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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 21, 2006 |
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Hachiya Persimmon - Hachiya Persimmon: The Hachiya is different. When it is fruity, firm and a bit crisp, its astringency makes it just about inedible. When it is ripe and sweet, its very soft to runny gel texture makes it seem just about inedible, because it is the texture a lot of fruit assumes when it is spoiled.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 14, 2006 |
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Cold Comfort - Cold Comfort: When the nights lengthen and the temperatures drop that spells the end of many a crop. Even in nearly subtropical Southern California, a lot of Summer favorites wither and die, or move indoors, as Autumn moves into Winter.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 07, 2006 |
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Almonds - Almonds: Almonds are nice any time of day, any day of the year, but seem to me to be specially linked to the festivities that bring the year to a close
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 30, 2006 |
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Avocado - Avocado: Ask a California Roll and it will tell you, No fruit says California like the Avocado.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 16, 2006 |
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Sage - Sage: We usually associate sage with Autumnal cooking, and particularly with the holidays at the end of this month and next. The reason for this association probably lies in sage's affinity for fat.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 09, 2006 |
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Feijoa - Feijoa: Since it has been at least a week since we presented a fruit, this weeks produce is Feijoa sellowiana, which you will find in the Farmers Market as Feijoa or Pineapple Guava. It is neither a pineapple nor a guava, but it is a fruit.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 02, 2006 |
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Dried Fruit - Dried Fruit: Removing most of the water from fruit preserves it by greatly reducing the osmotic pressure in it, making it nearly impossible for any spoiling microbe to remain active.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 26, 2006 |
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Jujube - Jujube: With the Jujube, we are back to discussing produce found at the Farmers Market. Not to be confused with the confection of the same name, the Jujube is a fruit about the size of an apricot, which should be available for the next few weeks at the Coleman Farms stand.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 19, 2006 |
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Foodieism - Foodieism: The beginnings of cooking dealt with the realm of the possible: making do the best you can with the materials at hand, which might be only tree bark and purlsane. In time, some could control their access to food and, freed from want, they might pledge themselves to desire: for them cooking entered the realm of the imaginable, of fashion and of power. A current manifestation of this is Foodieism.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 12, 2006 |
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Spin Ache II - Spin Ache II: One reason the spinach story received a lot of news coverage is the Airliner Effect. Air travel is much safer per passenger mile traveled than road travel, yet when an airliner goes down, unlike a car crash, it is national news. An airline crash is newsworthy because there are a lot of victims and because it is a rare occurrence.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 05, 2006 |
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Spin Ache - Spin Ache: This week and next we are going to cover something you would be very unlikely to find at the Farmers Markets, E. coli O157 H7. Left on my own, I think I would have written about dried fruit.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 28, 2006 |
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Nuts - Nuts: It is well known that peanuts are not nuts, botanically speaking, but sort of underground beans. But, botanically, neither is an almond a nut, but rather the seed of a kind of peach with atrophied flesh.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 21, 2006 |
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Herbs - Herbs: One of the nice things about late Summer is the variety of herbs available at the Farmers Market. We are taking a fairly broad view of herb here, to include any leaf used in cooking for its aroma or flavor, and we will be particularly liberal with cook, while we are at it.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 14, 2006 |
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Figs - Figs: Fresh figs are, for some people, a bit like balut. The difficulty has nothing to do with odor, which is of a slightly vinous honey. Rather, it has to do with the look and feel of a fresh fig being so far from what one normally associates with fruit.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 07, 2006 |
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Pears - Pears: It is probably a couple of hot spells to go until the season of mellow fruitfulness is upon us, yet pears are beginning to appear in the Farmers Market, and few things are as mellow and fruity as a pear.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 30, 2006 |
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Tomatoes - Tomatoes: Tomatoes likely exist in a number of varieties relatively close to that of chiles, yet what do you find at the store?
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 24, 2006 |
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Chual - Chual: This weeks vegetable is yet another weed, Chenopodium album White Goosefoot, known as Lambs Quarters or Chual, Cenizo, or Quelite blanco in the market.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 17, 2006 |
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The Food Less Traveled - The Food Less Traveled: They say that the average American meal has travelled over fifteen hundred miles before it gets eaten. Not really the meal, of course, but its ingredients.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 10, 2006 |
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Portulaca - Portulaca: Portulaca is a plant with many faces, and a name for each. In English it's generally known as Purslane, a word with allusions to folk medicine, things Romantic, and the mediaeval diet.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 03, 2006 |
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Amaranth - Amaranth: Amaranth is very hardy, tolerating heat and drought well, and putting up with cold, if not freezing, weather. Furthermore, it produces masses of seed and tends to be self-propagating: plant it once and grow it forever.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 27, 2006 |
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Oakleaf Lettuce - Oakleaf Lettuce: One of the more delicate lettuces is Oakleaf. It comes in both red and green varieties, but the red one is what you'll see almost exclusively.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 20, 2006 |
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Blueberries - Blueberries: Blueberries are in the news and they 1re in the Market. They are in the news because of their claimed health benefits. They are supposed to prevent everything from macular degeneration in humans to liver cancer in rats.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 13, 2006 |
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Sapote - Sapote: Sapotes have a smooth yellow green to yellow skin, depending both on the cultivar and on the degree of ripeness. They ripen quite well off the tree, and are very fragile when ripe, so unless you are going to eat them right away, you probably want to choose ones on the firmish side.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 06, 2006 |
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Lemons - Lemons: From about the end of the First War until the Sixties, Santa Barbara county was one of the worlds major exporters of lemons; lemon groves stretched from Mission Creek by Constance Ave. nearly to Ellwood.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 29, 2006 |
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Peaches - Peaches: The scientific name suggests the peach is a cousin of the prune, and while this is generally accepted, and naively supported by the similar construction of the fruits, sometimes the peach is put together with the almond in a separate genus, which the similarity of the pits gives some support to.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 22, 2006 |
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From Weed to Wal-Mart - From Weed to Wal-Mart: Some local weeds are truely wild, like poison oak or artemesia, but probably the majority of local garden weeds are something like arugula, naturalized escapees from food or fodder imported by Europeans. Mustard, dandelions, many of the clovers and most of the grasses are this kind of weed. Some of these, though weeds, have recognized culinary and even medicinal uses.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 15, 2006 |
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Agretti - Agretti: Agretti is now, briefly, available at the Santa Barbara and Montecito Farmers Markets. Agretti is also regionally known as roscano or barba di frate and, like arugula is a name that can be used of other similar tasting and looking, but unrelated, vegetables, samphire, for example.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 01, 2006 |
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Tyranny of the Recipe - Tyranny of the Recipe: In more traditional cookbooks recipes for something requiring a lot of stirring, jam, pudding or polenta, say - will often specify, stir with a wooden spoon.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 25, 2006 |
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Artichokes - Artichokes: Artichokes are definitely not fast food. They can take nearly an hour to cook and, as usually served, call for picky eating, particularly if the thorny bits have been left on.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 18, 2006 |
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Fava Beans - Fava Beans: For some, the swallow is the harbinger of Spring, for others it may be April showers, but here we'll talk of beans, specifically the Fava Bean . The Fava, like other peas and beans, can be preserved by drying and used year around. Dried, the Fava has an important role in cusine throughout the Mediterranean.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 11, 2006 |
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Mint - Mint: We typically associate mint with beverages, sweets and dental hygiene, but its culinary roles are far broader, and some mints go beyond the culinary, being well established in medicine, as insect repellants, etc.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 04, 2006 |
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Napa Cabbage - Napa Cabbage: Yet another Brassica, this week it is Napa Cabbage, which has as many common aliases as it does scientific names, but we can disambiguate the situation with a photo.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 27, 2006 |
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Kohlrabi - Kohlrabi: Kohlrabi is somewhat distantly related to turnips. They are both genus Brassica. It is the same species as cabbage, Brussels sprouts, and others of the cabbage kind.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 20, 2006 |
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Celeriac - Celeriac: This week it is back to our roots. Celeriac is a variety of celery, related to common celery as Beet Root is to Swiss Chard, the former develop mainly the root, the latter the stalk and leaves. The english language Wikipedia article we reference classifies Celeriac as an underutilized vegetable, and suggests its appearance is responsible for this.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 13, 2006 |
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Vienna's - Vienna's: Markets have played a huge role in the development of society. The greek word oikonomia means housekeeping, managing a large, largely self sufficient property with its attendant workforce.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 06, 2006 |
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Organic Produce - Organic Produce: Organic has become mainstream, even upmarket, often now seen riding in the same shopping carts as expensive wines and imported biscuits.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 30, 2006 |
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Brussel Sprouts - Brussel Sprouts: There is some story about Eleanor Roosevelt, the English and Brussels Sprouts which, as I recall, comes down to the vegetable having more endurance than the diners, it was Winter, it was wartime, and the only veg available was sprouts.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 23, 2006 |
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New Zealand Spinach - New Zealand Spinach: You do not want to confuse Australians with New Zealanders, but it is o.k. to treat New Zealand spinach like the ordinary stuff, even though they are much more distantly related, different families, than any two Antipodeans.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 16, 2006 |
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Cold Weather - Cold Weather: For the last couple of weeks we have been having trouble getting fresh produce photos, but so far we have not run short of words. This week, unanchored by the specificity of a photograph, we will respond to a number of stimuli ranging from the cold weather to some incidental research on Irish emigration prior to the Great Famine.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 09, 2006 |
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Endive Frisée - Endive Frisée: I forget what it is just now, but there is a song about something being better the second time around. We hope this applies to Endive Frisee.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 02, 2006 |
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Cabbage - Cabbage: For many people cabbage still seems to be associated with immigrants in tenements, to be the food of poor people whose cooking odor hangs sulphurous and dismal in the hallways.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 23, 2006 |
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Dandelion - Dandelion: Amongst all the other sprouting budding and blooming going on just now, you will have noticed Dandelions recrudescence. If you have a lawn or tidy garden, this may have given rise to a certain amount of hostility.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 16, 2006 |
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Citrus - Citrus: A lot of Southern California real estate was sold with Citrus. Starting about 1900, images of oranges and
lemons, the trees and their fruit were prominent in East Coast ads for California property. There is
something about Citrus that suggests a perfect climate sunny but equable, neither desert nor tropics even
to a person who knows nothing about their cultivation.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 02, 2006 |
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Onions - Onions: Onions have had a hard time competing with the wave of specious hygenics that has washed over the US in the last fifty years. Raw onions do have a strong odor, but the chemicals behind onion's odor are natural, 100% biodegradable, are not particularly allergenic and will not accumulate in your body fat.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 26, 2006 |
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Carrots - Carrots: This week it is back to that boring Old World and Carrots. Carrots are a pretty handy vegetable: they put up with poor soil and cold weather, and in really cold climates they can be easily stored through the Winter by clamping, packing them in sand, then covering with earth.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 19, 2006 |
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American Food - American Food: Indigenous agriculture in Mexico, Central America and the Andes developed a large range of products, fruit, vegetables and grain, dating from roughly the same time as similar developments in the Near East. It is difficult to see how the development of agriculture in the Americas was not completely independent from that in the Old World, yet even emminent geographers seem to overlook this.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 12, 2006 |
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Russian Kale - Russian Kale: Russian Kale is yet another Brassica, but one whose leaves, rather than flower buds, are eaten.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 05, 2006 |
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Cauliflower - Cauliflower: Cauliflower fully achieves the heady state that last time's Heading Broccoli attempts, reducing the stalks to near zero length attached to a sturdy core.
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