You tap a maple, you get maple syrup. You cut into the flower buds of a palm tree, you get palm nectar that you can cook down into palm sugar. (Specifically, you can tap sugar date palms, sago palms, and coconut palms.) If you let the palm sugar dry out and go from a semi-liquid [...]
Continue reading about Skip the Sugar Beets and Go for the Palms
One of the few nice things about winter is that citrus is in season: grapefruit, tangerines, mandarin oranges, even kumquats. Any and all of those can perk up even the darkest, dreariest day. Usually, I like to just eat them out of hand — especially cute little kumquats with their very sweetly edible skins! — [...]
My basilophilic nature (yep, just made up that word) has spurred me to figure out yet another way to use my favorite summer herb: in ice cream. Freezing basil is pretty much only way you can chop, slice, or otherwise cut basil and still have it be green rather than chop, slice, or otherwise cut [...]
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.) [...]
Limes have a certain pizazz that lemons just don’t. Grapefruit doesn’t, either…in fact, not even tangerines can match up to a lime’s potential to play a sweet/sour role as a keynote flavor or background blend. A squirt of lime juice also lends a dish a Mexican or Caribbean flavor that an orange simply can’t provide. [...]
What a curious word; it sounds downright Lewis-Carrollian. It would fit well into his “Jabberwocky” poem: “‘Beware the kumquats, my son!’” (Also an excellent word to know when playing Scrabble.) Kumquats look like tiny, oval oranges. Like oranges, they are rich in potassium and vitamins A and C. Their popularity has spread from their native [...]
