Somos pocos pero somos locos! (We are few, but we are crazy!)

As I look over our menu, I realize we are on our way to becoming locavores. While some of our ingredients originate outside a 150-mile range, all of our suppliers are in close proximity.

Local - meats, dairy and produce

Our meats come mainly from ranches in the North Bay. We are still trying out purveyors, but this week you'll find Fulton Valley Poultry and Niman Ranch Beef in our sandwiches. While Niman Ranch originated near Pt. Reyes, they've grown so large that they now source from family farms all over the country - we don't actually know which farm their beef comes from each week. We do know that they are organic, GMO-free, and all that good stuff. In the near future, we hope to begin using the grassfed Prather Ranch or Marin Sun Farms Beef, when the season changes and demand for the cut of beef we use loosens up.

Straus Family Creamery concocts our whole milk yogurt. Head northeast from the Straus farm, and you'll land at Sebastopol's Redwood Hill Farms, our source for feta. As for eggs, we've been picking them up at our markets each morning. We are looking for a steady supplier of fresh farm eggs.

Aside from jicama (can't find) and limes (prohibitively expensive), all our produce is organic. We've been shopping at Berkeley Bowl because we can't yet meet the minimums of Veritable Vegetable, a vegetable middlewoman that sources from local organic farms. Once we get our bearings with the market schedule, we also hope to search out more direct relationships with farmers.

Not so local - flour, olive oil, vinegar and spices

Central Milling, supplier to Acme Bakery, the Cheeseboard and other fantastic bakeries around town, provides the wheat and white flours used in Jenya's master flatbread recipe. Most of this grain is grown at high altitudes in Washington State.

Pantry ingredients like oil, vinegar and spices are also harder to source. There are several excellent producers of olive oil and vinegar in the Bay Area, but I've yet to find any we can afford. I will keep searching.

Dried coconut and sugar are two well traveled ingredients we're resigned to using. Soon I will begin to look for fair trade and organic versions of both.

Since Vesta's culinary inspiration comes from the Middle East and Mediterranean, spices are the vehicles which transport our sandwich lovers to another place, sending their tastebuds on a mini vacation. Whole Spice, a company which I discovered at the Oxbow Market in Napa, provides all our spices, from the cardamom in our iced Turkish coffee to the sumac in our harissa. They carry, hands down, the highest quality spices I have found in the Bay Area. I was first won over by their urfa chile powder. Urfa is named for Turkish village where the peppers are culivated. They are dried in the sun and then sweated beneath leaves at night, giving them the earthly flavors of tobacco and smoke. Whole Spice's Urfa, along with their Aleppo peppers and a slew of other spices, are tools of culinary alchemists and the secret to our harissa.  Given our desire to keep prices accessible, using Whole Spice is a bit of a luxury, but one we feel is well worth it.

-- Traci

Urfa Peppers drying in the Turkish Sun