Photo: holtmi

Give a baby her first spoonful of mashed spinach or blended brussell sprouts and you can likely watch her face pucker up in shocked torment. Veggies tend to be a dreaded childhood bane for many youngsters, yet there are exceptions to the vegetable hate rule. Sweet potatoes and carrots, for example, tend to score highly. But why is that? As a general rule, much of our likes and dislikes spawn from sweetness – or at least our perception of it.

Evolutionarily, we’re programmed to like sweetness, since it’s indicative of calorie-rich sugar. Millennia ago, when we were just beginning our evolutionary journey as Homo sapiens, those individuals who preferred and thus consumed sugar had an edge. Sugar imparts a quick energy boost, so desiring, locating and consuming sugar-rich food could mean the difference between out-maneuvering a predator, keeping warm during a cold night or bearing healthy children. Our closest relatives, such as chimpanzees, also share this propensity towards the sweet. Chimps regularly concoct creative ways to brave beehives to reach the sweet honey inside.    

In today’s world of car commutes, office jobs and sugary snacks, however, our attraction to sugar turns against us, helping to fuel an epidemic of obesity. The processed food industry realized this a long time ago when it dawned on them that cranking up the sugar content of even the most cardboard-like snack automatically makes it delicious to our primitive food brains. 

But sugar, it turns out, is not the only sweetness driver. The sweetness of a farmer’s market strawberry or a hand-picked blueberry comes largely from volatiles, or chemical compounds in food that readily become fumes. Our nose picks up on and interacts with dozens of these flavorful fumes in any given food, perfuming each bite with a specific flavor profile. The sensations received by smell and taste receptors interact in the same area of the brain, the thalamus, where our brain processes them to project flavors such as sweetness. ”The perception of sweetness in our brains is the sum of the inputs from sugars plus certain volatile chemicals,” said Harry Klee, a researcher with the university’s Horticulture Sciences Department and Plant Molecular and Cellular Biology Program, said at the American Association of the Advancement of Science conference, held last week in Boston. “The volatiles act to amplify the sugar signal so that we actually think there’s more sugar in the food than is actually present.”

A dozen or more volatiles can occupy a single food. Some trigger the sensation of sweetness, others of bitterness or sourness. If we could better understand just how these chemicals interact in foods and in our brains, we could genetically tweak foods to be more to our liking.

Scientists from the University of Florida think that “fixing the flavor” of foods such as tomatoes would make them more appealing to shoppers, which on the long run may facilitate a healthier society. “If we make healthy things taste better, we really believe that people will buy them more, eat them more and have a healthier diet,” Klee said. “Flavor is just a symptom of a larger problem,” he continued. “We have bred crops for a higher yield, while quality and nutritional value have dropped.” 

What we think of as flavor actually has a great deal to do with the subtle smells of volatiles. Not convinced? The researchers predicted as much. In Boston, they whipped out samples of gummy bear-like candy (raspberry and blueberry Sunkist fruit gems to be specific) to prove the power of volatiles to the audience. As instructed by the Klee and his colleagues, I pinched my nose shut tight, then popped the candy into my mouth, chewed and swallowed half of it. As if I had a seriously stuffed up nose from a bad case of the flu, the candy felt squishy and lackluster on my tongue. This bland sensation, the researchers explained, is taste. Now, they instructed unplug your nose, and swallow the rest of the gummy candy. A wave of intense sweetness hit me like a sugary rainbow of fruity flavor. This is olfaction at work, explained Linda Bartoshuk, one of Klee’s colleagues at the university’s Center for Smell and Taste. “Who experienced a rush of flavor and sweetness that seemed about twice as powerful as before?” she asked. In a room of around 100 people, about half the hands shot up. 

Several years ago, Klee made a mission of saving the modern tomato’s flavor in the hopes of ultimately improving consumer health. Those efforts have led him down a winding vine of chemistry, genetics and food science. 

Rather than starting his investigation with tomato growers–who are paid to churn out attractive tomatoes, not make a flavorful food–Klee began with consumers, or the people who buy and eat tomatoes. He wanted to understand what makes good and bad flavor on a molecular level. Figuring out the formula for creating a delicious tomato that still maintains the high yields and disease resilience of the watery, bland supermarket offerings could give growers an easy-to-implement toolkit for improving their offerings.  

Klee and his colleagues ground up dozens of tomato variety, then asked 100 different people to sample the fruits of the researchers’ labor and report back on their favorites and least favorites. Using that feedback, the researchers could identify which of the tomatoes’ more than 400 volatiles actually drove flavor. What they found indicated that consumers prefer tomatoes with a perceived sweetness – emphasis on “perceived.”

For example, yellow jelly beans, a breed of tomato, contain around 4,500 milligrams of sugar per 100 milliliters. A matina tomato, on the other hand, contains around 4,000 mg per 100 ml. Yet people perceive matinas as being about twice as sweet as yellow jelly beans. Volatiles drive the perception of what we think is sweetness in these two tomatoes.

Typically supermarket variety tomatoes vary in their sugar content, but they usually range from around 2,000 to 2,500 mg per 100 ml. The cherry tomato varieties typically sit in the 3,000 to 3,500 mg per ml range.

Just 15 to 20 volatiles control the majority of a tomato’s flavor, the researchers found.  ”Some of the most abundant chemicals in a tomato have absolutely no influence on whether people like it or not,” Klee said.

This knowledge in hand, they went about creating a recipe for the perfect tomato, which resembles an heirloom. Their ideal fruit represents the average of what the research participants ranked as their preferred tomato. While absolute individual preferences may vary by demographics, cultures and whether or not someone is a supertaster, Klee believes that nearly everyone would agree that “this is a really good tomato.” 

The next step, Klee says, is to move those desirable traits into the high yielding varieties of tomatoes. In the lab, he and his team successfully crossed modern tomatoes with their perfected heirloom, creating a hybrid. The new tomato maintains the deliciousness of the volatile-laden heirloom but produces twice as much fruit and keeps the modern strain’s resistance to disease. So far, yields aren’t quite at the level to convince commercial growers to change their ways, but Klee believes production improvements will get his tomato to the marketplace eventually. 

“Can volatiles enhance sweetness while reducing our use of sugars and artificial sweeteners?” Bartoshuk posed. “We think: yes.”

Miracle berries. Image courtesy of Flickr user roboppy

If you’re Jewish—and maybe even if you’re not—there’s an excellent chance that you will eat latkes sometime before the end of Hanukkah next week (it starts tonight). I fully support this: Latkes are delicious. It wouldn’t be Hanukkah without them. (I’m going with a zucchini-potato version this year to fit in with my low-carb pregnancy diet.) But are you going to eat them all eight nights of the festival of lights? Probably not.

I’ve been thinking it’s time to throw some new food traditions into the Hanukkah mix. I have a few ideas to propose:

Have a fryapalooza. The reason latkes are so associated with the holiday is that they’re fried, evoking the miracle of the oil that was supposed to last no more than one night but lasted for eight. So why stop at shredded potatoes? Have a fried-food fest that would put the Iowa State Fair to shame.

There are at least two ways you could go here. One is down-home, with fried pickles from Homesick Texan; corn dogs from Average Betty (using Hebrew National wieners, of course); Paula Deen’s Southern fried chicken; and don’t forget your veggies—Grit magazine’s fried zucchini, perhaps. For dessert, if you and your guests aren’t doubled over with stomachaches by this time, may I suggest funnel cakes, those crispy fried dough treats dusted with powdered sugar? Moms Who Think shows you how to make them.

Another way to go would be a world tour of fried food. Mediterranean appetizers could include Spanish-inspired smoky fried chickpeas from Food52 or Italian fried olives from Giada De Laurentiis. Japanese tempura vegetables have a lighter, more delicate flavor than their Western counterparts; Leite’s Culinaria shares a recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi’s new vegetable cookbook Plenty (which I’m hoping Hanukkah Harry brings me). And, though less famous than the cheesy Swiss version, fondue bourguignonne, where pieces of meat are speared on a fondue fork and cooked in hot oil, lets your guests get interactive. Make your final stop in Israel for a dessert that really is a Hanukkah tradition, the jelly doughnuts called sufganiyot; Chow shows how it’s done.

Whichever way you decide to go, this fatty menu should probably be followed by a juice cleanse. Of course, you could always space these recipe ideas out over the course of the holiday instead of eating them all in one go. But where’s the fun in that?

Dip it, don’t fry it. There’s no rule that says oil is only for frying. In fact, as Italians and other people from around the Mediterranean have long known, some oil is just too delicious to waste by heating away its flavor. You could host an olive oil tasting party with quality oils and slices of good bread, then follow the tasting with a meal of salads and other dishes that highlight the star ingredient. Kim Vallée and Fine Cooking magazine both offer suggestions for pulling it off.

Eat a miracle (fruit). Unlike the Passover story, which requires the whole Haggadah to explain, the Hanukkah story is told succinctly by the dreidel, the spinning top with four sides spelling out in Hebrew, “A great miracle happened there.” Although the name has more to do with marketing than divine intervention, so-called miracle fruit is pretty neat anyway. Miracle fruit is a West African berry that temporarily alters the way you perceive flavors, turning everything sweet—even something as sour as a lemon—for a while. It’s similar, though much more dramatic, to what happens when you eat an artichoke. The berries are available frozen, dried or in tablet form, or you can buy seedlings and grow your own. You could turn the evening into a game, serving an array of foods, some with bitter or sour flavors, and asking blindfolded guests to guess what they are.

Fuyu persimmons, courtesy of Flickr user outdoorPDK

The first time I tried a persimmon was a few years ago. I spotted the attractive fruit at the supermarket, and its smooth skin and deep orange color tempted me to buy one. Unfortunately, I didn’t know that the variety of persimmon I bought—hachiya—shouldn’t be eaten until it is extremely ripe. It tasted like industrial-strength cleaner. Since then, I’ve learned that fuyus, which are short and squat, are the variety to buy for eating fresh; pointy-bottomed hachiyas are better for baking.

Fuyus have a pleasantly firm, mango-like flesh. The most similar flavor I can think of is papaya—sweet, but not overly so, with a hint of floral or spicy tones. Both fuyus and hachiyas are usually available in late fall and early winter. Here are a few ways to use either variety:

1. In a salad. Despite originating thousands of miles apart, persimmons (from East Asia) and pomegranates (from the Middle East) harmonize nicely—both flavor-wise and visually—in a fall/winter fruit salad. For an even more colorful (and very nutritious) dish, toss them with sliced red cabbage, Romaine lettuce, Asian pear, hazelnuts and gorgonzola cheese, as in the Rainbow Chopped Salad from Epicurious.

2. As a condiment or accompaniment. Organic Authority suggests serving a fresh persimmon salsa with grilled fish or chicken. Or it can be cooked into a spicy chutney with apples and raisins, as Moscovore recommends. Firm fuyus can also be sliced and roasted to be served as a sweet/savory side dish, as in this recipe from About.com.

3. Dried. Hoshigaki, or dried persimmons, are a popular treat in Japan, where they are made through a labor-intensive process you’re unlikely to want to replicate at home. But even the shortcut method you can make in your oven—like this recipe from Martha Stewart—produces a yummy (albeit very different, I’m sure) snack.

4. In a drink. Just because I’m teetotaling for the next few months doesn’t mean you have to. Imbibe magazine’s recipe for a persimmon margarita rimmed with cinnamon salt is a novel twist on one of my favorite cocktails. On the nonalcoholic side, 101 Asian Recipes explains how to make a Korean persimmon tea.

5. In dessert. Nicole of Pinch My Salt shares her grandma’s recipe for sweet, moist persimmon cookies. And I would like to be in Denise’s Kitchen next time she makes this delicious-looking fuyu persimmon, pear and walnut rolled tart. Having spent only one very rainy day of my life in Indiana (on the interstate en route from Nashville to Chicago), I was unaware that persimmon pudding was a traditional regional food there. Joy the Baker explains how it’s made (including how to wheedle the fruits from your neighbor), describing the result as “sweet and super moist bread pudding meets spice cake.” Sounds good to me.

Delicious looking watermelons, courtesy of Flickr user whologway

If watermelon were a brand, it would be a very successful one. First of all, it has a name that tells you exactly what it is—at more than 90 percent water, it’s the juiciest fruit going. It has attractive packaging. Plus, it’s got impeccable timing. It doesn’t even bother making an appearance until summer really heats up and all anyone wants is something cool, sweet and hydrating. If they could only figure out that seed problem. (Sorry, so-called seedless watermelons are neither truly seedless nor, in my experience, as good as the original.)

The best way to eat watermelon? Straight up, by the wedge, bare feet dangling into a pool, lake or other body of water. But here are five other pretty good ideas:

1. Salads. It’s Greek. It’s salad. But it’s not Greek salad. Toss together some watermelon with feta cheese and olives and you’ve got the basics of a classic Aegean summer dish. For a twist: Grill the watermelon, as Recipe Girl does, to caramelize the sugars. Jacques Pépin adds fresh mint and Tabasco sauce. The Food Section gives equal billing to another quintessential summer fruit, tomatoes. Bobby Flay takes it in a Southwestern direction by swapping in jicama instead of olives and feta and adding lime juice.

2. Drinks. Watermelon is practically a beverage already, but it’s also a natural in cocktails and nonalcoholic drinks. You can mix up a Mexican-style agua fresca with lemon juice and mint. What’s Cooking in America makes the novel suggestion of blending watermelon puree with rosewater and lime juice. Imbibe magazine offers a spicy watermelon margarita recipe for those who like that hot-cold, salty-sweet combination. Or just cut to the chase and spike the whole melon with vodka (recommended only if you have a large group of friends to help finish it off).

3. Soups. The most ubiquitous summer soup isn’t necessarily made with tomatoes; a watermelon-cucumber gazpacho from Salon comes with a Spanish cultural history lesson. I’m intrigued by the addition of buttermilk and rosewater (apparently not as novel an ingredient as I thought) in a Bulgarian chilled watermelon soup. Thai-spiced watermelon soup with crabmeat from Epicurious also sounds delicious.

4. Dessert. Watermelon only needs the slightest nudging to be taken into the dessert category—Wicked Good Dinner explains how to make a watermelon granita by simply freezing the pulp with some salt and sugar and adding fresh basil. “Watermelon” ice cream pie is adorable but it’s made with lime and raspberry sherbet; Emeril Lagasse offers a recipe for real watermelon-flavored ice cream with chocolate chips (they look like seeds).

5. Pickled. You don’t have to be a freegan to want to minimize food waste. Why throw away all that watermelon rind when it only takes a couple of days or so to turn it into pickles? Seriously, according to The Bitten Word, they’re not very complicated to make, and if you’ve never tasted sweet-sour pickled watermelon rind you are missing out on one of the triumphs of southern pickling. Pickled pig’s feet, on the other hand, I’m not so sure about.

“Great news, Mom and Dad—Matt and I are having a cucumber plant! And some peas, and tomatoes, and beets, too. I know we should wait to tell people until we’re certain they’ve germinated, and there’s a long way to go before they actually fruit, but we just planted the seeds yesterday and we couldn’t be more excited. Matt already built the (raised) beds.”

Somehow, I don’t think this imaginary conversation with my parents would cause quite as much commotion as a similar announcement my brother and his wife made nine years ago. Theirs was accompanied by a picture of their first daughter’s ultrasound. Even though most embryos look pretty similar at that stage, it’s always awe-inspiring to see a brand-new person forming in the womb (and I can only imagine the awe is increased a hundredfold if the womb is your own). There is the head with beginnings of eyes, the tiny appendages that will someday turn into limbs with fingers and toes.

What I never realized was that a similar process happens in the plant kingdom. Inside every seed are the basic parts of a fully formed plant: immature roots and tiny leaves curled up like a vegetal embryo. As it turns out, they’re even called embryos. Within the seed’s protective wall is also a food called endosperm that nourishes the embryonic plant as it starts growing into a seedling.

Friends who have had children in recent years signed up for daily emails telling them what was happening to their fetus at that point in its development. As a novice gardener starting my first vegetable garden, I have a similar curiosity (obviously, on a far less emotional scale) about what’s going on just under the surface of my newly planted raised beds. If things are going well, three days after sowing, my little ones should be in the early stages of germination.

First tomato seedlings, courtesy of Flickr user amandabhslater

I got a preview of how this happens when I tried sprouting radish seeds a couple of months ago. The seeds were soaked in water, then rinsed twice daily to keep them moist. This, plus sufficient warmth, was enough to make the seed coating break down, which released enzymes that caused the embryo to grow into a sprout, or the beginning of a plant—though they wouldn’t ever reach full “planthood” without soil and sun.

The same thing is (I hope) happening under the soil with my vegetable seeds, although the required conditions vary slightly for different seeds. Some need warm soil, some need cooler temperatures, and a few require some light to properly germinate (all of which are helpfully spelled out on the seed packets). Larger seeds contain more endosperm, meaning they can be planted deeper into the soil and be nourished as they grow roots and shoots. I enjoyed seeing all the different shapes and sizes of the seeds—beets were knobby and irregular; lettuce, tiny, smooth and lozenge shaped; peas were, well, peas.

This Discovery Channel video explains the germination process in simple terms: After the seed coating breaks apart, the first root, called the radicle, starts to grow downward in search of nutrients. Then another shoot, called a plumule, grows up in search of light. With the help of nutrients from the soil, plus water and light, it will continue to grow to maturity.

The best part of all? No need to save for their college tuition. Although, between seeds and materials and tools, I could see how gardening could become an expensive hobby.

Thai festival. Image courtesy of Flickr user Halans.

At a Thai restaurant last week, my dining companion convinced me to forego the tantalizingly spicy offerings in favor of a chicken dish served with ginger, pineapple chunks and cashews in a sweet and sour sauce. When the dish came out, I was thrilled to see that it was served in half of a hollowed-out pineapple, with the fruit’s spiky green crown adding some visual flair. How novel! It was the sort of presentation I had seen only at picnics when someone would carve out a watermelon into a bowl or basket to hold bite-sized chunks of fruit. But in Thai cuisine, food carving is an intricate art form meant to turn ordinary dining into a visual spectacle.

Kae sa luk, the centuries-old Thai tradition of transforming fruits and vegetables into elaborate displays, began in the court of King Phra Ruang. Meals were expected to please both the palate and the eye. Using specialized tools to make intricate incisions and excisions, artisans—either palace chefs or the daughters of aristocrats—would craft foodstuffs to resemble plants and animals. Onions become chrysanthemum blossoms, cucumbers are fashioned into leaves to ornament soups, and the vibrant colors of a watermelon’s pulp and rind are used to dramatic effect in the creation of flower blossoms. And while pieces are generally made for garnish and table decoration, produce such as pumpkins may be carved into serving vessels and even some salads are presented as a floral spray to be dismantled and consumed by diners. And the Thai take on the watermelon basket is above and beyond anything I’ve seen at the picnic table.

Radish rosettes suddenly seem pedestrian by comparison (not that I could even carve one of those).

And for those of you wanting to learn the craft, there are books and DVDs on the market to get you started. For the rest of us who don’t have the time or patience, YouTube lets us admire kae sa luk masters and their edible masterworks from afar.

A lemon, image courtesy of Flickr user Miss Muffin

In spring a Northerner’s fancy turns lightly to… anything other than the same old starchy winter vegetables I’ve been eating for months. I don’t remember if this used to happen to me when I lived in a snow-free climate, but now that I live up north the only things I’m craving more than balmy breezes and flowers at this time of year are bright, sunny flavors to perk up my palate. Lemon fits the bill nicely. Not only does it add zippy flavor to everything it touches, a bowlful of lemons doubles as both cheerful table decor and subtle home fragrance. I’ve never seen anyone use rutabagas as a centerpiece, and I’m pretty sure parsnip-scented dishwashing liquid would be a commercial flop.

Plus, lemons have been curing scurvy since the 1600s—and providing entertaining videos of pucker-face babies since at least the dawn of YouTube.

If life hands you lemons, say, “thank you,” and don’t limit yourself to lemonade. Here are five ideas:

1. Breakfast. The best time to wake up your taste buds is first thing in the morning, no? You could go sweet, topping your favorite morning bread product with lemon marmalade, a sophisticated alternative to orange. (If you’re going to make it yourself, you might want to hold out for Meyer lemons—they’re a little sweeter and have thinner, tenderer rind). Or try fluffy lemon-ricotta pancakes, which use only the zest (squeeze the juice to use later, or mix up some Bloody Marys, if it’s that kind of morning). If you’re more a savory breakfast type, go for the whole classic New York bagel schmear: cream cheese, lox, capers, red onions and thin lemon slices (tomatoes are also a possibility, if you can find good ones at this time of year).

2. Soup. A recent Inviting Writing essay (with recipe) by a reader who tried to perfect her mother-in-law’s avgolemono soup may have sparked my latest round of lemon obsession. The ultra-lemony soup is one of Greek cuisine’s many delicious uses of the citrus fruit. Lemon also brings lentil soup into new and exciting territory (a squirt of lemon juice can even—almost—rescue bland, over-salted canned lentil soup, I find).

3. Main dishes and sides. The possibilities here are endless—chicken or fish piccata (I like this variation using miso paste); lemon pizza; lemon risotto (Giada de Laurentiis serves it in a lemon cup, if cute presentations are your thing); sole meunière, the French dish that Julia Child said changed her life; and Lee Lum’s Lemon Chicken is one of the recipes I’ve been wanting to try from Amanda Hesser’s The Essential New York Times Cookbook (originally published in the paper in 1969), but I haven’t been able to find water chestnut flour.

4. Desserts. For people like me who like their sweets cut with some tartness, this is the category where lemon truly shines. Last year I made a lemon tart from Cook’s Illustrated that came out brilliantly, if I do say so myself (the link is blocked to non-subscribers, so you can sign up for a 14-day trial or try this one with a pine-nut crust, from Epicurious.). Nigella Lawson’s lemon polenta cake sounds good. And for the true lemon lover, Smitten Kitchen offers a recipe for Shaker lemon pie that uses macerated thinly sliced Meyer lemons, peel and all. Those Shakers sure had some interesting ideas for baked goods. Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention an American classic, lemon meringue pie.

5. Drinks. Now, I’ve got nothing against lemonade, especially on a hot summer day. But why not at least jazz it up with basil, mint or—though I can’t advocate it—cilantro? It certainly wouldn’t be out of the question to add some vodka to any one of those concoctions. Even better, do as Tyler Florence does, and make icy lemon-ginger vodka cocktails or, if you can wait 80 days, make your own limoncello. And did I mention the Bloody Mary? Well, it bears repeating.

Normal (A) and mutant seedless sugar apples (B and C), courtesy of PNAS

If fruit trees grow from seeds, how do you grow seedless fruit? It’s not unusual for plants to produce mutant fruit that lacks seeds, but these fruits are usually the end of their line. Naturally occurring hybrids can also make sterile fruit. The varieties that we eat are specifically hybridized to be seedless, like seedless watermelon or bananas, or grafted onto host root stocks, like seedless oranges.

Navel oranges (named for the belly-button shaped indentation in the peel; did everyone else already know this?) were first planted in California in 1872; the New York Times looked back on the fruit’s origins in an article from 1902 (pdf).

The fine original seedless orange trees came from Bahia, Brazil, and were imported through the sense of a woman. Mr. Nellie Desmond of Syracuse, N.Y., was visiting her brother in a rubber camp along the Amazon. The natives brought her several seedless oranges, which were a curiosity to her. She inquired whence they came, and found they grew upon a clump of freak orange trees in the neighborhood.

The woman with sense brought some fruit back to the United States, and word got to the Commissioner of Agriculture, who instructed the consulate at Brazil to ship him some trees. A few years later, Mrs. Luther C. Tibbets, who was well-connected, procured three trees from an experimental USDA garden for land her husband was homesteading in what is now downtown Riverside, California. One of the trees was eaten by a cow, but after five years the others bore fruit. “On Jan. 22, 1878, two of the new oranges were cut open and critically tasted by a little company of orange growers at Riverside. A new star of the first magnitude rose that day in the horticultural firmament.”

Another star of the first magnitude might well arise from a recent report in PNAS. A mutant seedless sugar apple (Annona squamosa) from Thailand was found to have a genetic disruption that blocks ovule development. Fortuitously, similar mutations have been intensively studied in Arabidopsis, a mustard plant that is the lab rat of botany. Understanding this genetic pathway could lead to seedless sugar apples or soursops. Fruits in this genus “have a meat with a sherbet-like texture and a flavor that has been compared with a mixture of banana and pineapple,” the authors write, but huge seeds make these fruits a bit of a chore to eat or process. They also point out that Mark Twain described Annona as “the most delicious fruits known to men.”

Has anyone tried these fruits? I’m intrigued—and wouldn’t mind fighting through the seeds while the seedless varieties are in development.

Heirloom tomato salad, courtesy of Flickr user mnapoleon

Our final installment of this month’s Inviting Writing challenge, “First Tastes,” comes from Kim Kelly of Carlsbad, California, who writes the Liv Life blog.

Stay tuned for the next round of Inviting Writing, which we’ll announce on Tuesday, January 18.

A Slice of Heaven

By Kim Kelly

Tomatoes are a new thing for me. While I have always loved salsa, tomato sauce, and even an occasional dab of ketchup, I spent the first 42 years of my life diligently picking anything remotely resembling a tomato out of any salad, sandwich, In-N-Out Burger or taco. Something about the texture and what I remembered (from my one try as a child) as a somewhat “metallic” taste always had me saying, “no, thank you.”

In the past few years, though, articles praising the health benefits of tomatoes flashed across my computer screen and I began letting those tiny diced pieces on my taco slide by. I even kind of got used to those little fragments and almost missed them when they weren’t there. Then I bravely ate a slice from a salad. Unfortunately it was a winter tomato, white inside, mushy, a bit mealy and absolutely tasteless. To me it was just, well… for lack of a better word, yucky. The experience set me back a few years.

Two years ago a vendor at my local Carlsbad Farmers Market offered me a slice of heirloom tomato which had only hours earlier been picked fresh from his fields. I have to say his display was quite beautiful. Abundant with dazzling yellow, green, orange, red and even zebra striped tomatoes, I really wanted to like them but was sure I wouldn’t. A bright red globe had been sliced and simply dressed with a splash of balsamic vinegar and a light dusting of salt and pepper. Without an easy way to say no and to not offend him, I searched out the smallest slice and wondered how I was going to swallow the expected mushy texture and funky “tin-like” taste. Bracing myself, I popped the piece into my mouth and waited for my expectations to be met. Oh, how wrong I was! The flavor bursting in my mouth was anything but tin-like, and the texture not even remotely mealy. This small slice of heaven brought instead a fleshy yet firm and juicy bite combined with a savory sweetness. With the fresh delicate flavors dancing on my tongue, I found myself groaning in pleasure and actually reaching for a second slice. I purchased my first three tomatoes.

Since that eye-opening day, I have come to realize that there are good tomatoes and bad tomatoes. To me, “bad” (insert: soft, mushy, mealy) tomatoes are not worth eating. Good tomatoes, though, are a treat worth waiting for. That year, I spent my summer craving those luscious, flavor-filled heirlooms, even eating unadorned and plain slices out of hand. Recipes from magazines and internet sources filled my files and I spent leisurely afternoons at the market sharing tips on serving tomatoes with the vendors.

Mid-summer 2010 brought the much anticipated heirloom tomato arrival to our market and I purchased no less than 10 of the brightly colored, heart-shaped orbs the first day they appeared. Adding them to sandwiches, sauces and an extraordinarily tasty Heirloom Tomato Salad topped with Blue Cheese had my husband smirking and laughing at me. As I sat down and fully enjoyed this salad made almost wholly from tomatoes, I realized I had grown. Next summer I think I’ll grow again and give those mysterious yet alluring eggplants a try. Well… maybe.

Guava paste on cheese, courtesy of Flickr user World to Table / Veronica

Our theme for this month’s Inviting Writing series is “first tastes”: foods that were a revelation the first time you tried them. This week’s entry comes from Elizabeth Bastos, who shared a scary food story about artichokes last year. She blogs about “humor, food, home, parenting and cheese” at Goody Bastos.

A Rebound Relationship with Guava Paste

By Elizabeth Bastos

Years ago, when I was in a complicated relationship with a Venezuelan, I went to his home country and had a cheese arepa for the first time—and that was supposed to be the big deal. When I got home, broken-up-with and sad, my friends said: That’s too bad about Jose. How were the arepas? And I said they were okay.

The big deal for me was the guava paste. Not to get all magical realism, One Hundred Years Of Solitude about it, but the first time I tasted guava paste, it was the muted dead red of heartbreak, a sun just before it sets under the horizon, a thin slab that was sad/happy, sweet/tart and just slightly crystalline. Tears, maybe? I had a bit on top of a piece of cheese called queso tropical after one of my last arguments with Jose about the meaning of love and betrayal, and whether Americans can ever really be sensual.

Queso tropical distinguishes itself in no other way than that it is the perfect foil for guava paste. It is salty, coarse in texture, even squeaky. It’s the work-a-day piano man to guava’s torch singer. I said to Jose, through my tears: You are too passionate, like an artist, of course you are, but what is this cheese? What is this jelly on top? Is it jelly? A preserve of some kind? It’s definitely not strawberry. Or peach. More important, can I have some more? So I brought two bricks of guava paste home with me on the plane, plus some terra cotta knick-knacks, but they all broke.

When I eat guava paste even now, years later, I can’t help thinking: Wow. How can it be that for some people this fragrant, pomegranate-colored, ear-lobe-textured gem of a food is mundane? For me, it’s An Experience, perhaps The Experience. They don’t realize how lucky they are.

Fruitcakes, courtesy of Flickr user chotda

The action of Truman Capote’s 1956 short story “A Christmas Memory” is set into motion when a nameless sixty-something woman looks out her kitchen window and exclaims, “Oh my, it’s fruitcake weather.” Thus, she and her dearest friend, her 7-year-old, live-in cousin Buddy, begin amassing supplies for a seasonal four-day baking spree—which involves everything from snitching fallen nuts from a neighbor’s pecan grove to procuring a quart of bootleg whiskey. However, on learning how his spirits are going to be used, the bootlegger flippantly remarks, “That’s no way to waste good whiskey.”

In spite of the goodwill and Christmas cheer fruitcakes are intended to embody, they are the running joke of the modern holiday season. Late-night comedian Johnny Carson got his digs in with lines like: “There is only one fruitcake in the entire world and people keep passing it around.” In English slang the word has come to mean someone who is eccentric or flat-out insane, while in Manitou Springs, Colorado there is an annual fruitcake toss where unwanted loaves are bid adieu by medieval means—namely, catapults. There seems to be a cultural expectation that we collectively loathe this token baked good.

But can fruitcake really be as bad as all that? That’s hard to believe given its staying power, culturally speaking. The ancient Romans made a mishmash of barley, pomegranate seeds, nuts and raisins as a sort of energy bar; however the modern fruitcake can be traced back to the Middle Ages as dried fruits became more widely available and fruited breads entered Western European cuisine. But variations on the fruitcake started springing up: Italy’s dense, sweet-and-spicy panforte (literally, “strong bread”) dates back to 13th century Sienna; Germany’s stollen, a tapered loaf coated with melted butter and powdered sugar that’s more bread-like in consistency, has been a Dresden delicacy since the 1400s and has its own annual festival; and then there’s black cake in the Caribbean Islands, a boozy descendant of Britain’s plum pudding where the fruit is soaked in rum for months, or even as long as a year. The tradition of making fruitcakes for special occasions such as weddings and holidays gained in popularity in the 18th and 19th centuries and due to the cost of the materials, it was a grand indulgence. But, as with many traditions, how this confection came to be exclusively associated with Christmas season is a mystery.

Another mystery is the point at which the fruitcake fell from grace. Perhaps one nail was driven into the coffin in the early 20th century when mass-produced mail-order fruitcakes became available, creating the regrettably classic image of a dry, leaden cake encrusted with garish candied fruits and pecans. But since some of the companies producing these things have been in business for decades, this isn’t an entirely satisfactory answer. They must be doing something right, right?

Personally, I’m a fan of the homemade stuff. This time of year I enjoy remembering people through food, and I crack out the family recipes that distinguished the Christmas season. Among them is Great Grandma Reamer’s fruitcake, and although I never knew her personally, I know this one dish of hers and every year her guarded, liquor-kissed blend of dried fruits and miniature marshmallows is thrown together in my kitchen. And this holiday season I made my first attempt at making panforte, mainly because every year the Italian side of my family always remarks on how hard it is to find that particular fruitcake in the stores. We’ll see if mine passes muster come Christmas morning.

You may have to employ the scientific method of trial and error before you find a fruitcake recipe that pleases your palette, but I dare you to give it a try. With all the international and regional variations out there to try—and even a recipe championed by Good Eats chef Alton Brown—you may end up creating a positive fruitcake tradition of your own. And for those of you looking for the recipe that’s only vaguely described in “A Christmas Memory,” check out Fruitcake by Truman Capote’s aunt Marie Rudisill. She is perhaps best known for her guest appearances on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno under her stage name “The Fruitcake Lady.”

Cranberries, courtesy Flickr user jillmotts

So, this entry is for Bryn—and for people like me who buy too many fresh cranberries at the grocery store simply because they’re seasonal and on sale, but don’t know what to do with them!

1. Red and Green: Cranberries can grace your Thanksgiving table in more ways than just sauce. Use them to add color and zing to your green vegetable sides, like these roasted brussels sprouts with cranberry brown butter or wilted kale with cranberries.

2. Red and Orange: They also pair wonderfully with orange vegetables—try Simply Recipes’ butternut squash, cranberry and apple bake, this cranberry sweet potato bake or some roasted carrots with fresh cranberries. I’m also intrigued by the idea of apples and cranberries baked in a pumpkin.

3. Red and Brown: Bryn’s favorite recipe is Mollie Katzen‘s cranberry brown bread, which balances the berries’ tartness with molasses, orange juice and brown sugar. You can find it in Katzen’s “Enchanted Broccoli Forest” cookbook, or see this version on Modern Sage. I can’t wait to try it!

4. Red and White: Baked apples are my latest obsession. Peel the top third of some large apples and scoop out their cores (I used a grapefruit knife and a melon baller), leaving the bottoms intact. Squeeze a lemon over them, using your fingers to coat any exposed parts of the fruit. Stuff the cavities full of cranberries coated in brown sugar, the zest of one orange and a generous sprinkle of cinnamon. Put the apples in a glass baking dish, and pour a few tablespoons of sweet liquid into and over each one—I used pear cider with a splash of maple syrup and cognac. Bake at 325 degrees for an hour, basting occasionally. Top with white chocolate shavings, as this Cooking Light recipe suggests, or a scoop of your favorite white topping, like creme fraiche, whipped cream or vanilla ice cream.

5. Red and Blue: Make your cranberry sauce more interesting by throwing some blueberries into the mix, as Elise from Simply Recipes suggests, and maybe even some red wine. You can also pair the berries in a dessert, such as Sweet Life Kitchen’s cranberry blueberry pie or Food for Laughter’s cranberry blueberry crumble.

What’s your favorite way to eat fresh cranberries?

Poached pear, courtesy of Flickr user Julius.Hibbert

I’ve got no beef with apples. They have earned their position as the go-to fruit. But why should they hog all the fall glory? Why don’t people go pear-picking, or bobbing for pears, or bake pear pies? In my opinion, pears are just as versatile as their cousins in the Rosaceae family, and have a subtler, more complex flavor.

Also, although I love the expression “to go pear-shaped,” meaning to go wrong, I disagree with the negative connotation. From a still-life artist’s standpoint, the eccentrically and elegantly shaped pear, with its frequently freckled skin in shades of green, yellow, red and brown, is far superior to the blandly round apple as a subject. And cardiologists agree that pear-shaped is preferable to apple-shaped, at least when it comes to body types.

According to USA Pears, the Northwest pear growers’ association (Oregon and Washington grow more than 80 percent of the nation’s pears), I am a little early in celebrating their product—National Pear Month isn’t until December. But most varieties of American-grown pears are already in season, including plump Anjou, dimpled Bartlett, adorable Forelle, russeted Bosc, and Concorde, long-necked as a runway model.

Enough with the admiration. Here are five good ways to eat pears:

1. With cheese. Pears and cheese are such a natural and classic pairing that there is even an Italian saying— “Do not let the peasant know how good cheese is with pears”—that inspired food historian Massimo Montanari to write a book. Brie, gorgonzola, sharp cheddar and goat cheese are all good possibilities—my favorite combination is a strong-flavored firm cheese with Bartletts (which I think taste the most “peary” of the common pears)—or see USA Pear’s pairing guide.

2. In a pie. Turns out I was wrong—some people do bake pear pies (they also probably go pear-picking, in the places that grow pears, but I have yet to hear of anyone bobbing for pears). Grant Achatz, the acclaimed Chicago chef and restaurateur often associated with the American molecular gastronomy movement, gave Food & Wine magazine a straightforward recipe inspired by his mother’s pies.

3. Poached. Peeled and poached in wine, water, ginger tea or pomegranate juice, pears make a simple and elegant dessert.

4. In a Chutney. Pears aren’t common in South Asian cuisine, but they stand up nicely to Indian spices, as in this pear chutney by Indian TV chef Sanjeev Kapoor.

5. Baked into Chips. Sliced ultra-thin, sugared and baked for an hour or so, pears (and apples, if you like) make a crunchy snack.

Tomatoes from a farmer's market. Courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon

I hate to be a cynic, but I suppose it was inevitable: With consumers today increasingly willing to pay a premium for local and/or organic food, it was only a matter of time before the scam artists of the world exploited shoppers’ good intentions.

Just in the last couple of weeks, two separate investigations uncovered cases of organic food fraud, or at least misrepresentation.

NBC Los Angeles exposed farmers’ market vendors who were lying about where and how their food was grown. Reporters bought produce at farmers’ markets across the Southland, then made surprise visits to farms where the items were supposedly grown.

Most were truthful, but a few weren’t: the reporters found weeds or dirt where vegetables were supposed to be growing. In one case, a vendor admitted—after the reporters followed his truck to the wholesale warehouses in downtown Los Angeles—that he sold some items he had bought wholesale as his own, including avocados from Mexico. The investigation also found produce advertised as pesticide-free that tested positive for pesticides.

This sort of dishonesty isn’t confined to big cities like Los Angeles. Even in my rural area, which has some good farm stands and farmers’ markets, there are people who set up tables by the roadside and sell produce that couldn’t possibly have been grown locally. (Plump, red tomatoes in June? Not around here.) As far as I know, they don’t claim that they are selling locally grown produce. But they are taking advantage of the assumption of most people—especially tourists—that vegetables sold by the side of the road in a rural area are grown by a local farmer.

The other investigation, as Mother Jones magazine‘s environmental blog reported, was conducted by the Cornucopia Institute, an organization that says it promotes “economic justice for family-scale farming.” The group rated organic egg producers according to their animal welfare and environmental practices, and found that some looked more like factory farms, at least by Cornucopia’s standards.

In this case, part of the problem lies in the varied interpretations of “organic.” As the report explains:

All organic egg producers claim to be following the federal organic standards, but with different working definitions and viewpoints of what the standards mean. For most consumers and many producers, organic farming means respecting underlying principles of the organic farming movement…. For others, especially industrial-scale producers, ‘organic’ appears to be nothing more than a profitable marketing term that they apply to the agro-industrial production system—simply substituting organic feed in their production model and eliminating harmful synthetic inputs, such as pesticides and antibiotics.

The latter interpretation, even if it doesn’t match consumers’ expectations, doesn’t necessarily equate to fraud. But in several cases, Cornucopia found, farms were clearly misrepresenting their operations in their marketing.

Cornucopia’s entire report, including its organic egg scorecard, is available online.

]]> http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2010/10/is-your-local-organic-food-neither-local-nor-organic/feed/ 1 http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2010/08/a-culinary-tour-of-eat-pray-love/ http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/2010/08/a-culinary-tour-of-eat-pray-love/#comments Thu, 19 Aug 2010 14:37:02 +0000 Jess Righthand http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/food/?p=6482

Still from Eat Pray Love. Courtesy of movie's Facebook page.

“I’m having a relationship with my pizza.” As Julia Roberts looks over her Neapolitan pizza at her Eat Pray Love co-star, Tuva Novotny, I too feel a pang for the thin, cheesy, luscious display that nearly outshines the Oscar winner. As it turns out, this particular scene was filmed at the famous L’Antica Pizzeria Da Michele in the heart of Naples, which has been baking some of the city’s best pies since 1870, and where Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling book Eat Pray Love, actually ate during her four-month stint in Italy.

The new movie is an unabashed chick flick—my boyfriend was one of four men in an audience of about 100 people. But however girly the plot, the bounty of delicious Italian, Indian and Balinese foods can be enjoyed by all. Here’s a quick list of the film’s food highlights to get your mouth watering.

Pizza Napolitana: Forget New York. Forget Chicago. As mentioned, this pizza has become the object of my desire—days after seeing the movie, I still can’t get it out of my mind. As one might expect, the Pizzeria Da Michele does not divulge their recipe online, but here’s a pizza dough recipe you can use to try to approximate the real deal.

Egg, Asparagus, Potato and Ham Salad: One day in Rome, Roberts’ character, Liz, decides to stay home and do nothing—except eat, that is. She drizzles olive oil over a portion of asparagus, hard boiled eggs, and prosciutto, and pours herself a glass of Italian red wine for a job well done.

Figs and Ham: As she winds through the streets of Rome, Liz passes a woman delicately cutting into a platter of fresh figs and Parma ham. This was a pleasant departure from the also delicious but more ubiquitous dish, “prosciutto e melone,” or ham and melon.

Spaghetti all’Amatriciana: Nowhere is the power of simple recipes and fresh ingredients more apparent than when Liz gorges herself on a heaping plate of this spaghetti and tomato sauce dish. Spaghetti all’Amatriciana—which, at its most basic, includes onions, tomatoes, pancetta, olive oil, and chili peppers—is native to the town of Amatrice, located to the east of Rome near the border dividing the regions of Abruzzo and Umbria. Although older, more traditional recipes included lard and bacon fat, olive oil has proved a healthier substitute and is now widely used in Italian trattorias throughout the country.

Fried Artichokes: I tend to subscribe to the notion that frying vegetables defeats the purpose of eating them in the first place. But when a plate of crispy, golden, leafy artichokes was served up in the film, I had to reconsider. I’ve always eaten artichokes steamed, with a touch of mayo and lemon. But next time I might have to plunge those artichokes straight into the frying oil.

Thums Up!: While the Eat portion of Eat Pray Love takes place mostly in Rome, a few other interesting foods (and beverages, in this case) pop up throughout the rest of the film. During her stay at an ashram in India, Liz’s friend Richard takes her to a small cafe to enjoy a sweet, Indian cola called Thums Up! that serves as the Coca-Cola substitute in India. A hand making a thumbs up sign appears on the bottle.

Exotic Balinese Fruits: As Roberts’ character cruises the Balinese open-air markets with her new Brazilian squeeze, played by Javier Bardem, they scope out a couple of the native fruits of Bali, including the spiked Durian, a fruit prohibited in many hotels because of its offensive odor. “That one tastes like stinky feet,” Bardem says. Contrary to what his character would have us believe, though, I’ve heard that if you can get past the smell, the taste of the fruit’s creamy filling is pretty darn good.

Already been to see the film? What was your favorite Eat Pray Love food moment?