Quezi

An orange is not the easiest fruit to prepare and eat without making a mess, and many ways have been devised to go about it. Bite and peel Without a knife your options are limited. You need to remove the peel, and the easiest place to start is the stalk end. Bite off a little [more...]

Fruit and vegetables are sometimes sold pre-bagged with fine plastic netting. The netting is usually colored, but how and why is the color chosen? Colored netting is used because it improves the appearance of the produce. For that reason, you’re likely to find yellow netting on lemons, orange netting on oranges, green netting on zucchinis [more...]

If your sloes are not all wanted for sloe gin, try making them into jellies, jams, or spiced conserves to go with savoury dishes. It’s more trouble than gin – you have to really cook, not just mix – but you’ll end up with attractive and flavourful jars of stuff you made yourself, and the [more...]

A bullace is a wild plum that can be either dark blue-purple or light yellowy-green, sometimes flushed with red. Black bullace and white bullace are the traditional names for the two kinds. There are a few cultivated varieties too, which give rise to more names and varied colours. Damsons are similar to a dark bullace, [more...]

Sloe gin is not just the easiest way of using wild sloes, it’s probably the most popular in the UK. Other sloe-flavoured liqueurs – patxarán or pacharán from northern Spain, Italian bargnolino and Schlehenfeuer from Germany – have interestingly different flavouring, even though the basic idea is much the same. Sloe gin Pick sloes after [more...]

A frequently-repeated etymology of the fruit that we call an “orange” goes like this: The fruit was not grown in England, and when the dock-hands unloaded the cargo ships they heard the fruit referred to by its Spanish name: naranja. From this it became known as “a norange”, but over time this became “an orange” [more...]

When I was a little girl my mother made home made strudel. I remember what an undertaking it was to make the paper thing strudel dough. She would knead it until she was exhausted. As we got older, we got to help with the muscle power. All the kneading made the dough super elastic. Working [more...]

Summer Dreams – Art Print – Mitchell, Steven – Buy at AllPosters.com Watermelon straight from the fridge is very refreshing in summer, but it can be fiddly to prepare and awkward to eat. Most of the complication is due to the many pips. There are basically two approaches. You can leave the pips (seeds) in [more...]

Bilberries grow wild in Europe. Blueberries look similar but bigger, and are native to North America. That’s the short answer, but the longer truth is that there are quite a few different varieties – all cousins related to one another. It’s usual to call dark blue members of the European branch of the family bilberries, [more...]

The kiwifruit is native to China, and for many years was known in western countries as the Chinese Gooseberry because its shape resembles an oversized gooseberry and its taste is similarly acidic. The name “kiwi fruit” was coined as a marketing term in 1959 by Turners and Growers, wholesale fruit merchants of Auckland New Zealand. [more...]

The dragonfruit, or pitahaya, is a most unusual-looking fruit. On the outside it’s bright pink with red and green flame-like growths. But cut it open and the appearance is totally unexpected: white flesh with black dots, looking as if someone has sprinked poppy seeds over some snow. The black dots are of course the seeds [more...]

The pomegranate is delicious but it’s a bit awkward and tedious to eat. Here are some tips. A pomegranate is the size of a large orange and has a tough skin. Inside are a large number of fleshy deep-red seeds which are juicy and refreshing, but the kernel of each seed is hard and bitter. [more...]

If you visit the south of Spain in winter-time you’ll see colourful, fruit-laden orange trees growing along the streets, in squares and public parks. They’re not sweet oranges, and so they stay on the ornamental trees without being picked by passers-by. In spring, visitors may be treated to the fragrance of orange blossom. Book a [more...]

Many words have different meanings when used in different contexts, and “vegetable” is one of those. There are some situations where a tomato can legitimately be considered a vegetable, but others where it is unambiguously a fruit. From a culinary point of view, a tomato is a vegetable. Sometimes it’s used as a salad vegetable, [more...]

“Five a day” is a campaign being run by the UK Department of Health and backed by Cancer Research UK. It encourages people to eat more fruit and vegetables by reducing it to the simple slogan of “five a day”, i.e. eating five portions of fruit or vegetables per day. People who can manage that [more...]