Tag Archives: Fruit

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Take Drazil Kids Tea Back to School and or on a Family Adventure

Posted on September 1, 2013 | 8 comments

My whole family is thrilled that we found Drazil Kids Tea just in time to enjoy this summer and pack into healthy school lunches. Drazil is immediately, amazingly good! The flavors are fantastic. Anna instantly loved Grape Bliss. Each of the other flavors – Punch Passion, Tropical Burst, and Yummy Berry – was a favorite of other kid (and adult) testers. This tea is really good.

In addition to the fabulous taste, there are a lot of things for parents to be excited about when it comes to Drazil Tea. The portability is fantastic. We’ve already taken Drazil along on many bike rides and hikes. It is backpack- and lunchbox- ready.

Drazil Tea is also a healthy alternative to many juices and juice drinks. Drazil has 35% less natural sugars than 100% juice and half the calories of many juices and juice drinks. It’s sweetened with real fruit juices, rather than cane sugar. The teas are caffeine-free and contain lots of naturally occurring antioxidants, vitamins and minerals. The yummy taste comes from a unique herbal blend of Hibiscus, Rose Hips, Rooibos, Pomegranate, and fruit pieces. The teas are pasteurized and contain nothing artificial. All good!

We’re thrilled that we can find Drazil Tea throughout Northern California and on Amazon because we will be stocking up.

Enter the Giveaway

One lucky reader of this blog will win a variety pack of Drazil Kids Tea (32 boxes in 4 flavors). Follow the instructions in the widget below for your chance to win.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

This post is sponsored by Drazil Tea. The opinions expressed are my own.

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Blueberry Thursday: Bake an Old-Fashioned Blueberry Buckle

Posted on July 8, 2010 | 9 comments

Something about ripe summer fruit brings out the old-fashioned baker in me. I reach for recipes for all manner of cobblers, crisps, crumbles, grunts, betties, muffins, and pies. And I’m not the only one. On Father’s Day, my daughter offered (or did my husband request?) a homemade blueberry buckle.

This one comes from the superb Jim Fobel’s Old-Fashioned Baking Book. A similar recipe is in Marcia Adams’ equally inspiring Cooking From Quilt Country. She calls it Blueberry Cake with Streusel Topping. That turns out to be a fine description for the Buckle: a moist coffee cake with a crunchy crumb topping.

You’ll need:

For the topping:

1/3 c. all-purpose flour
1/3 c. packed light brown sugar
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
4 Tbsp. (1/2 stick) butter, chilled, unsalted, sliced

For the batter:

6 Tbsp. (3/4 stick) butter, softened
1/2 c. sugar
1 egg
1 tsp. vanilla extract
1/2 c. sour cream
1 3/4 c. all-purpose flour
2 tsp. baking powder
pinch of salt
1 1/2 c. fresh blueberries, rinsed and dried

Position rack in center of oven. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Butter an 8-inch pan.

Prepare the topping: In a small bowl, combine flour, brown sugar and cinnamon. With a pastry blender, cut in the butter to resemble coarse crumbs.

Prepare the batter: In a large bowl, beat the butter until creamy. Gradually beat in the sugar until light and fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla and beat until smooth, then beat in the sour cream.

In a medium sized bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder and salt to evenly blend.

Quickly stir the dry ingredients into the butter mixture just to moisten: the batter will be thick and lumpy.

If you are inspired to do a batter dance around the house or yard, this would be the time.

Gently fold in the blueberries and turn into the prepared pan.

Crumble the reserved topping over the batter.

Bake 30-35 minutes, until a toothpick inserted in the cake portion emerges clean. Cool on a rack for 15-20 minutes. Slice to serve. (9 squares makes healthy portions.)

Yum! Thank you Jim Fobel, and the roadside stand in Maine, where we first had a buckle and decided we liked them.

Photos by Susan Sachs Lipman

You might also like:

Blueberry Tuesday: Summer Triple Berry Crisp

 

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Posted in Butter and Egg, Home Ec., Nostalgia, Recipes, Seasons, Vintage

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Quince Dubbed “Poster Child of Slowness”

Posted on October 29, 2009 | 2 comments

quince by 4028mdk09

Folks in various Slow Food circles are suddenly rallying around the quince, which I featured on my site just a week ago.

Possibly with us since Biblical times, the quince was traded at middle eastern crossroads before making its way around the Mediterranean and across the Atlantic to Thomas Jefferson’s garden, only to become relatively neglected in more recent eras.

That seems to have changed, as the somewhat homely fruit has recently become the improbable star of cookbooks, restaurants, and home cooks.

Ben Watson, an author and food activist with Slow Food USA, proclaimed, “The quince is the poster child of Slowness. It’s lovely and fragrant but pretty much inedible unless transformed by peeling, coring and cooking. I think it is poised for a comeback.”

Watson has been involved with Slow Food’s Ark of Taste project, which is an extremely exciting effort to catalog and promote all kinds of delicious foods that are in danger of extinction as we move toward mass production of fewer varieties of foods. I urge you to visit the Ark of Taste web site to see tantalizing photos and learn about wonderful heirloom fruits and other foods, and where to find them.

More on quince’s comeback, history and harvesting can be found in this delightful Los Angeles Times piece.

Also just in, courtesy of Food News Journal: “French foodie Stevie Parle turns to Provence for a perfect quince crumble.” This from the Guardian. (His crumble actually looks and sounds to me like a crisp, which coincidentally is my favorite dessert. I’ll have to try to make some!)

Quinces Ag Research

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They Dined on Quince ..

Posted on October 18, 2009 | 38 comments

quince by 4028mdk09

In Edward Lear’s playful love poem, The Owl and the Pussycat, the title characters “went to sea in a beautiful pea green boat”. On their wedding night, “they dined on mince and slices of quince” and, yes, ate them with a runcible spoon.

While I don’t know what Lear’s mince was (if anything), the ancient-appearing, squat-pear-shaped, crunchy and little-used quince may be one of the oldest fruits in existence. Early traders traveled from the Tigris Valley to Isfahan, in what is now Iran, for quinces, honey, saffron, apples and salt. Those foods were combined with grapes, pomegranates, cinnamon, rhubarb and figs back at the trading crossroads of Bagdad.

Of these foods, quinces are thought to be one of the most ancient — it’s possible that Eve was tempted not by an apple but by a quince. (And wouldn’t this knowledge have raised the quince’s profile?)

Quince by David W

The evocative fruit made its way to the Mediterranean and to New World, appearing in the garden at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. I’ve been only somewhat aware of quince, having had quince sorbet and quince jam (which was wonderful, something like a sweet-tart apple-pear) , but not much else. I’d noticed the beautiful, sensuous fruit stitched into Medieval tapestries in museums.

So when the folks at Food News Journal found themselves with a bounty of fresh quinces on their hands, and asked their readers for a quince recipe, I had limited experience with the fruit, but was as curious as they about what to do with it. (I was also charmed by the idea of calling for recipes rather than wasting fruit.)

Quinces Ag Research

I found quince compotes and, of course, jam, which I’d like to try, but my curiosity was especially piqued by this Quince Tarte Tatin from Epicurious, precisely because I like apple desserts so much and substituting the somewhat exotic quinces for the recipe’s traditional apples seemed interesting.

My recipe was chosen, and Shelly Peppel of Food News Journal reports that the resulting tart smelled delicious. “It had a bubbling brown crust, and the caramel was bubbling around the edges in a buttery broth that sent me straight to heaven,” she wrote.

So now I’ll have to try it. Who knows? If enough of us start cooking with quinces, we can re-popularize this historical, romantic fruit.

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Photos: Wikimedia 4028mdk09/Public Domain, David W./Public Domain, Ag Research/Public Domain, Brian Leatart/Bon Appétit

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Fallen Fruit? Make Jam. Public Fruit Jam in L.A. August 2nd

Posted on July 26, 2009 | Leave a comment

publicfruitjam

I just got this great invitation from an L.A. group called Fallen Fruit:

“Join Fallen Fruit and the citizens of Los Angeles in a communal jam session. Bring along any of your home-grown or public fruit and any clean, empty glass jars you have. At the end everyone will leave with a jar of communal jam. If enough people bring surplus, even the empty handed will leave with jam. Vats of fun for all! The kinds of jam we make will improvise on the fruit that people provide. The fruit can be fresh or frozen. Fallen fruit will bring public fruit. We are looking for radical and experimental jams as well, like basil gauva or lemon fir with lavender. We’ll discuss the basics of jam and jelly making, pectin and bindings, as well as the communal power of shared fruit and the liberation of public fruit. Jam with us and share the fruit of our labor! ALSO: closing party starting at 3pm for our show at another year in LA.”

Here is their invitation on Facebook.

What’s Fallen Fruit, anyway? Fallen Fruit is an activist art project that started by mapping all the public fruit — that which overhangs public spaces like sidewalks and parking lots — in its L.A. vicinity, and has moved on to planting public fruit parks in under-utilized neighborhoods. They are inviting people from all over the U.S. to send in maps of their local, public fruit.

This manifesto is on their web site. It says it all:

A specter is haunting our cities: barren landscapes with foliage and flowers, but nothing to eat. Fruit can be grown almost anywhere, and can be harvested by everyone. Our cities are planted with frivolous and ugly landscaping, sad shrubs and neglected trees, whereas they should burst with ripe produce ..

The infectiously optimistic web site, Thriving Too, offers more great quotes from Fallen Fruit.

Many more examples of local fruit foraging, from Oakland to Brooklyn, Alaska to Michigan, are in this New York Times article. In some places, people have even begun fruit exchanges with the fruit they’ve found, many of which would have gone to waste.

Photo: Fallen Fruit

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Posted in Community, Home Ec., Lost Arts, Slow News, Sustainability

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