GINGER ROOT (MONDAY, JANUARY 23): Chinese New Year begins today. It's the year 4710 on the calendar. So, gung hei fat choy. So, I thought I would talk about some Asian culinary ingredients this week. You should start out with probably the number one spice used in Asian cooking. And that's right here. You probably would be surprised, yes it is indeed ginger or ginger root. Now, when you’re picking out your ginger root, one of this things that you need to look for is make sure that it is nice and shiny, shiny means it's fresh.

NAVEL ORANGES (MONDAY, JANUARY 16): This week happens to be National Fresh Squeezed Juice Week. Nothing like good apple juice, apple cider, of course, orange juice. I love pineapple juice too. But you know I get a lot of questions about navel oranges. This is peek of the season for the premier eating orange found anywhere in the world. It's called the naval orange and this is the orange that is seedless. It has no seeds in it. This is a clue to you. You can juice a naval orange. In fact, it is very sweet and very juicy.

AVOCADOS FOR GUACAMOLE (MONDAY, JANUARY 9): Well it's a B. C. S. National Championship game tonight. Oh my goodness. LSU, Alabama, 1 and 2. Who is going to take home the championship tonight? You had better have some avocado for your guacamole tonight. What you haven't been to the store yet? Oh my goodness, you'd better run to the store very quickly. You are going to have to bypass this avocado right here. This is a green haas avocado, and that won’t be ripe in time at all for your game tonight. You will have to go for some ripe avocados.

DIET (MONDAY, JANUARY 2): Our diet has gotten us into trouble. We are starting a new year, 2012, so I thought I'd talk a little bit about how we are going to start our diet in the new year, 2012. And you know 220 million people in the world today have diabetes. Many of them are going to die at a very young age, because of that disease. Here in the United States, 22 million people have diabetes and there are probably a few million more that don't know that they have it. Very, very dangerous. So what can we do about it? It all started really with our diet.

SWEET POTATO (MONDAY, DECMEBER 26): All right, so Christmas is over, and you are checking out the pantry. And you realize, I bought way too many sweet potatoes. That’s cool if you did. Sweet potatoes are actually the most nutritious vegetable grown on planet earth today. So, you can’t have, in my humble produce opinion, you can’t have too many sweet potatoes. So, what you are going to do with your left over sweet potatoes? You’ve already had some sweet potatoes casserole, maybe some baked sweet potatoes. Here is what I suggest.