Moving

I’m moving into a new apartment this weekend so there will be no Farmers Market Update. (Trust me, it hurts me more than it hurts you.) I hate moving but it will be fun to learn to work in a new kitchen. Shopping for it will also be awesome.

Here’s a shot of a very small fraction of my packed pantry. I love my pantry

This also explains why I’ll be eating grilled veggie burritos for the next couple days. Boooo.

Since I’m missing my own farmers market I’m going to live vicariously through all of you. So please tell me in the comments what you found today!

For The Love of Food

Welcome to Friday’s For The Love of Food, Summer Tomato’s weekly link roundup.

I’m pleased to announce that I did another guest post, this time over at TwiTip about Twitter and the value of food tweets. I also found some divine homemade pizza recipes, great advice for choosing (and not choosing) smart seafood and an urban legend debunking session. Oh, and I call B.S. on Men’s Health for pretending slightly-less-fattening fast food is “healthy.”

If you would like to see more of my favorite articles each week or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page.

Submissions of your own best food and health articles are also welcome, just drop me an email using the contact form.

For The Love of Food

• How To Make Any Tweet Worth Following << My latest guest post (at TwiTip by @problogger) where I discuss the value of tweeting what you eat (on Twitter). Alternate title idea -  In Defense of Food: A Tweeter’s Manifesto. Please retweet!
• How to Make Money on Food Items in the Shape of Religious Icons <<Worth checking out for the picture alone. Hilarious, irreverent entrepreneurship. Does it get any better? (from Serious Eats)
• Eat Healthy at the Airport <<B.S. of the week. Leave it to Men’s Health to redefine “healthy” to include complete garbage. Real airport health food? Nuts, fruit, vegetables, eggs, water. Better yet, bring your own.
• Chew better, stay full longer? <<Great advice on getting more satisfaction from your meals by chewing longer. Courtesy of the Nutrition Diva herself, Monica Reinagle over at Nutrition Data.
• Red Bull’s New Cola: A Kick from Cocaine? <<Apparently Red Bull has traces of cocaine in it, according to Time. Better than fiction.
• Sardines for the eco-conscious <<Wonderful guide to choosing the healthiest, most sustainable fish from Limes and Lycopene (by @kathrynelliott)
• Tastier, Healthier Pizzas <<I altered the title a bit because I do not think the New York Times gave their pizza recipe enough credit. Sure it’s healthier, but what most people don’t understand is that these kinds of pizzas taste orders of magnitude better than typical take out. Seriously.
• All you can eat <<More than you ever wanted to know about where Red Lobster gets their bottomless shrimp. This article is long, but I was enthralled from start to finish (via @sandrasay)
• Chewing gum, spiders and jellyfish stings — all with a dose of skepticism <<The always skeptical Tami Dennis of the Los Angeles Times debunks some urban legends about food and other oddities.
• Daily Delish – Cheer for cherries <<Shout out to the lovely Shannon at The Daily Balance (@thedailybalance). I’ve always known Shannon was awesome, but she topped herself this week by mentioning basketball and cherries in the same post. FTW!!

What links did I miss? Share your faves of the week in the comments.

Roasted Beets With Fresh Mint and Chèvre

I am very proud to share this recipe with you since it came by special request from my dad–a self-professed beet hater. I won him over with these beets several years ago and he is still talking about them! The same recipe stole my heart back when I thought I hated beets too.

Are you convinced?

Roasted Beets with fresh mint and chèvre is an elegant, impressive dish that hardly requires any cooking skills. If you are still worried you will not like the flavor of beets, you can look for the milder and less messy golden or candy-striped beets. Whenever possible I like to use a few different beet varieties to mix up the colors and flavors, but today I’m sticking with the common red garden beet.

Mint Leaves

To begin you must eliminate all thoughts of substituting canned beets for the fresh ones in this recipe. Fresh roasted beets have a rich, sweet and earthy flavor that is completely unlike the flaccid purple slivers that come in a can.

You will also need fresh mint leaves. Most grocery stores and farmers markets will have fresh mint this time of year. Dried leaves really don’t cut it in this recipe.

Chèvre is a soft goat cheese that a close friend of mine describes as “like cream cheese only better.” A little bit goes a very long way, so I always buy the smallest amount possible (this time it cost me $2.89).

Chèvre

Be careful not to add the cheese directly to hot beets or it will melt and form an unattractive pink slime. It still tastes good, but it’s better to avoid this problem by cooling the beets beforehand. An hour in the refrigerator works well, but if you are in a hurry you can get away with 10-15 minutes in the freezer.

This dish is very easy to scale for large batches, making it ideal for parties and potlucks.

Roasted Beets With Fresh Mint and Chèvre

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of beets (3 large), any garden variety
• 1/2 cup fresh mint leaves, loosely packed
• 1/4 oz. chèvre, crumbled
• Olive oil
• Sea salt or kosher salt

Preheat oven to 375.

If the leaves are still on your beets, twist them off leaving enough stem to use as a handle for peeling. If your beet greens are still fresh and springy I recommend cleaning them and cooking them up with some onions and garlic (cook them like spinach). Beet greens are so full of potassium that they are salty to the taste, so be careful with your seasonings because they are easy to over-salt. Both beets and beet greens are extremely good for people with high blood pressure.

Peel your beets using a vegetable peeler (I recommend this one) and chop evenly into bite-sized cubes. Discard stems. Cubes should be approximately 3/4 to 1 inch on each side. Keep in mind that the larger your pieces the longer they will take to cook.

Add 1-2 tbsp olive oil to beets and toss to coat. Sprinkle beets with salt and place in a single layer in a large Pyrex baking pan. Place in oven on middle rack and roast until beets are tender and have a glazed-like appearance, stirring every 8-10 minutes. Roasting takes approximately 35 minutes.

When beets are finished roasting, transfer them to a large bowl, cover with plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator. Chill for at least 30 min, but 45 min to 1 hr is preferable.

5 minutes before the beets are done chilling, stack mint leaves on top of each other and chiffonade them by rolling lengthwise like a cigarette and slicing into thin ribbons. I like to cut the ribbons in half once by making a single cut through the middle of the pile along the vein of the leaves. Discard the stems.

Using a fork, crumble a small amount of chèvre into a small bowl or plate and set aside.

Sprinkle mint onto the beets and stir, leaving a few ribbons for garnish. Adjust salt to taste. Transfer beets and mint to a serving bowl and sprinkle with chèvre and remaining mint. Serve immediately.

Do you love beets? Hate beets? Interested in having pink urine?

Avocado

And now for something completely different.

In a break from my usual elitist glory San Francisco farmers market adventure, I took a field trip this weekend to sunny Southern California where I discovered the cheapest produce I have ever seen in this state. Seriously, it was crazy.

Normally I prefer to hit up either the Irvine or Santa Monica markets when I’m in the OC. But this Saturday wasn’t amenable to a drive across town so instead I visited the Orange County Marketplace at the fairgrounds in Costa Mesa on Sunday. It is open 7am to 4pm Saturdays and Sundays, admission $2.

The OC Marketplace is really more of a swap meet than a farmers market, but there is a whole section for fresh produce. At the vegetable stands I found what I consider typical Southern California fare–tomatoes, avocados, citrus, squash and peppers–with a few seasonal items mixed in. I saw nothing particularly exotic, and the quality of produce ranged from not-so-hot to pretty good.

What is truly remarkable about this place is the prices.

Cheap Berries

Cheap Asparagus

Asparagus is typically $3-7 dollars per bunch at the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market. At the OC Marketplace it was $0.99. Berries, typically $3-6 per basket (even at the supermarket), dropped in price while we waited in line from (I kid you not) a ridiculously cheap 3 baskets for $2, to a mind-bogglingly cheap 4 baskets for $2. And from what I could tell they were perfectly ripe and in excellent condition.

Have you ever seen 7 white peaches for $1? I have.

Cheap Apricots

Cheap Peaches

Honestly, I don’t get it. If any of you can explain to me how this market can practically give away groceries I would love to know the reason.

My best guess is these are simply whole sale prices. In other words, these are the same goods grocery stores buy and sell to you for a higher price. The quality of produce was certainly more on par with grocery stores than what I have seen at other Southern California markets. And I doubt much of it was organic, though few items were clearly marked.

Alternatively these vendors could be offering a mix of whole sale and local fare. It wasn’t clear to me if/how any of the offerings were locally grown. This being California, however, it seems logical that at least some of the goods come from the area. When I asked someone where the food was from the answer I got was “the L.A. market,” which obviously is not a farm.

My worst fear is that much of this produce comes from the horrible slave farms that are starting to be exposed. Hopefully that isn’t true.

The source of this produce may be a little dubious, but I cannot imagine you finding a better deal anywhere in Orange County. If organic and local are less important to you than simply affording fresh healthy food, a trip to the OC Marketplace is easily worth the price of admission.

For you Bay Area readers, I’ve seen similar deals at the Ashby market in Berkeley (no admission fee).

Do you know anything about these swap meet style produce vendors?

Note: Since it is Memorial Day there will not be a new post on Monday. We’ll be back Wednesday–same Tomato time, same Tomato channel.

For The Love of Food

Welcome back to For The Love of Food. We’ve got some great stuff for you here this week, including my guest post at the renowned MizFitOnline and the first ever “B.S. of the week.”

If you would like to see more of my favorite articles each week or just don’t want to wait until Friday, be sure to follow me on Twitter (@summertomato) or the Summer Tomato Facebook fan page.

Submissions of your own best food and health articles are also welcome, just drop me an email using the contact form.

For The Love of Food

• When Is A Calorie Not A Calorie <<MizFit wanted to know why some calories have smaller impact than others. I give all the gory science details in this post.
• New Farmers Market Finds Home at the Metreon <<New 7 day farmers market at the Metreon theater in San Francisco (via @alohalizzie).
• 33 Healthiest Foods On Earth <<B.S. of the week. Healthy food advice coming from the food industry? I’m sure my health is their #1 concern. Very disappointing, Lifehacker.
• Politics of the Plate: The Price is Wrong <<An insightful look into how and why we do not pay enough money for our food, from Gourmet (via Chef2Video).
• Stormtrooper Breakfast Cereal <<You might as well come to accept the fact that I’m a huge Star Wars nerd (from Serious Eats).
• Updated Recommendations for Calcium and vitamin D <<People are finally starting to acknowledge that calcium is virtually useless as a supplement and vitamin D is where it’s at for bone health. Thanks Nutrition Data!
• How To Maintain A Healthy Lifestyle When You’re Too Busy To Care <<Personally I think you should never be too busy to care about your health, but in case you struggle with it here is a simple starter kit from Dumb Little Man.
• Sweet pea gazpacho <<Springtime version of a summer classic, recipe from Joanne Weir.
• Whole-grain cereal and other ‘healthy’ foods that fool <<So rarely does the main stream media (MSNBC) get it right, I thought I’d share. Just ignore what they say about calcium and osteoporosis–calcium intake is not related to this disease.
• Watch out for web diet scams!! <<Great tips on how to avoid bogus diet scams online (from Eleanor @ Make Friends with Food)

What great articles did you read this week?