The Sweet Spot for Sweet Cherries

By Katie Barreira

Like most stone fruits, sweet cherries are highly seasonal. In fact, they obtain almost half of their flavor and heft in the week before they are picked. Because cherries only ripen on the vine (some fruits can reach their peak after being picked) you’ll want to eat them at the height of the season and that means right now!

The very first of California’s cherries arrived in stores around the first of May and, according to the president of the Northwest Cherry Association, that region’s ruby crop shipped around the first week in June. So what are you waiting for?

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Try Okonomiyaki, a Savory Japanese Pancake

By Sandy Hu

I’m still reliving my trip to Japan and the wonderful meals we had. Whether an o-bento from the fabulous Japanese department stores that devote their basements to prepared foods and food gifts, to portable eki-ben meals from the train station, to ramen shops and izakaya, to more formal restaurants, our meals in Tokyo and Kyoto were uniformly artfully presented and well-prepared.

In Tokyo’s Asakusa district, after a temple festival, we wandered into an okonomiyaki restaurant. Often called Japanese pancake or Japanese pizza, okonomiyaki more accurately describes a savory, dense pancake filled with such ingredients as chopped cabbage and sliced pork, beef or seafood, then topped with okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise and a generous sprinkling of katsuobushi, shaved bonito flakes. The bonito (skipjack mackerel) fillets are steamed, aged, dried and shaved so thinly they look like wood shavings.

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Mom’s Super-Easy Avocado Sherbet

By Sandy Hu

When we were growing up in Hawaii, avocados were virtually free. If you didn’t grow them, a neighbor did.

To “put up” extras when we had more than we could eat, my mom created this simple, refreshing avocado sherbet. It takes just four ingredients and a few minutes, and it’s really quite wonderful.

Avocados are high in fat, making sherbet of a creamy-rich consistency. The fat is primarily the “good” fats: monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. And you can feel virtuous about eating avocados; they are a nutritional powerhouse.

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Farmers Market Tour

By Andrew Hunter

Last month we wrote about Dirt to Dish and the importance of teaching our boys how their food gets from the farm to their plate. Ben and Nick are urban kids, but they’re old enough to understand the basic principles of sustainable food, planting seeds, harvesting fruits and vegetables, and the idea of cooking and eating without wasting.

So we’ve decided this will be a summer of farmers’ market tours. We plan on hitting all the local markets from the west side to the east side. The first stop of our tour is the Santa Monica Farmers Market on Main Street.

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Doing Breakfast Justice

By Lori Powell

We are in for a ton of rain this weekend…some folks would not be very happy with that forecast. Not me, as it gives me license to stay in the kitchen all day and cook up some delicious grub.

Also, the weekend is when I have the luxury of time to really do breakfast justice. No eating a hard-boiled egg on the run, my favorite go-to breakfast (especially when hand- picked from my own chicks).

Speaking of chicks, 10 more came in the mail this week to add to my diminishing brood from two years ago. So in honor of the new chicks, the rainy weekend and doing breakfast right, here’s my take on salsa and eggs, where the eggs are actually baked in salsa and served with corn tortillas, mashed avocado and with lots of chopped cilantro sprinkled on top for a fresh hit.

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