Loquat I can do!

Its late winter (early Spring really) here in Florida. I am not thrilled to be living here. (For many many reasons i will not get into right now) But one really nice thing about living here is food I have never had growing right in my back yard - literally.

This is a Loquat tree growing behind the house I live in. And it is in fruit right now. I had never heard of these fruits before but they are amazeballs delicious! Escpeially in salad dressings and chutney. However those are the only things i have made so far and both were amazing so i can fairly guess that the other ideas i have for these beauties will be awesome too!

So what is a Loquat?

Its a tree that was imported from asia as (primarily) an ornamental. The trees are self polinating and super resiliant so they are a very good little plant for the yards in the warmer temperate regions of the US. They are found in California too!

The fruit grows in little bunches and the fruits kind-of ripen at the same time so you can just pluck the whole bunch at once. The fruit doesn't give much of a fight when picking and the cluster will come free fairly easily.

Feel free to eat it raw, as is (after washing of course). No need to peel. However, beware the seeds. Each loquat can have up to 5 seeds though most have only 1 or 2. The edible flesh of the fruit is a fairly thin area around the large seeds.

The fruit is about as large as a strawberry. It ranges in color from a yellowy green to orange/peach to a blushed orange color as they ripen. Its better to pick them in the peach stage as the fruit flies love there things and waiting until they are really ripe means you might get some added protein when you bide into one - if you get my drift. Nasty! So get them while they are still a little under ripe. The skin is thin and has some light peach fuzz on it.

Flavor:
Sweet - like a peach or mango but with a slightly sour/tangy flavor like a grapefruit added.

Preparation...

I simply wash off my loquats and slice them lengthwise. Then I remove the pit. I save these because I found a recipe for making amaretto from them, so I'm totally going to try it!

Some of the webpages I came across while learning about this fruit warned of a strong smell associated with the fruit - something akin to bleach apparently. They warned that you might want to blanch the fruit before you handled it, or wear gloves so as to prevent your hands from smelling funny later. I did not find this to be true of the fruits I have but different cultivars likely have different scents.

Loquat, being a fruit and all, is a healthy thing to eat. It is high in fiber nearly 2 grams in a 1/2 cup. In that same 1/2 cup you get about 1/2 a gram of protein. They are also reasonably high in vitamin A.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loquat
Nutritiondata.com

Spicy Blanched Broccoli

So we know you can eat Broccoli Baked and of course you can eat it raw...How else can you prepare it?!  How about Blanched?

I'm not talking about the Golden Girls here...its a legitimate way to cook vegetables. And its fairly easy.

Blanching is a cooking method where-in you immerse a raw food into boiling water for a brief period of time, draining it and then arresting the cooking process by immersing it in ice water. As mentioned before - broccoli is best only lightly cooked.

You will need:

A Large pot
A Colander
A Container with a tight fitting lid
A small bowl (for mixing the dressing)
A larger bowl (for the ice water bath)

Ingredients needed (for 1 serving):

1 Cup Broccoli, chopped
1-3 tsp Toasted Sesame Oil
1 Tbsp Soy Sauce
1-3 tsp Hot Chili Paste
1 Tbsp Rice Wine Vinegar
1 tsp Sugar
1 tsp Diced Garlic
1 tsp Ginger Paste
1 dash Salt
2 Tbsp Pine Nuts, toasted

Ice Cubes

Directions.

1. Fill the large pot with slightly salted water. Bring it to a rolling boil.

2. While waiting for the water to boil, chop your broccoli into florets. You can cook the stalks this way too or you can reserve them for a different recipe, or you can toss them. I have even seen grocery stores that offer fresh broccoli crowns without the stalks!

3. Drop the florets into the boiling water. Cook for 5 minutes (you can adjust this time to your own preference on how cooked you like your broccoli)

4. Put the ice cubes in the bowl and add water - so that you have a ice water bath for your broccoli to go into.

5. Drain the broccoli in the colander

6. Put the broccoli into the ice water and chill for a few minutes. You can take the ice bath and put it in the fridge overnight if you like.

7. While your broccoli chills out, mix the remaining ingredients except for the pine nuts. This is your spicy dressing. These amounts are approximate and you should taste it as you make it to adjust it to your personal preferences. Recipes are alot like the Pirates Code - more like guidelines really. (You could even skip this whole step and eat the broccoli plain, or substitute your favorite salad dressing)

8. Drain the broccoli again. Then put it in the container with the tight fitting lid and add the dressing. Close it up and give it a good shake. This distributes your dressing on the broccoli more evenly.

9. Top with the toasted pine nuts and enjoy!

Its great hot or cold!

Simply Perfect Baked Broccoli

With broccoli being so cheap right now its a good time to eat some! Broccoli benefits from very light cooking. The standard method for this is blanching but I find that baking is even easier and in many ways better. I'm certain that I'm not the only person who intended to lightly blanch/steam/or boil my broccoli and accidently Cooked It To Death!

Also, broccoli really has a delicate- almost mildly sweet- flavor. As such, if you want to savor the broccoli in all of its glory you need to keep you preparations and ingredients reigned in. This recipe is the easierst, cheapest, and best way to showcase the flavor of broccoli

You will need:

A ziplock bag or a container with a tight fitting lid

An oven safe dish large enough to let the broccoli lay on it in a single layer
An oven - set to 350

Ingredients needed (for 1 serving):

1 Cup Broccoli, chopped
1-3 tsp Olive Oil
1 dash Salt




Directions:

1.Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees
2.Place chopped broccoli, oil and salt into the bag/container with a lid.
3.Shake the broccoli until well coated with oil. Add a little more oil if needed.
4.Spread the broccoli on the oven safe dish in a single layer.

5.Bake for 5 minutes, until the broccoli is bright green and tender-crisp.

Nutrition facts created by: http://nutritiondata.self.com

Vegetable of the Week: Broccoli

It is coming up on the end (hopefully) of winter. As such you might disrepair of finding any good fresh vegetables in the market. Well, fear no more! There are many vegetables that are in season now, including broccoli.

The broccoli that you typically see in the store is actually called Calabrese broccoli, a relatively modern cultivar of the Cruciferae/Brassica family of vegetables. Other Cruciferae/Brassica vegetables include the much maligned Kale and Cabbage as well as brussels sprouts and cauliflower. I found some debate as to its exact origin...but most of the articles I read (see references below) agree that the broccoli we are familiar with today was created in what we now call Italy, though it was quite some time ago (perhaps as early as the first century CE). This is still relatively recent in comparison to its original parent vegetable which was eaten over 5000 years ago.

Broccoli gets a bad rap - broccoli farts, anyone? This smell is due to the naturally occurring sulfur compounds in the vegetable. They are worse if you over cook the broccoli or wait too long to eat it (either letting it grow too long in the garden before picking or letting it sit too long after buying before cooking). But those very same sulfurs may be really important to your health! Its a load of complex chemistry...but the end result is that compounds in broccoli (and other Cruciferae/Brassica vegetables) break down into antioxidants known to protect against cancer.

Ever hear of "magic smoke"? I'm not talking about what is now legal in colorado. I'm talking about the joke that is shared between antique vehicle enthusiasts and computer repair people."magic smoke" is what you smell or see right as a component in the machine fails (typically ozone). The joke is that if you let the magic smoke out of the machine it no longer works - as though the smoke was what was powering the item. The same holds true for broccoli - but in this case the magic smoke is the sulfur smell. If you smell the sulfur, you let out the magic and the broccoli is not a nutritionally valuable to you anymore. So don't overcook it!

There is no reason why you can't just eat it raw. It is great this way. There is some discussion as to whether the nutrients in broccoli (or any food for that matter) are more bioavailable if they are lightly cooked. 

I prefer to lightly blanch my broccoli so that it turns bright green. I often don't even place the broccoli into the boiling water. For instance I will take a full sized pasta pot and boil up some lightly salted water...get it to a nice rolling boil. Then I place the raw broccoli into a colander and simply pour the boiling water over the broccoli. 

In addition to the sulfur in broccoli...why should you eat it? Nutritionally it is a powerhouse (superfood is such an annoying term). It (like most vegetables) is low in calories  - only about 30 in a 3 oz serving. In those 3 oz though you get more than 100% of your daily recommended intake of Vitamin C (64.9mg) and over 100% of your Vitamin K (141 mcg), you get about a third of your Vitamin A for a day (1548 IU) and a reasonable amount of Fiber (3.3g) plus lots of other important stuff.

Another reason you should eat it...right now -  its cheap. Its not normally the most expensive of vegetables but now its even cheaper. It is getting to the end of the broccoli season here in the United States. Soon we will have to import it from areas in the southern hemisphere. So take advantage of the discounts and get some broccoli now.

Buying broccoli

If buying it fresh you should look for tight closed and uniformly dark green - almost purple- flower top. The stalk should be firm and pale. Any leaves should be very dark green and not wilted. The cut end should not appear slimy or brown.  Most people prefer the tops of the broccoli to the stalks. It is perfectly acceptable to buy only the tops if you can. 

Frozen broccoli is acceptable for most dishes (not salads of course) and as frozen vegetables are picked at their peak in the season and blanched and frozen right away, the nutritional difference is negligible (though you should still try to cook it as briefly as you can).

Resources.

The world Encyclopedia of Cooking Ingredients, Christine Ingram, 2004

The Wellness Encyclopedia of Food and Nutrition (UC Berkley), Sheldon Margen M.D., 1992

http://www.vegparadise.com/highestperch44.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broccoli

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22303412

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/antioxidants/

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/research_says_boiling/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioavailability

http://nutritiondata.self.com/facts/vegetables-and-vegetable-products

Kitchen Techniques: Ingredients: Onions

Onions are one of my favorite ingredients. I use them in nearly everything. I enjoy them both raw and cooked.

Recipe Note: When I say onion, I am generally referring to the common yellow storage onion. There are many other onions in the world that are available at your well supplied grocery store like Green onions – scallions, Sweet onions, Leeks, Shallots, Ramps, Red Onions, White Onions, and Pearl Onions. I use these in recipes but I will always specify which variety when I am not using standard yellow storage onions.

Why use them? They provide a flavor punch with very few calories. In about ½ a cup of chopped onion (3.5 ounces) you only have 38 calories. They also provide 10% of the Vitamin C and Folacin you need.

Shopping for Onions: Onions should be heavy for their size. This means if you have two onions that are about the same size the one that feels heavier is the better onion. The difference in weight is due to water content. The outer skins should be papery. You can select your onions individually or you can just go ahead and buy the orange mesh bag of them (that's what I do). The mesh bag offers a fast way to get a bunch of onions.

Availability of Onions (Seasonality): Onions are available year round but are most common March to September when they are fresh to most markets. Onions store well given the right conditions so stocking up on them when you have a good price at market is not a bad idea.

Storage of Onions: Onions can last several months in ideal conditions and can go bad in a couple of weeks in crappy conditions. What, pray tell, are ideal and crappy conditions you may ask? Onions want a cool dry place with lots of circulating air. If it is too humid you will get sprouting onions or rotting onions. The mesh bag is ok for storage if you are going to eat up the onions in about a month (I go through a mesh bag every other week if I'm cooking 2 times a week), or if you hang the bag so it is exposed to a lot of air. If you are going to hold on to your onions for longer you might want to try to store them in pantyhose hung from the ceiling. (To store them in pantyhose place them - one at a time - into a clean pair of hose and tie a not between each so that they have their own little nylon sack.) As you need them you can cut off the onion(s) you need and leave the rest hanging. (This is a great use of nylons with runs. You can also use this with thigh-highs too.) Do Not store them in the fridge!! Storing them in the fridge causes them to rot – The exception to this is an onion that has been cut but not used entirely. If you have a half-used onion you can store it for about a week in the fridge before it will go bad.

Preparing Onions: Onions can present somewhat of a problem for cooks in that they are round and not easily chopped into regular pieces. Be sure you have a sharp knife. A dull knife is more dangerous than a sharp one as they tend to slip off what you are cutting and cut you instead. Also onions can make people cry so the faster you can get them cut the better off you are likely to be. Here is the technique I use to more easily deal with onions:

Cut off the stem end first, leaving the root end intact. Discard the stem end into the scrap bowl.

Then you peel off the papery outer layers and the first thin inner layer and discard into the scrap bowl. Then you turn the onion onto the cut stem end and slice off one side of the onion the thickness of the chop you are looking for.

Then turn the onion onto the freshly cut side and again slice off an un-cut edge at the same thickness.

Now make parallel cuts across the width of the onion making sure not to slice through the root end.

Now turn the onion over onto the second of the side cuts and make cuts parallel to it making certain not to slice through the root end.

Now you cut across the length of the onion getting the exact size pieces you want. Discard the root end into the scrap bowl. Chop the two remaining side pieces and move all the cut onion into a prep bowl.

Hints and Tips for Onions: Onions can make your hands smell funny after you've been handling them – try rinsing your hands with lemon juice to rid yourself of the smelly fingers (also works for garlic-fingers). Onions can make you cry – lots of old wives tales for solving this (and just like cures for hiccups) some work for some people others don't. Try a few until you find one that works for you (Light a candle next to your cutting board, hold matches in your mouth – heads out- to block the smell, put bread under your tongue, etc) Raw yellow onions are bitter – after cutting them, soak them in ice water. Change the water several times over the course of up to 2 hours before serving they will be oniony with out being bitter. Onion Breath? - Chew fennel seeds, Parsley leaves, gargle vinegar, or drink some coffee.

History: Onions have a long and distinguished career as a domesticated food-stuff. There is evidence from the Bible and other sources both literary and archaeological that the onion has been cultivated since about 3000 BCE. It is believed that onions were part of the diet of the slaves who built the pyramids.

Myths and Legends: It is said in early cultures that onions were linked to the afterlife or eternal life because of the concentric circles you see when you slice an onion across its middle. Onions are also believed to have medicinal qualities. I don't know if I believe that they can cure any diseases but I eat them and enjoy a decent level of health. (Then again my sister won't touch them and she is as healthy, and perhaps more healthy than I am)

Food Journal-

Breakfast – 2 doughnuts – Red Bull

Lunch – Lasagna (my own) and a bowl of wild mushroom and rice soup (also my own) – Mellow Yellow

Dinner – Spicy shrimp over rice noodles (my own) – Mellow yellow

Exercise? - Sort of, I walked home instead of hitting the gym.