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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It all started with a brief conversation at the Fancy Food Show in New York City in July of 2007.  The owner of a company was telling me about an idea for a new product.

“What’s it called?” I asked inquisitively.
“Sacha Inchi,” he said.
“Uh…I’ve never heard of it.” I replied.  I asked him what it was.
“It’s the next cool thing.” he predicted.

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One of our vendors was featured on Oprah today for their innovative calf raising practices. Inspired by their concern for animal welfare, the Strauss family spent years researching alternative veal raising systems. Ultimately, they say the most humane and compassionate system is the one Mother Nature provides.

For anyone who wants to eat veal, this is the way to go —pasture-raised with exceptional quality and flavor, while raised in a healthy, humane and sustainable way. They promise their calves are:

• Free to Roam – never tethered, raised in confinement
• Raised on natural open pastures alongside mother & herd
• Never raised in feedlots
• Unlimited access to mother’s milk
• Strictly vegetarian fed – never receiving animal by-products
• Never ever administered growth hormones
• Never ever administered antibiotics
• Never experience the stress of industrialized farming
• Traceable to place of birth
• Agriculturally sustainable & environmentally friendly

If you want to know more, check out this video on their website. Strauss Free Raised™ Veal is available in our stores in the Southwest, Southeast, Florida and Rocky Mountain regions. It’s coming soon to stores in other parts of the country.

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Oktoberfest has been held every year in Munich, Germany for almost 200 years. The first fest was not really a festival, but a celebration of the wedding of Crown Prince Luitpold I and Princess Theressa of Bavaria on October17, 1810. Like many modern-day events, the highlight was beer and food—in this case wurst (sausages). These days, an astonishing ten million pints of beer and more than ¾ million sausages are consumed annually at this festival.

Stop by our stores and check out the great Oktoberfest selections. From authentic German sausages to new and unique varieties, plus traditional sauerkraut and a very fine lineup of German beers. We’ve got the “best wurst” in town to celebrate the flavors of Oktoberfest!

Get some awesome recipes and read more about beer and brat pairings on our Oktoberfest page!

Imagine slicing open a fresh leaf of aloe vera and extracting the beneficial properties from within—our new 365 Everyday Value® Aloe Vera Juices in both unflavored and tangy Pomegranate Cranberry flavor give you an easy way to take advantage of aloe’s benefits every day.

Our new 365 Everyday Value® Aloe Juice and Gel products are made from fresh, 100% Whole Leaf Certified Organic Aloe Vera grown in the rich and fertile Rio Grande Valley of Texas and along the Tropic of Cancer in the Mexican Dessert. They contain the full range of naturally occurring aloe polysaccharides– an average of about 2,400 mg per liter. Aloe polysaccharides are thought to be aloe’s most important constituents. Whole leaf products are made by processing the entire leaf and filtering out the unwanted bitter constituents. This retains more of the 200+ components such as amino acids, vitamins and minerals. We never use distillates or add water. Our product is 99.7% pure aloe vera!

The key to a better product is in the way you treat your aloe leaves. The aloe plants and fields are tended with care. It takes two to three years for a plant to reach maturity, and careful harvesting to keep the plants productive for five to seven years’ time. The plants are replaced after seven years and new fields take more than a year to become ready for a new planting. Our fresh aloe leaves are harvested by hand. The folks who pick the leaves have many years of experience and know exactly which leaves will yield the good stuff that aloe gives! Our fresh aloe leaves are refrigerated within two hours of harvest and processed under optimum conditions to retain aloe’s best qualities.

There are many claims about aloe vera and a few are even substantiated by science, how about that? Digestive and immune support as well as increased nutrient absorption are a few of the important ways aloe vera can support health.

To Juice or Gel, you ask?

Aloe vera gel is actually made from the aloe vera juice by adding a food grade thickening agent called carrageenan, which is a naturally occurring sea kelp/Irish moss. They are almost equally effective because the 365 Everyday Value® Aloe juice products contain 99.7% aloe vera, while the gel products contain 99.5% aloe vera. Juice products are typically made for dietary supplement purposes, while gel products are more commonly used for topical application, though they can be orally ingested and may be soothing to your throat, stomach, and digestive tract.

Drink two to eight ounces per day as a refreshing beverage! Pour over ice, mix with your favorite juice or try our tasty Pomegranate Cranberry flavor. To your health!

There are lots of things to love about figs.

Historically, the fig is one of the oldest domesticated fruits on record with references dating back literally thousands of years. The tree itself is a robust, self-sufficient organism — often living for more than 100 years (more than three times the average life of other fruit bearing trees). Figs grow all over the world and come in an astonishing range of varieties and characteristics. But the one thing all figs share is their sweetness — at full ripeness they can concentrate more sugars than any tree fruit.

Figs are also one of only a few tree fruits that have two distinct parts to their harvest season. The first harvest (or “Breba” fruit) comes from the branches the tree produced the previous year. In the U.S. this Breba fruit is generally available in late May through mid-June. The second harvest and main crop on the tree’s new branches grows all summer and generally is ready to harvest at the end of August through October. For those of us in the produce trade, the Breba fruit is a tantalizing (sometimes maddening) preview of the main season yet to come.

The most common commercially produced fig is the Black Mission — a fig with a purple/black exterior color and a pink/brown interior. The Black Mission is extremely prolific and tends to travel well so it is likely the fig you will see at your local store. Another common but less available variety is the Brown Turkey which tends to be larger and more fragile than the Black Mission. There are several green skinned varieties, including Kadota and Adriatic. The Adriatic has a very short season and is very fragile, but the bright red interior and strawberry jam-like flavor make them well worth the trouble.

Selecting figs is a lot like choosing the right package of berries. Since they are so fragile, figs are generally packed in containers. If this is the case, you should examine them from all angles (particularly the bottom) to make sure there are no split or crushed figs inside. Once you get them home you should remove figs from their container and inspect them for damage and then store them in your refrigerator until you are ready to eat them. You should never keep fresh figs for more than a week — I always eat my softest figs first.

Luckily, figs start becoming widely available just when berries and soft fruits like peaches start to wane. Figs make a great breakfast fruit and are excellent paired with cheeses as an appetizer. They also make a refreshing addition to late summer/ fall salads with nuts, apples, and blue cheese. If I have some figs when I’m grilling I remove the stem and stuff them with some gorgonzola and grill them over indirect heat — this removes a lot of the moisture in the fig, caramelizes the sugars and really brings out the flavor. Grilled figs are also wonderful for dessert topped with vanilla ice cream.

There are many delicious dishes you can make with dried figs as well, but I encourage you to indulge in some fresh figs during this short harvest season. Enjoy!