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Long-time followers of my Mutterings will be aware that I like to try weird fruits and veggies. I just came across another one:
It’s called Melothria scabra, also known as mouse melon, which is a particularly adorable name. It’s a type of cucumber that looks like a grape-sized watermelon, and in fact tastes a bit like a watermelon rind, crunchy and a bit sour.
Do you have any weird fruits & veggies that you particularly like, that I should watch out for?
I can’t resist new life forms, particularly when they inhabit fruit and vegetable stands. The other day I wandered into the one in the Stanford shopping center, and spotted a soft, heavy football with a scratchy skin. It wore a nametag: Mamay.
Hello, Mamay.
Mamay is a Cuban native weighing two or three pounds, which is a lot of fruit if you don’t like the flavor. But I did. It’s a delightfully weird fruit, not super sweet, with the texture of baked sweet potatoes and an overtone of its relative, the sapote (known in India as the chiku.) It has a giant and very shiny seed (the one in the photo is nearly the length of my hand) which was sprouting merrily inside. However, I was relieved to read that the seeds don’t necessarily grow true to type, because I’d have felt obligated to put the thing in my garden, and there I would have been, standing on the street giving away three-pound footballs that taste like sapote crossed with sweet potatoes.
A while ago I was at San Francisco’s Ferry Building on a Saturday morning, when the place just explodes into the Bay Area’s most fantastic farmer’s market. And so I bought…stuff. Berries and Chinese broccoli and hot sauces and things I knew. But the fun part of a market like this is the produce you don’t know. So I bought a little punnet of fiddleheads–fern shoots. Aren’t these just the cutest thing in the world?
The seller told me that, being Western fiddleheads, they needed two trips through the blanching pan, so I did that, and then sautéd them in some butter. They taste vaguely artichoke-ish, and they’re firmer than I expected. Whenever I cook something new I make it very basic, so I taste what it is rather than the flavorings. Next time I might use garlic, and a flavored oil.
Have you tried fiddleheads? Any other odd veggies you love?
So, this crime writer walks into a kitchen…
Or maybe a bar—it depends on what story you’re after, and what you’re hungry (or thirsty) for.
Whether it’s drinks to curl your hair or a soup to warm your heart, Kinsey Millhone’s peanut butter & pickle sandwich or Valentine Wilde’s chicken fricassee, or maybe a cup of Jack Reacher’s coffee with one of Mrs Hudson’s coffee-sheet cookies, there’s enough here to keep you fed and watered for weeks to come.
Besides that, the book is really gorgeous–
with pictures of scampi & bullets, spaghetti & pistols, and food porn that makes you want to ring up Nero Wolfe and invite him over for a plate of Alafair Burke’s run-soaked Nutella French toast. Check it out, here.
Pardon me, I’m feeling a bit peckish. Maybe it’s time for me to slip out to the grocery store…
The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook is available today, from your local Indie bookseller, from Barnes & Noble, from Amazon—or until April 3 you can enter to win a copy at Goodreads.
The Mystery Writers Cookbook, by a hundred or more of us murderous sorts: recipes to kill for.
Coffee plays a large role in the Russell memoirs, and I believe we can now see the kind of pot the Holmes household possesses:
Love the Boing Boing channel.
One of the chief reasons I always stay within striking distance of Oxford when I come to England for a few weeks is the Covered Market.
The Market is a Victorian glass cover over a hive of shops, from carrots to watches, shoes to fresh pasta, coffee to cheese. It’s where I head if I crave those gorgeously fresh, tender English strawberries–the kind that reveal tiny wisps of the actual straw that has cushioned the berries from the ground–or a loaf of the wholemeal bread I’ve tasted from nowhere else in the world.
I understand the Oxford city council is about to make a series of rent increases that will drive many of these independent retailers out of the Market, which would be a tragedy. Mary Russell passed through here, drank tea here at Brown’s Cafe,
dodged delivery vans here.
During the times I’ve lived in Oxford, I’ve passed by the supermarket fruit-and-veg departments to shop at Bonner’s, where the men who worked the stall did all the math in their head. (Of course, if they were wrong, would I have known?) The younger generation now uses paper, but the fruit-and-veg are still superb.
If they disappear from the Market, Oxford will be the less for the absence.
There’s some interesting history of the covered market,
. And if you would like to sign a petition to help save the market, that is
.
Oh, I do love this time of year, every morning:
Strawberries, pineapple, blueberries, and raspberries.
Ahhh.
Jeezie Louisie, I look up from digging myself out from under a pile of papers and computer tasks and find that in nine days we’ll be sitting down to the traditional pumpkin pie breakfast with a heap of wrappings burying the carpet. How the hell did that happen? What happened to the memo cancelling November?
I blame two of the women in my life: my editor, who deliberately chose to drop the proofs onto my desk the week before Thanksgiving, and my daughter, who dawdled overseas instead of coming in the door on December 1st demanding that we set up the Christmas tree. And since the tree is usually the thing that gets me moving (must be the smell that triggers the reaction of Fir tree=shopping impulse) and we’re not getting the tree until Monday (and I just don’t want to think about the Charlie Brown trees that’ll be available then) I’m only now turning my mind to the question of Christmas.
And to the Christmas meals.
The night before Christmas, I like to keep the food light but festive. Some years we’ve done crab or shrimp along with a soup that balances those flavors, but since I don’t much like seafood in general and shellfish in particular, I can now use an excuse a new Jewish family member to remove them from the options. I may take another look at the take-away menu of the Gayle’s Bakery & Rosticceria (fabulous food, as are Gayle and Joe themselves) so I can join the festive and put off the work.
But for the 25th itself, my family is adamant: Christmas equals turkey. Even if we’ve just managed to get the bones and leftovers out the door from Thanksgiving, we have to have turkey, a form of protein that rivals tofu on the boringometer. Which means that I have taken to playing with all the peripheral elements of the meal. One year I substituted celery root for some of the potatoes in the mashed potatoes. I often start with a small serving of tart crunchy salad (again I often depend on celery root here) balanced by a tiny cup of sweet, rich soup (cream of carrot with a pear tossed in, perhaps, or something with chestnuts) just to set up the taste buds for dinner. And although parsnips are not a part of our traditional family diet (my mother must not have liked them) I often make the yams roasted, tossed in a bag along with some cut up parsnips and a bit of oil and salt, and roasted high after the turkey comes out.
But I’m thinking this year of doing delicata flowers instead.
Delicata squash are one of the gifts of the modern foodie movement, that has brought us arugula and brown mushrooms. They’re small and elongated, the perfect size if you want to split them lengthwise and fill them with anything—sauteed vegetables and ricotta cheese are a favorite here—but the great thing is, the skin is tender enough to eat. So if you choose the delicatas with the most raised ridges to them, and just slice them crosswise, you end up with these very interesting rings. Drop them into a plastic bag with a little olive oil, salt, and whatever spices go with the dinner you have planned—Chinese five spice powder, Mexican chili mix, Moroccan spices or just cinnamon and nutmeg—then roast them in a nice hot oven for twenty minutes or so, turning once on the cookie sheet. Voila: delicata flowers.
Your family won’t even notice the turkey.
Hilarie, one of my Friends on Facebook, located the Radio 4 piece on Stilton in Stilton. Listen in pleasure, even those of you who don’t like cheese.
One of the more delightful aspects of British culture is their determination to cling to the radio as an art form. Long stretches behind the wheel of the car becomes a seat in a theatre or lecture hall, with the same disinclination to climb out that one has with an audio book—more so because it’s not a recording.
One of my drives across the British southland was accompanied by a long piece on Radio 4 about Stilton cheese, the EU, and the village of Stilton.
Readers of Mary Russell’s memoirs may remember that the young Miss Russell kept an alarmingly ripe piece of Stilton in her sock drawer as an undergraduate, and feared that her sudden and prolonged absence might have a disastrous effect on the wood below. Stilton is a powerful blue cheese, one of those myriad foodstuffs that are better tasted than smelt. On a lightly sweet biscuit or slice of apple, there is nothing better.
Rolling a Stilton on May Day
However, Stilton is not made in Stilton. Stilton the village is in Cambridgeshire; Stilton the cheese, according to the officials of the European Union, is 1) a pasteurized milk cheese 2) unpressed and with blue veins that 3) comes from one of three UK counties: Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, or Leicestershire. Not, please note, Cambridgeshire.
However, Mr Richard Landy, of Stilton (“of” in both senses) protests that Stilton was indeed originally made in Stilton. Daniel Defoe talked about it. And just because in the late 18th century the production of said cheese moved to Leicestershire doesn’t mean that Stilton should be banned from making their own Stilton, and calling it by the name. Mr Landy has even found evidence of ancient cheese-making in the town, when he was out walking one day and discovered a Roman cheese press in a ditch, where presumably it had lain for 1700 years waiting for him to walk his dog.
Mr Landy is now engaged in a battle with the European Union over the very definition of a cheese, as a village rises up in age-old and rightous indignation against the foreign oppressors from Brussels. That no one in the village currently manufactures, or even wishes to manufacture, Stilton cheese is beside the point.
Equal rights for village Stilton!
And now, take a look at the Stilton home page, and tell me that your mouth doesn’t immediately begin to water: cheese, figs—and oh my god, Stilton cheesecake!