuisine across its diaspora. We've got a recipe

for her East African curry with chickpeas.

You can find it on our website at kcrw.com slash good food.

On deck, people said it couldn't be done, but one seed breeder was determined to cross

a garlic with a leek. The result is sweet garlic, and it might be at farmer's markets

near you. Find out more when Good Food continues.

I'm Evan Klyman, and this is Good Food.

The Allium family, you know, garlic, onions, shallots, and leeks, they don't get as much

hype as, say, an organic heirloom tomato or a Santa Rosa plum. But Jillian Ferguson is

at the farmer's market now with news of a brand new veg that's making a big splash.

This is Jillian Ferguson with the Market Report. I am at the Santa Monica farmer's market this

morning with Alex Weiser of Weiser Family Farms and a special guest, Chef Dan Barber,

who has traveled here from New York.

To introduce us to a brand new vegetable at the farmer's market. In addition to his role

as chef at Blue Hill Stone Barns and family meal at Blue Hill in Manhattan, Dan is also

the co-founder of Row 7 Seeds, a seed company that brings together chefs and seed breeders

in pursuit of deliciousness. Welcome to LA.

Thank you. Thank you. It's great to be here. I love it.

So Alex is sitting here holding what looks like a bunch of leeks. Tell us what this is.

So Alex is, first of all, Alex is one of the great farmers in the United States. And I came

to promote Garlique, that's true, for Row 7 Seed Company, but I also came here to hang out for two

days today in Santa Monica, tomorrow in Hollywood with what I consider to be the leading farmer

in the U.S. And I work with a lot of amazing, I'm lucky enough to work with a lot of amazing

organic farmers. There are a few that have his approach to the holistic sense of what it means

to grow food. And I feel very privileged. So I wanted to say that as part of your great

introduction. Garlique is a new,

alien, brand new. It comes from a breeder named Hans Bongers in Europe. Hans is actually

among the alien know-it-alls, which are very few in the world. He's like up here, you know,

he's a mythic dude. Anyway, he's very brilliant. And he had as part of his life's work, like his

Rosetta Stone was creating the love child of a garlic and a leek. And everyone said, cannot be

done. Is it very good? Is it very good? Is it very good? Is it very good? Is it very good? Is it very

hard? Actually, it's almost, it's an impossible cross. This is an impossible alien. And he figured

out how to do it, which, you know, took 12 years and a lot of resources. He's now retired. When

this was done, he retired. And I just called him a couple of months ago and showed him everything

we're doing. It was interestingly, the company that he did this with, the president called me

and said, you know, I've got a new onion here. I think you might like, I love it personally,

but the marketing department says, you know, it'll never work because,

there's no market for garlic. And I, I said, of course there's no market for garlic. It doesn't

exist in the world. So he gave it to us. And through the support of people like Alex, farmers

like Alex and chefs all over the country are using garlic, loving it, putting it on their menu. And

that's the birth of this new vegetable. So Alex, you are the first to try all this here in

California. I know. I love that. Thank you. It's an honor to be able to try all these new special

vegetables. It's very important because when you have a new vegetable and you get it in the wrong

hands, cause you know, I'm obsessed with breeders. I've always been obsessed with farmers, but I've

become in the last, let's say late inning revelation is breeders are writing the original

recipe. So we got a concept. We got to talk to breeders directly. We have to write that recipe

with them and we can get great results, but without the farmer, without the soil and really

without organic farming, you know, our, our vegetables, I think are loaded with the possibility

for flavor because that recipe has been written that way. But without the farmer,

forget you're cooked. So it really does take an Alex to get people to see what the promise is.

And Alex, this isn't your first time that you've trialed things for row seven seeds. What kind of

considerations do you have to make when you're trialing something versus when you're growing

something like potatoes that you've done for decades? Well, the same thing as what Dan

mentioned, it's just something that stands out working with breeders and, uh, universities.

We've been for decades now, always doing trials. And, uh, we were what major commercial growers

are always looking for maybe disease resistance or something a little earlier. Yeah. Yield,

you know, flavor wasn't in, in the consideration. So I really, I care what, when the taste off

contest, uh, I wanted to know, you know, what looked better, had a plate presence and

looking for other things that commercial growers were looking for.

So you're, I love that expression plate presence. Well, you know, I never heard that and I'm going

to definitely quote you like the honey nut squash thing. Cause I go to restaurants. I like to, I can,

for example, I'm an eater and garlic, particularly Dan's mentioning how great they are full size

used as a leak, but also as a baby we've been selling it. It hasn't even gotten to maturity

because so many chefs are liking it in the baby small stages on a steak, or that's what I love

about it as a grower. And another thing that I love about it, it's kind of saving our garlic crop.

We're harvesting our spring garlic and people love spring garlic.

It's gone.

We don't have any dry garlic by the time fall comes around. Cause we used to sell the whole

crop as a spring. Now you can have garlic year round here in California. We can plant it pretty

much year round. Another thing I haven't thought of. So Dan, let's talk about flavor really quick.

This cross between a garlic and a leak. How do you bring it to the kitchen? So right now, like last

night in my kitchen, I have it on the fish station, the vegetable station, the meat station, the cold

garmanger station, and I'm pushing the dessert team to come up with something. Cause I'm just

like, I want this in every corner of the kitchen because I want people to experience its versatility.

Alex talking about its size and flavor versatility. It goes everywhere. And we have dishes that

just advertise garlic. In fact, I was out here last, um, yesterday and Providence is doing this

dish with, with garlic as the centerpiece of the dish with salmon skin and Hakurai turnips. It's

beautiful.

Then I went to Nancy Silverton and Mozza and had a tasting of garlic with, with mozzarella within a

brodo. I mean, I was just like, God, this, this vegetable and, and in chef's hands, um, is just

like, it's so uplifting really is. I mean, I'm very excited to be in California as you can tell.

Uh, but I'm also just excited to see that, that when chefs get inspired by flavor,

the creativity is just endless. It's really fun to watch.

Well, thank you both so much. It's very exciting to see a new product here at the market.

Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks so much.

That was chef Dan Barber of Blue Hill Stone Barns and Family Meal at Blue Hill in Manhattan,

along with Alex Weiser, our hometown hero. They're here to debut sweet garlic,

the newest vegetable from Rose 7 Seeds. You can look for it at Weiser Family Farms the

next time you're at the farmer's market. For the Market Report, I'm Jillian Ferguson.

If you missed any of today's show, listen at kcrw.com.

Good food or on KCRW's mobile app. You can also subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher or Spotify.

My thanks to the good food team, Jillian Ferguson, Leryl Garcia and Elena Shatkin and to our

engineers, Hope Brush and Sue Margulies. And this special thanks to Laura Kondurajan and Gary

Mesiha. I'm Evan Kleiman. During this week of heat, I'm leaning in on my fave way to eat cold tofu.

It is so easy.

I top the block of soft tofu with chopped green onions, cilantro, a bit of soy sauce and sesame

oil and a tablespoon of chili crisp. Yum. I could eat it every day. As always, thanks for listening

and I'll meet you back here next week for another episode of Good Food.

KCRW sponsors include Universal Pictures. On September 13th, James McAvoy will scare you

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teeth clenching, seat clawing suspense. Speak No Evil, rated R, only in theaters September 13th.