Stupid seasonal produce!

One of my favorite days of the year is in late spring, when the weather has been warm enough for long enough that it's safe to pack away the winter sweaters and pull out t-shirts and shorts and sleeveless cotton dresses.

Of course, this means there's an equivalent worst day: when end-of-summer denial is no longer sufficient insulation, and the t-shirts are regretfully put into storage again and replaced with heavy coats and waterproof boots and flannel pajamas.

I have a parallel experience in the grocery store. There's the day when the produce section is miraculously overflowing with local tomatoes and corn and peaches and berries. And then, for no good reason, they take it all away and replace it with a solid, mocking wall:



Not that I have anything against pumpkins, per se. It's just that they signify the inevitable return of winter. They mean waving goodbye to fresh raspberries and plums and nectarines, and instead relying on carrots and beets and yams. They say, "Oh, you want fruit? Sure, there's fruit—as long as you like apples! And how, exactly, do you like them apples, huh?"

There are survival strategies, of course. One of mine is to turn late-season fruit—such as the New Jersey peaches I picked up this weekend—into crumbles and keep them in the freezer. They'll stay there until a particularly gray and miserable winter night.

In case of emergency, preheat oven to 350.

Signs you live in a wealthy nation

Despite the calorifically good time we had indulging in fried food at the Big E last year, we decided not to schlep out there this time.

Which is a shame in some ways, as I was just thinking about one of the Big E's big draws: the butter sculpture. What could be more perfectly American than taking an unnecessarily large amount of food, shaping it into a whimsical approximation of a cow, and then throwing it out?

And then my co-conspirator Mike sent me a link to the site of Jim Victor, a Pennsylvania sculptor who takes food sculpture to a whole new level.

A roast turkey made from chocolate!



A Channel 10 newsanchor in parmesan cheese!



A rather coy Fidel Castro in vegetables!



There's more; so much more. If you want to see Columbus's ships in pizza dough, Ronald Reagan in butter or Mickey Rooney in chocolate (yes, a disturbing thought, I know), I suggest you go visit Jim's food sculpture page.

Meanwhile, I'll be in the kitchen with a picture of Larry King and a bag of walnuts.

"The next piece is dedicated to cabbage ..."

This video about the Vienna Vegetable Orchestra puts me in an uncomfortable position.

I want to ridicule them. I really do.

But they actually produce some very cool sounds (check out the eggplant during soundcheck). So even though they all dress--and sound--like Dieter, they make me want to start carving carrot flutes and fashioning leek guitars.

Their website has all the deets.

Oh man--I was just about to make some comment about their phat beets.

Damn them.