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.) [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Seeing as Halloween is just around the corner, I thought I’d sample my first blood orange. (And yes, since I’m still watching all the back episodes of True Blood, it’s fun to do a dinner-and-show vampire theme. Beets and red wine are also popping up on my table…) Blood oranges are mottled a darkish-orange on [...]
…Sssshh!… I have a secret ingredient in my cupboards that I’ve started to use in unexpected places. It’s something I stumbled upon when reading a Mediterranean cookbook and then again in one featuring Middle Eastern cuisine. Seeing the ingredient twice in a row made me curious, and finding it at a local market the [...]
If I didn’t live in a place that’s cold and snowy for a good chunk of the year, I’d have a date palm in my backyard. (And citrus trees and pinenut trees and olive trees and maybe a goat or two…) Not only do dates have a wide range of uses — eat them out [...]
You can add visual appeal, flavor, and exotic flair to any dish just by topping it with an edible flower or two. (Which you probably already have growing in your backyard.) Sprinkle rose petals onto a bowl of vanilla ice cream, and suddenly you have a romantic dessert guaranteed to knock the socks off of [...]
