When I first saw these teardrop shaped plums in the grocery store, I tweeted out a picture, asking if anyone knew anything about them.

They were bright yellow, some with a greenish tint and others with orange-red tips. They were rock hard, so I passed on buying them.

I didn’t get much information back from Twitter, but I did get an invitation to tour Peddler’s Son warehouse in South Phoenix.

Peddler’s Son is a small, family-run specialty produce company serving Phoenix area restaurants and grocery stores since 1988.

A portion of their business is specialty items, like these Chilean lemon plums.

Robert Garcia, who handles their specialty products, gave me a sample to take home and told me to put them on the counter to ripen. (You can find them at A. J.’s Fine Foods in the Phoenix area.)

In a few days, the neon yellow color gave way to a bright, orange-red, and the flesh softened, too.

Once they were ripe, I (naturally) made a smoothie.

These plums taste of honey, with an understated, delicate plum taste, compared to the usual black or red plum. And unlike traditional plums, they are not tart or acidic at all when when fully ripe.

I paired the plums with chipotle chile powder to give it some kick.

Lemon Plum + Chipotle Smoothie

Makes 2-1/2 cups, serves 2

Ingredients:
10 to 12 ounces chilled lemon plums (about 3)
1-1/4 cups low fat vanilla yogurt
Scant 1/4 teaspoon chipotle powder

Method:
Slice plums and discard the pits. Place yogurt in a blender and top with sliced plums and chipotle powder. Blend until smooth.

Note: I also made another version, adding two rounded tablespoons of amarena cherries in syrup, and nearly fell on the floor it was so delicious. I just didn’t snap a “before” picture, but the picture on the right of the finished smoothie contains the cherries.

Tags: A. J.\'s Fine Foods, amarena cherries, Chilean lemon plums, lemon plums, Peddler's Son, smoothie, specialty produce
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | No Comments »

Don’t panic. I haven’t gone rogue with all these healthy vegetable posts. I’ll do something decadent before the month’s over.

In the meantime, I present to you: celeriac (also called celery root, celery knob, or just plain old ugly vegetable).

It’s gnarly. Bad-to-the-bone. And… and… mild.

That’s right. Beneath the grisly skin is a pale, mottled muse. It tastes like a cross between mild celery and parsley, with a texture like a raw turnip.

Now, I’m not fond of turnips — raw or cooked — although I can choke down honey-glazed roasted turnips, especially if they’re scented with lavender. But that’s another post for another time.

The point is, don’t let the turnip texture turn you against celeriac, because it really is a delicate, delicious vegetable.

It takes some peeling to get that grisly skin off. Start by slicing off the top, and then slice off the bottom. That’s where you’ll find deep crevices that seem to never end.

Just keep slicing until all signs of grooves are gone.

You’ll get there. Now you can slice it however you want. You can even grate it. It depends on how you want to eat it.

You might want to slice them into rounds and broil or steam them.

You can eat them plain, or drizzled with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

Or, once cooked, you can turn them into a puree or a soup.

Or you might want to cut them into matchsticks (julienne cut) and toss them in a salad with apples, or stir fry them with carrots and mushrooms.

Or you might want to dice them, and mix them in a seafood salad, or chopped vegetable salad.

Celeriac is in season now (October through April).

It does turn brown (oxidation) after peeling, so keep it covered in acidulated water (water + a squeeze of lemon juice or splash of vinegar) until your ready to use it.

Looking for Recipes? Try these:

Celery Root Gratin from Leite’s Culinaria

Celery Root Salad from Simply Recipes

Celeriac, Pear and Stilton Soup from CD Kitchen

Do you have a recipe for celeriac? Leave a link in the comments to share.

Tags: celeriac, celery root, How to peel celeriac
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | 5 Comments »

Tuscan… Cavolo Nero… Dinosaur… Laciniato. These all are names I’ve seen — in grocery stores, farmers markets and cookbooks — for the blackish-green, rough, wrinkly kale.

It’s easy to see why it’s called Dinosaur, since the leaves are roughly textured, but this kale defies it’s rugged appearance. It is actually quite tender. Not as tender as Swiss chard or spinach, but it is more tender than say, mustard greens. And, it doesn’t have the grassy taste of some greens.

Because it’s tender — and doesn’t taste like grass — it’s a great green to eat raw, even though you can cook with it. In the past year, I’ve seen chopped kale salads appear on several restaurant menus, including Phoenix’s Gallo Blanco, as ensalada cortada. Gallo Blanco mixes chopped kale with other shredded cabbages, Manchego cheese, avocado and crunchy corn nuts and dehydrated peas.

Like all greens, Tuscan kale should be thoroughly washed and dried. Cut the tough stems out. Roll the leaves into a long cigar shape and slice crosswise into ribbons (you might remember this is the chiffonade technique). Now your kale is ready for whatever you chose to make.

For chopped salads, cut the ribbons into smaller pieces. For adding to stews or pastas, you can just use the ribbons without further cutting.

Tuscan kale is a blank canvas. You can put any flavor spin on it you want: Mexican, Asian or Italian. Traditionally, since it is an Italian green, it’s paired with Italian flavors, like white beans, pancetta, pine nuts and balsamic vinegar.

Later this week, I’ll have a recipe for you: a Christmas Kale Chopped Salad, using some of the season’s best ingredients.

In the meantime, here are a couple of recipes for cooking with Tuscan Kale:

• Mediterranean expert Paula Wolfert’s Sautéed Tuscan Kale with Garlicky White Beans

• The Foodinista Blog: Tuscan Kale Chips

Got a Tuscan kale recipe, too? Leave a link in the comments.

Tags: cavolo nero, kale, laciniato, Tuscan kale
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | 5 Comments »

It started with a tweet from @ShareYourTable, and a fuzzy shot of a brownie from The Pineapple Room, Alan Wong’s “ladies-who-lunch” spot tucked in the back of Macy’s in Waikiki’s tony Ala Moana Shopping Center.

I tweeted back that the best reason to hop a plane to Honolulu was The Pineapple Room’s Kalua “BLT.”

Or maybe the black rock and white sand beaches, or a mai tai on the Halekulani patio, but no, no, really, that pork is worth the trip alone. And voila! The next tweet I got was a link to Share Your Table’s oven-roasted Kalua Pork.

As luck would have it, I had a pork roast in the fridge that was destined for a little achiote paste and sour orange juice, a la cochinita pibil, but I thought, maybe I could do a little Hawaiian hula instead.

Kalua pork, the centerpiece at so many Hawaiian celebrations, is just another version of pulled pork, like the Yucatan’s cochinita pibil or Southern BBQ pulled pork.

I happened to have a jar of Hawaiian pink salt, called Alaea, a sea salt that gets its pinkish hue from the red clay where it’s harvested.

I didn’t have the banana leaves the recipe called for to wrap the pork, although these days they aren’t hard to hunt down. Check in the freezer section (or even in the fresh produce section) of Latin or Asian markets.

I did have a bottle of liquid smoke on hand, a subject that was tweeted back and forth last week, namely “what the heck is it and is it safe to eat?” (Here’s the answer.)

Armed with the essential ingredients, I set about recreating the Kalua Pork recipe from @ShareYourTable, with a few minor adjustments to accommodate what I had on hand, and now, I’m sharing it with you.

I have to confess that I modified the key ingredient — the pork.

Kalua pork is made with pork butt (also called picnic shoulder). It’s a gloriously fat-laden hunk of swine, but I had a top loin roast in the fridge so that’s what I used. It probably resulted in a slightly drier end product, but I can tell you that it is still lip-smacking delicious.

Oven-Roasted Kalua Pork

(adapted from Share Your Table)

Serves 6

Ingredients
2-1/2 pounds top sirloin pork roast (or, for real decadence, pork butt)
1 tablespoon of Hawaiian Pink Alaea salt (or sea salt or kosher salt)
2 cups water
2 tablespoons liquid smoke
1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper

Method
1. Heat the oven to 500°F.

2. Rub the pork with the salt and place in a roasting pan. Mix the water and liquid smoke together and pour into the pan (but not over the pork or you’ll wash off the salt.) Cover tightly with foil.

3. Roast for 30 minutes, then turn the oven heat down to 325°F. Roast for 2-1/2 hours. Remove from the oven and let stand, covered, for 10 minutes. Remove foil and shred pork with two forks. Sprinkle with black pepper and toss again.

(NOTE: At this point, you can eat it as it is, or mix in your favorite BBQ sauce.)

Tags: Hawaii, kalua pork, liquid smoke, pork, recipe, Restaurant Journal
Posted in About Ingredients, Pork, Recipes, Tips & Tutorials | 1 Comment »

My mother was a sucker for new food products. Finding a Sunday coupon only fueled her enthusiasm for the quirky, bizarre foodstuffs that the Nabisco’s of the world throw at us.

I inherited this trait, albeit with a little different twist. If it’s “gourmet” and “expensive,” it will jump off the shelf and into my shopping cart.

How else could you explain the $13.49 bottle of bamboo rice that followed me home?

Yep, that’s right. $13.49 for 15 ounces of a Chinese, short-grain white rice infused with bamboo juice. Is bamboo juice scarce?

I do admit I was a bit breathless looking at the grassy green rice in the upscale, Urban Accents plastic bottle with a metal cap.

Directions are simple: Bring 1 cup of bamboo rice and 2-1/2 cups of water to a boil in a saucepan.

Reduce heat to low, cover and simmer 20 minutes. Remove from heat and let it rest, covered, for 5 minutes. Gently fluff with a fork. The result?

A pale, icy-green, soft, sticky rice.

The taste?  Mild, perhaps a bit grassy. Does it taste like bamboo? I have no idea. I’ve never tasted bamboo (canned shoots don’t count because they only taste like the can.) Between you and me, it could use a little salt, unless you’re serving it as a base for a naturally salty stir fry.

I could see using this rice for sushi, if you’re so inclined to make sushi at home (too much trouble for me, when we have a respectable sushi restaurant just minutes away).

The color would add an interesting element to any dish. I used it as a base for a fresh, brightly flavored stir fry, with tofu, shiitakes, sugar snaps, ginger, garlic, jalapeños, cilantro and a touch of hoisin.

Will I use it again? You betcha! Gotta get my money’s worth. Will I buy it again? Yeah, probably as a gift for my hard-to-find-gifts-for foodie friends.

My mom would have loved it, too. She never met a rice grain she didn’t like.

Tags: bamboo rice, hoisin, rice, sushi, Urban Accents
Posted in About Ingredients, Book & Product Reviews, Tips & Tutorials | 7 Comments »

Salt:

The single most important ingredient in my kitchen.

(After wine, of course, but that’s for me, salt is for the food.)

Recently, a very talented home cook whipped up a gourmet meal for his guests.

As he was plating, he said, “I don’t know, it might need salt.”

He was PLATING, and he hadn’t TASTED it. (Insert screechy noise here.)

Calmly, I screamed at him, “WHAT! You’re putting food on the plate that you HAVEN’T tasted?”

(It’s a fact: chefs yell at their cooks all the time, some more than others, but yelling is a chef prerequisite, along with the ability to stand on your feet 16 hours a day, skip bathing occasionally and touching excruciatingly hot pans — repeatedly — without crying.)

The point is, a cook’s best asset is his palate, and salt is money in the bank.

Salt is a mineral that we cannot live without; ergo, it is a nutrient, but I’m no health expert. I am a cooking expert so I will talk about another role salt plays: flavor enhancer.

Harold McGee, a food scientist with impeccable credentials, explains why salt is a flavor enhancer in his book On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen (a book you should have in your library if you’re the curious, geeky type of cook.) Something about highlighting aromas while diminishing bitterness, positive and negative ions, and yadda, yadda.

All I know is that when I taste a sauce or vinaigrette or any dish, I’m thinking, “how does it taste?”

Add a pinch of salt, stir and taste again. Wow — difference. Flavors pop. Add a little more salt and repeat until the tastes buds say, “that’s perfect.”

Learning when enough is enough is a trial and error process. Taste, add, taste, add. Stop! Dang, too salty. It happens.

You won’t learn if you don’t experiment. It’s impossible to learn if you transfer food from pot to plate without tasting it.

Which kind of salt you use is really a matter of personal preference. I attended a salt tasting once and came away with a head full of salt notes and a burned out palate.

Table salt, sea salt, kosher salt, flavored salt, handcrafted salt — salt is salt.

There are nuances to salts, whether it’s the pinkish Murray River salt from Australia, the red clay salt from Hawaii, Fleur de Sel from France, Mauldon English salt and hundreds of salts in between.

I prefer plain old kosher salt for everyday cooking and seasoning. It’s clean (no additives), the larger crystals dissolve quicker than table salt, and it’s inexpensive compared to sea salt or specialty salts.

That said, I do like to use the specialty salts as a finishing salt, sprinkling on at the last minute for appearance and taste.

If you’re interested in stocking your pantry with specialty salts, check out Salt Works, a company based near Seattle that specializes in salts from around the world, or The Meadow, a gorgeous salt boutique in Portland.

Whichever salt you use, taste your food before and after and soon you’ll build your own salt flavor bank.

Tags: flavored salt, kosher salt, salt, Salt Works, sea salt, The Meadow
Posted in About Ingredients, Book & Product Reviews, Tips & Tutorials | 3 Comments »

If there was an awards ceremony for vegetables, spaghetti squash might just win the most underrated category. It’s one of those vegetables that looks harder to cook than it actually is, so I think cooks bypass the squash bin at the grocery store, heading instead for sweet potatoes. The truth is cutting it open is the most difficult part of cooking the it (any winter squash, really, and among the winter squashes, it’s one of the easiest to cut, you just need a big chef’s knife).

After cutting the squash in half and scooping out the seeds, place the squash cut side down on a lined baking sheet. Pour in about 1/4 of water to keep it from burning and roast in a 350 degree oven for roughly 30 minutes.  While the squash is roasting, you can whip up a few other ingredients and in the end, you’ll have a vegetarian spaghetti with a simple marinara sauce, and get a good dose of greens, too, in about 45 minutes, or less.

My marinara sauce is embarrassingly simple. Dice half a large onion (any color, I used red because that’s what I had) and saute it in a healthy splash of olive oil. Once it’s tender, about 5 minutes, stir in minced garlic (as much as you like). As soon as the garlic smells wonderful, a minute or two, pour in 1/4 cup of white wine. Cook until the wine is almost reduced, and then add a can of diced tomatoes with the juice (I like Muir Glen organic tomatoes, and if fire-roasted, all the better). Stir in a generous teaspoon of dried Italian herbs and then simmer until thickened, about 20 minutes.

While the sauce bubbles, have some wine and toast some pine nuts. I like an Oregon or Californian Pinot Gris with this dish. Or, on second thought, toast the nuts first, and then have wine. You have to watch them or they’ll burn. Throw a handful of nuts in a dry skillet and toast over medium heat until browned, tossing frequently. It’ll take about 5 minutes. Once the nuts are done, saute up some Swiss chard.

I cut chard from the stems and then roughly chop the leaves before soaking them in a salad spinner to remove any dirt. Spin them dry and saute with a generous splash of olive oil in a skillet, maybe add a little garlic, salt and pepper. After the leaves are wilted, cover the skillet and turn the heat to low. It should take about 10 minutes to turn them into soft, tender greens.  While the greens are steaming to tenderness, you can scrape the spaghetti squash into lovely yellow strands with a fork, and season with salt and pepper. Place a mound of squash in a pasta bowl and top with the marinara sauce, pine nuts and a sprinkling of Parmesan. Scatter the greens around the squash and now, in less than 45 minutes, you have a healthy, delicious, vegetarian spaghetti dish.

Tags: chard, how to cook spaghetti squash, marinara, pine nuts, spaghetti squash, vegetarian
Posted in About Ingredients, Recipes, Side Dishes, Tips & Tutorials, Vegetarian | 2 Comments »

“Do you have any cardamom? Not ground but the whole pods,” my friend asks as we’re walking our dogs. I run through a mental picture of my spice cabinet, and land on the little bottle of green cardamom I bought a while back at Penzeys Spice Company.

“Yes, I do,” I say, “but they’re green, not black.” She looks at me with a blank stare. My friend is not a prolific cook or baker, and she is constantly amazed at my tools, gadgets, and well-stocked pantry. “What’s the difference, she says?”

And I couldn’t answer her question, so I went hunting for the answer. Found it in the Field Guide to Herbs and Spices by Aliza Green. (Disclosure: I’ve met Aliza, and she’s quite well known in the professional culinary circle as the field guide queen. She’s also written guides on meat, seafood, and produce.)

Turns out that both green and black cardamom are used extensively in Indian cooking (think chai tea flavor as an example). Cardamom is also used in African, Middle Eastern and to a lesser degree, Chinese and Scandinavian cooking.

The green is more delicate in aroma and flavor than the black pods and black cardamom has a unique, smoky aroma and flavor as well. Green cardamom is also about three times as expensive as black cardamom, which would explain why I have green instead of black in my pantry. I tend to buy expensive things when it comes to the kitchen, thinking that it’s better. Sometimes I’m right, other times not so much.

About an hour after our dog walk, I’m rummaging around in my pantry looking for the green cardamom pods when the phone rings. It’s my friend and she tells me that she just returned from the grocery store and found black cardamom pods…on sale…half price, even. Instead of $14, she spent $7. If you knew how frugal my friend was, you’d laugh. She would NEVER spend that much money on a jar of spice. But she is determined to make these “Swedish Toasts” (Skorpa) that she describes as similar to biscotti, but thinner.

Now that she has her own cardamom, I’m not sure I’ll get a sample of her Swedish treat, but I’m hoping that just the effort of looking for it, and reassuring her that using the black pods instead of the green pods won’t cause any kitchen disasters, will be enough to encourage her to share. It is the sharing season, after all.

Tags: Aliza Green, cardamom, Penzeys, spices, types of cardamom seeds
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | No Comments »

©iStockphoto.com/Liza McCorkle

Pumpkin seeds are also called pepitas, and the little green seed is actually inside of a completely edible white hull.

Sometimes you see large, flat white seeds (the brand David comes to mind) and other times you see the green seeds. Some pepitas are elongated, others are more oval, and the inner seed comes in various shades of green. Different pumpkins produce different shapes and sizes.

Raw pumpkin seeds can be toasted just like any other nut or seed, and they’re delicious just tossed with a little salt after roasting, or toasted with other spices like cumin or chile powder.

Sure, you could toast your own pumpkin seeds if you’re ambitious.

One of my favorite bloggers, Jess Thomson of Hogwash, wrote a post recently about just how to spend an entire evening doing so. (I’m kidding… it only takes a little while and a propensity to get your hands slimy.)

Cracking open the white hull to get to the green seed is a little more daunting.

I guess I’m lazy and the Trader Joe’s down the road carries both raw pepitas (great for my granola) and toasted and salted (great for snacking).

Tags: pepitas, pumpkin seeds
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | No Comments »

There they sit on the window sill, wondering what’s to become of them. The middle one is leaning toward the left, as if straining to hear the other one.

They are French Butter pears, and I found them at Whole Foods Market. The sticker says they’re from California. Since I’m in Utah at the moment, they didn’t have to travel too far, although much further than the peaches I bought yesterday at the farmers market that traveled only 60 miles.

A little research tells me that this pear is also known as Beurre Hardy and is a relative of the Anjou (which isn’t my favorite — that would be Comice). This heritage variety was used almost exclusively for canning up until several years ago, since it doesn’t travel well when even the slightest bit ripe. But farmers markets and specialty grocery stores are stocking the French Butter pear when it’s grown nearby.

I’m waiting for them to ripen. Pears are one of a handful of fruits that ripen off the tree (bananas, peaches and plums are others), so it’s only a matter of days before the flesh around the stem begins to give a little under pressure. By then, I’ll be able to detect a delicate, pear fragrance from the bottom end. For now, the butter pears are window dressing. In a few days, they’ll be sugary sand in my mouth. Hurry.

Tags: farmers markets, French Butter pears, pears, Whole Foods
Posted in About Ingredients, Tips & Tutorials | 1 Comment »

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