Entries tagged with 'fruits'
Page 1 of 2
"I have been feasting with impunity on fruits that are being grown responsibly 3,000 miles from my home." When you're a serious eater and a serious dieter you look for treats or snacks that you can eat with impunity at different times of the year. Yes, all you Michael Pollan and Alice Waters acolytes, I am talking about seasonal snacks that I can eat without worrying about my weight. Bananas have become a staple of my serious diet, but they are neither local nor seasonal unless you happen to live in a sub-tropical area. (I did have some killer baby bananas in Vieques, Puerto Rico, last December that tasted like they had been crossed with limes—banimas or limnanas, anyone?) Summer...
Continue reading »
A Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle shade of figs. While Greece is great for the salty fiends (olives, feta, and Santorini capers), there are plenty of opportunities to get cavities there too. Syrup-submerged fruits and nuts known as spoon sweets are common to eat alone or with cheese, and for years have symbolized sweet hospitality. A couple we visited wouldn't let us leave with a net-zero calorie intake, so they pulled out the coffee and little plates for spoon sweets. It was something like the Greek answer to British teatime....
Continue reading »
It's the time of year when it's fun to take visitors to the market. Friends who don't typically shop at farmers' markets will be overwhelmed by the amount of produce that we have available locally and in season, and will be sure to go home with a bag full of summertime delights. The market is bursting at the seams with color and flavor and scents, and it's an exercise in restraint to decide where to spend my budget. My strategy during this time of abundance is typically to find out what products are going to be around for a little while, and then to prioritize from there. Okra have just begun to show up in the market and as...
Continue reading »
This isn't necessarily new (the idea, I mean; the video, which appears after the jump, starting making the rounds yesterday), but ... does anyone else peel their bananas that way?...
Continue reading »
The Grocery Ninja leaves no aisle unexplored, no jar unopened, no produce untasted. Creep along with her below, and read all her mission reports here. Before I moved to the Bay Area (land of Ranch 99 and accessible Asian foodstuffs), I used to cart heavy glass jars of yucheong (yuzu syrup) on the 24 hour flight back from Asia. My friends would save their luggage space for practical things like textbooks (usually one-third the price of what you would pay here). But I would splurge all my luggage space on jars of this golden goodness. Because when the days are long and dreary, and when it seems like the weekend will never arrive, and that the work keeps piling up,...
Continue reading »
I am a bad daughter. My dad, an aircraft engineer who keeps planes in the air for a living, forwards every piece of email he receives that carries “useful” information: “What to do if you’re being followed down a dark alley; Beware of poisonous spiders lurking in restrooms; Don’t eat red and blue foods together lest your bowels explode.” Being ungrateful, I tend to mock the information, convinced that if an email claims that drinking tomato juice while skipping will prevent disease, Dad will stockpile tomato juice while skipping ropes in earnest. So when I read Dad’s latest email, entitled: “Starfruit can be deadly,” I was ready to dismiss it. How could such a pretty little thing cause harm?...
Continue reading »
If you’re of South East Asian descent, you know that
being called a “potato eater” is a grave thing. It implies that you’ve rejected your culinary heritage of rice as the basis of, and main source of carbohydrates in, your diet. Instead, you’ve embraced the “white man’s” dietary staple of potatoes.
Continue reading »
Housemates’ wild partying grating on you? Time to ante up. Get your hands on a bunch of these scaly beauties, peel them, and leave the skins scattered about—the housemates will be convinced there’s a molting snake on the loose! That should put a temporary stop to the parties.
Continue reading »
At a gelati stand, I remember being thoroughly confused when my friend asked, “So what kind of nut is the lychee?” “Huh?” I exclaimed. The friend fairly thumped the counter pane with his finger, indicating the near-empty tub of Lychee Nut Sorbet. “The lychee isn’t a nut… it’s a fruit!” I said. “Bet?” challenged the friend. He knew two things: 1) that I would be dying to rush home to consult the google gods; and 2) that I had an afternoon of appointments far away from civilization. This fiend-friend delights in tormenting me. But he soon owed me dessert. As it turns out, this whole lychee nut business stems from a mistake. Lychees deteriorate quickly once picked and dry...
Continue reading »
A wallet guide that lists the relative amounts of pesticides found in the most common citizens of the produce aisle. [Tip o' the hat to Simon]...
Continue reading »
