The crumpled brown paper bag was heavy this morning—overstuffed with fresh onions, dirt still falling from the fist-sized bulbs, green stalks bent under their own weight. Dried prunes, sticky with summer. All a wonderful gift. “The best eggs in Healdsburg come from the chickens right here—free roaming—raised by Bob,” Ari Rosen mused. He had brought me to a garden on Chiquita Lane to meet a Healdsburg legend.
It takes a thousand conversations to uncover the source of this town’s most vivid flavors—like the mystery behind those bright, sunburst-orange yolks. They come from nonagenarian and gardener extraordinaire, Bob Brock … shhhh, don’t tell.
Healdsburg is full of food secrets. Someone knows who has the best mulberries (the word on the street is Preston and Millbrook Farms). Someone else swears by the broccoli at Noble Goat. There’s a bee person everyone keeps telling me I have to meet—and a seed guy, too…