Scapes

You may not know its Latin name, but I bet the allium family is one of your favorite relatives!  Alliums include beloved aromatics like onions, garlic, shallots, leeks, green onions, and chives.  What would a meal be without one of those?  All of the world’s cuisines hold aromatics in high regard.

Lots of allium members grow wild and are typically foraged rather than cultivated.  You might find the wild ones at farmers’ markets…or you might find them in your backyard.  Happily, these pictured scapes grow rampant in mine.  Another common wild allium is ramps, which I’ve seen at farmers’ markets more often than I’ve seen scapes.  (What great names, right?  “Scapes and ramps.”  I’ve been enamored of them ever since I saw them profiled in Fine Cooking when I was a kid; it was quite a thrill to realize they were growing in my backyard!)

These wild alliums are at their peak in late spring and early summer.  In the case of the scapes, you can see that they curl coquettishly.  That elegant curve signals that they’re still tender enough to be lightly sautéed and enjoyed.  As the summer progresses, the stalks harden and straighten, until finally they’re pointing towards the sky.  By that point, they’re just too tough to eat.

If you’re lucky enough to find scapes that are still curling, try using them in your daily cooking: just cut off the upper third of the stem, cut off and discard the head, and then start chopping the stem.  Depending on what stage the scape is in, you’ll probably notice the stalk getting tougher to cut once you’ve gotten about four or five inches down the curve of the stalk.  Discard the part that seems too woody and difficult to cut through.

Very young/tender scapes can be eaten raw; slightly older/tougher ones are best sautéed over low heat with a drizzle of extra-virgin olive oil for about 5 minutes or until softened and fragrant.  Add them to salads, pilafs, stir-frys, soups…anything you’d like to flavor with a bit of onion.

Enjoy your wild alliums!

Stuffed Grape Leaves

There’s something ever-so-charming about edible little packages: tamales, spring rolls, pasties, grape leaves…every culture seems to have a neatly-wrapped specialty.  (Maybe they appeal to our sense of orderliness?)  Not only are these wrappables practical to eat and fun to make, their central position in any given cuisine means that centuries of tradition have fine-tuned their perfect blends of simple and savory ingredients.

One of my favorite stuff-and-wrap dishes is grape leaves — whether you make them vegetarian or with meat, you just can’t go wrong if you start out with authentic sheep’s-milk Feta and good-quality leaves that have been cured in water, sea salt, vinegar, and nothing else.  And nutritionally speaking, since omega-3 fats are primarily found in the supple part of plants (the leaves of a plant versus its roots and berries), including grape leaves on your menu is a smart idea as well as a delicious one.

Stuffed Grape Leaves

(1/2 lb. ground lamb, optional)
1 small onion, diced
1/4 cup pine nuts
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 medium tomatoes, diced
1 cup cooked brown rice (you can use leftover rice or cook a batch of fresh rice — just remember that 1/2 cup uncooked will yield more than 1 cup cooked rice)
1 T. fresh mint, slivered, or 1 tsp. dried mint
About 4 oz. sheep’s-milk Feta, or more if you’re a big cheese fan
Approximately 20 brined grape leaves (you can find these at Mediterranean markets or well-stocked mainstream grocery markets)
1 lemon, sliced into thin wedges
1 1/2 cups vegetable stock

Preheat oven to 400 degrees F. Locate and set aside an 11×7 glass pan. (If you add the lamb to the recipe, you might need more leaves and a 9×13 pan.)

Sautée onions (and lamb, if using) with a pat of butter or ghee over medium heat for about 3 minutes, stirring often, or until onions are soft. Stir in pine nuts, garlic, and tomatoes. Reduce heat to medium-low and cook for another 2 minutes to mellow the garlic (and finish cooking the lamb).  Remove pan from heat immediately.

In a large bowl, combine the onion/lamb mixture, the rice, the mint, and the Feta, crumbling the Feta by hand if necessary. Salt and pepper to taste.

To stuff the leaves, pull out a bunch of leaves and carefully unroll and separate them, setting them on a plate as you go. When you have about 20 unrolled and ready, place an individual leaf on a cutting board, then spoon a mound of the rice mixture onto the leaf. (Only spoon on about a tablespoon to avoid overstuffing. You may have to add more or less depending on the size of the particular leaf you’re working with.) Carefully wrap the left, right, and bottom edges onto the filling, then roll over once or twice to seal the top flap of your leafy “envelope,” so to speak. Transfer the stuffed leaf to the glass pan and place it seam-side down.

Repeat until you’ve used up all your stuffing. (Extra leaves can be stored in the refrigerator for at least a month.) Your pan should be fully stuffed with individual leaf packages. Stud the packages with the lemon wedges and then pour the stock over the entire pan. (If you’re making lamb-stuffed grape leaves and are using a 9×13 pan, you may need a full 2 cups of stock.)

Cover the pan tightly with aluminum foil and bake for 30 minutes. Reduce temperature to 325 degrees F and bake for another 30 minutes.

Serve hot as a main dish or an appetizer, or serve any time within 3 days of having refrigerated your leftovers. Top with additional Feta if you like.

Enjoy!

Custard Apple

Until I lived in Costa Rica (and had to watch out for falling coconuts on my way to Spanish class!), I never knew how intriguing and bizarre fruits could be.  In the Midwest, we’re fortunate to have a world of berries and apples and pears and cherries at our fingertips — and of course we have tropical staples like avocadoes and bananas in our markets — but when you get closer to rainforests, fruit gets downright odd.  I mean that in a good way.

Take the cherimoya family of fruit.  It includes custard apples (pictured) and soursops, both of which have the texture of custard and a flavor that’s…well,  so fragrantly tropical that you just can’t compare it to anything else.  (Vanilla/pineapple/banana/passionfruit, maybe?)  Soursops are slightly less sweet than custard apples, but both are studded with large, easily-removed seeds nestled into a soft flesh that can be scooped out or cut into quarters and eaten like an apple.  Just don’t try to peel a ripe cherimoya — the thin, green, almost-scaly-looking skin would tear.

When I was in Costa Rica, the soursop ice cream was my favorite, so I was almost giddy with delight when I found custard apples in my local produce market.  Tropical produce seems to be getting more and more common — you might stumble across a cherimoya as well.  If you do, choose one that’s mottled with brown spots and is soft to the touch.  Handle with care, though, because these heavy fruits (each usually weighs a pound or more) are delicate and bruise easily.  If there are only fully-green ones available, bring one home and let it ripen out on the countertop.

You can eat it straight out of the skin, you can drizzle it with a bit of lime juice first, or you can scoop out the flesh, remove the seeds, and then blend the flesh with coconut milk or pineapple juice or anything else tropical that strikes your fancy.  Homemade cherimoya-coconut ice cream would be fabulous!  Or how about a cherimoya daiquiri?

If you can’t use it all at once, cut the cherimoya in half, rub the unused half with lime or lemon juice, wrap it securely in plastic wrap, and refrigerate it overnight.  It’ll be just as fresh and tantalizing the next day.

Enjoy!

Macadamia Mango Mousse

Upfront disclosure to the mousse die-hards out there: this is not a true mousse.  True mousses are made with eggs — they’re the key ingredient, in fact — whereas this one is made with macadamia nut butter.  Still, the nutty richness of the macadamia butter is very reminiscent of an eggy richness, and both the nut butter and fresh mango lend this faux-mousse an incredible smoothness.  The chai tea gives it all an exotic, spicy flavor.  (The macadamia nut butter is worth seeking out for this recipe because it’s so creamy and yet easily blends into the background; peanut butter would be far, far too strong and would override the delicate chai.  I think it would also clash with the mango.  Cashew butter is your next-best bet if you can’t find macadamia nut butter.)

Macadamia Mango Mousse (which happens to be egg- and dairy-free)
This is enough for a single serving of mousse. Double or triple (or more) as necessary.

1 ripe mango, peeled and chopped (you can use frozen mango chunks, but the mousse won’t have the lightness you’re looking for)
1 T. macadamia nut butter
1/2 cup strongly-steeped chai tea (I used the leftover pot of chai I’d made the night before)

Place all ingredients in blender and blend just until smooth. (Since you’re starting out with soft ingredients, blending shouldn’t take more than 10 seconds.) If you’d like the consistency to be a bit thicker, add another tablespoon of macadamia nut butter. If you’d prefer to have a smoothie rather than a mousse, add another 1/2 cup of chai tea.

Spoon/pour into pretty glass and serve.

Enjoy!

Roasted Kale Chips

Unbelievably.  Easy.  And.  Delicious.  Best four words I can come up with to describe roasted kale, my latest culinary adventure.

I’d been meaning to try making my own kale chips for almost a year and hadn’t gotten around to it.  (Even though some good friends of mine always have kale on hand to feed to their lizard, and every time I see the lizard, I think he must be on to something.)  But in a recent burst of fulfilling my gastronomical to-do list, I decided to finally try making my own kale chips.  I’m happy to say that the kale experiment yielded a far more impressive result than the rutabaga one.  Not that there’s anything wrong with rutabaga — it certainly has a whimsical name! — but it isn’t nearly as tongue-teasing as kale chips.  Even a recent bag of East of Eden tortilla chips seasoned with Mexican spices couldn’t trump the kale chips.

The secret is tri-fold: tear the kale into smallish pieces before baking them, don’t overcook them, and use a full-flavored, unrefined oil like peanut to give them fantastic crunch and flavor.  You’re ten minutes away from chip nirvana!

Roasted Kale Chips

Preheat the oven to 375 degrees F.

Thoroughly rinse kale, shake off excess water, and pat dry with a clean kitchen towel.  Tear the hard “spine” free from the leaf and discard, then tear up the leaves into smaller, chip-ish pieces.  Place pieces on a baking tray or cookie sheet that has turned-up edges (as opposed to a completely flat tray or sheet).  You’ll probably be able to fit about 4 torn-up leaves on a standard-size tray.

Drizzle about a tablespoon of unrefined peanut oil onto the leaves.  (If you use another type of unrefined oil, read the label and make sure it can handle the heat — otherwise, it’ll burn and throw off the flavor of the chips.  Peanut goes up to 395 degrees F, but sesame only handles up to 350 F.  Coconut oil can easily handle 375 F.)  Season chips with sea salt.

Using your fingers, carefully swirl each chip in the peanut oil until each one is well-coated on both sides.  Bake for 4 minutes, then promptly remove chips from oven and use tongs to turn each one over.  Bake for another 4 minutes.

Serve immediately…and beware!  Homemade kale chips are highly addictive and will probably wind up supplanting your potato and tortilla chips.

Enjoy!

Rapini Stir-Fry with Noodles

When it comes to produce, I’m a big fan of the “two-fer” deals: you buy beets with the greens attached and you get two veggies for the price of one, you buy one papaya and get fruit + edible garnishing seeds for the price of one.  Rapini (or broccoli rabe, as it’s often called) is another great twofer vegetable.  It’s also easy to keep crisp and crunchy because you can treat it like a fresh herb — put it in a vase/glass of cold water, loosely cover it with plastic wrap or a plastic produce bag, and keep it in your fridge for up to ten days.

To Americans, rapini is a mysterious, crinkly, is-it-broccoli-or-is-it-not? vegetable.  To a Silician or someone from the south of Portugal or Spain, however, rapini wouldn’t be odd at all.  In fact, it’d be considered darned tasty thrown into a quick sautée or braised with some fragrant garlic, much as we would use curly spinach or any other type of hearty green.

For me, the twofer concept of rapini comes into play when I compare the flavor of the stems to the flavor of the flowered heads — while the stems can get woody and bitter if the rapini is past its prime, after only a few moments of sautéeing, they’re usually tender, a bit sweet, and reminiscent of asparagus.  The flowered heads, on the other hand, taste like toned-down broccoli.  The leaves are a nice greeny backdrop to both.  Very young rapini is also sometimes eaten raw in salads.  With so much inherent versatility, it’s time to give this oddball green a try!  (Note that stores usually keep rapini tucked in with the greens and/or root vegetables.)

Rapini Stir-Fry with Pasta (note that these are general ingredient ideas — double or triple the quantity as needed)

Whole-grain pasta of your choice, gluten-free or with gluten
Red bell pepper, chopped
Onion, chopped
Chopped tomatoes
Black-eyed peas, drained
Garlic, cut into slivers or thin rounds
Fresh or dried thyme, rosemary, basil, and/or oregano
Rapini, rinsed, bottom third of the stem removed, the rest coarsely chopped
(Other tasty veggies to include would be mushrooms, zucchini, carrots, sweet onions, leeks…you name it!)
Extra-virgin olive oil

Prepare noodles according to package directions. While the noodles are cooking, in a large pan, sautée red pepper and onion with a pat of ghee or butter over medium-high heat for about 5 minutes or until onions are translucent and beginning to turn golden. Reduce heat to medium-low and add tomatoes, peas, and garlic. Sprinkle in some herbs, stir, and let simmer for about 5 minutes or until garlic has begun to cook through and become fragrant.

Add rapini, stir well, and cover pan. Increase heat to medium and let rapini steam for about 3 minutes. If you’d like your rapini super-crunchy, only cook for 2 minutes; if you’d like it to be softer and more wilted, cook for 4-5 minutes.

Immediately remove from heat and place in a large mixing/serving bowl. Toss in pasta and a drizzle or two of olive oil. Season with sea salt and freshly-cracked black pepper. If you’d like, you can accent your stir-fry toss with a grated hard cheese like Parmesan or Dutch Parrano. A few sprigs of extra fresh herbs would be a nice garnish.

Enjoy!

Mexican Papaya Smoothie

Here’s some fruit trivia for the day: what’s the difference between a Hawaiian papaya and a maradol papaya?  The latter is from Mexico and is visually very different than the vaguely-pear-shaped Hawaiian variety — maradols are almost a foot long and have much darker flesh.  Both, however, have a wonderfully smooth tropical flavor; both blend well with other tropical fruits like coconut, banana, and pineapple; and both have peppery black seeds that can be used as edible garnish or dried and used the way you’d use black peppercorns.  (And both are sometimes used as vegetables when they’re still green and un-sweet.)

Although the maradol has a slightly milder flavor than its more-bulbous Hawaiian cousin, its vivid color makes it an appealing choice for smoothies and cocktails.  Because it’s so much bigger, too, you can eat it like a watermelon: cut it in half long-ways, scoop out the seeds, and slice it into wedges with the skin still attached.  The other great thing about maradols is that they can be quite a bargain — the last time I bought one, it cost $1 less than a Hawaiian papaya and weighed about four times as much.  Holy tropical treat, Batman!

An Easy Papaya Smoothie (with either Hawaiian or maradol papayas)

Trim skin away from papaya flesh, cut into rough chunks, and place  in a blender with a squirt of lemon juice and a handful of ice cubes.  If you’re using the smaller Hawaiian papaya, prepare an entire fruit; if you’re using a maradol papaya, cut into quarters and trim flesh from only one quarter, wrapping the remainder in plastic wrap and storing it in the refrigerator for up to 3 days.

Blend fruit until you have a smooth, icy drink, then serve immediately.  A wedge of lemon and/or sprig of fresh mint would be a nice garnish.

Enjoy!

Peppadew Pictured with Olives

Doesn’t it feel great to stumble across an undiscovered corner of a place you thought you knew inside out?  (Like when you find a hidden closet in the basement storage room or attic.)  It’s such a “wow — neat!” moment.

I had one of those unexpected moments when I recently thought to troll through the olive bar at my favorite produce market.  Actually, it was the cheesemonger’s idea — “You might find some nice olives to go with that Cabrales!”

Not needing a second prompting, I boldly ventured into why-didn’t-I-notice-this-before? territory.  As I browsed through the olives bar, to my delight, I came across bulbous little peppers called peppadews nestled amidst the Gordal Queen olives and 99-cent jumbo pickles.  Well, that’s interesting, I thought.  They were the cutest peppers I’d ever seen.

Upon being faced with an unknown (to me) edible, my first instinct is to eat it, culinary caution be damned!  Most of the time, this is a sound strategy, because the vast majority of foods are at least interesting if not great.  Granted, on rare occasions, my curiosity quickly morphs into a satisfaction that I have learned two things: how the food in question tastes and that I won’t be eating it again.  (Such as the natto sushi I tried last night.  It’s just something about those fermented beans that have enough mucilage to string out across the length of my living room … ugh.  But I’m sure there are some nifty industrial applications for string-able foods.)

Happily, the peppadew peppers were a pleasant discovery.  They’re sweet yet hot, and fortunately for my impromptu cheese plate, they’re a wonderful accompaniment to cheese and olives.  It turns out their signature taste is due to both the fruit itself — a type of chili pepper that grows in the Limpopo province of South Africa — and to the way it’s brined and bottled.  Depending on whether or not the process includes de-seeding the peppers, some peppadews are spicier than others; depending on when they’re picked, some are red and some are golden.  They’re the latest and greatest fruit-known-as-a-vegetable to hit plates in the U.S. and abroad, and their production is a tightly-controlled, boutique industry.  (“Peppa” + “dew” is actually a trademarked name that combines the idea of spicy peppers with sweet dew.)

If you’re fortunate enough to find a peppadew or two, use them as you would roasted peppers, and especially use them when you’d like a sweet-hot kick: with cheese, in omelettes, woven into kebab skewers, in sandwiches/wraps, tossed with salads, incorporated into pilafs and pasta dishes, etc.  Their vibrant red hue and slight crunchiness make them a welcome addition to nearly any plate!

A Freshly-Cracked Coconut

Even if it’s a frigid mid-winter day and you’re hunkered down inside watching a blizzard blow by outside, opening a coconut will make you feel downright tropical.  Once it’s open, you can drain the water and then notch out chunks of fresh, sweet flesh to eat out of hand.  (They’re particularly good frozen.)  You can also cut those chunks into matchsticks and then use them in Asian stir-frys and soups, or mince them and sprinkle them over a dessert made with tropical fruits or ice cream.  Die-hard coconut fans will appreciate brownies or cupcakes made with strips of the just-cracked meat.

But getting a coconut open isn’t the easiest task in the world, although it’s a bit easier to crack a pre-scored coconut than one that has just fallen off the palm tree and thunked onto the sandy beach.

Choosing Your Coconut

Before you even purchase your coconut, however, make sure it sloshes easily when you shake it, and double-check the hairy surface for any signs of slime or mold. (Struggling to open a coconut and then having putrid water gush out when you finally do crack the sucker is quite a depressing experience!)

Cracking Your Coconut

Once you’re home and have access to your toolbox, rotate the coconut until you find the three softer spots at the end.  These are called the “eyes” and are a bit reminiscent of the finger hole pattern found on bowling balls.  Carefully pound a thick nail (or other pointy, long object) into each eye to make a hole, then upend the coconut over a clean bowl to let the water drain out.  (Rice simmered in coconut water is a nice treat; so are smoothies made with it.)

Once the coconut is empty, place it on a towel, arm yourself with a chisel and hammer, find the score-line — or notch in one to make things easier for yourself — and go to work.  Remember that coconuts are fairly hard, but not rock-hard!  On the plus side, since you’ve already drained it, at least it won’t make a tremendous mess if you have a heavy hammer hand and wind up splitting the coconut with more force than you’d intended.  Do not, however, try doing this with a simple kitchen knife!  Even butcher knives were not made to pierce a sturdy coconut husk.  (I recently told a friend that he might have to use his treasured Roto-Zip tool to open the coconut.  He thought I was kidding … until he started chiseling away.  Then he decided that coconut-cracking –which is simply inconceivable without an array of tools and a certain amount of violence — was the vegetarian version of hunting.)

Once you’ve cracked the coconut, though, you can do any or all of the things I mentioned earlier.

Enjoy!

Ugli Fruit

Okay, I’ll admit it — I’ve been shallow.  For years, I’ve avoided the ugli fruit because it was called an ugli fruit.  (And because it didn’t look weird enough.  I get so curious about strange foods I’ve never seen before that I would happily try something called “ugly” as long as it looked weird enough.)

I love citrus, though, and I realized that I’d tried all the other oddball citruses:  pomelos, tangerines, kumquats, yuzus, tangelos, blood oranges, even limequats.  (Yes, they look like kumquats and taste like limes.)  It was just time for things to get ugli.

So they did.  I found out that ugli fruits are oddly baggy — it seems like the skin is a bit too big for the inner sections — and that they taste like a tangy-yet-sweet grapefruit.  The fact that the juicy sections are too small for their britches makes them a bit tricky to squeeze on my citrus juicer but also makes them rather handy to pull out and eat.  All in all, I would say that ugli fruit can be treated like a tart orange or a sweet grapefruit, depending on how you’d like to use it (as drinking juice, tossed with salads, squeezed onto seafood, etc.).  One thing is certain:  ugli fruits sure do taste pretty!

Papaya

The best kind of fruit is the kind that yields all of itself to the cook:  flesh, skin, and seeds.  If it can be used in savory or sweet settings, so much the better!

Enter the papaya, a fruit that can be sliced, sautéed, and served as a vegetable when green.  You can scoop out the flesh and use the sturdy skin as a serving vessel for fruit salads, ice cream, or anything else that can be eaten with a spoon (a fork would rip through the “bowl”).  The sweet, silky-smooth flesh can be included in salsas and salads, puréed into sauces and smoothies, frozen into ice cream, and freeze-dried into chips.  Or you could add an interesting coolness to cocktails by serving them with frozen papaya-chunk “ice cubes.” (Mojito with papaya cubes, anyone?)

The seeds are edible, too, and resemble a cross between a caperberry and a peppercorn — they have the texture of the former and the flavor of the latter.  You can use them as garnish or include them in dishes that call for capers, like baked chicken with a delicate stock-based sauce or poached fish set off with lemon juice and sea salt.  Some cooks in southeastern Asia even dry out the seeds and then grind them the way we would grind peppercorns.

I think the best way to enjoy papayas, though, is straight off the spoon.  Just cut them in half laterally, scoop out the seeds (you might want to leave a few in for contrasting flavor/texture), and then spoon out curls of sweet papaya meat.

Enjoy!

Snake Fruit

Tapas, flamenco, red wine, olive oil, ham, Manchego cheese…and snake fruit.  Those are my overriding impressions from a recent trip to Spain.  I hadn’t expected to find rambutans and snake fruit in the mercado central, but I was overjoyed when I spotted the bins of frutas exóticas — ever since I’d gotten my first glimpse of snake fruit (also called salak) in a fruit encyclopedia, I’d been wanting to get my hands on one to see how it would taste and feel.

This scaly, teardrop-shaped fruit is native to Indonesia, where several different cultivars of salak are commercially grown.  Sometimes they’re incorporated into fruit salads or paired with ice cream for a dessert, but they’re often also consumed simply as they are.  That’s how I prefer them — they have such a delicate and haunting flavor that I can’t imagine overshadowing them with anything else.  It’s hard to pin down how a salak tastes, though, because it’s such a distinct and aromatic fruit.  The best comparison I can make is to a passionfruit.  A passionfruit that has somehow managed to blend itself with a pineapple and a kiwi, that is.  Quite a refreshing 3-in-1.

If you do have the fortune to stumble upon a snake fruit, choose one that’s fairly firm but that still gives a bit to the touch.  (If it doesn’t flex at all, it’s probably old and dried out.)  Just cut off the pointed end, place the tip of the knife under the skin, and peel back a section of skin.  The rest will come off easily enough.  All of the interior white flesh is edible, although each one hides a large and inedible pit.  Just pull it out or nibble around it…and see if you can come up with a word to describe its flavor.  I’m sticking with a simple one:  “delicious.”

Persimmon Coconut Ice Cream

I love ice cream.  (Who doesn’t?)  I love chocolate.  (Ditto.)  Lately, I had the best chocolate ice cream I’d ever tasted — it was silky and creamy beyond belief and hinted at a little something past the cocoa.  The secret, I figured out after the third spoonful, was that it was made with coconut milk rather than standard dairy milk.  Now, some flavors may lend themselves more to coconut than dairy (and vice versa), but on the whole, I think most people would be surprised at how wonderful coconut ice cream is.  A can of top-notch organic whole coconut milk is also much cheaper than the equivalent amount of top-notch, beyond-organic local cream.  If you throw in an interestingly tropical fruit like persimmon or mango, so much the better!  (Or rum and pineapple — frozen piña coladas, anyone?)

Persimmon Coconut Ice Cream (which happens to be naturally dairy-free)

15-oz. can of whole coconut milk
1 egg yolk, preferably from a local, cage-free hen
1/4 cup of agave nectar, preferably amber grade (i.e., unrefined)
1 tsp. ginger
1 ripe Fuyu* persimmon, peeled and cut into chunks (it’s easier to slice the skin off with a paring knife than try to use a peeler)

Place all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into ice cream maker and follow manufacturer instructions. (Mine takes 30 minutes to freeze.)

Just before serving, garnish with a squirt of fresh lime juice.

Enjoy!

* You could also use Hachiya, but Fuyu ripens more quickly — unripe persimmons are horribly astringent and nearly inedible. Let the persimmon ripen until it’s a deep orange and gives slightly to the touch.  This may take several days or several weeks, depending on how ripe the persimmon was when you bought it.

Fresh Pomegranate Seeds

It’s pomegranate season!  Bottled pomegranate juice is good, but the 100% fresh version is even better, plus the whole seeds add a chewy crunch to anything they adorn.  And once you’ve excavated the seeds from a few fruits, the process gets much easier.  I’m not even worried about the Stain Factor any more.

Some tips and suggestions for using this brilliantly-hued, tangy fruit:

- Stir seeds into plain yogurt or cottage cheese for a quick snack/breakfast.

- Strew seeds atop chicken or fish before serving to add an extra burst of acidity.

- Scatter seeds onto pancakes and serve with honey or agave (blueberries and maple syrup are good, too, but it’s fun to try new things).

- Make a durable fruit salad by combining pomegranate seeds with blueberries and kiwi.

- The next time you watch a movie, try munching on pomegranate seeds instead of popcorn.

- If you’d like to add a burst of fresh pomegranate juice to your homemade salad dressings — which are simply oil + an acid (vinegar, citrus, etc.) + salt & pepper + herbs/garlic/mustard (optional) — fill your garlic press with as many seeds as it’ll hold and squeeze out the juice.

Another great thing about pomegranate seeds is that they’ll last for up to a week in your refrigerator.  You can cut the pomegranate in half and then wrap the other half for later (leaving the seeds in place), or you can excavate all of the seeds and save them in a plastic bag or sealed container.  Either way, pomegranates will brighten up your winter!

Pinenut Torte with Date Sugar & Honey

There’s a “new” natural sweetener in town — at least, in U.S. towns — and her name is Date Sugar.

The term “sugar” is only used to describe form and functionality in this case, however, rather than what the item is, which is simply dehydrated and ground-up dates.  (Likewise, palm sugar is boiled-down and dried-out sap from a palm tree; coconut sugar is boiled-down sap from coconut blossoms.)  Even in their fresh state, dates are so sweet — they can be as much as 50% fructose/glucose — that they make fantastic  “sugar.”  Dried, they’re even better (with a wonderfully concentrated flavor), and thanks to their high natural sugar content, they store for long periods of time.

You can find date sugar at health-food/natural-food stores, right alongside the sucanat and unrefined honeys and maple syrups.  It’s a great alternative for refined sugar when you’re making fruit-based desserts or Indian/Asian/African sauces.  (Many people in those regions of the world use sweeteners made from sap or sweet starches like tubers or roots; tapioca syrup, for example, is another interesting alternative.)  Date sugar also works well in hearty cakes and pies such as the Pinenut Torte pictured above.  It isn’t as sweet as refined sugar, however, so don’t expect an identical outcome…plus, of course, the dates present flavor as well as sweetness, which is why they work especially well in baked goods featuring fellow warm-weather ingredients (think banana bread and coconut muffins).  In the Middle East and northern Africa, dates (and date sugar) are also paired with savory dishes.  And date sugar is ideal for sprinkling on top of ice cream (either dairy-based or coconut-milk-based) and bananas.

So, the next time you’re searching for a different natural sweetener to try, bring home a bag of date sugar!  (I transfer mine to a glass jar for easy storage and dispensing.)  Not only is the flavor sure to tease your tongue, just inhaling the heady scent of the dates will make you think you’re on a sunny Mediterranean island.