Herbs, Herbs, Herbs : High-Tension Business

Michael Feig had been through the experience of working for somebody else. He’d spent a couple of years as day chef at Ma Maison and taught at the restaurant’s cooking school, Ma Cuisine. So in 1987 he opened a catering business of his own.

To subsidize it, he started a farm to supply restaurants with the herbs he knew chefs had a hard time finding. Actually, calling Country Fresh Herbs a farm was going a little far at the time--it was just Feig’s back yard, planted with herbs, mostly basil. But it didn’t take him long to expand.

“Within eight months,” he recalls, “Sandy (Tandler) and I started a partnership and leased three and a half acres. We figured we’d be busy with that property quite a while, but a year later we had to expand again.

“Now we have 14 acres, seven leased from a farmer in Moorpark and seven more in Tarzana and Reseda that we lease from the Department of Water and Power. They’re located under the high-tension wires, and every year we get handouts from the DWP about what to do if a power cable falls.”

The catering business idea faded away in the first couple of months and Feig hasn’t looked back. Today he has 10 or 12 employees on the road every day just delivering herbs to restaurants and offers 50 or 60 varieties of herbs for sale.

“My biggest seller is basil,” he says. “I can ship 300 pounds a day. There are a lot of Italian restaurants in L. A. and they all want basil, fresh sage, thyme, rosemary. And arugula--I sell 80 to 120 pounds of arugula a day.

“It’s a lot of fun, but it isn’t all fun. The bugs come and the bugs go, and we have to worry about water. If it doesn’t rain soon, we’re in trouble--the city has cut our water 25% already. We’ve already had to give up three-quarters of an acre from each of my Valley fields or we’d have been going over our allotment.”

MINT JELLIES (From Michael Feig, Country Fresh Herbs)

1 1/2 cups spearmint or peppermint or orange bergamot or pineapple mint, packed

2 cups water

1 tablespoon rice vinegar

1 teaspoon salt

3 to 3 1/2 cups sugar

3 ounces liquid pectin

Wash and dry mint leaves. Chop mint very fine. Pat mint immediately into large saucepan and add water. Bring to slow boil 30 seconds. Remove saucepan from heat and allow to stand 20 minutes.

Pour 1 1/2 cups liquid from saucepan through fine strainer into another saucepan. Add rice vinegar, salt and sugar. Bring to rapid boil, stirring constantly. Add pectin and return to hard boil. Boil 1 minute. Remove saucepan from heat. Remove foam and pour hot jelly into 5 hot sterilized (6-ounce) jelly jars. Leave 1/2-inch head space and seal at once. Makes 5 (6-ounce) jelly jars.