Heartstick Ojaru, a co-op of nine women in Chiba, Japan, have been selling these cute heart- and star-shaped cucumbers in grocery stores in Tokyo. Plastic molds affixed to the stem shapes the cucumbers into the shapes when sliced cross-wise. The arrangement possibilities, as you can see, are endless. [via Trends in Japan]
This week's Cook the Book feature highlights How to Pick a Peach
As with all weekly Cook the Book features, we've got a number of copies to give away. Ten (10) winners will be chosen at random from among the commenters below. All you have to do is answer the following:
What's your favorite fruit or vegetable for 1.) cooking and 2.) eating raw?
some fancy-pants chefs love iceberg lettuce, too. I'm not ashamed to admit that I love iceberg lettuce. It's cool, it's crisp, and it's a perfect foil for blue cheese dressing.
Don't get me wrong. I love a fresh, peppery arugula salad picked that morning from somebody's garden. But I don't much care for wilted organic arugula grown 3,000 miles from my house and picked two weeks before it finds its way into my hands. I also hate iceberg lettuce that is more brown than light green with tons of droopy outer leaves. C'mon, admit it. You like iceberg lettuce, too.
Here's a great blue cheese dressing recipe from the late Jamie Shannon (and Ti Adelaide Martin) of Commander's Palace (Are there others out there? Hell, I even like Marie's, though the best commercially available blue cheese dressing is from Point Reyes Cheese.
Not all farmers' markets in the UK are certified or monitored, and so if you're visiting one caveat emptor definitely applies—the produce you buy may not be any better than what you get at the supermarket:
Consider, for example, Isle of Wight Tomatoes, one of the most established stallholders at London’s numerous farmers’ markets. It looks like a small, traditional enterprise and claims to sell its own homegrown produce. Think again. Its tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers are bought from a separate company, Wight Salads, the bulk of whose £60m turnover comes from supplying supermarket chains.
Worse, as far as many green consumers may be concerned, many of the tomatoes are actually experimental genetic crossbreeds that Wight Salads is engineering to try to find the “next best thing” for the supermarkets. In short, these tomatoes are a far cry from traditional British produce homegrown in a smallholding.
I'd be really upset if I was going to a farmers' market and buying what I thought were more expensive but locally-grown vegetables from a small farm and they turned out to be experimental stuff from a big supplier, especially if I was making the effort for the safety of children. I imagine there are thousands of people who will be thinking twice before visiting a UK farmers market again, and that's a damn shame. [via The Grinder]
Since 2000, my friend the Brooklyn artist Ranjit Bhatnagar has been buying food at his neighborhood Saturday greenmarket and scanning his purchases in high-resolution when he gets home, and so you can see a set of his lovely greenmarket produce scans on Flickr.
They're mostly of fruit and vegetables, but occasionally meat, eggs and fish will make an appearance, like in the scan at left. Some of my favorites: a nest of eggs and cilantro, scallion in a sea of popcorn, and a study of reds and greens. (Click on "all sizes" to see them larger and close up—they get even more intense when they're sized larger than life so buy a print if you see something you like!)
Time Magazine's current cover story is Eating Better Than Organic by John Cloud, in which he explores the debate between buying local and buying organic. Which is better for the food system, food grown by a small farmer locally or one grown by a big organic firm that uses large-scale industrial methods? Is buying local food that might have been treated with pesticides better for the environment than organic food that's been trucked, shipped and flown from far away, using up tons of fossil fuels? Which tastes better? Cloud asked Whole Foods CEO John Mackey for his opinion:
He told me that when he can't get locally grown organics--and even he can't reliably get them--he decides on the basis of taste. "I would probably purchase a local nonorganic tomato before I would purchase an organic one that was shipped from California," he said. He called the two tomatoes "an environmental wash," since the California one had petroleum miles on it while the nonorganic one was grown with pesticides. "But the local tomato from outside Austin will be fresher, will just taste better," he said.
Cloud goes on to check out restaurants dedicated to local ingredients, like New York's Blue Hill which sources 80% of their food from within the New York region, or the free restaurant at Google HQ in Mountain View, CA called Café 150, which only uses food produced within 150 miles of them, as well as joining a Community Supported Agriculture, which lets you subscribe to a local farm and receive fresh produce every week or month.
Are those washes for fruit and vegetables worth your money? Alina Tugend of the New York Times thinks not, after talking with University of Maine food science professor Alfred A. Bushway, who found in a study that the washes were no more effective at cleaning fruit than using distilled water—he says you can go ahead and use tap water. If that still makes you a little antsy but you don't want to spring for the washes, you can just use "a mixture of lemon juice and water."
Marketman’s Philippine Fruit Index: "I was recently reviewing a reference guide which had a section on tropical fruits from this part of the world and I was surprised to note that I seemed to have covered many of the fruits in the book. Turns out that Marketmanila has already featured over 50 locally-grown fruits in the past two years!!"
(If you read nothing else, make sure to check out his Mango Slicing 101—it's pretty easy once you know what to do.)
"The avocado industry says it's expecting football fans to buy 53 million pounds of Hass avocados this week for Super Bowl Sunday, rivaling Cinco de Mayo for the day of the year when the most guacamole is consumed. The question is, after January's big freeze, will growers be able to meet the demand?" The SF Chronicle says California growers will do okay despite losing about 25% to 30% of their harvest due to cold fronts, but their avocados will be available for raised prices to California consumers who will also have access this month to avocados from both Chile and Mexico.
Oh, and make sure to read all the way down to the end of the article for five guacamole recipes from Bay Area chefs—plus one from a SF Chronicle staffer, who created it with a childhood friend when she was 9.
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