Jakob's Bowl

Strange Fruit 2011: A Tahitian Surprise

When the young woman in the booth offered me a taste of her Tahitian Pummelos, and tried to entice me by telling me it tasted like margarita mix, I was skeptical, but the juicy pale green flesh looked tasty - besides, I had never had any pummelo before. Sure enough, that's exactly what it tasted like, but even better since it was lower in acid and a bit more moderate in its sweetness. She was unable to tell me how to judge a pummelo's ripeness, but I took a chance anyway. Even though it was densely seeded and very pithy, there was plenty of delicious, fragrant flesh. While I thought it would make some great margaritas it was added to our salad of bitter greens, Mandarinquat slices and Fuju Persimmon.

Mini Me Citrus

These little puppies are not much bigger than a silver dollar and I found them today in a market, believe it or not, here in Seattle. If you are thinking that they are Pixie Tangerines, we are about three months too early for those gems. These wonderfully fragrant, tiny citrus are Seedless Kishu Mandarins from California - I believe that they are the variety used to create the Mandarinquats I bought at the San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market a few weeks back. They are thin skinned and easy to peel - and their intense fragrance lingers on the fingers. They are believed to be one of the oldest varieties of citrus grown in Japan, and originally hail from China. Sweet without being cloying and possessing a low level of acidity, they are quite addictive. I will be making another stop tomorrow.

Filler Up: What's In Your Meat? 2

As I sit through yet another Taco Bell commercial, I'm not sure whether to laugh or cry!!! They are still advertising their "beef" offerings in light of the just-filed lawsuit and recent revelations over what's actually in this "beef" filling. According to the story posted on Gizmodo early last week, in order for Taco Bell to advertise their products as "beef" products, it is required to be complying with the USDA definition of "ground beef":

Chopped fresh and/or frozen beef with or without seasoning and without the addition of beef fat as such, shall not contain more than 30 percent fat, and shall not contain added water, phosphates, binders, or extenders.

Instead Taco Bell appears to use an industrially made substance called Taco Meat Filling without fully informing the public exactly what that is. Gizmodo provides an ingredients list from a tub of Taco Bell taco meat filling, a list seen only behind the closed kitchen doors:

Beef, water, isolated oat product, salt, chili pepper, onion powder, tomato powder, oats (wheat), soy lecithin, sugar, spices, maltodextrin (a polysaccharide that is absorbed as glucose), soybean oil (anti-dusting agent), garlic powder, autolyzed yeast extract, citric acid, caramel color, cocoa powder, silicon dioxide (anti-caking agent), natural flavors, yeast, modified corn starch, natural smoke flavor, salt, sodium phosphate, less than 2% of beef broth, potassium phosphate, and potassium lactate.(emphasis added)

And if that weren't bad enough, the USDA also has a requirement that any product labeled "meat taco filling," should contain at least 40% fresh beef, and that's what the class action lawsuit is about. The Alabama law firm had the filling tested, and they alleged that their samples contained only 35% beef!!! If this turns out to be true, was it poor quality control or an intentional corporate decision to replace a small percentage of beef with one less expensive filler or another in the industrial "taco meat" formula to improve the bottom line?

Patties Or Links: What's In Your Meat?

This bit of video taken at Smithfield Foods hit the alternative media and the Internet in mid-December, - I'm a little behind in my reading - and I caught it on Yahoo News. I've posted about the many horrors of, and stemming from, industrial hog production several time in the last year, and as you can see we will never see true progress unless Big Ag is legally forced to change. They will be aggressive with their PR - a la the recent "corn sugar" campaign. What Big Ag cannot completely hide from the public, it may eventually eliminate some close confinement techniques such as 'gestation crates,' but it will do so only when it develops alternative methods to raise pigs even faster at lower costs, methods that it will tout as more humane, or hide behind even higher walls. You see, their model of inexpensive, plentiful food is dependent on keeping the consumers and the public in the dark about how they work their slight of hand.

Think about this video the next time you're running late in the morning and hit the drive-thru for those $1 egg, cheese, and sausage sandwiches, or when you head out for a grand slam Saturday morning with the kids.

Risky Business

At this time of year, all I usually expect to see at the Farmers' Markets here in Seattle, and in Portland for that matter, are big mature Kales, Collards and Mustard Greens, as well the last of the picking of beets, large, dirty nubs with tops trimmed. But still we've been fortunate for the last four or five years since some of the farmers in the warmer micro-climates have been planting their second or third round of crops in September, and extending the 'fresh and local' season practically year round. However, given the freeze in early December and the long, hard freezes the last three winters, I was stunned by what I saw last Sunday. Young and baby greens, including the sweetest baby collards I've ever tasted, six to eight weeks ahead of schedule greeted me at several booths. I was about to ask the farmer at the Full Circle Farm Booth about this when I spied rows of brightly colored Chiogga, Golden and Red beets, freshly picked and with their young, tasty looking greens intact. Despite the risks of ice storms and hard freezes, they planted yet another crop in November! Sheets of plastic covering protected the young shoots during the relatively short and mild freeze in December, and no more drab mid-winter offerings...at least this year. Given the crappy weather we've had the last few years - winter, spring, summer and fall, it's nice to see some people are still willing to take chances, and they will be getting even more of my dollars from now on!

Badda Boom, Badda Beans

While trawling the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market a few weekends back, I at the Tierra Vegetables booth when I noticed that they had a number of dried heirloom beans for sale. I thought I had a fair handle on all of the heirloom beans that were cultivated, and prized, in either major or minor acreage in Italy, and so I was a bit surprised with what I found. From a distance they looked like yellow eye beans, but as I examined them up close, I could see that they were shorter and rounder, and the 'yellow' patches on the Tierra Vegetables' beans was much lighter, and much more variable in size - everything from a tiny speck to 80% or more of the bean's surface coating.

The sign read "Badda Beans" and it indicated that they hailed from a small area in Sicily, specifically, the Polizzi Generosa Gardens of Madonie Park. They had been grown in the area for over two hundred years and were on the Slow Food Ark of Taste in Europe. They were smuggled into the country by the folks at Tierra Vegetables a few years back who have been growing them ever since. Apparently, the bean has a color variation due to climate and soil variation. When they are ivory and yellow/orange they are known as Badda Bianco, but they can also be ivory and dark purple in which case they are known as Badda Nero. In Sicily they are used for Pasta e Fagioli, and they are also served with fresh tomatoes, in several seafood preparations, and in a simple bean soup with wild fennel and pork rind. My first choice will be to try them in a recipe that I found online - Tagliolini with Baby Squid, Tomatoes and Basil...I will report back