My great grandma’s pickled beets are legendary in my family. All my aunts and uncles talk about how good they were. Each of them has sampled modern versions of pickled beets and nothing ever compares. There was something special about her beets that can’t be duplicated. No one remembers exactly how she made them. As far as we know she never wrote the recipe down and when my great grandma passed away, the recipe went with her. I have a suspicion about the real secret ingredient.

Last Monday was the official last day bloggers could submit recipes for the cookbook. To celebrate the fact that this cookbook is finally coming to life I wanted to give you a behind the scenes look at some of the choices we’ve made and why.

I have always hated onions. They went on the NO list as soon as I was old enough to say the word. But a few months ago I experienced a whole week were onions were -everywhere- and it was such a pain to avoid them. Each meal I ate at a restaurant had hidden onions, recipes I wanted to make called for way more onions than I was willing to use.

The pineapple plant is SO amazing. I really took this fruit for granted. It was a strange tropical fruit that came in cans. Occasionally, it would show up in the grocery store as a whole, weird fruit with huge leaves and no way to tell what was inside it. Pineapples grow

Have you ever heard someone say that vegetables loose their nutritional value when you cook them? Or that frozen veggies have just as much nutrition as fresh ones? Have you heard that beans and legumes contain anti-nutrients? I remember hearing things like this years ago and I still hear about it today.

The issue that stops people from packing real food lunches is that it takes a lot more time and effort than tossing a rice krispy treat in a backpack. I totally know the feeling of being so busy all you can do is toss something in a backpack. The trick is to plan ahead and do a little prep over the weekend so that whatever you toss into your purse or kid’s backpack during the week is actually food.

I  have two tomato rules to live by.

Buy local varieties. Never put them in the fridge.

Beyond that, navigating the wide world of sizes, shapes, colors, and growth can be overwhelming.

Want to hear something crazy? A coconut is more like a peach than a pecan. In fact, coconut isn’t a nut at all, it’s biologically a drupe, or stone fruit, like peaches, nectarines, and apricots.

You probably have a little jar of fennel seeds in your spice rack. And you’ve probably seen the white bulbs and tall feathery fronds at the farmers market. Fennel is a super diverse plant with a very unique flavor.

All at once fennel is a vegetable, an herb, and a spice.

What kind of food do you eat?

Where does your food come from?

It kind of all boils down to those two questions. The first part, what kind of food do you eat, is the question that gets really complicated for a lot of people. There are people in every corner telling us what we...

Cucumbers are a natural addition to summer time salads. They add substance, a nice crunch, and their high water content has a lovely cooling effect.

But would it surprise you to know that the lettuce in your salad has more nutrients than the cucumber?

Last week I talked about picking out good counter top storage containers for the fruits and veggies that taste best at room temperature. Let’s be real, tomatoes taste best at room temperature but there is always the risk of attracting fruit flies.

Fruit flies have an incredible sense of smell and can detect fermenting fruit from a significant distance.

Do you know how many different ways there are to keep bananas fresh?

9

Yep. I’ve been searching the internet for weeks to find any tid bit I could that might solve the banana problem.

Three months ago, when it was still cool and crisp outside, my kitchen counter was filled.

It was a beautiful mix of little wooden boxes full of fresh fruit, glass bowls with fresh vegetables, and a lovely hanging wire basket filled with tiny new potatoes.

But now, it’s 90 degrees outside, I can’t open the front door for even a second without letting ten flies into the house, and even the coolest spots in my kitchen are getting…. toasty.

It’s an alien potato!

It’s a dinosaur cabbage!

It’s a green earth apple!

Nope. It’s a kohlrabi!