PrintA Piece of Fruit Can Change Your Life
On the way to visiting friends this weekends on the East End of LI I stopped at the Citarella on 75th and Broadway. Citarella's produce is consistently better than its next door neighbor Fairway, and on Saturday Citarella had what is for me one of the greatest pieces on fruits to be found on this earth, white apricots.
Some of you might remember the John Seabrook piece on the fruit detective, David Karp, which mentioned white apricots.
I know white apricots are not local (they're grown in California), but man are they delicious. They're sweet and juicy and have the most intense apricot flavor.
I bought eight (they're small), ate one immediately upon exiting the store, and after shopping at Fairway for some phenomenal cheeses and some lomo (more about these in another post), I decided to buy eight more. Because I was in a hurry I just put one bag of the apricots on top of the other instead of combining them. Big mistake. When I checked their condition two hours into the train ride I discovered that most of them had fallen apart. I had unwittingly created chunky white apricot puree.
When we arrived at our friends' house our host Joan tasted one and declared them to be apricots from the gods. We decided that she would bake a French tart crust and then place the broken apricots in the crust uncooked with a little lemon verbena from her garden. Brilliant! I suggested a little Haagen Dasz vanilla ice cream would complete this masterpiece. One bite later, and Joan's brilliance was confirmed. Nobody, not Alice Waters nor Nancy Silverton, could have improved upon this creation.
So if you can get your hands on some white apricots (they have a very short season, so definitely go to Citarella this week), try to follow Joan's method. And if you don't want to bake the tart crust, just serve them with vanilla ice cream. White apricots will change your life. Mark my words.
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2 Comments:
Loved your story on white apricots but since i was a kid, summer always meant the sweet smell of strawberries
Probably nothing beats the taste of a just-picked, sun-ripened strawberry. Strawberries are loaded with natural sugars, but these sugars rapidly convert to starch once the berry is picked. Strawberries can be grown in a greenhouse year-round, but not without a little help from you . Owning a greenhouse has been a way of providing our guests here at the Fish Creek House B&B in Southwest Montana with quality, fresh and mostly organic fruits and vegetables.
So it is not mere pride that makes a freshly picked home-grown strawberry taste better - it really does. The fresher the berry, the sweeter the taste. Strawberries are high yielders. From a single, well-cared-for 2-year-old plant, you can expect to harvest 1 to 2 quarts of strawberries. That's 50 to 100 quarts of berries from a bed 15 feet long and three plants deep - about 50 plants.
Keep Planting Strawberries
You can maximize yields by continually renewing your strawberry bed with new plants. Many gardeners try to keep old plants producing year after year, but this inevitably leads to decreased yields and increased disease problems. You can start out in the spring with ten plants that will each produce five healthy daughter plants in the first year - and they'll bear an abundant crop of strawberries the second year. Keep two beds in rotation and every year you can count on 50 to 100 quarts of juicy red berries - enough for about thirty strawberry-drenched shortcakes and fifty pints of preserves to enjoy all winter and fifty helpings of Sunday brunch strawberry waffles, not to mention the sweetest possible berries for eating straight out of the garden. Visit us at http://www.fishcreekhouse.com
horsewoman at 3:03PM on 07/19/06
Another good spot is the Manhattan Fruit Exchange in the Chelsea Market. A great selection!
DaJoSee at 5:46PM on 03/06/08