Produce News for February 9, 2009

PINK LADY APPLES (Monday, February 9):   Hey, the “Pink Panther” movie opened up, number two opened up over the weekend, Friday, and so I thought I’d go down the produce aisle and think pink down the produce aisle. Pink grapefruit, pink caracara oranges, pink guavas, lots of things that are pink, but one of my favorite right here – the beautiful pink lady apple…absolutely love this apple. And it’s actually this time of year where these pink lady apples start tasting a whole lot better. When they first harvest this apple (and they usually harvest this like in October…it’s one of the last apples in the orchard to be harvested), but when they harvest it, there’s a lot of starch. I mean, you would eat it and you would just pucker up. I mean it’s so starchy! It takes over time about two months in storage for this thing to mellow out…what they call mellow out. So the pink lady has to mellow out. So now as you’re getting them in the stores, oh my goodness! The pink lady apple is one of the coolest apples and one of the best tasting apples this time of year. So let’s think pink.

MUSHROOMS (Tuesday, February 10):  You know, I thought it would be fun…the Daytona 500 is just about ready to happen right around the corner, and you know, there speed counts. I mean, you’ve got to be so fast, and you know, between first and second place could be like one-hundredths of a second. So it got me thinking, you know…produce. There are some produce items that grow pretty fast. So I thought it would be fun…let’s start with mushrooms here. You know we all know these beautiful brown top mushrooms, crimini mushrooms, but did you know that mushrooms double in size every single day? That’s right. So it goes from here…well, that’s not quite double. That’s a little more than double. It goes to here in one day. Then it will to go here the next day, and then it goes to here the next day. So in a matter of four days you go from a cute little crimini mushroom to the huge portabella mushroom. Holy Toledo! You never knew they grow so fast. Because they grow so fast, they also go bad very fast, so you should use them quickly.

ASPARAGUS (Wednesday, February 11):  You know, we were talking yesterday about how fast mushrooms grow and probably some of you were amazed they double in size every single day and the reason that’s got me thinking about it is the Daytona 500 is this coming weekend and it started me thinking about things that are fast…things that grow fast. You know, apples take a long time. That pink lady apple I was talking about on Monday – from blossom to harvest, 180 days. Pineapples take like three years to harvest. Well, there are some produce items that are very, very fast. Here’s one of them. Beautiful asparagus. So, how fast does asparagus grow? Right now we’re getting asparagus from Peru and Mexico, and California is just starting out in the desert region, but in the month of May, April/May, when we start getting out of the Delta of California…oh, my goodness! Warm sunny days. Cool nights. How fast does it grow? Get this. An inch every single hour. That’s right. That is fast.

GRAPEFRUIT (Thursday, February 12):  No other month does citrus shine brighter than the middle of winter. It’s a slice of sunshine. And with Valentine’s Day coming up I thought I’d talk about the king of it all – beautiful grapefruit. I love grapefruit. My dad loves grapefruit. Now I know when I first mentioned grapefruit to you, some of you immediately…your faces started grimacing and you started to pucker up. You remember those old grapefruits. Not any more. These are the newer grapefruits. They’re redder. They’re sweeter. They’re better. They have more sugar content, more potassium. In fact, there is ten times more potassium in this grapefruit than in a sports drink. And the sugar? Oh, my goodness! 12 to 1 sugar ratio of Texas grapfruit. So which half is sweeter? Valentine’s Day is coming up, so get really close here because I need to show you something. See this? This is called the blossom end…the stem end. Every fruit that grows on a tree is always sweeter on the blossom end. That’s right. So always give this half to your sweetheart.

STRAWBERRIES (Friday, February 13):  Man, it is such a bummer! You know that freeze they had in Florida a few weeks ago…it just really did a lot of strawberry plants in and strawberries are what I want to talk about today because Valentine’s Day is tomorrow, right? And of course strawberries are the official fruit of Valentine’s Day. You do, of course, know why? Well, check this out - it’s the only fruit shaped like a heart. That’s right. So it’s the official fruit so you are going to pay a little bit more money for it. So we’re getting the strawberries from Mexico, California, and of course, Florida. And that freeze, man, it just did those plants in, and it also affected the blossom. Now every blossom is a piece of fruit, so when you freeze off a blossom, you’re also freezing off a piece of fruit, and that fruit would have been in harvest for now. So even though this is the official fruit of Valentine’s Day, you’re going to pay a little bit more money for it. That’s okay. You’re Valentine deserves a little extravagance.