Henderson Helene - Malibu Farm cookbook: recipes from the California coast

Malibu is a small town stretched over twenty-seven miles; a town with one highway, one movie theater, and one high school, just like any other small town in America.

OK, maybe not exactly the same: Add a few surfers, epic beaches and waves, movie stars, and a perpetual California summer. But Malibu is more than beaches and surfing. There is the hidden Malibu, which most day visitors and tourists never encounter.

In the backyards here, chickens and organic vegetable gardens are as common as surfboards and golf carts. (A golf cart is a necessity for heading to the beach.) Vineyards small and large dot the hillsides. Hobby winemakers, movie star winemakers, and large-scale wine-making operations are beginning to challenge the more well-known wines from Napa and the central coast of California. Having your own fruit orchards or olive oil production is a pretty standard backyard practice. Having a beehive is Malibu bee-havior.

Whether a bum or a billionaire, everyone in Malibu dresses the same, which means no jackets, no ties. A Malibu suit is a wet suit, a bathing suit, or a bee suit.

I did not grow up in Malibu. I did not even grow up in America. I was born in Lule, in the very north of Sweden, near the Finnish borderpretty much as far away from Malibu as you can get. I came to America as so many immigrants before me, with a one-way ticket, $500, and a heart full of the American dream. I knew nobody when I stepped off the plane, and I barely spoke English.

My father was an African American jazz musician, who met my mother while touring in Sweden. Although he left my mother behind to raise me without assistance or financial support, I did hold the golden ticket: an American passport, acquired at birth.

Because my mother worked in restaurants as a waitress, so did I, starting at a very young age. Soon I transitioned out of waitressing and began to work in a restaurant kitchen. I learned cooking first from my mother and then from cooks in small, nonglamorous kitchens in Sweden. Cooking was not fashionable or even considered a career for women at the time. When I left for America, I left to find bigger and better things. I modeled and worked as a graphic designer, but somehow the kitchen always drew me back in.

I met my husband John some years later. He is a surfer and wanted to be near the beach, and I was looking for land where I could have a few vegetable beds. We moved to Malibu in 2008, after a long search for the perfect house. We finally found our little neglected Craftsman house on a two-acre lot filled with weeds and potential. There were also a rusty old barn and a corral. Our neighbor had horses and twenty-eight very loud peacocks.

The fight for the land began right after we moved in. It was us against the weeds. Sad to say, weeding on the hillside gave me a bad case of poison oak: round one to the weeds. But while I recovered, I thought of a brilliant solution. Instead of weeding the yard myself, I would get goats to clear the land. We already had a barn and a corral, and goats on Craigslist were less than $40and so with a few computer strokes, we had farm animals.

The solution was not as brilliant as I had first thought. The goats turned out to be very picky eatersthey knew they were residents of Malibu from the day they arrived and smelled the ocean breeze. They simply refused to eat the weeds that were all around them. They preferred alfalfa, roses, or fruit trees. They loved walks on the beach. In Malibu, everyone turns out to be a beach bum sooner rather than later, even Nubian/Boer mix goats. We were back to square one and ended up clearing the weeds by hand while the goats watched from nearby.

Our daughter, Celia, started college on the East Coast that year and wanted a pig. And we were the parents who thought that it was a perfectly reasonable request from a child no longer living at home, and so that year Santa brought a potbellied pig for Christmas. The pig would become the best friend of our son Casper. In his junior year of high school, the pig was his prom date. They wore matching bow ties, rode in a limousine together to a Beverly Hills hotel, and lasted about 45 minutes in the ballroom before hotel security escorted them out. It made his schools best of list for 2010: Casper and his pig date.

Once you have goats, a pig, dogs, and a cat, chickens and bees are bound to follow. We planted a vineyard, fruit trees, and vegetable gardens, and Malibu Farm, our backyard, was complete.

I had previously worked in catering for many years, and when we moved to Malibu I went into private chef work. A private chef is someone who goes to the clients home, usually someone very rich, and makes dinner for the family. I called myself a cooler lady. Not someone cool, but someone who brings a cooler to work. At the request of a few local moms, I started teaching cooking classes during the day from my home while still working as a private chef at night. I began a blog as a place to post recipes for my studentsand Malibu Farm the blog was born.

My classes were great fun. We picked produce in the yard, and then we cooked up a big lunch as part of the lesson. After a year of classes, the participants suggested I throw a dinner party so that the husbands could join the fun. I wasnt sure that anyone would pay admission to attend a dinner party in my backyard, so I turned it into a fundraiser for Point Dume Marine Science Elementary School. I asked other local producers to join me: Sonja Magdevski, who lives two blocks away from me and produces Casa Dumetz Wines; Robert Jaye from Malibu Olive Company; Bruce Lampcov from Malibu Honey; Doug Burdge and his colleagues from Malibu Mary; Danette McReynolds from Chvre Lavande; and Lawrence Charles of Charles & Company, which sells organic and kosher teas.