The Fear of Fruit

I was in Sunshine grocery store today, and was walking through the produce aisle and found myself surrounded by all this great looking fruit. Living in the Napa Valley, we get a lot of good produce, yet I bought nothing. Not a thing...just couldn't do it. The reason? I wasn't sure any of it was good.

I think people don't eat a lot of fruit for the same reason, we're just not sure if it's going to be any good, and for the price stores are charging, shouldn't we have some assurance that the peaches will taste like peaches? If you keep buying lousy peaches you're eventually going to come to the conclusion that peaches just aren't any good, and will just avoid them. Consumers these days don't really care about seasonality. They want what they want when they want it, and stores have found ways to fill this need. This means we can by nice red tomatoes all year round, but most of the time they taste like crap. they're picked green,and treated with ethylene to turn them red, but they don't ever develop any flavor. The same can be said for most of the fruit found year round. The fruit is trucked in from around the globe, and while it might look pretty, the taste is usually lack luster, and so people just tend to avoid them even when they are in season.

As Ferran Adria once said, a great peach is always better than an OK lobster. But how do we know we're getting a great peach? I had some incredible strawberries when I was living in Davis a decade ago, and long to try some again, but do I really want to spend the money just to be disappointed? There were some great looking white peaches in the store today, but who knows how they taste, and at $6 a pound, am I willing to take the risk?

One way to get good produce is to shop at farmers markets, but unfortunately the St. Helena farmers market is on Friday mornings when I'm at school. There is always Napa, but sometimes I don't feel like driving 30 minutes just for the hope that there is something good. There are some fruit stands around, but even these tend to truck their stuff in and who knows how far its traveled. I guess there isn't certainty in any aspect of life, and the chance that I will get a truly great peach is enough to make me take the chance.

The World's Ugliest Soup

I've never had contempt for soup before, I mean really where's the point in that? But he soup I made the other night...sheer contempt. I detest that soup, this despite the fact that it tastes pretty damn good.

After school most days I work in the teaching kitchen, helping out, and helping prepare student meals for dinner. Usually we work with left over foods from production classes, and this invariably means that we get a mish mash of produce and meats that we have to some how combine together. Normally this is no big deal, I mean it's not hard to find a use for 20# of left over steak or chicken, and when all else fails we make soup. This job fell on me the other day, when I was told that I had to make soup with about 15# of left over red cabbage.

"But it's going to be purple" I kept saying, but alas that's what they wanted, so that's what I did. "Why can't we make Borsht?" I asked to anyone who would listen, "Well we have no beets" I was told. OK that's actually a fair answer. So I went and made the soup. This involved cutting up a bunch of carrots, onions and celery, and about 30 heads of cabbage. All the while in the back of my head I was thinking...why am I making purple soup? So after tending to about 30 gallons of soup for a few hours, I then had to blend the soup into a puree. This is when the contempt started. Not only was it a bit of a pain blending all this soup, but it was getting close to 7pm and we still had to cool the soup down, and then package it up, this takes some time, and at this point I just wanted to go home. The contempt was bolstered by the fact that I knew no one would eat this. Who would want to eat a bit bowl of Purple. But I stuck it out, and got to end up tasting pretty good, quite tasty in fact, but still it was a big ass mass of purple, and I have no idea who would eat it. I even ended up labeling the containers "Purple Soup", because who cares what's in it, anyone who saw it just said "Man that's one purple soup". So it's been a few days, and I still haven't dared going into the walk in to see how much of it is actually gone.