121 | The Skinny on Asparagus
How to Organize Your Fridge
Hello!
Gratuitous Oranges
There are those who feed only on oranges. — S.Y. Agnon Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. It stands alone, with luster in a far tinge. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. On Saturday it’s blue like an orange Or like a surrealist sight rhyme in a garage. Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. But rime riche is rich enough for an orange. Still my doorman sings, Put it away in storage! It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. Orange replies: I’m drunk from my last bar-binge Half-rhymes like hangovers suddenly impinge. But nothing rhymes in English with an orange. While my wife in French eats one in her nude linge Playwrights Synge and Inge flap forward on a car-hinge. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe. Pronounce it orange and then expunge. So ends the story of the very violet orange. Nothing rhymes in English with an orange. It stands alone, and seems to make a star cringe.
—David Shapiro, Poetry Magazine
BTW, I'm Bruce Cole, Publisher of Edible San Francisco. If you’re new here, welcome to Eat.Drink.Think., a newsletter spotlighting seasonal recipes, the latest SF Bay Area food news, poetry, and more!
A Risotto All In One Pot? Risotto is famous for being needy; you must watch the pot, stir in a bit (but not too much) of stock every few minutes, and taste, taste, taste until the rice is precisely al dente. In her latest Genius cookbook for Food52, Simply Genius: Recipes for Beginners, Busy Cooks & Curious People, Kirsten Miglore turns to Judy Rodgers' one-pot, no-fuss Citrus Risotto recipe for doing away with all that stirring nonsense. "As Judy Rodgers, the late chef and driving force behind San Francisco's Zuni Café, wrote in The Zuni Café Cookbook, "I started experimenting with cold, warm, and hot stock and found I could make a creamy risotto with anyone." This means you can grab any stock out of your fridge or pantry to start your risotto—and roam the kitchen making salad and putting away dishes as it cooks, no longer tethered to the pot. Download the recipe from our latest issue:
What’s In Your Fridge? This is one of the best television segments on a cookbook we’ve seen yet (most are just of the “let’s see how many recipes we can cook in two minutes” variety). Host of CBS Good Mornings, Tony Dokoupil, who coincidentally is a huge fan of Tamar Adler, and a disciple of her first book, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, talks to her about The Everlasting Meal Cookbook: Leftovers A-Z (which we mentioned in our last newsletter) and how food leftovers are your next meal's ingredients. “All cooking is actually problem solving,” says Adler, “so it is magic and it feels like magic, but I think it’s really attainable magic.” CBS News
How to organize your fridge and prevent food waste from Which Co. UK
Plus tips on:
Salad items that don’t belong in the fridge
New rules on storing potatoes
Watch out for ethylene-producing foods
Make your leaves last longer
Make the most of your freezer
📺 Is This You? How to Eat Dinner Even Though You Already Watched All Your Shows? Reductress
17 Years at the Top: Top Chef, the cutthroat cooking show that chefs around the country aspire to, was initially based on the premise of the hit series “Project Runway,” and turned Bravo into a leader, in reality, pop-culture television. Buddha Lo, the reigning champion, notes that his restaurant Huso, in NY, had a 500-person wait list for six months after he won the title. The show has changed how Americans eat, becoming a mirror of the restaurant industry. NY Times (gift article)
🖐 Raise your hand if, like us, you’ve never watched a single episode of Top Chef.
New Crop of Cookbooks: We’re especially looking forward to Andrea Nguyen’s Ever-Green Vietnamese: Super-Fresh Recipes, Starring Plants From Land and Sea (Ten Speed Press, April 25), and Hetty Lui McKinnon’s Tenderheart: A Cookbook About Vegetables and Unbreakable Family Bonds, Knopf Publishing Group, May 30. Complete list of new cookbooks here. Eater
The Skinny on Asparagus
Are You a Thick or Thin Asparagus Shopper? "Although many shoppers think 'younger and thinner' equal tenderness, the opposite is true for asparagus. A young asparagus plant is putting more of its energy into producing spears that will stand upright, so most of the plant material in the spears of younger asparagus plants is crude fiber." –Peter Ferretti, Professor of Vegetable Crops, Penn State
Bigger is Better: Ferretti also says stout asparagus spears have a tender middle that serves as a reservoir for that grassy vegetal flavor we 💚, and thick stalks are also higher in soluble fiber and vitamins B and C than thinner stalks.
Cut It Out: Why you shouldn’t snap the ends off asparagus and why you should overcook it. Dan Souza for America’s Test Kitchen
Asparagus Wine Pairing: Wayne Garcia of DIG Wine weighs in on how spring can throw you for a loop if you are a wine lover. Edible SF
Local Asparagus Update: While there seems to be plenty of asparagus in supermarkets and Full Belly Farm in Capay Valley is harvesting asparagus this week, but they are still a couple weeks behind at Zuckerman farms in Stockton because it’s too wet to get into the fields to pick. The Foodwise newsletter notes that Iacopi Farms in Half Moon Bay, famous for their Brussels sprouts, English Peas, artichokes and fava beans, have tilled under their entire pea and fava crop recently due to heavy rains. And strawberry crops everywhere in California have been swamped as well.
Environmental Working Group’s 2023 Dirty Dozen Shopper's Guide to Pesticides in Produce™: Blueberries have joined green beans in this year’s list:
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🍷 Wine from Here is a wine fair celebrating American natural winemakers; a gathering of makers, growers, and fermenters of natural wines who are doing pioneering and visionary work in agriculture and the cellar. April 2, 2023 | 12-5 pm | Subject to Change Winery, 1387 Marina Way S #500, Richmond, CA
Black Winemakers in the Bay Area are Paving a New Path: Marreya Bailey of Mad Marvlus Wine, Chris Christensen of Bodkin Wines and Theodora Lee of Theopolis Vineyards are proprietors of Black-owned wineries now featured on Bay Area menus. Michelin Guide
🚚 You’ve Got Banchan: So excited! We just subscribed to the weekly banchan club from Korean Superette in Berkeley. This week’s delivery menu: Spicy Tofu, Stir-Fried Baby Anchovy, Braised Fish cakes, Spicy Cucumber, Kabocha Jorim. That’s at least one night a week we won’t have to cook dinner. Join here: Korean Superette Banchan Club
🥚 A Vegan Poached Egg That Oozes Yolk: Seeing is believing, but we’ve yet to try in person. Sky Cafe in South San Francisco serves a vegan eggs benedict with Yo! Eggs, a new plant-based egg made in Israel that looks and tastes (apparently) just like the real thing . SF Chronicle (gift article)
🐙 Cruel and Unusual: A leading multinational company in seafood commercialization plans to build the world’s first octopus farm in Spain. It intends to dispatch the eight-limbed mollusks by submerging them in -3 degree Celsius slush, which scientists say “would distress the highly intelligent animals and cause them to die slowly.” BBC
If you’ve seen the documentary My Octopus Teacher, you know they are sentient beings who can feel pain and pleasure. There’s no getting around that killing animals for food is a messy business; remember the spy cams in pork slaughterhouse gas chambers showing hogs suffering horribly? And pigs have been compared to octopuses in terms of intelligence too. But did you know octopuses have a brain in each of the eight arms and one in the head? Just how smart are they?
On repeat this week: Bono and The Edge on NPR’s Tiny Desk:
Never been a fan of U2, but this rendition of Beautiful Day, accompanied by the teen choir from the Duke Ellington School of the Arts in Washington, D.C. hits all the right notes.
That’s all for this week.
We’re outta here. Be well and take care,
—Bruce
P.S. In case you somehow missed that subscribe button:
The only people for me are the mad ones: the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who... burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow Roman candles.
―Jack Kerouac