Let’s start this post with a bit of fiction: It’s 1944, you’re a bomber pilot in the United States Navy, flying missions over Southeast Asia. It’s a dangerous job, but you’ve got a great crew: there’s Knute, a.k.a., “Swede”, the navigator, a quiet, big-hearted 18-year old blonde kid from northern Minnesota; Tony, the bombardier, a […]
How Much of an Avocado Is Edible?
Berkeley Bowl Marketplace in Berkeley, California is justly famous for its vast array of produce and their avocado selection is no exception. They sometimes sell five or more different sizes — I have seen pee wee, small, medium, large and extra large. Of course, each size has a different price and they are always sold […]
A Sampling of Vintage Kale Salad Recipes from 100+ Years Ago
Kale salad — superfood in a bowl, a nutritional powerhouse, a bold canvas for bold flavors — has been a major trend in recent years. A recent article in Food52 — A New Genius Salad from the Chef Who Started the Kale Salad Craze — notes that it was introduced to a wide audience in late […]
Spud Stats: Growing, Eating, Importing and Exporting Potatoes
A segment on potatoes with author Raghavan Iyer on the May 13, 2017 episode of Good Food, got me wondering about potato statistics: Where are the world’s potatoes grown? Which country eats the most potatoes? Who imports and exports potatoes? I went looking for answers at the amazing FAOSTAT website, which is a statistical database about food and […]
Completing the Celery Trilogy: A Celery Ngram
I’d like to conclude my celery trilogy by looking at the ngram for celery (the first two parts of the trilogy were about celery on restaurant menus and celery vases). Ngrams show the popularity of a word or phrase throughout time and are especially useful for slang, grammar, and spelling preferences (like ketchup and catsup). An ngram is […]
Moringa Leaves, One of Today’s Superfoods (Unusual greens, Part 8)
It’s been almost 10 years (!) since I last updated my “Unusual Greens” series — I haven’t been exploring markets like I used to and the places I shop almost always have the same few greens (chard, kale, rapini, etc.). Today’s featured greens are Moringa oleifera leaves (a.k.a. drumstick tree, horseradish tree, Tree of Life, […]
Growing Belgian Endive is “A Really Wacky Process” – Touring California Endive Farms
You might have spotted Belgian endive in your local supermarket and thought “yet another salad green, nothing special.” But you’d be wrong. Belgian endive is an amazing vegetable that requires significant agricultural ingenuity to grow.
The Inside-Outside Game: Cooking Eggplant Flesh and Skin Separately
People often say that the San Francisco Bay Area doesn’t really have seasons. Weather-wise, they have a point – we have wet and dry, nothing nearly as dramatic as New England, for example. But for those who obsess about local food, there are scores of seasons, each one marking the appearance and disappearance of certain […]
Liquid Burdock
Back in June, I wrote about setting up garden infrastructure to grow burdock root (a.k.a. gobo, Arctium lappa) so that I could have a local source for recipes in Elizabeth Andoh’s Kansha: Celebrating Japan’s Vegan and Vegetarian Traditions (my review of the book is here.). My plants seem to be doing well, with each one […]
Burdock Towers: Growing Long Vegetables at Home
One of my minor frustrations with Elizabeth Andoh’s “Kansha” (my review is here) is that quite a few recipes feature burdock (a.k.a. great burdock, gobo, Arctium lappa), but all of the supply in local markets seems to be grown in Taiwan, even in Berkeley Bowl and Tokyo Fish Market, two markets that have many types […]