Tag Archives: apples

Umami and the Apple in the Tomato Slayer’s Eye

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oscarmushroom

“Stop embarrassing yourself.”

We have made it through an entire tomato season having only woken up a handful of times to a mauled tomato on the living room floor. This is progress. I think the progress is mostly due to the habit we’ve developed of hiding our tomatoes like Easter eggs rather than any real rehabilitation on the part of Oscar (a.k.a. The Tomato Slayer). But progress nonetheless.

The other day, while Oscar was busy seducing the top of a soy sauce bottle, I hatched a new theory about his unnatural tomato love. Maybe he is so nuts about them because of umami, that mysterious fifth taste that English has hard time capturing in words. Most people say it corresponds to savory, the taste of meat and MSG and ketchup (and…tomatoes?!) A quick Google search had me feeling smug; there were multiple reports of carnivorous housecats attacking non-meat items that are rich in that umami taste, particularly mushrooms. Oscar has never shown a particular taste for mushrooms, even the ones that I grew on my windowsill, but he does have a discriminating palate, so I decided to rehydrate one of our fancy Chinese black mushrooms and run a little experiment. Perhaps I had finally plumbed the secrets of the Tomato Slayer’s inner workings.

But the response was… Continue reading →

The Summer’s Dirty Dozen: Healthy Food You Don’t Want to Serve Your Kids

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Every spring, just in time for summer, the Environmental Working Group, a D.C. non-prof that conducts research on public food safety, publishes lee marvinits Dirty Dozen list of produce most tainted with pesticides and other poisons.  They’ve trademarked “Dirty Dozen,” which I think is funny and makes me think of Lee Marvin, who strikes me as the kind of man who never ate a single vegetable.

I can see Lee eating an apple though, just ripping into it as a prop while reading somebody the bitterest of riot acts, and that only adds to my disappointment that apples are 2014’s most pesticide-laden fruit.  Pesticide poisoned, actually, since the primary pesticide found on 99% of the sampled apples was diphenylamine, a poison banned by the EU and for which the WHO has determined 0.02 parts per million to be the upper limit for safe ingestion by humans.

Our own EPA has designated 0.10 ppm to be the acceptable limit. Continue reading →

What Does This Apple Say About Me?: Hunting the Dunlap Apple

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dunlap's aurora

Say my name, say my name...

We’re deep into apple season now, and over the past few weeks, as Jason and I gulped big glasses of cider with dinner and munched on Empire apples from our farm share, a snippet of a lecture I once heard on the radio kept coming back to me. The speaker was an apple crusader by the name of Creighton Lee Calhoun Jr. I use the term “crusader” rather than, say, “enthusiast,” because Mr. Calhoun is a man with a mission: to save as many antique apple varieties as possible in the name of genetic diversity.

Back in the 19th century, the apple scene in America was very different. It was brimming with apple varieties, some good for eating, some for cooking, some for making applejack. And when I say brimming, I’m not talking about the few dozen that you’re probably able to name—there were thousands of varieties, over 16,000 by some estimations, in the late 1800s. But as family farms gave way to mass agriculture, all but the heartiest, most transportable, most eye-pleasing varieties were gradually lost. There are still about 3,000 varieties, but the vast majority of them are like endangered species, available only from specialty orchards.*

To illustrate his point, Mr. Calhoun often gives audiences a list of extinct apple varieties and, without telling them what they are, asks them to scan the list for their last names. That’s how genetically diverse American apples once were: almost every family could claim their own apple variety. I was dying to know—did my family have an apple? Had it survived? But since I’d heard Calhoun’s speech on the radio rather than in person, I didn’t have a copy of his extinct varieties. So I headed down the Google rabbit hole, trying to discover my ancestral apples.

Coming from farm stock and having been raised in Johnny Appleseed territory, I thought my chances were pretty good. Of my four grandparents, two had come from farming families, though one of these seemed more likely to have a tobacco variety named after them. My paternal grandfather’s line, with their farm in Cadiz, Ohio, was the most likely to hit the apple jackpot, I thought, and carried the bonus of sharing my maiden name, so I started hunting for Dunlap apples.

Weirdly, I felt a little nervous while I was searching. What if Dunlap apples were lousy? What would that say about us as a clan? I doubted that Mr. Calhoun would agree with this line of thought, but what if your family apple was like a horoscope? Continue reading →

Salty Sweet Winter Squash & Apples

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I love winter squash.  Summer squashes like zucchini wear me out pretty quick, but winter squashes have stamina.  They’re nutty, buttery, have heft.  They’re full of all the B vitamins and omega 3s and fiber.  They’re a good source of folate.  I don’t know what folate does, but I trust that it’s good, and I’m okay with just eating winter squash and trusting it’ll hold down the folate fort for me.

I found a winter squash recipe at the Union Square farmers market last week.  As best as I can tell, the Natural Gourmet Institute next to the Flatiron Building is laying claim to it.  It rocks.  You should eat it.

You need squash, apples, thyme (fresh, if possible), honey, salt & pepper, butter.

First, get your squashes, let’s say 6 cups-worth or so.  That worked out to be 2 medium-to-small specimens for me.  You can use Acorn, Butternut, whatever is on hand, but you want them hard and you want them colorful.  Unless you are John Ford or Dorothea Lange, color is always good. Continue reading →