Rye Cooks

Apple Selecting

Over this glorious weekend we visited friends in Delmar, Albany.  Albany has something of a reputation for being cold, grey and windy.  And it was for much of my undergraduate experience at SUNY.  But when it's good, it's really fabulous.

There was some soccer, in which the college (or near) kids held nothing back against the intrepid sixth graders and everyone got muddy and sweaty.

Next day for apple picking.  We drove up to a pretty orchard and felt lucky that it was easy to find a parking spot.  The line for cider donuts was also short so we decided to do the donut/coffee break first, before the line got huge.  We bought two dozen hot sugary confections and enjoyed the sunshine on a picnic bench.

Walking up the hill to the apple trees, we finally see the hand written sign telling us there will be no picking today. Due to a long summer and an early frost, the apples were previously rescued by the owners and placed in large crates.  The kids reached in to select the reddest, the roundest and the most blemish-free.

They had so much fun selecting that we forgot our mission of the day was to pick.

The apples are really delicious, we couldn't have done better ourselves. I have my eye on a recipe in the October Rachel Ray magazine for caramel covered cupcakes.  I'll let you know how it goes!

 

Our First Show, Mark IV

Watermelons, Port Chester.  ©Suzy Allman

Would you like to see our first show?  It's here.  Don't worry about the lack of picture in the first fifteen seconds; it's deliberate.

Whistling Spuds: A Little Less Packaging?

Potatoh!  ©Suzy Allman

Take a perfectly self-contained, natural, oven-ready veg.  Wrap it tightly, Twin-Peaks style, in plastic.  Triple the price.

At a dollar apiece, the Potatoh! comes in a special micro-perforated plastic and is supposed to give you an oven-baked crunch in a microwave-cooked potato.

We laugh at the individually wrapped superspud, but let's give this modern-age Tang a try:

Potatoh!  after seven minutes of microwave.  ©Suzy Allman

Good potato.  The skin isn't crispy the way it is when it cooks in the oven.  The wrap is FDA approved.  It screams as it cooks in the microwave chamber, a shriek you have to hear to believe.  Try not to listen.

And, really: do you really want to pay a triple for a potato wrapped and cooked in plastic?  Isn't the potato already perfectly convenient?  Can we at least hold the line on packaging at the spud? Farther down the produce aisle, fresh apples, sliced and individually wrapped in plastic and packaged again, reclined seductively beside the packaged carrot sticks.

Fiddleheads Are Here

Fiddlehead ferns.  ©Suzy Allman

I'm not saying I drop everything and run to the store when the fiddleheads are here.  But I do get them while they are, and right now they're in a little bag in the produce section of Stop and Shop.

Fiddleheads, tasting something like asparagus and smelling something like the cool forest floor, are the unfurled heads of ostrich ferns.  Because they must be picked while the head is still tightly-wound, their season is short.

I like to steam them with baby potatoes (white and red) to doneness in a bamboo steamer on the stovetop.  From there, toss them with melted butter and lemon, or olive oil and seasoned salt and parsley.

Your kids probably won't eat them.  But who cares?

Fiddlehead ferns with baby red and white potatoes.  ©Suzy Allman