According to an article in the London Telegraph, sales of turnips have gone up 75% in the UK over the past year. It marks an interesting side-effect of the current economic calamity—the resurgence of a “credit crunch vegetable,” as per one turnip farmer. Turnips haven’t been popular in the UK since WWII when the kingdom OD’d on the hearty root, one of very few foodstuffs available. Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, a Scottish writer bemoans these as rooty impostors—not true neeps (as the Scots call them), but rather some insipid white radishy things. You can’t mash those up with tatties and make a true clapshot! Anyway, let’s see how else our economic collapse effects our diets—Americans should probably start developing a tooth for neeps.

Mountain Bounty Farm, my local CSA, has an abundance of tomatoes this year; more fruit than can be included in the weekly distribution, sold at the Saturday’s Farmer’s Market, or to individuals focused on canning sauces and salsas.

With the threat of global economic collapse on the front burner, my partner Steve and I have decided to invest in tomato futures by freezing, drying, canning, and gorging daily on this sublime fruit.

Today is mostly cloudy and cool, a break from the blistering temperatures of summer. It’s a good thing that I’ve already dried 150 pounds of tomatoes in the last three weeks, when daytime temperatures stayed in the 90s with little humidity. Read on… »

Photos by Califia Suntree.

I should start by emphasizing that I am not an expert on kombucha. I have been drinking it pretty regularly for a couple of years, and for the last six months or so have had two big Mason jars in my kitchen filled with the stuff. Every week to ten days, I harvest six bottles worth out of those jars and start brewing (“brewing”? “growing”? “cultivating”?) another batch.

The first time I encountered kombucha must have been sometime in 2005, when I saw my friend Kevin with a bottle of “G.T. Dave’s Kombucha.” I asked Kevin what he was drinking, to which he replied, “It’s, like, a LIVING CULTURE, man! After you open the bottle, you gotta drink it within, like, TWO HOURS…or it could become LETHAL!” Read on… »

First, I want to spread the word to all New Yorkers that the Edible magazine family has a new title: a two-week-old magazine called Edible Manhattan. Many of you enjoy Edible Brooklyn (I know I do!), and now we can read about the food culture of what we Brooklynites think of mostly as “the skyline.” I was fortunate enough to help the Edible folks out at a couple of farmers’ markets last week, and was struck by the loads and loads of tomatoes everywhere. These later-harvest fruits look to be enormous and very, very ripe. I started to fantasize about canning tomatoes, making and freezing sauce, drying them on the roof…One good place to start is with Kate Dwyer’s inspiring tomato story, and Susie Troccolo’s easy Pasta d’Estate. I may not get around to creating a tomato-product factory in my kitchen, so I’m going to binge on fresh ones ’til they run out.