Every time I open Russ Parsons’ book, ‘>How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table, I learn something. His book is so informative without being pedantic (too wordy, drivel type or preachy). He gives you the facts in a couple of different forms, as well as a few recipes, his favorites for that particular fruit or veggie. So it was that I learned we Americans are quite proprietary about our apples. Parsons thinks it’s because of our pioneer heritage – we hold hardiness and plain goodness as really important. We used to dominate the apple market worldwide, but no more. Bet you’d never guess who’s moved into first and second place, would you? (1) China; and (2) Chile. Those were surprises to me.

China barely knew apples 30 years ago, but they now harvest a third of all the apples grown in the world. But, there’s a bit of trouble in river city . . . the Chinese haven’t worked out storage very well, nor have they excelled with apple quality either, so they haven’t totally controlled the market. Yet.

It used to be that Golden & Red Delicious were the “IT” apples here in the U.S. But they’ve slid way down the desirable scale (more on that story below). So varieties like Gala, Fuji, Honey Crisp and Pink Lady have slid up into top types. Apparently Golden Delicious apples used to be a really superior apple – but only when it was allowed to mature on the tree to a golden hue. But the farmers and producers were lured into harvesting and shipping early, when they were still green, and the apples suffered. That’s still the case, unfortunately.

Then there’s the Red Delicious. I can recall that being one of the few eating apples I ever bought from about 1965 to 1995. But something happened to the red variety farming. Because we consumers wanted redder varieties, the farmers began pushing the producers of tree seedlings to bring out redder skinned apples. Guess what? The taste suffered because when skin darkens it becomes more bitter. Now we see red delicious that are almost black in color. Not good. We continued to buy them, because we trusted the variety. I stopped buying them some years ago when I couldn’t seem to find a really crisp one anymore. Every Red Delicious I bought was soft and mealy. We consumers buy fruit too much on color and may not realize the blacker the skin the more bitter the finish.

Finally, apple eaters began complaining, but the farmers didn’t want to hear it. They thought they had a lion by the tail and weren’t about to change their ongoing success. Eventually we did stop buying this old favorite. So the farmers began selling their product abroad. No, they weren’t going to change the breeding. They found exporters, instead. Then, as Parsons puts it, the sleeping giant (China) woke up and began producing big time, so American farmers suddenly lost business. Big time. During the last 15-20 years thousands of apple farmers went out of business. Trees and orchards were upended and farms sold. Some apple farmers had begun growing Pacific varieties (Fuji from Japan and Gala from New Zealand) and when they couldn’t sell them abroad they began selling them here. Voila! We started seeing them in our markets. Now they’re fairly standard issue.

So here are the different varieties he discusses (when I mention below about storage, it’s mostly the cold storage at harvest, not our home refrigerator chilling):

FUJI: a Japanese-bred cross between Red Delicious and Ralls Janet. Holds its shape during cooking, good sauce apple, buttery flavor. Stores well, but don’t buy them past mid-summer.

GALA: Cross between Cox’s Orange Pippin and Golden Delicious. A tart apple, golden with pinkish orange strips. Good for cooking, sauce, buttery flavor with a hint of spice. One of the earliest harvests. Does NOT keep well once purchased, so eat them up right away and stop buying in early Spring.

BRAEBURN: one of the first Southern Hemisphere apples to become popular. Probably a chance seedling from cross-pollination between Lady Hamilton and a Granny Smith. Spicy, tart bite, juicy crisp texture. Good for cooking, stores well and okay to buy into early summer.

JONAGOLD: New York apple, an offspring of Golden Delicious and Jonathan. Tangy, slightly soft, though, when eating out of hand. Not good for storing and don’t buy them after Spring.

EMPIRE: Also a New York apple, mostly available on the East Coast [I’ve never seen an Empire apple here in California]. A cross between McIntosh and Red Delicious. Good flavor, holds its shape in cooking, but buy before the end of Spring.

PINK LADY: From Australia. Crisp and honeyed, pinkish cast, a champagne tartness, and one of the last apples harvested, usually starting in late September. Stores well.

CAMEO: A chance mutation in Washington State from a Red Delicious. Bright red-striped with unique white spots. Good flavor, sweet and mildly tart. Lots of crispness and staying power. Because of its dense flesh, Cameos take longer to cook than most apples.

HONEYCRISP: Crisp and sweet, holds its shape during cooking, red with a golden background [our Costco has them right now in a 12-pack]. Developed at the University of Minnesota, mostly grown in northern Midwest. Remarkable storage characteristics, i.e. does well in long storage. Interesting to me is that scientists have done DNA testing on apples (yes, really) and have discovered the Honeycrisp is not a cross between a Macoun and Honeygold, and they still don’t know its heritage.

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Grown: Washington State, New York, Michigan, California and Pennsylvania

Choosing: look for smooth skins, deep color; yellow apples should be golden, striped apples have a background that’s golden. Look for heavy apples that are firm.

Storing: In the refrigerator, as close to 32 degrees as possible; lots of humidity – best in a perforated plastic bag that will retain water, but not collect it. Your crisper drawer is best. Red Delicious apples are the first ones that turn brown once they’re cut – but all apples will keep for awhile if you put them in acidulated water – lots of water plus fresh lemon juice.

Recipes: Parsons included his favorite baked apple recipe (brown sugar and butter only); also an applesauce made with bourbon, sour cherries and hazelnuts; and a gratin of apples and dried cranberries.

Here on my blog you’ll find apple recipes for the following:

Escarole, Belgian Endive & Apple Salad
Bombay Cheese Ball (best served with apple slices)
Cinnamon & Apple Bread Pudding
Baked Brie & Apples
Caramelized Apple Gingerbread
Grandgirl’s Fresh Apple Cake
Crisp Apple Pudding (my all-time favorite apple dessert)
Apple Buttermilk Scone Round
Applesauce Spice Cake with Caramel Glaze (a real favorite)
Apple Pear Upside Down Cake
Apple & Parsnip Soup
Cranberry Relish with a Zip (I make this, without fail, every Thanksgiving)
Roasted Butternut Squash Soup (includes roasted apples and onions)
Apple, Dried Cherry & Walnut Green Salad
Crostini with Apples, Watercress & Blue Cheese (one of my very favorite appetizers)

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A few years ago my friend Cherrie and I attended a cooking class (at a wonderful venue in San Juan Capistrano that is no longer a cooking school) where the subject was apples. No ordinary apples however, but mostly heirloom ones. About 15 years or so ago my DH and I were with good friends, Jerry & Judy, on a driving trip in New England – in September when the leaves were just beginning to turn – and the first farm stand I saw with a big sign announcing “Fresh Apples,” I yelled and asked if we could stop. Back here in California it was in the high 90’s, but that Fall day in Vermont or New Hampshire, it was c-o-l-d, misting with rain. So East Coast Fall. I promptly bought about a dozen apples, of three varieties. I know one of them was Northern Spy. Another had “black” in the name, but I don’t recall it. The flavors were sublime. Different.

You see, where we live in Southern California, we can get nothing – and I mean nothing – except Golden, Pippin, Granny Smith, Red Delicious, McIntosh, Jonathan, Fuji, Braeburn (my DH’s favorite), and now the new Honey Crisp. Occasionally we can find Gala too. As I’m writing this I’m thinking that for many people that’s a LOT of types. But after years and years of those, and knowing there are others out there that offer very different flavor and texture, I’m in an apple-want state of mind. Actually most of those don’t come from California, but from Washington State. We have no heirlooms at all in our neck of the woods. I don’t believe they’d grow here even if we tried since our climate is only good for a couple of unique varieties (Anna, for one). We had an Anna apple in the backyard of our last house. The new owners tore down all of our gorgeous fruit trees (about 5) and put in an expansive cement-lined dog run. Makes me sad just thinking about it because the Anna tree produced some really nice apples.

So anyway, back to that cooking class. We tasted apples of a plethora of types. All very different. And from that class I still make two of the recipes – the Apple, Blue Cheese, Watercress & Honey Crostini, and the Caramelized Apple Gingerbread. There were another 5 or 6 recipes from that class, but they weren’t as memorable as the above.

The cooking class included information from the apple supplier, Applesource in Chapin, Illinois. You can order all their products online. We sampled 12 varieties that day. I made notes that the Calville Blanc was a French dessert apple (soft, good for Tarte Tatin), that Jonalicious is soft, juicy, high sugar, though. And that I liked the Macoun (like a McIntosh). And I knew I liked Northern Spy. The quote included about that apple was: “There’s no pie like a Spy Pie.”  But there were other types: Matsu, Pink Pearl, Ashmead’s Kernel (tart, firm), Cox’s Orange Pippin (very popular in the U.K., crisp, special aftertaste, but also soft, unlike our American Pippins), Esopus Spitzenberg (supposedly the parent apple of a Jonathan).

So recently I suggested to my friend Cherrie that we share an apple purchase from Applesource. The boxes arrived about 2+ weeks ago, and they’ve been stored in our wine cellar ever since. Every few days I pop down there and pick out a new variety to try. All heirlooms. Many different types than the ones we sampled at the class. All enjoyable. We’re only had four of the 12 so far. And they were on the pricey side, what with shipping and all. The idea (I thought) was that if we found some we really, really liked, maybe I’d order a bigger box of one or more of them. I might still do that, but I must remember that the shipping takes the price way up there in the stratosphere. You really want to be an apple connoisseur to do that. What we ordered was an “Antique Sampler.” They also have a (regular) Sampler of 12 too. The types change with whatever varieties happen to be ripe at the time you order or they ship.

We also ordered their cookbook. I haven’t yet made anything from it, but it’s a nice book and full of many different kinds of dishes, all using apples in one way or another. On Monday I’m going to write up a different kind of apple post – more info about apples in general. So stay tuned if you are an apple lover like I am.

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Actually, I’m very blessed to have a husband who LIKES grocery shopping. In fact, he will always do my shopping for me if I just tell him what I need. (For those of you who are new to my blog, my hubby’s parents used to own a gourmet grocery market in Ocean City, New Jersey, when he was growing up, so his interest in food started way back.) Anyway, we’re having a big dinner party here at our house tomorrow (more recipes will be coming up), so I created the grocery list a couple of days ago, and he happily went off to about 4 different stores to buy everything I needed. Yesterday morning I started working on some of the menu items – to get them done ahead of time – so I’m not so stressed tomorrow.

But, we always have a discussion about the list before he leaves. I’ve learned to be VERY specific. With brand names, ounce-sized cans or bottles, shapes, colors or labels, with basil or without, tubes. It’s taken some years to “train” him. Yes, it’s true. But I luv him and am very appreciative that he does this chore for me, week after week. (I’ve told you before, I have a wonderful husband – he even does all the dishes too.) But there are mistakes. Maybe not every week, but often enough. Some have been funny. Mostly he’s good about taking something back. Sometimes not very, especially if I haven’t been specific ENOUGH.

A couple of weeks ago I asked him to find some cans of shoe peg corn (for the Corn & Black Bean Salad we had at our friends’ home in Oregon). He couldn’t find it. Nor did he know what it was (I did explain about it before he left, and he phoned at least twice to ask more questions about it). Three stores didn’t have it. (I finally found it at an independent grocery store the following week – it is a little elusive – but now I have two cans on the pantry shelf.) Last week I made Blueberry Pumpkin Muffins, and discovered I had no canned pumpkin. Therefore canned pumpkin (2 cans) was on my grocery list. Without calling me, Dave made a management decision and bought the only thing he could find – Pumpkin Pie Mix. Oh, dear. I really hated to tell him I couldn’t use that.

He actually paid me a huge compliment when he said “honey, you’re such a whiz at baking, I knew you could make this work, since this is all I could find.” But when it comes to the chemistry of baking, I decided no, I couldn’t adapt it. Maybe I could have researched on the ‘net to find some kind of alterations to adapt a pumpkin pie (using pie mix vs.. canned pumpkin) but for muffins I didn’t want to take that chance. Besides, the spices were wrong in the pie mix. So, those had to go back. I phoned our local independent market; sure enough, they had it, thankfully. Dave happily went to pick it up for me. He paid me an even greater compliment this morning when he said he’s learned an enormous amount about food and cooking from having to do the shopping.

So if you watch the video, I mean no disparity against male grocery shoppers, or readers of grocery lists. Just some good humored jibing. I laughed out loud. Thanks to my friend Chris H, who sent me the link to the YouTube video.

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To tell you the honest truth, I’ve never been much of a plum fan. I’m not saying I don’t eat them (none so far this summer, actually). I do eat them, but not often. I don’t seek them out is what I’m really saying, but I know that’s a mistake. After reading the chapter on plums in Russ Parsons’ book, How to Pick a Peach, I’ll be on the lookout for some specific varieties (Greengage primarily, or Wickson). My parents had a red plum tree in our backyard. A very prolific plum tree, actually. And I can recall, as a mid-age young girl reaching up to the low-hanging branches to taste the first fruit of the season and being sorely disappointed because of the sour skin. Mostly my mother just stewed the fruit with a little sugar and water. I have no recollections of a plum pie. Or cake. Or anything else with plums, for that matter. Just stewed plums. Maybe that’s another reason I didn’t develop a fondness for them.

Even I have noticed lots of plum varieties – yellow plums, green plums, red plums, scarlet plums, purple plums, and almost black plums. But by and large, most plum varieties taste the same, despite the variations on skin color. Mostly it’s just a sweet and tart flavor. The Elephant Heart is an herbaceous type, and the Wickson contains a golden honey tang. The greengage is the sweetest.

Did you know that plum trees are promiscuous? Yup. They cross-pollinate with wild abandon, so Parsons says. Yet the early varieties were mostly developed by the great Luther Burbank. Even though we have countless schools here in California named after Luther Burbank, I knew very little about him until I read his brief story at Wikipedia. With no more than a 5th grade education, he was fascinated with nature, plants and flowers, and eventually moved from Massachusetts to California. Then he began, in earnest, to hybridize a variety of vegetables and fruit, most notably the plum. [Just as an aside, Burbank developed the Russet potato – it was originally called the Russet Burbank potato, on which McDonald’s relies for its famous french fries. He also developed the Shasta daisy, the Fire poppy, the July Elberta peach, the Flaming Gold nectarine, the Freestone peach, the white blackberry AND both the Santa Rosa plum and the Wickson plum. Burbank was not highly regarded in his time because he didn’t use accepted scientific practices – note-taking particularly – in his research – he merely wanted the results and didn’t care a whit about how he got there.] Burbank actually developed 113 new varieties of plums and prunes. Amazing. He died in 1926.

Since then, another agricultural scientist named Floyd Zaiger took up Burbank’s banner. He’s the guy who crossed the plum and apricot, to create the pluot. He also developed the Aprium, which has a more apricot-ness than the pluot, which is more plummy. There are several varieties of these – the Dapple Dandy, the Dinaosaur Egg, Flavor King and Flavor Supreme.

Growing: Most plums are grown in California.

Choosing: Find the more deeply colored, shiny and firm, but not hard. Don’t worry about any of the white powder on the skin – that’s normal, called a “natural bloom.”

Storing: If unripe, leave out at room temp for a day or two, then refrigerate. If you chill them before they’re ripe the quality suffers.

In the book Parsons has detailed recipes for a Spiced Plum Ice Cream and a Cornmeal Buckle with Plums.

A year ago: Summer Shrimp Salad (very refreshing dinner type salad)
Two years ago: Grandgirl’s Fresh Apple Cake (oh my, yes, delicious, a Paula Deen recipe I believe)

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On our recent driving trip through California, Oregon and Washington, we saw a multitude of roadside stands hawking cherries. Bings. A few Rainiers. The season is short, as we probably all know. It wasn’t always that way, apparently. Back in the day (probably the 1800’s) a plentiful variety ripened at different times. But somebody, in their infinite wisdom (?) decided it would be better to choose one variety and have them all harvest at the same time (more efficient . . . they decided). Hence the Bing. Our favorite national cherry.

Well, except in Michigan, where they grow about 240 MILLION pounds of sour cherries. But would you believe that 239 million of them end up in cans? Yup. Only about a million of them end up being eaten fresh, and only in Michigan.

Most cherries are grown on the West Coast (Washington, Oregon and California), and they make up about 65% of the marketable cherries in the U.S. I like how Russ Parsons (all this data comes from his book, How to Pick a Peach) describes the flavor:

• [A Bing] “is about as good as any cherry variety that has ever been grown – crisp on the outside, with a melting center that saves it from being crunchy; dark and sweet, with a nice tart backbone.”

It’s the “tart backbone” that I like. But anyway, so the legend goes, the Bing variety was found in 1875 on the farm of eastern Washington agricultural pioneer Seth Lewelling – by a Chinese workman named Ah Bing. Isn’t that just too cute? Now, there are 4 cherry categories (Bigarreaux (or Black, of which Bing is one), Dukes, Hearts and Sours. Hearts and Dukes are very soft cherries (can’t be shipped) and exist mostly in home gardens. Blacks (Bing, Royal Ann and Rainier) dominate the fresh cherry market. Royal Ann & Rainiers are the ones used to make maraschino cherries.

Interestingly, the Japanese are huge consumers of American cherries. And the “gold rush” of cherry farming is getting the first fruit of the season to the Asian market – jet-freighted to Japan and Hong Kong, where they charge 10x as much as they do here. And marketers, doing what they do, have begun growing Bings further south where the weather patterns aren’t always cherry partners. You see, cherries need at least 700 hours of winter temps at or below 45 degrees. Now THAT is a little factlet you can pop out at your next dinner party, right? But because of the more temperate climate in California, sometimes that doesn’t happen. Without the winter nap, Parsons calls it, the cherry trees simply don’t have enough energy to produce fruit. The other factlet is that cherries don’t like rain (they crack and split). And because winters in California can be rainy, more risk is involved each winter when California farmers attempt to get an early ripening.

In 1988, though, the University of California developed a new cherry – the Brooks (a cross between a Rainier and a Burlat, an heirloom variety). It is more resistant to warm weather flaws and can be picked about 10 days earlier than Bings. As a result of many California farmers shifting to the Brooks, California now grows more than a third of fresh cherries in the U.S.

One of Russ Parsons recommendations is that if you have a batch of cherries that are just barely past their prime, add a nip of balsamic vinegar to them when cooking. That will balance out the flavor. Don’t overdo it, though.

Choosing Cherries: sort through them if you can and choose the darkest – mahogany red – if possible. Make sure they’re shiny. A matte color means they’re over the hill. No shriveling or wilting, of course. Doubles and spurs mean they’ve had too much heat on the tree.

Storing: Plastic bag, coldest part of the refrigerator. Don’t wash until ready to eat. They’ll last 2-3 weeks.

In Parsons’ book he includes 3 recipes: Cold Spiced Cherry Soup, a Red Wine-Poached Cherry Dessert, and Cherry-Almond Cobbler.

A year ago: Supposedly a rendition of KFC’s Cole Slaw (not one of my better recipes)
Two years ago: Sicilian Tuna Salad (a real favorite of mine)

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If you’ve been reading my blog for very long, you already know that I am married to a sailor. He’s a pleasure sailor, not a sea captain-type, but he’s been one since he was 6 years old, when he found his first abandoned leaky rowboat floating in the marshes after a big spring storm in his hometown, Ocean City, New Jersey. He hid the derelict boat in a tiny inlet on one of the marshy islands and waded to it at low tide. With no oars for the rowboat, he couldn’t get very far. Finally, his father heard about his somewhat risky adventure, and figuring that if his son was that determined, he ought to buy him a real rowboat (a 12-foot Bateau) at age 7.

When I met Dave he owned a Catalina 27, and shortly after we married we bought an Endeavor 38, a sloop. I wanted it mostly to entertain on it. He wanted it to sail, of course. In either case, it’s a beauty still, I’ll admit, even though I don’t hardly sail. I get seasick, you see, if I get into open ocean. But Dave enjoys going to the boat regularly, kept at a dock in San Diego (even as a double amputee he’s quite agile at it). He sails for the day, or a jaunt of a few days with his sailing buddies.

My hubby reads sailing magazines like I read ones about cooking. And rarely do the two interests intersect. His magazine articles are full of words like “floating sheeting-point tracks” or “wing keel.” Sounds mostly like Greek to me still, even after 25+ years of marriage to a sailor. But one day recently Dave wanted to tell me about a story he’d just read, written by Deborah Shapiro (pictured above in her galley, with some of her on-board dishes) in the recent issue of Cruising World (May, 2009). First he pointed to the gorgeous photo of this boat, the Northern Light, and began telling me about the couple who sail it. The boat is a 40-foot cutter-rigged steel ketch (see, more of those words again – see vocabulary at the end of this post).

That’s the kind of photo that sends chills up my spine. But sends thrills up Dave’s spine, and those of most saltwater sailors. “Rail down” (in the water), it’s called. See how the boat is tilted, the wind filling the sails and leaning it over on its side. Sailors love to have pictures of their boats rail down. That’s macho, you know. But it makes my stomach lurch as I look at it. There, at the helm, is Rolf Bjelke in his yellow slicker. Likely his wife Deborah, the first mate, took the photo.

They met in Fiji in 1980. Rolf is Scandinavian, and was sailing his boat, obviously stopping in Fiji. At the time Deborah (from the U.S. of A) was a novice at small boats. But she was willing to learn. A year or so later she suggested they sail to the Arctic as a “training trip.” [Can you imagine – sailing to the Arctic as a TRAINING trip?] Yes, well, off they went. Some months later on their sailing journey, Deborah had not jumped ship, nor had Rolf put her ashore at the first port. They happened to be shopping in Boston. She spotted some Corelle dinnerware. You know Corelle, right? The glass dishes that don’t scratch and don’t BREAK! Having used some grungy scratched plastic dishes since 1967, my guess is that Rolf didn’t much care about how his dishes looked. Nor did he believe the Corelle dishes were unbreakable. The salesclerk demonstrated – she flung the plate “like a Frisbee” to a tile floor. It landed unbroken. So purchase them they did, and off they went, continuing their odyssey (Arctic to Antarctica). And that began the nearly continuous sailing they’ve done ever since. Rolf and Deborah are now accomplished documentary filmmakers, photographers and authors. Put them in port somewhere and they get itchy to get back into cold-cold water somewhere, in places most people would never see, could never see, except from a boat.

Deborah, along with the Corelle dishes (and a few other dishes purchased along the way – some rimmed china soup bowls especially acquired for a favorite Swedish pea soup that must be grazed through a little jot of mustard placed on the rim, plus a couple of ceramic mugs acquired in 2000) have logged over 22,500 miles aboard Northern Light. Rolf has skippered Northern Light across 214,000 miles (equal to the distance from Earth to the moon). Whew. I’m tremendously impressed.

In 1989 Rolf & Deborah actually sailed to the Antarctic peninsula and let the boat get frozen in the fast ice (that’s why they need a steel-hulled boat) for the entire winter. If you look at the photo of the boat above, just to the right of Rolf you can see a roundish shape – that’s a clear bubble skylight that allows Rolf & Deborah to peek up into the landscape without opening hatches which would let in the frigid sub-Arctic air. It was after that winter they wrote two books about the experience.

They wrote Time on Ice: A Winter Voyage to Antarctica as a shared endeavor, each chapter penned by one, then the other. Deborah wrote Letters from the Sea too. Perhaps the subjects aren’t for every reader, but I like Deborah’s writing style, so I may try to find one or both at my local used bookstore. Even though there will be lots of words and phrases I won’t understand. And since I’d like to know what they did, stuck down below on their boat for months on end, frozen in the ice. Scrabble? Solitaire? Reading? I mean, how many books can you really take for a winter stuck in ice? Surely they didn’t cook a lot. Couldn’t waste either food or the propane to cook it with. Write? – well yes, they obviously “worked” some too. And likely cuddled a lot to keep warm. My curiosity is piqued.

So here’s a salute to the Bjelkes and to Corelle. The dishes are still being made, and I’d guess Deborah & Rolf are still using theirs. Now I want to know what kind of hand cream Deborah uses!

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Photos reproduced by permission from Deborah Shapiro and Cruising World magazine. Yes, I did get permission from Deborah – she responded to a special kind of email called sailmail (messages mostly read by marine radio) as they are sailing somewhere out in the wild blue ocean, nowhere near an internet connection. But do remember, even if you’re confined on a sailboat frozen in the Arctic, some people still like nice dishes. I can appreciate that feeling. For the record, I don’t own any Corelle dishes. On our boat we have some clunky, heavy duty plastic dishes that have knife scratches just like Rolf’s did. And, in case you’re interested, Rolf & Deborah’s ongoing articles will be in upcoming issues of Cruising World. I’ll be reading them. And yes, we have a photo of our boat rail down too. And, I really have learned a lot of nautical language even though I pretend I haven’t.

Nautical Vocabulary Lesson: (mostly defined by my husband):
Ketch – two-masted sailboat, with foremast taller than the aftermast, stationed ahead of the rudder head (fore means toward the front of the boat or the pointy end as my hubby likes to tell novices; aft, or after- means toward the back, the stubby end; the rudder is what steers the boat)
Sloop – single-masted sailboat with sails both fore and aft of the mast
Galley– a kitchen on board a boat (but you knew that one already, right?)
Cutter-rigged (ketch) – a sailboat rigged for heavy weather sailing
Floating sheeting-point tracks – adjustable points on the boat deck for controlling the sails
Wing(ed)-keel – a winged-shaped form at the bottom of the keel (the keel weights the boat AND keeps it from tipping over when you’re rail down among other things)

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In the newest issue of Cooking Light, Michael Ruhlman (a food writer of the first order) wrote an article about the new ingredients, dishes and techniques that have the attention of foodies, mostly the leaders of the top chefs. And starting off the lineup was a word I didn’t even recognize:

1. Chaat. Okay? Not chai (tea). Chaat. It’s Indian street food – a variety of small plates, using a mixture of spicy and acidic, salt and sweet, soft and crunchy. According to Krishnendu Ray, assistant professor of food studies at New York University, “chaats carry lively, fresh flavors, overflowing with chiles, cilantro, coconut, and tamarind.” An example in the article suggested boiled cubed potatoes with a topping of spring onions, lime and tamarind sauce. Hmmm. Or a salad of avocados, strawberries, plums, cucumbers and pineapple with a squeeze of lemon or lime and a sprinkling of chaat masala (Indian spice blend).

2. Heritage Meats. Those derived from old strains of rare breeds of livestock (which produces better intra-muscular marbling and enhances taste). Whole Foods is one source. Others: Heritage Foods USA, Hoye Brothers Farm in Missouri (no website, but email: hoyebrothersfarm at gmail dot com), La Cense Beef in Montana (grass fed), Lava Lakes Lamb (Idaho grass-fed); and Local Harvest (a web directory of small sustainable farms that lets you search for heritage meat purveyors in your area. My only experience, really, is with the Berkshire (Kurobuta) ham I ordered last Spring. It was stupendous. I can’t say enough superlatives about it.

3. Agave Nectar. A substance much like honey, but is the sap from the agave plant. Its most notable feature is that it’s a low-glycemic carb. It’s sweeter than sugar, so you can use less (generally 25% less than sugar). Comes in three varieties: light, amber, and raw (the latter two taste more like maple syrup). Most supermarkets carry this now (at least they do in my area).

4. Allspice & Nutmeg. Oh, good. I like those a lot. But the new twist, if you can call it that, is to use it in savory dishes rather than sweet (like gnocchi, game meat, pork). All of these ideas are coming from the exposure to world cuisines.

5. Heirloom Beans. Why, you ask, are heirloom beans so popular? Experts say they taste better. Some varieties actually have a kind of potato-like consistency, or creamy. Beans like borlotti, Christmas limas, runner beans. You may have to grow your own, or seek out farmer’s markets to find these. They’re not all that common . . . yet.

In the article there were a couple of other trends to watch: pressure cooker and induction cooking, plus natural food preservation (dry curing, salting, pickling).

All information above from Cooking Light, March 2009. Photo at top of borlotti beans from beanieswholefoods.co.uk

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I know, I know, I know. This blog is mostly about food. But I read an interesting piece in the PC Magazine Digital (the first subscription mag that I’ve started receiving in digital format only – no longer mailed to me in hard copy).

The article, written by John Dvorak, was just riveting. What caught my eye first was the title – about Error 404. Now to you who read this blog for its food content, you might never know what a 404 is! It’s when a link on a website doesn’t work. When it doesn’t work, most websites have a built-in page that announces to you that it’s a error 404. It’s a page template that pops up if anybody accesses something where the chain is broken. So, okay, what’s that got to do with anything, you ask?

John Dvorak was citing some examples of how 404 is going to plague our lives in coming decades (or whatever further error code, that’s currently called a 404). He told the story about reading a very interesting editorial on the London Times’ website within days of 9/11, and had sent the link to lots and lots of people. Was still sending the link to people recently. Then, boom, suddenly the link is an error 404. The Times (one would assume) finally thought it was time to take off lots of stuff from their server. It’s 7+ years later, so why not? John lamented that he’d never printed a hard copy of that editorial. Then, he also mentioned trying to contact a book publisher (I presume, about the use of some quote) from a particular book printed in 1964. The company, the publisher, is no longer in business. Who owns the rights to the book? He doesn’t know. Nobody seems to know. (Quoting from that book could be an iffy situaion if he’s an ethical writer, and I think he is.)

So, taking this one step further, he projects that in 10 years school children (at least here in the U.S.) will be reading all their course material, textbooks, etc. on a Kindle. Books, as a hard copy, won’t even exist. Will those books, or other digital books even be accessible 10 years later? How would people in 2050 quote from a digital book written in 2009, or 2019? Will people be ABLE to access any of the digital media currently in use? My question, how will the Library of Congress keep digital books, I wonder? If you’re interested in the general subject, I think you can get to Dvorak’s editorial – at least I was provided with the link to it.

That got me to thinking about the archiving of so MUCH material that exists only on the internet. Who is keeping all this stuff? (In actuality, it exists on servers and computers ’round the world, computers that will age, deteriorate and die at some point, or are stored with companies that will fold, or go out of business.) In the year 2109, will there even be a record of what was on the internet today (probably not – only things deemed “important” by some people). Printing out hard-copy pages from the internet today – – – in 100 years those pages will be disintegrating. Saving files to a CD – well, will computers in 100 years be able to read a CD? Probably not since people can’t even use 5-inch floppies anymore. Remember those? When I’m gone, my blog will be nothing but internet dust. Even for my great grandchildren who will likely be the only people interested in reading it.

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There are these things that go around the blog world now and then – called a meme. A blogger starts one and tags it to others. Usually it’s a list of questions and the person is supposed to answer them, then pass the torch on to other bloggers. Nobody’s ever sent me a meme, thank goodness, as I don’t know that I’m all that good at it, or that I even want to do them. But I was reading David Liebovitz’s list of 25+ random things. He didn’t stop at 25, but at 89. Whew. I’ll be lucky to get close to 25, I think. He talked about lots of different subjects, most of them NOT about food, but about him, the person, his character, his politics, his likes and dislikes. If you aren’t a follower of David Liebovitz, the list might not be as interesting as it was to me, having read his blog for a couple of years. He actually thinks he’s not a very interesting person, and wonders why people contact him, want to meet him, etc.

But, composing a list of random things? Well, maybe I can do this one. Here goes:

1. I don’t actually like to cook every meal, every day, day in and day out. My hubby fixes breakfast, although at the moment we’re on a new breakfast menu, so I really do all the work at other times of the week, he just kind of puts it on plates and does a minor amount of cooking to get it there. And we go out to eat about 1-2 times a week for lunch, and at least once a week for dinner.

2. I miss having a dog. But we’re not sure we want the commitment of having one again.

3. I don’t like organ meat. Except pâté.

4. I’m actually quite good with computers. But then I get confounded with some simple problem now and then. I have to sit quietly and think it through – using logical reasoning – to figure it out. Sometimes I’m not successful. I’ve never had any real computer training . . . just picked it up by doing and reading. I did all the computer training for the staff at the ad agency I co-owned, and did all the network administration.

5. I am an only child.

6. Basically I’m a very shy person. Walking into a room full of strangers, where I’m supposed to interact with them, is very intimidating. Unless I’ve been asked to speak to the group about something that I know or understand well. Isn’t that funny? I can do public speaking, no problem.

7. I detest filing, and my home office shows it. That’s why you’ve never seen a picture of it!

8. I’m really, really lucky – my husband enjoys grocery shopping and doing dishes!

9. I don’t really enjoy working out (I do it, but I’m saying it’s not fun), which is why I’m always battling calories in versus calories out. And losing the battle.

10. Once upon a time I lived in Washington D.C. and worked as a clerk/secretary at the Department of Agriculture. Very boring. I had the choice of two jobs – that one, or another that made more money, but the requirement was that I would have to cut the heads off of a whole lot of lab mice (with special mice-decapitating scissors) every day, pouring the blood into a vial, in prep for the mouse and its blood to be tested for various things. No way could I do that. Fortunately I moved about 8 months later.

11. I’m fed up with politicians. Period. I really don’t care which party they belong to, I think most of them are corrupt. Their definitions of honesty, morality and ethics differ from mine.

12. I rarely read the newspaper anymore. Too depressing, period. Nobody writes any good news anymore. Besides, I don’t really trust that the news is accurate, anyway. We get a newspaper every day (my husband reads it, and I do occasionally). On Sundays I read the travel section and Parade. Sometimes the arts and entertainment section. That’s it. I do, however, listen to the radio (news and news/talk) when I’m out driving, so I do get news and commentary that way.

13. I don’t eat much fish anymore unless it’s wild caught. I’m very concerned about what we, as consumers, are doing to the natural order of things because we crave and clamor for all kinds of fish, all year around, everywhere. Therefore, fish producers scramble to raise more and more, using questionable feeding practices and confined pens (here I’m talking about salmon and shellfish mostly). Same thing goes for beef, pork and chicken. I’m buying more and more organically grown meat, too.

14. I never have enough hours in the day to do the things I want to do.

15. I have a luv-affair with my Tivo. I record (not in any particular order) The Closer, Dog Whisperer, Little People, Big World, Barefoot Contessa, CBS’s Sunday Morning (a basic “good news” program), Oprah, Nova, Masterpiece Theater Classics, Steven Raichlen’s Primal Grill, among other things. Also Meerkat Manor, but it’s not “on” at the moment.

16. When I go to sleep at night I plug into my ipod, which has a bunch of (radio) podcasts on it, everything from book reviews, high tech talk shows, to a few food programs too. I usually fall asleep within 10-15 minutes and the ipod shuts off by itself when the program is finished. This morning at the gym I listened to a speech about Andrew Jackson (from a new book about him).

17. I don’t text message. But I do have a cell phone which gets used mostly when I’m away from home. We have a multi-level home, and we have 6 cordless phones in different places in the house. And we have 3 televisions (actually 4, but we never watch the one in the bedroom). I have two computers and my husband has one which he rarely uses.

18. I wish I could write a novel. But my mind just can’t wrap itself around creating a fictitious story.

19. Some years ago I started an investment club, and have learned a whole LOT of stuff as a result of that, but I’m very disenchanted with what’s going on in corporate American business these days (those companies that are public ones) and the things they hide. Makes me wonder whether there are any companies out there running ethical businesses. Business ethics seem to be a thing of the past. Makes me question whether we as individual investors should really entrust companies with our money. Their track records of late haven’t been very good.

20. Celebrities should never be revered as knowing more than any other average joe. Why do celebrities think they know more about politics or politicians than I do? And why do so many of us ordinary people give them credence – mostly we’re far too gullible or star-struck.

21. I have zero credit card debt. (I have credit cards -two of them – but they get paid off each month in full.) And I think what the credit card companies out there have done to encourage people, young and old, with good credit and bad, from all walks of life, to spend up to unrealistic credit limits, is just criminal. Equally criminal are the individuals who have run up the bills and now think they shouldn’t have to pay it back. We, the steady payers, end up paying for those lenders’ bad judgment and the individual greed. Same thing goes for shoplifters – it angers me so much that we, as shoppers, end up paying more for products because stores don’t catch or don’t prosecute shoplifters.

22. I don’t believe in global warming. I came to that conclusion after reading Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear. Although it’s a fictional story, the subject has to do with global warming and the statistics and tables in the book are convincing, and factual.

23. I don’t believe I have ever re-read a book. Except the Bible. And I own hundreds of books (that I’ve read) that collect dust, but I like to look at them. I now own a Kindle (an electronic book reader device) and am trying to buy all works of fiction on it. Cookbooks? Nope. I want to see them in an actual book.

24. When I went to college, I decided to get a degree in Business (a B.B.A – Bachelor’s in Business Administration)). It was mostly a male-dominated arena then, but I was honored to receive an award as Student of the Year in my graduating year from the School of Business. I still have the plaque for it. I went to a small college, California Western University (no longer in existence), in San Diego. Oh, and I graduated from college in 3 years. Most semesters I took 21 units. And I worked part time too.

25. My very first job out of college was in a Personnel Dept. (now they’re called Human Resources Depts.) of a San Diego department store chain, as a trainer. Mostly I gave 2-day seminars on how to be a salesperson, and how to use the (now) antiquated cash register.

26. I really enjoy classical music. I took piano lessons from age 7-14. Then from 14-16 I took lessons on a huge church pipe organ, taught by a very aesthetic music professor at a private boy’s school in Newport, Rhode Island, where my parents and I lived for that 2-year period. My favorite composers? Bach, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Mahler. And for about 10 years my DH, Dave, and I sang in our 100+ voice church choir. He sings tenor and I sing 2nd alto. We are not singing in the choir at the moment, but want to return to it at some point.

27. I’m a practicing, believing Christian. And in case you didn’t know, prayer absolutely WORKS.

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There is no doubt in my mind that Abraham Lincoln is smiling proudly that so many people are more aware of his Presidency than ever before. That more people are reading biographies about him than ever before. And that roses named after him are blooming right now too. My DH went out into the rain to cut this rose to fragrance our kitchen. I dashed immediately to my photo area and snapped a few pictures of this rose. There’s nothing like raindrops to make one admire a rose.

A year ago: Red Cabbage with Apples

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