Produce News for May 17, 2010

LETTUCE (Monday, May 17): Hey, Mia Hamm turns 38 years old today. Women’s soccer superstar and Hall-of-Famer. One of the things she absolutely loves – salad! And all of your salad right now, all of your lettuces, they are moving. What do you mean they’re “moving”? Well, they’re actually moving where they are coming from this time of year. See, during the winter months, all of your iceberg, your leaf lettuces are all coming from the desert growing regions of California, Yuma, Arizona, and then they move up to Huron for about six weeks, but now they are finally making the transition all the way north to Salinas, and this is the time of year where America’s grocery cart goes to Salinas for all of their lettuce. So this is the time of year…during this transition we tend to have a little more volatility in pricing, supply, and also shelf life lettuce. It doesn’t just impact the whole heads of lettuce. It also impacts your fresh cut lettuce. By the way, if you want to prepare your iceberg lettuce, this is all you do. Take it. Slam it down on the table. Pull out that core, and that’s the best, easiest way.
GARLIC (Tuesday, May 18): Got some beautiful garlic, but where in the world is the flavor in this garlic? Holy Toledo! Man, you break this garlic open and you put it in your recipes, and you say, “Honey, did you put garlic in that spaghetti sauce? Did you put garlic on that garlic bread because I don’t taste any garlic on that garlic bread?” Well, this time of year this is what we call old crop garlic. It’s been in storage for like six months. Right – six, eight months. And that means a little less oil in the clove. See, it’s the oil in the clove that has the flavor, and when you’ve been in storage for six months, seven months, eight months, that means a little bit of that oil content in that clove has dissipated. Well, if oil leaves, that means what else leaves? Yes, flavor leaves. So, what do you need to do? Well, there’s a couple things you need to do – whatever the recipe calls for in your garlic, just double the amount and you’ll be A-okay.
TURNIPS (Wednesday, May 19): Hey, this date 1936 Margaret Mitchell published her little tiny novel called Gone with the Wind. So, you’ve got Red Butler, and of course, Scarlet O’Hara, and in the movie Scarlet O’Hara says, “If it weren’t for the turnips and turnip greens, we all would have died during the Civil War.” Well, turnips and turnip greens are still one of the most popular items in the south. Like Beets, there are two parts to this great vegetable. Of course you have the greens, which are actually classified as “spicy greens.” You would use these just as you would any other green. Then you have the round bulb, which is generally how you find 90% of the turnips sold in the United States. Sometimes they just a few inches in diameter. Sometimes, they are huge…the size of a softball. I don’t like the really large ones. They’re not nearly as sweet. Smaller ones are going to be sweeter. Preparing Turnips is actually quite simple. You’re going to cut off the north pole, and you’re going to cut off the south pole. Then get a vegetable peeler, and do your thing. Once peeled, you can slice it. You can chop it. You can dice it. You can boil them and add them into your mashed Potatoes. You can roast them. Oh, roasted turnips – nothing like them!
RHUBARB (Thursday, May 20): Hey, tomorrow there’s a huge rhubarb festival in Pennsylvania, and so I thought I’d write a little bit about rhubarb – very, very popular. Well, at least it was popular with our grandparents or great grandparents. Many parts of the country rhubarb is very popular, grown in back yard gardens. It grows wild in Alaska. It seems to grow wild throughout the Midwest. So this time of the year, you start finding a little bit more rhubarb in the grocery stores. There are a couple things I do want you to look for. Sometimes you will find the rhubarb that has the ends cut off. I want you to be aware of those. There’s a reason why the ends are cut off, and the reason is because they have kept that rhubarb too long and the ends have actually began to decay. So the produce guy goes through and, to clean the stand up, he will cut off the ends to make them look a little bit fresher for you. They’re not fresher at all, just trimmed. So I want you to be aware of that. Ask the produce guy, “Hey, when did you get the rhubarb in?” and maybe ask them when’s the next rhubarb being delivered. That way it will be a little fresher for your strawberry rhubarb pie this time of year.
ONIONS (Friday, May 21): Hey, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born this weekend. I love his Sherlock Holmes. So I thought I’d have a Sherlock Holmes question. Why in the world do onions, doesn’t matter what the onion – it can be green onions, it can be leaks, it can be yellow onions, white onions, red onions – why in the world do they taste sweeter after they have been cooked? Now cooking can be sautéing. They can be baked. They can be roasted. But every time you cook an onion, they get so sweet! Oh, my wife, my beautiful and lovely wife, Julie, she loves baked onions. So here’s the secret. Let me tell you what’s going on with Onions when they are being cooked. There’s two things in here that make up the flavor of that onion. There is sugar. That’s why Onions darken as they are sautéed. Sugar is carbon based, and anything carbon based, when heated, will turn black. But sugar is just one of the components. Number two – sulfuric compounds, or acid. When you cook onions, the acids, the sulfuric compound level actually goes down. With the acid dissipated, the Onion tastes sweeter.