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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 27, 2007 |
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Overeating - Overeating: When I was maybe eleven or twelve it came to me as something of a revelation that one could get through
the holidays by eating only the usual amount at meals: the compulsion to stuff one's self, and then feel
miserable for hours or even days afterwards, was illusory.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 20, 2007 |
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Celery - Celery: Celery steps into history over three thousand years ago, appearing in Egyptian architectural decorations and being grazed by Achilles horsemens steeds in the meadows under Troy.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 14, 2007 |
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Pomegranates - Pomegranates: The pomegranate shares with the persimmon the habit of hiding coyly amongst the foliage, being revealed when colder weather makes the leaves drop, and the fruit, in this case dark reddish purple, and quite spherical, remain to decorate the otherwise bare branches.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Dec 06, 2007 |
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Fuyu Persimmon - Fuyu Persimmon: December is traditionally thought of as a traditional time of year, so we thought we would indulge our own seasonal tradition of writing about persimmons. Last year, we dealt with the Hachiya. This year, we will talk in some detail about its cousin, the yellower orange, tangerine-shaped Fuyu.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 29, 2007 |
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Garlic - Garlic: I suspect there is a tendency in the U.S. to associate garlic with Mediterranean cooking, specifically with Italian and perhaps with Greek or Spanish, if it is familiar, and with the cuisine of Provence, and also with certain styles of Asian cooking, Szechuan Chinese, for instance.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 08, 2007 |
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Curd Cheese - Curd Cheese: Curd Cheese, is something like the formalization of that temptation, an intermediate stage of a culinary process that has itself been raised to the status of an ingredient, or a dish in itself.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Nov 01, 2007 |
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Market Diversity - Market Diversity: Pedal powered ice cream sellers are an example of an interesting economic phenomenon. In past columns we have mentioned several kinds of diversity, biodiversity and product diversity, in particular. The ice cream sellers are an example of what we can call market diversity.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 18, 2007 |
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The Food Chain - The Food Chain: There is lots of other life in the garden besides plants. There are some lizards, voles, maybe, mice and rats, the squirrels I am competing with for the walnuts, the birds eating the last of the grapes before taking off for a Winter in Mexico, and on a good day a snake or possum.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Oct 05, 2007 |
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Walnuts - Walnuts: What most of us think of as a walnut has a relatively thin shell, some varieties thinner than others, the hard part being essentially a sphere enclosing a large brainlike nut and a thin shelly membrane, making it easy to get the all the meat out in large pieces.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 27, 2007 |
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Not The Farmers' Market - Not The Farmers' Market: The WalMart shopping experience is different. We will leave aside the maze of shelving displaying a really bewildering amount of stuff and the effect of the color shifted florescent lighting on packaging that struggles to look real even in daylight.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 20, 2007 |
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Food Regulation - Food Regulation: Industrial food production disassociated consumer and producer, so there was no way the consumer could know how his food had been treated and how safe it was to eat. The producer, often enough, did not really care.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Sep 13, 2007 |
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Peel Brussels Sprouts? - Peel Brussels Sprouts?: Dear Veggie of the Week, In one scene of the sixth Harry Potter book, Harry and Ron are in the kitchen of the Burrow, forced to peel sprouts. What is this about peeling sprouts?
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 30, 2007 |
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Have A Pear! - Have A Pear!: We have reached that stage of modernity which no longer has the technology to preserve such bounty, separating us from our grandparents, and from bees and ants, so we have got to use the pears fresh.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 16, 2007 |
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Fresh Fruit - Fresh Fruit: There is a limit to the amount of fruit a person can eat just as it is, or in compote or pies or cobblers. This week we will look at some nontraditional uses for fresh fruit.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 09, 2007 |
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Farm Subsidies - Farm Subsidies: This week we will again discuss something you would not find at the Farmers Market - farm subsidies. Subsidies are big business in the U.S. - twenty something billion a year paid to less than 0.1 percent of the population - and they are currently in the news.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Aug 02, 2007 |
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Water - Water: Water is pretty easy to take for granted when you have only got to turn a tap to get some. There are parts of the world, fairly large parts, where the supply of water is more problematical.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 26, 2007 |
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Bananas - Bananas: Bananas have not been available at the Santa Barbara Farmers Market for several years. It is possible to produce bananas in Santa Barbara County, but only just. More than a few miles from the coast it is too dry in the Summer and risks being too cold in the Winter.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 19, 2007 |
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Olive Oil - Olive Oil: With all the talk of oil driving the economy, much of the news, and possibly foreign policy, it may take a bit of a stretch to realize that the first oil economy was based on olive oil.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 12, 2007 |
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Eggplant - Eggplant: I do not remember where I first noticed eggplant. I was probably about ten years old, and while far from a picky eater when among familiar foods, I was taken aback by these glossy dark violet stretched spheroids, melonsized, huge for a vegetable, and looking more like the mounted coco de mer on a friend's drawing room table, or something anatomical, than like something to eat.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jul 05, 2007 |
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Cucumbers - Cucumbers: Cucumbers are a kind of melon, and are technically a fruit, but since they are not particularly sweet, they get treated as a vegetable so, like tomatoes, they are a fruitgetable or a vegeruit, for culinary purposes.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 28, 2007 |
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Farmers' Market - Farmers' Market: A few years ago, a friend who sold at the Santa Barbara Farmers Markets was shorthanded, and I got the opportunity to find out what it was like to work there.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 21, 2007 |
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Sprouts - Sprouts: When I was little, I discovered Chinese food was based on worms. There were crisp worms and soft ones; the crisp ones were pretty good, except they got soon soggy, while the soft ones were reliably good, whether lightly cooked and that bit crunchy or, more often, cooked really soft.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 14, 2007 |
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How Val Is My Greenie? - How Val Is My Greenie?: Green is currently at the forefront of fashion. Great, you think, people are really concerned, good things are starting to happen. But the problem with fashion as a shaper of policy is that it is superficial and deceptive. The emperors decision to order new clothes was based entirely on fashion.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jun 07, 2007 |
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Honey - Honey: Honey has a long history in Europe, though, with known archaeological evidence of the collection of wild honey dating back around ten millenia, and bee keeping was well established by the advent of the Roman Empire.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 31, 2007 |
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Apricots - Apricots: A ripe Apricot is fragile and wont travel well, nor will Apricots ripen much after picking, so to get really good ones, you have either got to grow them yourself or get them from someone who does.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 24, 2007 |
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Nettle - Nettle: The Nettle is a very versatile plant, one whose stalks can provide fiber for textile and whose leaves have medicinal uses as well as culinary ones.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 17, 2007 |
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Couve Tronchuda - Couve Tronchuda: We tend to associate the Kales with Autumn and Winter, and most Kales are at their best in cooler weather. However, Couve Tronchuda, or Portuguese Kale, is coming to market now in peak form.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 11, 2007 |
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Grenobloise Lettuce - Grenobloise Lettuce: Grenobloise lettuce, also known as Rouge de Grenoble, seems hard to find: a brief mention in an earlier column comes in the first page of Web search results, while a reference to our sponsor's Salads page comes in the second.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on May 03, 2007 |
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Strawberries - Strawberries: There is a delicious ambiguity about Strawberries. They are a fruit, and fruit is something we associate with Summer, but they traditionally start to appear about now, months earlier than most fruit - berries, particularly - so we associate also them with Spring.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 26, 2007 |
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Mustard Greens - Mustard Greens: Early Spring sees the first of the really seasonal cooking greens, and one of the first of these is Mustard greens. These come in many varieties, some of which, such as Mizuna and Tatsoi, are often used raw in such things as salad mix.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 19, 2007 |
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Lollo Rosso - Lollo Rosso: You need to be a bit flexible when looking for Lollo Rosso lettuce. It is also known, with increasing degrees of gender confusion, as Lolla Rossa and Lollo Rossa and even, in the English version of a Korean seed catalogue, as Red Rollo.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 12, 2007 |
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Variety & Choice - Variety & Choice: They said, look at choice. Thirty years ago the British consumer could choose between rolled oats, Shredded Wheat, Wheetabix and Grape Nuts for breakfast cereal. Now theyve got Fruit-Loops and more. This added choice has a value, the Economist said, which should be deducted from current prices before figuring inflation.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Apr 06, 2007 |
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Forellenschluss - Forellenschluss: Again with the lettuce. Well, as we said last week, it is that time of year. Todays subject, Forellenschluss, is particularly happy in Autumn and in Spring.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 28, 2007 |
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Butter Lettuce - Butter Lettuce: With the recent warmer weather, the lettuces are heading up and rolling out. Butter lettuce should be particularly happy this time of year, producing larger looser heads than during the Winter, and not having to worry about sunburn and heat-induced bitterness, as it will later on.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 22, 2007 |
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Spring Is Here - Spring Is Here: There a number of natural harbingers of Spring, an orderly succession of budding, blooming and leafing out, and on top of this the suite of migratory birds provide both notice of Springs approach and a direct indication of the weather it is bringing with it.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 15, 2007 |
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Rapini - Rapini: This weeks vegetable is a somewhat confusing member of the Brassica family, Rapini, which is also known as Broccoli Rabe, Broccoletti, Cime di Rapa, Broccoli Rapa, among other things.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Mar 08, 2007 |
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Parsnip - Parsnip: Despite its unassuming appearance, the Parsnip is surprizingly interesting, and vice versa. For example, its russian name pasternak is shared with the Russian poet and novelist.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 28, 2007 |
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Turnips & Rutabagas - Turnips & Rutabagas: Its more roots this week, Turnips and Rutabagas. They are related, but rather than the rutabaga being a variety of turnip, it is apparently the result of a turnip crossing with a cabbage in a rather special way, with the result that the rutabaga seems to have incorporated both the turnip genome and that of the cabbage.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 22, 2007 |
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Fennel - Fennel: Fennel is a plant that seems at home everywhere, or nowhere. It has been used since ancient times both medicinally, externally as an antagonist to skin parasites and internally as a digestive aid and antispasmodic, and as a vegetable, both raw and cooked.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 15, 2007 |
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Tangerines - Tangerines: Tangerines are clearly distinct from Oranges. Out of the first ten or so Google returns on tangerine, one has to do with the fruit, the rest seem to be related to popular music, while Orange returns a bank account and a phone company.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Feb 08, 2007 |
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Beet - Beet: Think beet and we usually visualize something dark red about the size of a baseball, hard or soft, depending; but they come in lots of shapes, sizes and colors.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 24, 2007 |
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Sustainable & Local - Sustainable & Local: Following the usurpation and adulteration of organic by the introduction of the USDA Organic standard, many producers and consumers of traditionally organic produce have begun emphasizing other aspects of traditional organic farming, mainly locally grown and sustainable.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 17, 2007 |
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Salsify - Salsify: In another country I used to see something in the canned vegetable section called Salsify. The cans were, I think, from Poland, and the picture on the label was a paragon of Communist marketing, ugly enough to convince me not to buy, but mysterious enough that I never forgot the vegetable.
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| Articles from Daily Newsletter on Jan 11, 2007 |
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Acquired Tastes - Acquired Tastes: Whatever seductions of flavor and aroma it may offer, and a dedicated coffee lover could supply a lengthy list of these, drinking a cup of strong coffee is also like being woken by a gong or hugged by a sumo wrestler, there is an unavoidable harshness or heavy-handedness about it. Yet many people can't live without it. And this got me to thinking about acquired tastes.
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