Produce News For Week of August 2, 2010

NAVEL ORANGES (Monday, August 2): Hey it’s Australia Picnic Day today. That’s right so we’re heading to New South Wales, Australia, and if you actually go to southeastern Australia that is the citrus belt of Australia. They have irrigation, and you go down there, and there are orange trees and tangelo trees. So let’s talk about their oranges. They’re navel oranges. That’s right. They’re just now coming into the supermarket, beautiful navel oranges from the land down under so it’s like a picnic day here as well. Now I know what you’re interested in. You’re interested in one thing right? Mike, how in the world do they look inside? You don’t care what they look like out there. Let’s cut one open. Take a look at that in there. Oh, my goodness! Look at the juice content in there. It’s like I just turned on a faucet or something. Okay, you want to know how the taste, so I’ll taste it for you as well. You ready for this from down under? Come on (Takes Bite). Super sweet and super juicy.
CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS AND PEPPERS (Tuesday, August 3): Let’s see today, today in history it was Columbus. What year was it? Columbus set sail, oh, I remember. Yeah, Columbus set sail on the ocean blue, in 1492. There you go, 1492 this very day Columbus set sail. Now what in the world does Columbus have to do with produce? There’s a huge section of your produce department that he actually discovered in the New World and took back to the Old World. What section was that? The entire pepper section. That’s right - sweet peppers, the beautiful bell peppers, red peppers, and of course all of the chili peppers, poblano chilis, long green chilis, serano chilis, of course jalapeno peppers with all that capsaicin in them, makes them hot. You know one of the things I love this time of year is chopping up some jalapeno peppers and putting it in a lot of different things and on the grill the sweet peppers - nothing like it. Hey, thanks Christopher Columbus
CLEMENTINE TANGERINES (Wednesday, August 4): Sweet, Clementine, hm, hm, hm, they’re so good, every time. Hey clementines, I know you don’t pay me to sing. I’ll just stick to the produce, ok. Beautiful sweet clementines are coming in. There’s actually a couple regions bringing these beautiful clementine tangerines. It’s one of the smaller of the tangerines. These are coming from Chile. They’re also coming in from South Africa and also from Spain. So, let’s just go ahead and peel one. I like to take it down at the stem end and put my fingernail right underneath the stem and that way you can start the peeling a little bit easier. Now these have what’s called a zipper peel. See how that is just like so easy to peel? Some…now this is early in the season so the peel sticks a little bit tighter to the skin, but a little bit later on, man, this just pops off really quickly. You want to know how they taste? Ok, I’ll tell you in just a second. (Takes Bite) They’re worth every penny. Oh, oh.
SUMMER SQUASH (Thursday, August 5): There is a very logical, and nutritional, and healthy reason why this time of year, the middle of summer, why in the world we should be eating a lot more what we call summer squash. Now when I first started in the produce industry 30 years ago, we called these summer squash, and then we had winter squash. Well, I know this…you know, here in theUS now we get summer squash all year long, and we get winter squash all year long. So a lot of produce departments are starting to call this soft squash because it is a soft shell…the skin is very soft. Now look at all the different kinds. This is what we call a patty pan or a just a regular summer squash. This is called a sunburst, and of course you know the crook neck, and of course you know zucchini squash. Now why is it important for us to eat more of the summer squash this time of year? There are two reasons. Number one, they’re full of moisture. What do our bodies need in the summer? Moisture. Number two, fewer calories. We don’t need calories in the summer.
101 WAYS TO CUT ZUCCHINI SQUASH (Friday, August 6): Hey, this coming Sunday is Eat Zucchini Squash on Your Neighbor’s Porch Day. You know this time of year our gardens…loaded with squash and it’s one of the best values of squash at the grocery store as well so I thought it would be fun - 101 ways to cut your squash. The first way we’re going to cut them…we’re just going to take just a little sliver off. We’re going to cut it into a slab. See this slab? You know why we’re going to do that? That’s going to go on the grill. Or you can take this slab and you can cut it like this and I’ll tell you why. Now you have little zucchini sticks. Uh, how else can we cut this? We can cut it into just a regular…sliced or diced. We can cut it into…this is called a slant cut. Aren’t we brilliant in the produce industry? A slant cut. You could also do what we call a half moon which is take that in half and then slice it like so, and now you got a half moon. 101 ways to cut your zucchini squash, and we just did. OK, four or five.