Supermarket / Russia 4

I was struck by how much prepared food was available in the Russian grocery store.  Many, many vegetables and salads, cooked meats, side dishes.  Much was cooked on site, and smelled delicious! I guess Russian women are at work, not in the kitchen -- or maybe the kitchens are small.  Clearly some people have enough money to get dinner at the store.

Supermarket / Russia 3

The supermarket in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk had a feature I've never seen before: frozen foods in bulk.  At the end of the freezer case, after all the packaged fruits and vegetables, were a bunch of open bins with scoops.  Help yourself to one half plum or just enough broccoli for one!

I suspect that frozen foods are way more important in remote Russia than they are to US shoppers.  Winter lasts a long time -- this is Siberia, after all -- and I doubt there's a whole lot of fresh produce being flown in.  But I don't expect to go back in February to test this hypothesis.

Supermarket / Japan 1

I've just returned from a trip to Japan and Russia, and perhaps surprisingly, the highlights of the trip included visits to food markets.  To my amazement, the supermarket in Kushiro, a small Japanese town on the remote northern island of Hokkaido was so well stocked that I could imagine myself happily subsisting there.  Can't always say that about small towns in remote areas of the U.S.

I'll have a bunch of posts in subsequent days so I can show you everything I discovered.

Today: the produce section (don't you love the "vegetable" sign in English?)

In Japan food is always displayed artistically.

Melons with an elegant bit of stem still attached, protected in plastic foam nets, packed into beautiful cardboard boxes with a little brochure.

Green vegetables standing upright in perfect little bundles.

Blueberries from Oregon.

Vegetables!!

When you have a busy schedule, miss some meals and fix others under duress, it seems that vegetables are the first thing to be thrown off the sleigh.  And after several days go by, you just NEED a serious vegetable remediation.  I recall several times while traveling that we sought out Chinese restaurants because we knew we could get a whole plate full of vegetables, and you could practically feel the health returning to your innards with every bite.

The other night we had such a situation and as we entered our go-to Asian place we saw a daily special on the chalkboard: Chinese greens.

I don't know what kind of greens they were but they had deep green leaves and firm stalks slightly smaller than your little finger, fixed with pork, garlic and ginger.  I might have wished for some paler produce alongside, just for contrast, but I just filched some onions and water chestnuts from my husband's plate.

Now I wish this were on the menu all the time.

Eat your vegetables bait and switch

At the grocery this week and a new kind of pasta caught my eye -- instead of just tinting your tricolor pasta in different colors, they promise a full serving of vegetables.

But wait -- you have to eat 4 ounces of pasta to get that serving of vegetables.  That's a lot of pasta, as I know well because I weigh my pasta before cooking (I use between 4.5 and 5 ounces for two adults, when that's the only entree).  In fact, the "official" serving is just 2 ounces, as you can tell on the side of the box.

And here's another brand, same concept, same misleading display on the front of the box.

So why the bait and switch?  Why not just say "a half serving of vegetables in each serving of pasta"? That's good right there.

If your intention is to make it easy and appealing for people to eat more vegetables, then making them think they're getting more than they really are seems counterproductive.

Asian gourds make me famous

My last post showed some truly humongous Asian gourds hanging from the patio rafters at my neighborhood Vietnamese restaurant.  A couple of weeks later I was surprised to find almost the identical photo in our local magazine, in the monthly feature that shows a strange place and challenges you to identify where it was taken.

I immediately sent them an email identifying the restaurant.  And it turns out that I was the first with the correct answer.

I wish I could say that I got a free meal out of it, or even a free magazine.  But I did become famous, at least to everybody who read the very teeny type on page 15 of the November issue of Louisville magazine.

Farm stand, British style

Cornwall, in the southeastern part of England, has a surprisingly balmy climate, washed by the Gulf Stream.  On our vacation this spring we visited two magnificent gardens, and found this tiny self-service market in the village nearby.  (I thought 1 pound -- $1.67 -- was a bit steep for a little bunch of green onions, considering the low overhead, but it's an expensive country.)

Tomatoes arrive!

They've been holding the farmers market for several weeks already but unless there are local vegetables to be had why bother?  The farm-raised eggs, the local bison, the flowers and jams and the coffee-and-omelet special aren't on my shopping list, no matter what the season.  But last week we thought maybe there would be tomatoes.

There were!















And they tasted like actual ripe tomatoes!  Maybe not as deep red and magnificent as in August, but definitely worth savoring in the first tomato sandwich of the year.  I hope they'll be good all summer.

We're home -- need vegetables!

We've been away for three weeks (more later on our culinary adventures) and for the last couple of days of the trip all we could think of was coming home to our own kitchen and eating a lot of vegetables.  Not that vegetables were absent from our menus, but we were seduced by too many desserts, too much bacon, too many bar-food snacks.

When we inspected our crops we found that the arugula was tall and flowery, signs that it had bolted and become bitter with the onset of hot weather.  But it was lush with gorgeous dark green leaves that cried out to be eaten.  Perhaps too bitter for a salad, but OK to be cooked.

So here's our coming-home, vegetarian dinner: the arugula was tempered by the sweetness of pine nuts and the blandness of pasta, and tasted great.  I wish I had picked twice as much; I always forget how much greens shrivel when cooked.

And a big salad, of course, which comes with 95% of the dinners served at home.  It's good to be back.

Save money, get a knife

It's not news that you pay for your food to be processed by somebody else, but last week at the fruit market I was surprised to find out how steep the markup was.

plain old corn in its husk -- 99 cents for two ears

four ears of corn with the husks removed, wrapped in plastic -- $4.99 -- 52% markup

red peppers -- 3.49 a pound

peppers cut into bite-sized pieces -- 5.99 a pound -- 72% markup

peppers cut into rings -- 9.99 a pound -- 186% markup!!

Life and death

Here's a product I haven't noticed before -- "Living Lettuce."

I guess they call it living because the roots are still attached, but when you're talking about plants no longer in the ground, I think the semantics are questionable.  Is the rest of the lettuce in the store "Dead Lettuce"?

Next from the marketing geniuses might be "Living Potatoes," those with lots of sprouting eyes.  Yuk.

First corn of spring

Yes, they have corn on the cob all winter in the grocery store, but I don't buy it, fearing that it will taste like cardboard.  I'll buy tomatoes now and then, knowing they'll taste insipid when raw but will caramelize into something quite nice after 20 minutes in a pan.  And I'll buy eggplant, carrots and celery all winter even though I have no idea where they're grown or how that is accomplished in the cold weather.

But for other produce I'm perfectly willing to wait for the season.  That includes corn.

So yesterday I couldn't resist.  The good news: the corn was excellent.  You might even have thought it was July.  I hope this is an omen that winter is finally over and this summer will be good for the growing things.

Turnip surprise

For decades, the only turnips welcome in my kitchen have been these.

Bethany Uhl, Turnips, pastel















I'm sure I've had turnips hidden in many foods that I've enjoyed over the years -- heck, they're white, who knows what you're eating? -- but the turnip cake at the Chinese dim sum restaurant is the only dish that I have ever knowingly ordered where turnips are the main ingredient.

But wait!  This month I've discovered that raw turnips can be my friends, and I commend this approach to other turnip-avoiders.

Always on the lookout for new ingredients to pep up the daily salad, we've been cutting them into little matchstick pieces and adding them to the lettuce or spinach, where they turn out to be excellent contributors, mild and crunchy without overpowering the rest of the bowl.

        I find that three or four cubic inches of turnip is a good quantity for two people, but you could certainly use more if you wanted.  They'd probably also be good in a cabbage or cabbage/broccoli slaw.

Eggplant a new way

We love eggplant, and my default preparation is to slice it and saute in a bit of olive oil.  We'll either just eat it on a plate as is or cut it into small pieces and add to a pasta.

But this week the eggplant was semi-forgotten and it was looking unhappy, a bit limp and withered.  It needed to be cooked NOW.  And besides, we were going out that night, so I had to cook it in advance of actual consumption.  What to do?

I put it on a pan and stuck it under the broiler, on the highest shelf so the top of the vegetable was only an inch under the heating element. Broiled it until I started to smell char, then flipped it over and did the same thing on the other side.  After it cooled I stuck it in a plastic bag and put it in the fridge.

The next day I scooped it out of its skin and mashed it up into baba ghanoush, the classic eggplant dip/spread.  I was happy to add garlic, lemon juice, olive oil and parsley, as the recipe called for, but didn't have any tahini.  Inspiration struck: I did have almond butter, which seemed to be the moral equivalent of tahini, nutty and gooey.  So that went into the bowl.

And it was wonderful, if I do say so myself.  We went all authentic and ate it with pita, and a bowl of soup, for a light dinner.  I have made baba ghanoush in the past but had forgotten how easy it is, considerably easier than tending the eggplant slices in a saute pan.  And it uses a whole lot less olive oil while managing to taste much richer.  I'll have to remember to add this to my regular food rotation.

Vegetable blues

This has been the worst summer for fruits and vegetables in my memory.  Our zucchetta has produced four fruits, one of which ripened while we were gone on vacation and became an almost-inedible baseball bat.  Another was soft at the flower end and I had to cut off a third of it.

Here's approximately 50% of our entire tomato crop for the year.  They tasted great.

Not just our own crops have been disappointing, but also those from the market.  The watermelons have had seeds, true, but only one or two have tasted really wonderful. The tomatoes have been insipid, even the beautiful red ones from the farmer's market.  I've ended up roasting or pan-caramelizing more than we've eaten raw.  No juicy tomato sandwiches; no wonderful fresh-tomato pasta sauces.  Even the heirloom tomato salad at the pricy new restaurant was on the so-so side.

(that's crabmeat and bacon on top, lemon aioli on the plate; magnificent even with so-so tomatoes)

We've had some disappointing peaches on and off all summer, so much that I'm afraid to buy more than two or three at a time.  Last week we bought three.  The first one was magnificent -- the best I'd eaten all summer.  The second and the third were mediocre.

On the bright side, the corn has been superb all year.  I think they must have made some permanent breeding improvements in the last five years, because no matter where it comes from, the corn seems to be consistently excellent throughout the season.  Thank heaven something is turning out reliably delicious.

At the market

Before we went to France on vacation, I read an article in the New York Times about how conservative the local tastes are regarding vegetables.  It described a Normandy truck farmer who decided to branch out as "a maverick in a field where most farmers grow pretty much the same produce: leeks, carrots, a handful of lettuce varieties, turnips, celery root, beets, onions, shallots, parsnips and maybe Jerusalem artichokes."

So I was interested to visit a farmer's market in Paris, where a much wider variety of stuff was on display.  The stalls were beautiful, often decorated with artfully cut fruits and vegetables so you could be tempted by the delectable flesh.

Often the produce was taken from its shipping crates and arranged on big trays like still lifes.

But even the crates seemed to have been packed by an artist.

Found object

Here's what an avocado looks like after escaping from your grocery bag and dessicating in the trunk for a week or so.

Too bad I couldn't figure out a way to incorporate it into art.

Kale, the secret ingredient

Kale is one of the healthiest foods on the planet -- all that dark green fiber, rich in Vitamins A, B, C, minerals, antioxidant flavonoids and other good stuff.  I like to eat it, but not cooked.  I loathed cooked spinach as a kid, have barely been able to get by that prejudice as a grownup, and don't like anything that even reminds me of it.

So every now and then we buy a big head of kale and I search for ways to incorporate it, raw, into our menus.  This head was getting toward the end, having performed yeoman duty in a couple of soups.  It also showed up as an additive to mashed potatoes (chopped, stirred in just before serving).

Then I came upon it one night when I was putting some rice into the rice cooker and decided that the same approach that worked for spuds might work here too.  Just before serving, stirred the green shreds into the rice.

Since I had cooked the rice with salsa it had some red stuff in it already, so the deep green made a colorful Italian-flag display.  It tasted great, and the warmed-over leftovers made a good breakfast.

Improvisational lunch

In the fridge: a slice of leftover eggplant, sauteed for dinner the night before.  I could have put it on a plate and eaten it warm or cold, but then what would have been my second course?

So I made some toast, spread each piece with hot Indian lime pickle, divided the eggplant in two, and put some cheese over the top.  A zap in the microwave, and it was a highly satisfying lunch.

Fish, a new way

We like to eat fish, but I am an unimaginative cook in that department.  I don't deep-fry things, so that leaves out all the battered preparations that are so delicious in restaurants.  I usually buy only fish that I can confidently broil or pan-saute, so that means our home repertoire is largely limited to salmon, tuna and trout.

My husband got crabby about that recently and started nagging me to try some new kinds of fish.  In fact, he came home from the grocery with a big hunk of cod.  When I whined that I wouldn't know how to cook it, he sat down with the new cookbook he gave me for Christmas (Mark Bittman's "How to Cook Everything: the basics") and found a recipe.

So I followed the recipe, which had an intriguing technique: you chop up a big pile of vegetables (I used zucchini, peppers, onions, tomatoes, black olives and garlic) and saute them in a big dutch oven.  Then you lay the fish over the top of the vegetables, cover the pot and let it cook for five to ten minutes over a low heat.  In effect, the vegetable juices steam the fish.

Sure enough, the fish was cooked perfectly.  When I was serving out the plates I decided to just pile the green beans, cooked separately, on top of the other vegetables rather than get another dish dirty.

The verdict from my husband was that the fish was fine.  The verdict from me was that it would have been better with a quarter-cup of hollandaise sauce.  I thought the cod was just too delicate a fish to have much character when fixed this simply.

If you were on a diet, which we probably should be but aren't, this would be a good menu choice.  Hardly any calories.  If you were on a diet you could probably pep it up with some pesto or tapenade rather than hollandaise.