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I no longer believe I have the “best ever” guacamole recipe. Every year about this time, the search for the ultimate guacamole comes up in the office or the blogosphere and I gather another nugget that raises the bar on my personal concoction. New ingredients and theories get added or subtracted – things like the right texture (creamy or chunky) or the right balance of ingredients (simple or complicated). Even the question of if putting the pit back in the bowl of guacamole really keep the guacamole from turning brown is a subject of seemingly endless debate. For some the business of guacamole is a serious, exacting science. For others, you just mash an avocado with a fork and your work is done. I’m somewhere in the middle but my recipe evolves every year.
Rodrigo, our office avocado buyer and resident expert, is crazy busy right now. Avocadoes are very popular and demand is strong year round but in January demand really takes off. This is due in part to very strong, overlapping availability from Chile and Mexico, both of which are producing excellent fruit. But the main reason demand increases in January is football. For the week of the big game, Rodrigo will book more than double the amount of avocadoes shipped in a normal week. This year supplies are much stronger and the fruit is ripening beautifully.
There are few meals more satisfying in the winter than a simple bowl of sautéed greens, brown rice and maybe a small piece of fish or chicken. Mustard greens are my favorite variety by far and while not the most common they are certainly the most flavorful. Growing up in the South, greens were always on the menu for my family. Turnip or collard greens were the main attraction then — slow cooked for hours in a giant pot with a lump of salt pork. These days healthier oils (or none at all) have replaced the salt pork and the cooking time has gone from hours to a brief sauté, but my love of greens has not diminished.
Foraged wild mushroom lovers are a dedicated group. Like fishermen, we are constantly swapping stories of perfectly prepared dishes or texting the location of the most beautiful specimens in area markets. Stand in front of a display at your local market long enough and chances are you will run into a foraging enthusiast. It seems I do every year right before Thanksgiving whereupon I happily burn five minutes gathering new techniques for cleaning (a 1” stiff artist paintbrush being the best) or a new recipe twist. I also don’t mind that most foraged varieties of mushrooms are messy, expensive and unreliable — this makes that moment when you find the truly perfect ones all the more satisfying.
We don’t buy foraged mushrooms at the global buying office where I work and even at the regional or local level it is almost impossible to predict what will be available from week to week. Foraged mushrooms need cool moist conditions to grow so supply is driven largely by the weather and the ability of the foragers to get out and harvest. Conditions that are too cold or wet will also affect supply (and quality). The winter and spring rainy seasons are when we are far more likely to see them, so chances are good that foraged mushrooms will be available during Christmas and into the spring. Varieties will change but here is a rundown of what is commonly available.
As the days get shorter, wet and cooler, things in the produce world start slowing down — from plant growth rates to harvesting and packing. Increased cloud cover further slows growth and increases mildew worries among row crop producers who are just starting the all-important Thanksgiving harvest. Yet at a time when the sun has all but disappeared, Mother Nature brings it back in the form of citrus.
You never know what Mother Nature will throw at Thanksgiving. November is always an interesting weather month but the build up to the biggest food holiday of the year starts much earlier in the fall and is almost never without some drama. Tubers (potatoes) and onions have been dug up and cured, so the first phase of the holiday build up has come off well. Apple and pear producers report some labor shortages but fruit is still coming off the trees despite the tight labor market. The big remaining question is: what will the weather will do to all the green onions, herbs, celery, Brussels sprouts, radishes and other row crops in the last few critical weeks of growing before they are harvested for Thanksgiving dinner tables all over the US.
The demand for fresh produce for Thanksgiving is enormous. The holiday also coincides with the end of the fall harvest season for the northernmost farms in the US, so demand for transport also increases throughout the month. This can be problematic towards the end of November as fresh produce competes with Christmas trees for trucks in the Pacific Northwest and Southeast regions of the US. Transportation is further complicated by gradually deteriorating road conditions as the arctic jet stream dips further south and the first of the winter weather systems form, so we try to build in slightly longer delivery times as a safety precaution.
It seems everyone is an optimist when it come to pumpkin forecasting. I suppose it is difficult to predict how many pumpkins are in a given field when they are still green (which they were for longer than normal this year in California) but even right before harvest when the fields are peppered with a golden orange, the number of bins a farm will produce is, at best, a guess. Since it is our job here at the global buying office to fill in gaps in supply, Charlotte (our pumpkin buyer) is at crunch time, dutifully redirecting the remaining supply to regional distribution centers who two weeks earlier were saying, “We’re fine, we have plenty of local supply.” Pumpkin buying must also be exacting — like Christmas trees, jack-o-lanterns have no value after the holiday so the goal is always to buy just enough but not too much.
Last week, the weather changed here in northern California. The first storm system of the fall blew through, dropping temperatures by 10°F and bringing several inches of rain. This brought an end to the steady stream of strawberries we have enjoyed all summer and also brought us to the final stages of the summer growing cycle for many tree and row crops.
he days getting shorter and cooler triggers a color change in many fall trees and row crops — the final stage most growers wait for prior to harvesting their crop. The amount of cool days necessary to bring on color will vary depending on plant type. While there are ways to artificially induce a color change, most experts agree it’s best to wait and let Mother Nature do her work naturally.
It seems that most times I don’t notice apples. In my home we almost always have them around but they are like milk, juice or any other basic staple we buy every week. We eat apples less in the summer when there are so many other great domestic fruits available, but apples always seem to make it on our shopping list. The only time apples rise above the normal buzz of my daily life is when they are absent; gaps in available supply (like we had in August and early September this year) really stand out with a commodity so common and reliable.
Predicting the fall apple and pear harvest dates here in the US is always hard. Apples are grown in just about every part of the country so with weather as wild and varied as it has been this summer, pinpointing exactly when the fruit will be ready has been more difficult than most years. Additionally, fruit importers from the southern hemisphere ship their fruit before the expected domestic harvest. When the domestic harvest comes late, there will inevitably be a gap in supply. By late September we have made the transition from summer to fall fruit at our stores, but only now are we seeing harvest volumes start to build to support the change.
August brings another period of change in the business of produce. It’s really too warm (okay, hot!) just about everywhere right now. And just like that heat puts stress on people, it also puts pressure on crops. Certain plants will shut down when it gets too hot — sometimes they will even spontaneously abort their crop if the heat is putting the plant in danger. Farm worker days get shorter as it gets too hot to harvest progressively earlier in the morning and truck refrigeration units have to work harder to keep produce cool as they roll over highway pavement temperatures well in excess of 120°F in some places. Despite the challenges of the dog days, there is one more crop Mother Nature has in store for us: Figs are the final treat of summer.
Figs are unique in the tree fruit world in that a single tree will have two distinct harvest periods every season. Early summer, usually around the middle of June we see the “Breeba” crop — this is fruit that emerges from the old wood on the tree. The Breeba season is short and serves more as a tantalizing preview of the larger, longer harvest of fruit from the new branches of the tree. Figs are also unusual in another respect. Most commercial fruit trees have a relatively short lifecycle — losing productivity in 20 to 25 years. A well-cared-for fig tree, on the other hand, will continue to be a prolific producer for twice that long.
