Felicia Friesema

Tarocco Blood Oranges from J.J.'s Lone Daughter Ranch

​You can time the passing of winter in Southern California by watching the citrus timeline at your local market. December starts us off with small tangerines and mandarins, just in time for a holiday table, weather permitting. Then in January, you make room in the market bag for gravid pomelos and perfumey Cara Cara navels. Blood oranges, specifically the inky dark-fleshed Moros, show up at the end of January and are followed into early spring by the slightly larger, less flashy and significantly sweeter Tarocco. Sanguinelli brings up the rear, competing with the Tarocco on who will outlast whom. Last year we saw Taroccos well into May, possibly thanks to the super-cold winter and slow-to-warm spring that followed.

This winter has had none of the bone-chilling icy freezes that crippled some tree fruit crops in 2011. That's great news for stone fruit, apple and pear orchards. But if you're an admirer of the dark, tangy flesh of our local blood oranges, don't stall. If the warmer weather keeps coming, it'll be a much shorter season than last year.

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jgarbee

Farmers Market Underwear

​January and February are ripe with local farmers market finds like fresh truffles, sweet limes and cherimoya. And now, an exciting (revealing?) new discovery: Underwear printed with your favorite grower's produce and logo.

Well, before you get all Valentine's Day gift excited, we should note that these were for display purposes only. Last week, we spotted the almond-print undies in question (pictured above) at the Fat Uncle Farms stand at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers Market, which does not permit the sale of commodity items that are not directly food or garden-centric by its vendors. And, there is only one pair of the "Nuts for You!" underthings (let the eBay bidding begin).

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Felicia Friesema

California white truffles from Clearwater Farms

​Somewhere in a back alley outside of Paris, $30,000 worth of black European truffles is changing hands. Asking the seller about the truffles' origins could send them packing to another less inquisitive buyer, so the buyer ponies up quietly and hauls off the heavily perfumed, cloth-lined crate while the seller slips discreetly into an already running Mini.

This is not fiction. A recent expose on 60 Minutes detailed just such an exchange, and all the mafia-esque transactions, thuggery, price gouging and the plumping of inventories with inferior imports from China that the European truffle market is currently enduring. Why? Climate change seems to be the biggest culprit, blamed for reducing the past year's harvest to a mere 30 tons, down from more than 1,000 tons about 50 years ago. We predict that truffle certification will soon be de rigueur, assuring the concerned consumer that no one was harmed during the harvest, sale and export of the aromatic fungi.

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Felicia Friesema

​Farmers markets and the vendors who populate them with table-bending piles of bumper crops and hard-to-find seasonal produce rarely sell every last item before it's time to collapse the pop-up tents and head home. Portlandian pickle jokes aside, what do farmers do with all those extra berries, tomatoes and apples?

Before you immediately let loose the cry of "Donate!" (and many farmers do exactly that), remember this food is their livelihood. A few have cleverly extended the sellable period of their produce by making their own preserves, butters and salsas and offering them for sale. Aching for a taste of summer Blenheim apricots? In January? Want a quick foodie gift of California-grown orange marmalade for the snowbound aunt in New England? Or maybe the idea of grinding your own almond butter seems about as rewarding as data entry? Your local farmers have some great products on the tables, and a lot of it is in jars. We've zeroed in on five of them who offer some outstanding jarred preserves made from what they grow.

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Felicia Friesema

Sweet lemons from Jeanne Davis

​"This lemon will cure that cough of yours," advised a fellow market-goer. It turned out that her motherly advice wasn't simply anecdotal. The Sweet Lemon, or Sweet Lime depending on who you talk to, is incredibly high in Vitamin C and has been a favorite of Mediterranean and Persian cultures for centuries for that very reason.

Native to Southeast Asia, the Sweet Lemon suffers from a bit of an identity crisis here in the states. The "true" sweet lemon, genetically speaking, is actually quite difficult to come by. Genetic clones of the true sweet lemon -- a mutant strain off of other true lemons like Eureka -- are occasionally available through UC Riverside's Citrus Clonal Protection Program, but on a very limited basis and certainly not for commercial production. What we usually find at market stalls is genetically separate from the sweet lemon and even has a different species name: Citrus limettoiodes. The trip from Southeast Asia to Persia to the U.S. muddied the translation of the common name, but it's easily identifiable, especially after an eye-opening taste.

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Felicia Friesema

A Selma and Bay cherimoya from Rancho St. Cecilia

​It feels a little early to be sorting through some of the subtropical lovelies from Rancho Santa Cecilia (Carpinteria). Along with their multiple varieties of avocados, guavas, and sapote, we've been enjoying a parade of cherimoya varieties. We usually associate March with a mouthful of the banana and mango flavors of the cherimoya. And most of the fruit you buy now will take a few days, if not a full week, to reach that velvety, spoonable stage.

Cherimoya trees are native to more temperate climes along the northern Andes in South America. They also thrive along our hilly coastlines, most within a few hours drive of Los Angeles. Thankfully, Rancho Santa Cecilia makes the trip for you, and you can find them every Sunday at the Hollywood market, just north of Selma on the west side of Ivar. They'll have the fruit well into early summer. But which variety to choose? In South America, they name cherimoya varieties by the type of skin, starting the long list with lisa for smooth and ending with tuberculada for fruit with warty, dinosaur-scale like bumps. What lies underneath that skin, bumpy or otherwise, is what we're actually interested in, which you can discover after the jump.

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J.Garbee

Kinny Jung At Work With His Hellfighters Hard Hat

​Sure, your local farmer's market is a great place to find produce. But it can also be a great place to find a circa 1968 hard hat from the John Wayne movie Hellfighters. "Yeah, I collect quirky things," said Kinny Jung, whom you'll often find working behind Weiser Farms' stand at the Wednesday and Saturday Santa Monica Farmers Markets (Arizona Street) wearing the aluminum hat.

Hey, if we had a hat with John Wayne creds, we'd wear it to work, too. "I've also got rusty metal bedsprings from Prince's [1980 album] Bedsprings, barnyard art like rusty old wood chairs... lots of rusty metal things," he continues. More on that rust obsession in a bit. First, Jung's mashed potato tips.

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Felicia Friesema

Wichita pecans from K&K Ranch at the Hollywood market

​The Witchita pecan, developed in Texas back in the 1940s for more arid climate production, is one of a handful of pecan varieties that actually do well in California (it usually like a moister climate). K&K Ranch grows the Witchita and has had the nuts -- still in the shell -- available for the past two weeks at the Hollywood, Cerritos, Palos Verdes, and Westchester farmers markets. Sean Laughlin, their Hollywood market manager, expects them to be in for at least another month.

Dubbed, "precocious and prolific," by USDA Horticulturist LJ Grauke, the Witchita pecan tree yields a long, torpedo-shaped nut with blonde skin, and an almost perfectly round cross-section when cut in half, which is easy to see when you crack them by hand. The shells break well with a little pressure, but too much and you crack that long, delicate shape, something we tried a few times at the booth. If the look of the nut is important to you, use a nutcracker, gently and precisely. Otherwise just grab a couple in your hand and press. They'll yield against each other easily and the nut meat slips out with a little poking.

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A. Scattergood

fennel

​It's January at Los Angeles farmers markets, where farmers have been loading their tables with winter greens and citrus, cauliflower and leeks, fennel and pomegranates and the beautiful ornate stalks of Brussels sprouts. Oh, and dandelion greens and fragrant stalks of green garlic. Check out our virtual grocery list, taken at last Saturday morning's Pasadena farmers market. And yes, it tastes as good as it looks.

Felicia Friesema

Kishu tangerines from Jeanne Davis at the Hollywood market

​Jeanne Davis owns a small orchard out in Fallbrook (formerly known as Coyote Growers) where she grows a variety of citrus trees. But none that garners the attention that her grove of 85 Seedless Kishu mandarin trees does. She started offering the small, walnut-sized fruit about four years ago, at first in small quantities. The past two years she's had sizable piles of the fruit, usually starting the last week of December. But they whittle down to nothing fast. The reason why becomes clear when overhearing her customers talk with her about the fruit, some even asking her if she'll sell them their own trees. We waited and watched as each successive customer bought the same thing -- five in a row -- one big bag full of the tiny but powerful fruit.

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