Early Winter Citrus

The leaves have fallen- the days are shorter and we spend less and less time outdoors. Fall is finishing, winter is just around the corner or has already arrived.  It seems every trip I take on a plane, I bring back some new Rhino-bug (the same is true almost daily with my son Aidan and his Kindergarten gang of plague carriers). Just when we need it the most, Mother Nature brings us the sun in a neat little package.

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For those who enjoy the unexpected and esoteric sides of life, I have a souvenir for you to share with those you love to amuse. Algae. From green to red, slimy to coarse, and microscopic to enormous. Just mention the topic of algae, and many people think of the unsightly green film in swimming pools and fish tanks…or their eyes glaze over. Add to your unpredictability the story of potentially the most humble, unpretentious organisms on Earth.

My name is Tim Schaeffer, I am the founder of Depth, an exclusive brand at Whole Foods Market.  Depth offers body and hair care products based on the renowned skin benefits of marine algae, all formulated to meet the stringent Whole Foods Market Premium Body Care Standards. Prior to creating body care products, I was a marine biologist for ten years. My wife, Depth’s co-founder, is also a marine biologist, which is how we met. During my tenure as a marine biologist, my focus was on marine algae. I’d spend hours engulfed in all types of algae on land and underwater, studying their ecology and genetics. Believe me, I have first-hand experience in how algae can flabbergast friends.

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In my world, Thanksgiving is all about the side dishes.  For produce people, there is significance to just about every season.  But there is a special place in our hearts for the fall and Thanksgiving, which are the biggest times of the year for us!  It’s all about abundance, freshness and making that extra effort to provide everything our customers (and we ourselves) need to make an exceptional family meal. This is no small feat because for produce, this is also a time when local farms shut down for the season and our produce teams become more reliant on product grown further away. The holiday is steeped in tradition and many of the items we traditionally serve are truly at their seasonal best, but a few others have been added over the years and are not exactly in season. Regardless, Thanksgiving is about celebrating the bounty of Mother Nature in ways we know and maybe don’t know.

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 Soft Ripened Cheese: Play Now | Download (323)
 Soft Ripened Cheese [2:30m]: Download (162)

Hello to all the cheese lovers out there! During the holiday season, we always get a lot of questions about how to select cheese and pair it with wines for entertaining this time of year. Our team members are always available to help you out in the stores, but we also put together this short video about choosing and serving soft-ripened cheese, like brie. Check it out and if you are inspired, try out our awesome exclusive brie from Isigny Ste. Mère, a co-operative of 700 farmers in Normandy, France. This holiday Brie is unique because it contains 60% butterfat, a formula customized especially for Whole Foods Market. Let us know what you think about it!

My last blog entry was extolling the virtues of Sacha Inchi and how this unique food discovery came to be found in Whole Foods Market stores courtesy of our good friends Laurent and Thierry at the Brandstorm Company.  As promised, this time around I want to give a quick run down on the other nifty products in the TerrAmazon line.  As I mentioned, there are quite a few products that involve cacao due to its ubiquitous nature in South America.  The TerrAmazon cacao is certified USDA Organic and derived from a rare variety of cacao called Criollo, which is less bitter and more aromatic than other species of cacao.  The single ingredient cacao products include cacao powder and cacao nibs.

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When the weather starts to cool off, my body and soul begin to crave root vegetables in almost every meal in as many different combinations imaginable.

These bulky, clunky, sturdy vegetables have a history of being supporting vegetables buried deep in a stew or a soup. We all know how to cook and eat carrots, but there are so many other great roots that we don’t all know what the heck to do with. Lots of roots can be found in your local Whole Foods Market from some of your favorite growers. I like to buy all different sizes of these classic autumn treats to test my skills in the kitchen and on the dining room table. In my kitchen at home I have been working to isolate the flavors of these tasty roots and build them into as many meals as possible. The Radish family is always a staple in our house; we eat them the European way with butter and salt spread on a raw radish — a great snack any time of year. Black Spanish Radishes and Watermelon Radishes are great to wow your friends with beautiful variety and unusual spicy savory flavors not found in traditional red round radishes.

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For Halloween this year I headed to Costa Rica with a couple of friends to Finca Luna Nueva!  It’s a unique ecotourism destination and rain forest lodge in Costa Rica dedicated to sustainable living in a tropical rain forest environment.  This working certified organic biodynamic herbal farm and estate — located adjacent to the 50,000 acre “Children’s Eternal Rainforest” conservation area — farms organic ginger, turmeric, and other tropical fruits and vegetables.

Since it was Halloween, we thought it only fitting to make some organic crystallized ginger candy! Granted, picking the ginger, cleaning it, cutting it, boiling it, and then crystallizing it yourself in the rain forest of Costa Rica, on Halloween, is quite the story to tell, but you can make this incredibly special treat yourselves at home!

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Fall Salads – Pairing Pears and Nuts

About the time the first leaves start to fall and the evenings get a little cooler, I make a major change in my diet. The grill gets covered and the lighter summer meals are replaced with soups, stews, and baked dishes. I still eat plenty of salads but my ingredients change with the seasons.

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Photo courtesy of julianmeade via Flickr

I lived in Alaska for a few years, where almost everything is a lot bigger than Texas. The sight of 800 pound (and heavier) pumpkins at the State Fair in Palmer is simply astonishing. Kitschy postcards of pumpkins the size of tool sheds date back to the 1950s, at least, and show up yearly in local newspapers. How in the world, I wondered, is it possible for a pumpkin to attain the heft of a horse? As I was soon to learn, cool weather crops such as pumpkins and parsnips attain gigantic girth in the long daylight hours of the growing season at such high latitudes. In the more temperate latitudes of Tennessee, where I also lived, farmers were justifiably proud of their 180 pound pumpkins, and even they were the very devil to move out of the field without the help of a mule or a sturdy field hand with a wheelbarrow.

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One thing I’ve learned about the business of produce is that every season is different — success is often a byproduct of learning from the past but remaining nimble about the future. Nowhere is this truer than with apples. Over the last twenty years the apple industry has undergone a huge transformation — the flavor, the look of the apple (and orchard), variety, and growing method have all changed significantly. This change has not come easy. Unlike row crop growers, apple producers have to take a much broader outlook as changes in variety and growing method often take many years to bear fruit. For example, if a lettuce variety does not produce a desired result a grower can change the seed 90 days later. For an apple producer the decision is multi-generational and the productive life of an orchard is measured in decades — the growers children will literally live with the decisions the parents make.

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