Day 87: Grapefruit

Through the deep and dark months of the winter, there is, surprisingly an amazing fruit that comes into season: citrus! I actually had no idea that citrus are in season in late February to March. I assumed it was a summer fruit like everything else.

For me, as a kid growing up on an orchard, the summer and fall months were marked by the changing of the fruit. Cherries, then school ended, then strawberries, then pears, then school returned, then apples, then pumpkins, then Halloween. This mattered to us kids for two reasons. First, we survived off of eating fresh fruit, much to the annoyance of the farmer (and his vicious man-eating dog - more on that in another post), and to the disapproval of our parents because they rightfully assumed that eating dozens of fruits in one sitting would probably spoil your dinner. And secondly, picking fruit was our main source of income - there was only one paperoute, and Dylan, the eager entrepreneur who lived 5 doors down from me, had that sweet gig locked up as long as I'd ever known about the route. So what's a kid to do if they wanted to make an honest buck back in the day?

But I digress. Citrus. I never watched citrus season change, because of course in Nova Scotia, you didn't grow citrus. That is, until the other day, when our Grocery Gateway order came in, and they substituted one fruit with a grapefruit.

I'll admit, grapefruit was never my favourite fruit. As a kid, I would sprinkle copious quantities of sugar on top of it, and spoon out the little segments one by one. At the very bottom, once all the segments were removed, I'd pretend it was a bottomless soup bowl, and spoon out the now oversweetened juice, which seemed to magically fill my spoon with liquid every time I pressed it to the bottom of the "bowl". So when I got that Grocery Gateway shipment the other day, I wasn't thrilled. But then I cut open that bad boy.

The flavour is crystal clean. Sour to start, and finishing with a sweet coda. The texture - both crunchy and juicy with little vesicles exploding in your mouth. You get little flecks of bitterness from the white membrane, which is both painful and pleasurable. What you realize is that the fresher it is, the sweeter, juicier, crispier, and citrus-like it is.

My favourite way to prepare them is to skin it. Just lop off the top and the bottom, stand it upright, and then cut off the skin. Once it's naked, I cut it roughly along the natural segments. The fancy way to prepare it would be to, instead of cutting roughly along the segments, cut out the segments, leaving the white membrane in tact. You can do the entire grapefruit, and then at the end, squeeze the juice from the membrane into the bowl. (there's actually a fancy term for this technique, and it's called "supreming" the grapefruit... well well...)

You can also dehydrate them. I have an actual dehydrating machine (not that I'm trying to brag but I sort of am...), but you can just bake it on a rack over a baking sheet at 170F for 6-7 hours. It makes a nice garnish and snack too.

Another thing you can do which I've heard of, but never tried, is to submerge segments in a neutral oil, like canola, stirring until segments break down into individual vesicles (vesicles are the little juice-packed sacs that constitute the grapefruit). I don't know exactly what you would do with this, but I imagine you can use this in salads, or dressings or add it to fancy drinks.

Conclusion: get them now. Season ends in mid-March.

On grapefruits
Grapefruits are actually a natural hybrid of a sweet orange and pomelo. A pomelo is massive citrus, which many westerners, but very popular in asia. Apparently, back long time ago, grapefruits were white in colour, but now, they've been cultivated to be red.

Florida is the world's leading producer of grapefruit (these grapefruits came from there).

Day 87: Skate Wings

Skate. Yes, the fish that looks like a stingray, and you're eating the wing. Not an easy fish to find at stores in Toronto, and you have to be lucky to find it at a store because it depends on when the fishmonger gets a shipment in, but I was lucky to find it at St. Lawrence Market. The price is about $8 for a 1lb wing and each wing is enough for 2 adults because there is surprisingly a lot of meat there.

The texture is the most curious part - it's firm, sort of slippery and has a noodly sort of feel to it. The skin is fatty and the flavour of the meat is almost like scallops. In fact, sometimes they are marketed as "imitation scallop" You've got cartilage in between the top and bottom of the wing and the meat scrapes easily off of the cartilage with just a fork.

One of my favourite ways to enjoy skate is the Malaysian way, because skate is a common Malaysian hawker food (i.e. from a street vendor), and the flavour comes from banana leaves, chili powder/paste, and plenty of ginger and galangal.  But in the picture above, I basically pan fried it (dry with paper towel, then add salt/pepper, then fry in butter) and finished it in a hot oven. I added caper berries and browned butter on top - browned butter is basically butter which is cooked in a pan to the point that it's brown, giving it a nutty aroma. It may take a bit of practice to get the browned butter just right.

On Skate (from Monterey Bay and Encyclopaedia Britannica)
Skates are cartilaginous bottom-dwelling fish, of the superorder "ray". Previously discarded as "trash fish" and a nuisance fish, skate has become an increasingly important fishery.

According to the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch, Skate is recommended to be avoided from a conservation perspective because several skate species in the Northeast are overfished or in serious decline. Skates, like their close relatives, the sharks, are highly vulnerable to overfishing since they grow slowly and are long-lived.

Day 86: Guanciale

Guanciale (pronounced gwan-CHA-lay) is a bacon that's made from pork cheeks. Cheeks are wonderful parts of animals that are totally underused. They have lots of fat, lots of texture, and they can be cheap. Think Halibut cheeks or Barbacoa. Just little flecks of Guanciale are nice in scrambled egg or on a salad, and it can be amazing with corn. It's the best way to go for Spaghetti Carbonera (the pasta that has an egg-based white sauce and bacon). In Southern States, they smoke the cheeks (guanciale is unsmoked)  and call this "hog jowl" and used in dishes like collard greens. It can be substituted with Pancetta, but the fattiness is a different taste.

The texture is nice and chewy, but you really get that genuine dark meat and salt flavour in every bite. In the picture, you see lots of meat, but much of it below the picture is actually super fatty. And the texture on the edges, if you cook it right, gets nice and crispy. I prefer it cubed, because you get the chewiness of it, but thin like this is good and a little goes a lot further. I got this from Brickworks Farmers Market. At  a whopping $50/lb, this is something of a treat. A little $10 or $15 piece will flavour a good pound of pasta. To put this in perspective, your regular breakfast bacon usually retails at around $3-$5/lb. Pancetta is a bit more than this. Something like Iberian Ham de Bellota can run you up to $600/lb, so with that in mind, $50 is a deal, right?

On guanciale
Guanciale is Italian cured pork cheek or jowl. It's traditionally used in classic pastas, like spaghetti all carbonara and bucatini all'amatriciana. Because it's largely fat, guanciale has a more seductive pork flavor and delicate texture than cured meat that comes from the belly (like pancetta, which is a common substitute, though the flavor isn't the same).

To make guanciale, you rub pork cheeks with some combination of salt, sugar, pepper, herbs and spices and then air dry them for several weeks.

Day 85: Chaunsa Mangoes - The King of the Mangoes

The King of the Mangoes. I didn't come up with the name. That's just what it's called! It's also known as the "Chaunsa" mango and it is mainly cultivated in India and Pakistan. It is is in season between June and mid-August, and you can buy them right now in little India.

The sign of them read "Very Sweet" in a black marker. They cost over $2 each, and they're smaller than those massive red mangoes you get all year round. But the taste. Oh the taste. If you've ever been or lived in Southeast Asia, this is what you're used to. Sweet flavour, cold slippery texture, not fibrous at all, and pumped full of mangoey (is that even a word?) flavour.

In the Philippines, the most common mango is the ataulfo mango, aka Manila mango, and they are actually grown in Mexico, so we can get them here in Canada when they are in season (April - October). And they're probably not as good here in Canada as they are if you get them fresh in the Philippines or Mexico, but they're pretty damn awesome. Right now in Little India, you can get them for 50 cents each, so about 75% less than the Chaunsa mango.

But more common in your average grocery store is the Tommy Atkins mango, which aren't very sweet and the flesh is harder, drier, and more fibrous, but definitely passable given our options in Canada. But they ship well, have long shelf lives, and don't bruise as easily. Apparenlty 80% of mangoes in the UK and US are these. For some reason, I always call these "Mexican Mangoes", to distinguish them from "Filipino Mangoes" although I can't find any reference to this name on internet so I don't know if I made up that name or I saw it somewhere.

Ataulfo mango vs. Tommy Atkins

Why are they Chaunsa mangoes so expensive vs. Ataulfo or Tommy Atkins? If you are conscious of carbon footprint, cover your ears. The short answer is that I bet that they are air freighted in, and that adds a few bucks per pound. But why are these air freighted in? I'm about to launch into a bit of an economics speculation, so you can skip this section below, but absolutely economics matters in food. Keep in mind that one of secrets to any fruit is the ripening process. As you may know, a fruit which is ripened on the tree or vine, will always have more natural and delicious sugars. Easy for a grocer in the Philippines to access these fruits because the grower is a few miles away, but here in frosty Canada - how do you get these tree ripened fruits? Put yourself in the position of the grocer. First, you can get them from a Canadian hot house, think about tomatoes, so you can get them vine ripened even in the winter. Yum. Alternatively, you can find a distributor who brings them in from Latin America, so typically they have to be picked a few weeks before they're ripened and allowed to ripen on the container over where a distributor would ship them to you. These typically won't taste nearly as good and sometimes the transportation process bruises the fruit and it gets sensitive to shelf life. There's always the option of preserved vegetables, and if you think about it, part of the great expansion in Dutch trade in the 17th century was because of the invention of a process of preserving fish and specialized ships that allowed this to happen (called "gibbing" if you're ever interested). So preservation is an option. But there is a change in flavour. Finally, you could air freight them in. Air freight comes over in 24-48 hours I believe, so they can be tree ripened in Pakistan, and at your grocery counter 24 hours later. But air freight is much more costly than shipping by container because of the packages are harder to handle (vs. shipping containers which can be picked right off a boat and directly loaded onto a truck), the fuel cost of lifting an aircraft thousands of feet above ground, and you don't get scale because you're not bringing in thousands of grocery stores worth. It might be just for you and three other stores. And air freight can be shipped right to your grocery store or a storage place near the airport, so there's all those costs of getting to the airport, picking up a small amount, and then bringing them to your doorstep within a few hours. It could be handled by a distributor, or who knows, each of them could do it on their own, and the grocery store owner could drive to the airport on the way onto work, whatever, the point is that air freight adds a few extra bucks per pound (hence $2 per mango). This is neither here nor there. Sometimes it's the only alternative for getting amazing tasting mangoes in Canada.

Day 84: Mussels

A mussel dipped in a bit of butter. Sprinkled with a smoky hot sauce. Some crusty bread on the side. Awesome. What I love most, though, is sipping on wine while eating mussels, because you get that oceany flavour that comes right through.

It's June. So what? When is a good season for mussels? That's a hard question to answer. The received wisdom is that you should eat them in the months with the letter "R" in them (i.e. September - April), but I think that they are good all year round. I don't know how scientific the "R" month strategy is, but one reason is that the mussels spawn in the summer, so the meat is a little bit smaller. Sometimes you'll get  a batch and they are really thin, and that's because they just released all of their "goods". The other reason is safety, because if you're not dealing with a good fisherman, sure,  the water is a bit warmer and so bacteria can grow if they aren't stored and handled properly.

The mussels here were from St. Lawrence Market, and they cost $2.99/lb. Typically, I can eat 1 lb myself for an appetizer, or it's a side dish, half a pound per adult is okay.

The quickest way to cook them at home is just to fry up some onions, garlic, carrot, celery, until soft, then add the mussels and some liquid (e.g. broth, white wine, water, clamato) and cook until the mussels open which is anywhere from 3 to 6 minutes. Save those juices at the bottom of the pan, I call that the nectar, and just add parsley into it at the end and pour it all on top of the mussels.

Throw out the mussels that don't open, because they're dead and you have no idea how long they've been dead.  In the photo above, I made a tomato stew (canned tomatoes, clam juice, onions, garlic, oregano), and then added the mussels at the last minute and I ate it with baguette cut into triangular pieces - that way you get lots of soft surface area to soak up the liquids with. I've heard that you shouldn't serve them to kids under 5.

Sometimes you need to debeard them, but I've found that in Toronto, they generally take out the beards for you. Mussels with beards in seem to be able to be stored alive for longer.

On Mussels (facts come from Wikipedia)
Mussel is the common name used for members of several families of clams or bivalvia mollusca. Most of us are used to seeing the "blue mussel" here in North America. This is interesting - 80% of cultured mussels are produced in Prince Edward Island. When I was in Vancouver, though, I noticed that there was a lot of mussels from Washington states, in fact an estimated 2.9M pounds of mussels were harvested in 2010 valuing roughly $4.3M.

Mussels can be smoked, boiled, steamed, roasted, barbecued or fried in butter or vegetable oil. You can get smoked canned mussels at most grocery stores, in the same area as canned tuna, and you can put them right on crackers.

In Belgium, the Netherlands, and France, mussels are often consumed with french fries ("moules-frites") or bread.

As opposed to the Blue Mussel, New Zealand green lipped mussels can be found in restaurant here in Canada but almost always in their previously frozen form and on the half shell. Why would someone use a frozen mussel? My guess is that they are safer to handle than live mussels, especially if you're not selling a whole lot of them in your restaurant.  The meat is quite large, but chewier, because they were previously frozen.

Mussels are a high protein food source. Their low fat content makes them potentially healthier than other protein sources, such as beef, which can contain a lot of saturated fat. Mussels are also low in calories. Mussels are also an excellent source of vitamin B12 and selenium - Vitamin B12 is important in the functioning of metabolism processes and a deficiency can cause fatigue and depression, as well as other symptoms. Mussels are also good sources of other B vitamins (particularly folate), phosphorus, manganese and zinc. Mussels are a very good source of omega-3 fatty acids and are considered an excellent seafood choice.

Day 83: La Tomme de Haute-Richelieu

This may sound childish, but the reason I decided to get this cheese was because I was recently watching Ratatouille, and at one point, after finding some leftover cheese, Remy (the main character) looks at his brother, Emile, and goes, "Do you know what this is? It's not just any cheese, it's La Tomme de Pays! Gusteau loves this stuff!"

I ended up getting another cheese, and before I go into what I actually got, what is La Tomme de Chevre de Pays and why was little Remy waxing philosophical about it? And why was it so hard for me to find it?

Tomme - Tomme-style cheeses are the ones with a grey-brown rind, making it look sort of 'rustic' or 'weathered' and I typically think of them having a soft and creamy texture - think brie or camembert. This is not the actual definition, but since I'm more layman than cheesemonger, let's just call this a working definition because it'll help you out 90% of the time.

Chevre - means Goat in French, so it's made of goat blood. Just kidding. It's made with goat milk (obviously).

De pays.- means "from country" in French. So typically, a tomme would use the region after its name (e.g. "Tomme de Savoie" or "Tomme de Beaujolais") and since 'Pays' translates to 'Country', Remy was looking for a Tomme cheese "from country", which as you can see, doesn't make sense and so that might also explain the weird looks like received when I was asking the cheesemongers if they had "Tomme de Chevre de Pays" because that doesn't exist!

I ended up getting something called "La Tomme de Richelieu". It's a tomme from Quebec and it had that  milky, farm, nutty flavour with a soft melt-in-your mouth texture. The rind was really sticky and strong smelling so that threw me off at first. Not sure if it was because I had it in my bag for awhile. The price came to $55/kg. (for perspective, cheddar cheese is typically something like $10/kg).

On La Tomme de Richelieu

Created 12 years ago by Fritz Kaiser, Le Tomme Haut Richelieu was an invention of necessity. The fromagerie had received more goat's milk than it needed to make its soft cheese Chevrochon. Wanting to preserve the milk by making a cheese that would have a longer shelf life, they made a goat's milk version of their semi-soft cow's milk cheese.

Day 82: Fiddleheads

If you've been in grocery stores this week, you may have noticed that fiddleheads are in season. For some reason, the grocer at St. Lawrence Market had them floating in water, which made it look fresher. The price was $6.99/lb.

You can blanch, steam, or stir fry them. Blanching and stir frying is nice, because it seals in the colour. But stir frying is more practical though. We put in some fried onions and garlic, and then a little bit of hot mustard (the mustard came from Caplansky Deli and that stuff is awesome). You can add lemon.

You may want to cook them for quite a while (over 10 minutes) for food safety reasons. Cleaning them is a bit of a hassle, because you need to remove these little brown stuff on the outside and you have to chop off the woody part of the stem.

We ate this quite a bit as a kid (apparently there's a town in NB that claims to be the fiddlehead capital of the world?). The flavour is like a subtle asparagus and the texture is curious -  fibrous and chewy. It's a nice treat in the middle of the week, but it is a bit of work to prepare, and the cooking time is relatively longer.

On Fiddleheads (from wikipedia): 

'Fiddleheads' or 'Fiddlehead greens' are the furled fronds of a young fern,harvested for use as a vegetable. Left on the plant, each fiddlehead would unroll into a new frond.

They have antioxidant activity, are a source of omega-3 and omega-6 fatty acids, and are high in iron and fibre. It is also called a crozier, after the curved staff used by bishops, which has its origins in the shepherd's crook.

They  have been part of traditional diets in much of Northern France since the beginning of the Middle Ages, Asia (India, Korean, Chinese, Indonesia) as well as among Native Americans for centuries. They  are a traditional dish of northern New England (especially Maine) in the United States, and of Quebec, Ontario and the Maritimes in Canada.

Fiddleheads are available in the market for only a few weeks in springtime.