fruit : Sheryl Kirby

Category : fruit

Mango Tango

July 3rd 2011 - Posted in Food, fruit
Comments Off

Mango purists (and I count myself among them) will rant about which mangoes are best until the cows come home. We’re pretty unanimous in our hatred for that hard red football known as Tommy Atkins, the variety that most often passes for “mango” in these parts, especially in the off-season, in the way that Macs or Golden Delicious tend to be what most people think of as an apple, neglecting the hundreds of other varieties.

In my local supermarket lately, there has actually been an assortment of mangoes. Old Tommy Atkins is there, but as mangoes are in-season right now in the Caribbean (the season in India, specifically for Alphansos finished in early June), there were a trio of options. Since it’s rare to find so many varieties all in the same place – at least here in Toronto – we bought one of each to compare.

Read More...

When Life Gives You Really Big Lemons

February 28th 2011 - Posted in candy, d'oh!, Food, fruit
Comments Off

This is a Cedro lemon sitting on my butcher’s block beside a standard size lemon. It’s, um… big. This huge, sweet lemon is native to Sicily and is most commonly used for salads. Really. I bought this one at St. Lawrence Market but have seen it in other fruit markets since, labelled as a “salad lemon”. They’re meant to be thinly sliced and added to salads, and some people sprinkle them with a bit of sugar and/or salt.

The unique thing about the Cedro is that the actual area of pulp is the same as a regular lemon. All of that extra space is spongy pith. Unlike other citrus fruit, however, the Cedro’s pith is sort of sweet and not bitter.

I had the idea that I would candy the Cedro. But I wasn’t sure whether I was supposed to discard the pith and just used the fragrant outer peel (the Cedro smells like a cross between a lemon and a bergamot) or use the whole thing. I had little luck searching out recipes, and a couple people on Twitter pointed me to a David Lebovitz recipe for candied peel. But I had this idea that I wanted to to do thin cross-section discs so that the pulp in the centre would look like stained glass and dry to an almost crunchy consistency.

Read More...

Market Mondays – Cranberries

October 11th 2010 - Posted in Food, fruit
Comments Off

I think cranberry sauce is one of my favourite things about Thanksgiving dinner. Bright red and sweet, it’s like a little treat with all that meat and veg.

Cranberries are native to North America and are related to the blueberry. Used by First Nations people as food, medicine and dye, they were likely introduced to settlers in New England to become part of the first Thanksgiving feast. While cranberries grow wild, the ones we get have been cultivated for easy harvesting. Grown either in wetlands or areas with a shallow water table, the area is flooded when the cranberries are ripe and the berries are removed by machine. Since the berries float, this creates the picturesque cranberry bog we see in photos or on television ads.

This wet method of harvesting is usually done for berries destined to be processed into juice or jelly. Some berries are still dry-harvested (picked by hand or with gentle machinery that doesn’t harm the vines), and these are more likely to be the ones sold to consumers whole.

Read More...

Market Mondays – Apples

September 27th 2010 - Posted in Food, fruit, recipes
Comments Off

Is there any fruit that typifies September and the Fall harvest better than the apple? Boy Scouts apple day, an apple for the first day of school, a roadside produce stand groaning with different varieties… we love us some apples. And despite what your supermarket might have you think, they come in more types than red, green and yellow. 7500 varieties, to be specific, with the fruit originating in Western Asia and showing up throughout history in Norse, Greek and Pagan mythology. One theory about the apple being the unnamed “forbidden fruit” in the Bible is based on the fact that the Book of Genesis was written by Romans at a time when the Christian church was trying to convert pagans. Since the pagans revered the apple, making it evil or forbidden contributed to the number of new converts.

Apples now grow in almost every part of the world. Here in Ontario, growers have focused on about a dozen common varieties, but there are over 100 heritage varieties that can be found at local orchards and pick-your-own farms. Apples are typically harvested from late July until October. Growers’ associations like the one in Norfolk County provide storage facilities for area apple growers in a climate-controlled, low-oxygen warehouse that allows Ontarians to have local apples year-round. There’s no reason to be eating apples from China (where 35% of the world’s apples are grown), when we have a great year-round variety right here.

Read More...

Market Mondays – Pears

September 13th 2010 - Posted in Food, fruit, recipes, toronto
Comments Off

Pears are the less glamorous cousin of the apple. In the same family as the apple, along with roses and quince, pears have been cultivated for thousands of years in Asia, are referenced in Roman and Celtic texts and are thought to possibly date back to the Stone Age. Popular in Britain and France where they were beloved for their use in perry (pear cider), the first pears were cultivated in North America in 1620. Pears were originally eaten cooked, not raw (they were probably closer to a quince), until the 18th century when they were cultivated to have the soft, juicy and buttery flesh that we know today.

There are over 130 varieties of pears grown in Canada, but here in Ontario, there are five major varieties that are grown for sale; Bartlett, Clapp’s Favourite, Anjou, Bosc and Flemish Beauty. Growers hope that a new variety, Harovin Sundown, will eventually be added to that list, although it will be 2015 before the pears will be widely available in stores.

Read More...

Market Mondays – Melons

August 16th 2010 - Posted in Food, fruit, recipes, toronto
Comments Off

Sometimes, I’m not so bright. Because when I made up the list of fruit and veg to include in this column, I mostly based it on what would be in season. Which is the point of the whole thing (we’ll start covering meat and dairy and spices and such in the winter after the fall harvest), except for the fact that I didn’t really think too much about recipes.

Or more importantly, that there are a few seasonal items, such as melon, that you just don’t cook with all that much. Think about it – chilled soup, salsa, a few cocktails, fruit salad… maybe some cantaloupe wrapped in prosciutto. Whoops.

So what I have for you today is two different recipes for watermelon gazpacho, both from fabulous local chefs, and (thankfully) different enough that you can pick which one you’d prefer to make based on the other ingredients. Or make them both and do a taste test.

Read More...

Walking on the Beaches, Looking at the Peaches

August 15th 2010 - Posted in eating locally, Food, fruit, homemade is better, preserving
Comments Off

I can’t say it often enough – I HATE SUMMER. I would honestly rather deal with 3 feet of snow and bitter wind chill than the heat and humidity we’ve gone through in the past few months. I’ve got my days arranged for the minimum amount of outside time absolutely necessary. Some days I only go outside to walk the dogs and then we don’t even go around the block, it’s so hot. I grew up in Nova Scotia where it was seldom humid and where, when the temperature hit 25C, we’d head for the beach and the frigid chill of the ocean. My body just never acclimatized to living in pea soup.

The only good thing that comes from an Ontario summer is the food. And it’s truly the only thing that keeps me from fleeing to Halifax for July and August. Because if I left, I would miss out on Ontario corn, melons, tomatoes and peaches. (Not blueberries, though… Nova Scotian blueberries far exceed those we get in Ontario.)

Peaches in particular are a point of contention. A couple of years ago, Ontario’s last canning facility shut down. Canned fruit in the supermarkets is 100% guarantee to be from away – usually from places like China or South Africa. Many Ontario farmers who grew peaches and pears in particular razed their orchards because without the cannery, there was no one in Ontario to buy their fruit in quantity.

Read More...

Market Mondays – Blueberries

August 2nd 2010 - Posted in Food, fruit, recipes, toronto
Comments Off

Here in the city, we’re lucky enough to have any number of markets where both wild and tame blueberries are available for a reasonable price. But for me, blueberries have the ability to make me really cranky. As a kid we’d trek off into the woods in the suburb of Halifax where I grew up, and fill huge buckets and jugs with the things to make pies and muffins and the famous Acadian blueberry grunt. Covered in mosquito bites, backs aching from bending over the low bushes and that awful feeling in the pit of the stomach caused by worrying that, at any moment, you’d come face to face with a hungry bear, picking was never really considered fun. We’d try anything we could to get out of going blueberry picking, but ultimately, at the first slice of Mom’s pie, it was all worth it.

Blueberries are native to North America and related to cranberries and bilberries. While there are a number of varieties, most are separated into either low bush or high bush types, the first being wild berries, mostly picked by hand, while high bush berries are larger, able to be harvested by machine and in a taste comparison are considered more bland than their wild cousins.

Read More...

A Berry Good Idea

August 1st 2010 - Posted in eating locally, Food, fruit, preserving
Comments Off

We’re moving through the summer so quickly and with the harvest for pretty much everything being about two weeks early, we’re already done with strawberries (except for the everbearing varieties) and raspberries. Blueberries are in full force and I bought my first batch of blackberries this week. Like many people, I’ve been making jam, but there’s only so much jam two people can eat, so that isn’t always a practical way to preserve summer for the long cold days of winter. A few years ago we bought a small deep freezer and so now every summer I make “berry bags”.

The idea for putting together bags of frozen mixed berries came when I was searching for frozen blueberries at the supermarket and ended up with one of those 5-fruit blends by mistake. The berries were all from China or Chile and weren’t very good, but the idea was a good one and I started buying berries throughout the season as they became ripe and filling freezer bags.

Read More...

Frangipane Tart

September 14th 2009 - Posted in baking, Food, fruit, recipes
Comments Off

I’ve been making variations of this little beauty all summer. Pretty much any fruit goes well with almonds, so all it takes is some fresh fruit and about 125mL of jam in a similar flavour.

The crust is a Martha Stewart recipe, although I’ve tweaked it slightly because it’s pressed into a pan, not rolled out. The frangipane itself is a recipe featured on a BBC food show called What to Eat Now. I’ve tweaked this a wee bit as well since I found the batter to be so soft that the fresh fruit added on top sunk into the batter before it could cook and firm up.

I’ve used plums here, but I’ve also used raspberries, peaches and it would work with apples or pears as well.

Read More...

What’cha looking for?
What’s going on
What came before

Food, Life and the World at Large

Category : fruit

What’cha looking for?

What’s going on

What came before