How did it all begin?

This whole crazy thing kinda began at last year's Eat Real Festival. We were pursuing the stands and came across ForageSF, which was basically a guy named Iso promoting his version of community supported agriculture (CSA) but with wild foraged food-- a CSF! So every month he goes out and forages in the mountains, forests and street of Northern California, and you get a box of the most local food around. A CSA is the same thing (and much more common), but you're buying a share of a local farm, which delivers a box of their produce to you each month.

Our good friend Sunny Savage is an amazing foraging expert (she even has her own tv show!) and so our interest was peaked- we signed up with his list. Six months later we received an email from Iso that he was interested in putting together a market event that would allow local food producers and home cooks, that have not had the time and money to go through the whole permitting process necessary to serve their goodies at official farmers markets, to come together and sell their stuff- and the Underground Farmers Market was born.

Jon and I had been talking a while about starting a Jewish deli truck. My entrepreneurial grandpa was pushing the idea, by connect us with the guy who runs the deli he visits regularly in Northbrook, Illinois. It was mostly wishful thinking, as we are both a bit too conventional to just up a quit our perfectly wonderful jobs. But then we got encouragement from a family friend who runs a very successful food business in Marin, who told us- keep your day job and start by doing it on weekends!

OK so this Underground Farmers Market was our chance. Not to much financial investment and no city bureaucracy required. We decided to do it. It was on a Thursday so I took a vacation day (Jon couldn't- no surprise) and baked rye bread, cooked 13 lbs of Robert's Corned Beef, and made 4 pans of sweet noodle kugel over the course of 12 hours. (The hourly wage for this job is not the point people!)

Well it was a great experience and an utter success! We sold out of our corned beef sandwiches in less than 2 hours and brought noodle kugel out of the kitchen and into the consciousness of lots of local SF foodies.

SLIDESHOW: Underground Farmer’s Market – Mission Loc@l -- San Francisco Mission District's News, Food, Art and Events

So when Iso decide to do it again a month later (mind you, this was a week and a half ago) we jumped on the chance to participate again. This time there were twice as many vendors and 50 times more people. Lines around the block for hours on end. It was fabulous! We made twice as many sandwiches and again sold out in a few hours. We met some great street food vendors like the Magic Curry Cart and the Pizza Hacker, who came over, introduced themselves and gave us tons of encouragement.

And the rest is -less than 2 weeks of- history. There is amazing network of vendors who communicate and use their combined popularity and social networking skills to introduce more and more people to their wonderful cuisine. We hope to join their ranks with Pearl's Kitchen!