miso & mushroom supper with shared cultures
october 8
Next Thursday, my dear friend Eleana Hsu, co-founder of Shared Cultures, is coming to Greens for a
Miso & Mushroom Supper celebrating the work she and her husband, Kevin Gondo, have built together.
The timing feels especially sweet because just last week I was at their wedding, celebrating them, their families, and the life they’ve made together here in California. It was joyful and generous, a gathering filled with Bay Area chefs doing food things, which is just as it sounds: delicious.
I wrote about their wedding in
my Substack afterward, and it had me thinking about how long their misos have been part of my cooking. I’ve been reaching for them for years. Miso is one of those ingredients I come back to constantly, and write about in my cookbook, because of what it can do for vegetables (depth, salt, savoriness) without getting in the way of what’s already there. And all with just a spoonful.
What I love about Shared Cultures is how particular their work is to this place. Eleana and Kevin draw from their Chinese American and Japanese American traditions while working with ingredients grown and foraged here in Northern California: mushrooms, grains, legumes. Then they let time and fermentation do their work. It gets at a question Greens has been asking in its own way for nearly fifty years: What does it mean to cook from where you are?
For us, the answer has always started with what’s growing at Green Gulch and what our friends bring through our doors. Next Thursday, Eleana and I are going all in with miso and mushrooms, from morel miso butter to candy cap pound cake. Yes, mushrooms for dessert.
Eleana is also teaching two small miso-making classes, before dinner at 5PM or after dinner at 7:30PM. You’ll make your own jar, take it home, and then do the hardest part: wait.
Which feels fitting for this time of year. Summer in San Francisco can feel long and bountiful and special, like you have all the time in the world. Until somehow, all at once, you find yourself at the edge of fall. May your mason jar of miso capture a little of this late-summer abundance to share with the people you love in the months to come.
We hope you’ll join us.
With love,
Katie + Eleana (& Kevin)
and the teams at Greens & Shared Cultures
