On the Table

As soon as the mornings turned chilly enough to see your breath, my grandfather, who normally never lifted a chopstick in the kitchen, would commandeer the stove and scowl over a pot to make miso soup for our breakfast. This was not the pale little bowl of cloudy broth and delicate cubes of tofu you […]

We are fast approaching Thanksgiving, and the Saturday before, Nov. 19, is the last Farmers’ Market of 2011 on the Arcata Plaza. That’s the day when I say arrivederci many times, when the wish to be particularly attentive and thankful competes with the need to focus on the final alfresco shopping of the year. It […]

Several polls in recent years have shown that about 90 percent of Americans support the labeling of foods that contain genetically modified organisms. That’s about as close to a consensus as you’re going to get in this country. But amazingly, in this supposed bastion of freedom and democracy, we’re still denied the fundamental right of […]

Being Italian, I should be eager to preserve tomatoes. My mother did it every summer in her kitchen. If my memory serves me well, she would get 175 pounds of San Marzano tomatoes and turn them into countless bottles and jars. As long as I lived with my parents, I played a role in my […]

At the Tuesday Farmers’ Market in Arcata, I was pleasantly surprised to learn how cheap basil is right now. Big, verdant bunches, redolent with pungent anise scent; they seemed almost impossible to refuse. With basil so inexpensive, now’s the time for making and freezing batches of pesto (and canning tomato sauce, but that’s another column). […]

OK, let’s get this out of the way first. Comfort food is not always NC (nutritionally correct). The function of comfort food is contained in its name. Put your Euell Gibbons/Michael Pollan hysteria on hold and allow yourself to be comforted by food whose only reason for being is to make you feel better while […]

A few Saturdays ago, as my husband and I were roaming the Arcata Farmers’ Market, we met a neighbor. She asked whether I was buying zucchini from the stall in front of us. I had in fact written in a recent Table Talk (“Zucchini Season,” July 7) that I buy zucchini by default every time […]

Hooray, it’s summer! And it totally is less crappy thus far than last summer. Sun, bearable wind, not too much rain. While I appreciate our temperate clime, I sometimes long for the psychologically comforting seasonal delineators of Actual Weather Changes. In the Midwest and back East, seasons are specific. There’s snow. You wear a big […]

There is no middle of the road with fish tacos. People who haven’t tried one furrow their collective brow at the idea. “Fish? In a taco?” Those who have tasted the truth revel in the delight that is the perfect fish taco. They tend to be gloriously dogmatic in their conviction that we should all […]

Seeing freshly picked zucchini at the Farmers’ Market gets me into a celebratory mood. I admit that I get excited about many kinds of fresh fruit and vegetables, each one for a different reason. With zucchini, it is a desire to make amends. I did not get along with zucchini during the first part of […]

MyPlate, the USDA’s new symbol of dietary correctness, was unveiled on June 2. It replaces the agency’s Eating Right Pyramid (est. 1992), which succeeded the Four Basic Food Groups (1956). Those four in turn represented a consolidation of the seven food groups the agency pushed in the 1940s, pared down from 12 during the Great […]

As the season progresses, a wider variety of fresh fruit and vegetables becomes available at the Arcata Farmers’ Market. But from the very first day, Swiss chard could be purchased from several farmers. If you managed to walk all around the Plaza last Saturday and go home without any chard in your basket, you’ll have […]