Fruit of the week: Honey Red Dates

Name: Honey Red Dates

Brand: Ah Jiao

Place of Purchase: Uni-Mart Korean Grocery in Ames, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: South Korea

 

Price in Iowa: $1.89 for 200 grams of fruit

Description: Big, sticky red raisins

Flavor: Very sweet, with a meaty, mealy flavor underneath

Aroma: They smell like honey

Texture/Mouth-feel: Sticky exterior, the skin is rigid with a good snap to it, the interior is mostly hollow.  Most of the fruit is attached to the skin.

Notes: I picked these up at the Korean grocery when I was stocking up on ginseng and Katsu sauce.  I knew that the flavor would be nothing like the actual fruit, but there were a number of varieties so I decided to try one.  They were very good.  This candied "date" is actually a dried jujube.  Typically in Korea, the candied variety is eaten with tea (or in tea), but there are a variety of other dishes that use the dried fruit (some sort of cake made from dried jujubes, tamarind, chilies and jaggery that sounds fantastic).  These were a nice treat, but I could only eat a few of them.  Very very sweet. 

Fruit of the Week: Golden Raspberries

Name: Organic Golden Raspberries

Brand: Driscoll's 

Place of Purchase: Wheatsfield Organic Co-op in Ames, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: California

Price in Iowa: $2.39 for 6 ounces of fruit

Description: Pretty, yellow aggregate fruit

Flavor: Tart, not too sweet, strong berry flavor

Aroma: Not very fragrant

Texture/Mouth-feel: Organic fruits ripen quicker for some reason, so these berries were rather squishy.

Notes:These golden raspberries were tasty.  They weren't that sweet and has a stronger "raspberry" flavor.  Their true allure is their golden color, which makes them a nice contrast when mixed with red and black raspberries.  However, their stronger flavor and reduced sweetness actually makes them attractive for jam-making.


Too bad they're so darned pricey.  The cultivar that produces the golden berries is owned by a single company, so they are only grown in the US and only available seasonally.  Which isn't a bad thing, but limits the availability of these tart jewels.  Which is another factor that lends to preserving this fruit.

Libation of the week: Trumpetflower Nectar

Name: Trumpetflower Nectar

 

Brand: God made this

Place of Purchase: Free in Ames, Iowa

Full-screenRemoval requested ()Restore requestedEdit

Get Directions

Country/Region of Origin:Ames, Iowa, USA

Tasting Conditions: Chilled

Price in Iowa: $0.00

Description: a clear, light liquor

Flavors: Sweet, with floral and astringent notes

Mouth-feel: Very light, for sugar water

Aroma: Clean, slightly floral

Notes: At the end of June/beginning of July, the trumpetflowers bloom and fill with sugary nectar.  If you can beat the bugs, you can suck the nectar from the bottom of the bloom.  I didn't want to hurt too many of the plants, so I poured the nectar from the flowers.  It took about 20 flowers to gather half-an-ounce, which I took home and chilled.  There wasn't much of an aroma, and the sucrose overpowered much of the complexity of the nectar.  I did detect some floral notes and a strange astringency, probably fruit acids acting as an anti-fungal.


I just felt like trying something different.  If you have some trumpetflowers in your yard, give them a try.

Cheese of the week: Taleggio

Name: Taleggio

Brand: none listed

Place of Purchase: Wheatsfield Organic Co-op in Ames, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: Italy

Price in Iowa: $12.17/lb.

Milk: cow's milk

Processing: cheese molded into squares, and is then washed in a special brine

Texture: soft

Color: straw-colored to orange around rind

Rind: washed

Aroma: WOW.  Powerful.  It isn't unpleasant, but strong dairy and wine, with some moldy/woody undertones.

Taste: Nutty, woody, tart wine flavors that grow stronger as you eat more.  There are some other flavors underneath all of that that I don't fully recognize (something like wood, cherry, and vanilla, but faint)

Mouth feel: Buttery but unyielding paste.
 
Notes: Everytime I hear about some magically amazing cheese, I'm skeptical.  I search for it and buy it, but I'm skeptical.


Tallegio is such a cheese.  This Northern Italian secret is supposedly the first of the soft cheeses and is so protected that it's hard to get here in the States.  Typically, they have to fly it in special.  Don't ask me how the organic co-op got it, but they did.  So I did.  And boo-yah, this is a good cheese.  Buttery, soft, spreadable paste.  Extremely rich and complex flavor.  I need to keep eating it to discover everything.  Delicious.

Fruit of the Week: Mangosteen

Name: Mangosteen (canned in syrup)

Brand: Lamthong

Place of Purchase: Double Dragon Market in Des Moines, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: Thailand

Price in Iowa: $1.89 for 8.1 ounces of fruit

Description: Beige, sectional, meaty orbs

Flavor: Tart citrus, peaches, sweet flowery notes 

Aroma: Flowery, with a blunt spicy scent

Texture/Mouth-feel: Sectional, like an orange, but with a single large seed in each section.

Notes: My wife, who has had the fresh fruit, tells me that the canned fruit are unripe.  Which makes sense because the ripe fruits must be eaten right away.  They can not be transported.  So, if I want "the Queen of Fruits" I will either have to go to Southeast Asia or find some unripe fruits and wait wait wait.  The canned ones weren't bad.  I liked them.

Again, I have to apologize about my sideways image.  I rotate it in Photoshop, but the rotation doesn't stick.

Cheese of the week: Tomme de Savoie

Name: Tomme de Savoie

Brand: Fromagerie Edouard Conus

Place of Purchase: Wheatsfield Organic Co-op in Ames, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: France

Price in Iowa: $14.92/lb.

Milk:  unpasteurized skim, typically from winter milkings

Processing: at least one month of aging, a brown crust insures at least 6 months of aging

Texture: semi-soft

Color: straw

Rind: brownish and dusty

Aroma: mild dairy

Taste: bitter, sour, shockingly piquant, meaty, nutty

Mouth feel: firm and unyielding, smooth
 
Notes: This simple cheese has an amazingly complex flavor.  It starts strong, tart and piquant, and eventually mellows into meaty and nutty tones.  Amazingly delicious.  The Cheese Primer warns to only buy cheeses produced in Savoy.  Apparently, some cheeses are made elsewhere and then sent to Savoy for aging.  With the simplicity of this cheese, it is probably best to look for authenticity.  That way you're sure to have the most accurate flavor.  So, avoid affinie en Savoie.  

Fruit of the Week: Lychee (fresh)

Name: Lychee

Brand: God made these

Place of Purchase: Laotian Festival in Des Moines, Iowa

Country/Region of Origin: Florida

 

Price in Iowa: $2.50 per pound

Description: Spikey, red and yellow-green ovoid fruits with a translucent, "dragon eye-style" drupe

Flavor: roses and peaches, with a lingering musky aftertaste

Aroma: peaches and roses

Texture/Mouth-feel: Firm, chewy, juicy

Notes: My Indian friend, Rahul, has informed me that my review of Litchi Juice would not have been an accurate representation of the lychee fruit itself.  So, when my wife brought me back  these beauties from a Laotian Water Festival (along with some fried quail and some sweet sausages) I was very pleased.


So, I let them sit overnight and cracked into them the next day.  The flavor was stronger than the juice.  I hadn't noticed the peach flavors in the juice.  It was just rosy and musky.  Could I eat a million of these fruits?  No, probably not.  But I could subsist on them as my sole source of sweetness.