A. Scattergood

cherries

Cherry season, that glorious six weeks of early summer when cherries overflow at local farmers markets, is almost done. According to the California Cherry Board, the week around June 20 (next week) is the end of when we'll be seeing local cherries everywhere.

By this time in the season, we've usually gorged ourselves on fresh cherries and are now looking for creative ways to cook and preserve them. We scoured the internet to find the best cherry recipes so you don't have to. Turn the page for 5 recipe suggestions.

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Felicia Friesema

Flying Saucers from Peacock Family Farms at the Hollywood market

Summer squash aren't a surprise at a June market; they're as ubiquitous as baseball and rattlesnake warnings for hikers. Worse -- or great, depending on your perspective -- they're easy to grow. Perhaps too easy, given how many bags of them quietly appear on neighbors' porches. Farmers know this, and have worked some novelty into their crops, harvesting them when they're the size of your pinkie or skipping the fruit altogether and offering baskets of the large Day-Glo squash flowers ready for stuffing.

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A. Scattergood

peaches at the farmers market

If you've spent any time at local markets lately, you'll know where you are on the seasonal flowchart: citrus is about over, great tomatoes aren't quite here yet, and we're in the midst of what's looking to be a terrific stone fruit season. Cherries and apricots and nectarines are everywhere, and the first of the season's peaches are showing up at your favorite farmers' stalls. And peach season is, for some of us, reason enough to live in this part of the world.

Because of a hot spell in early May, there are a lot of early season peaches out now, and even some mid-season fruit. This week Fitzgerald's had Sugar Lips, and Regier Family Farms brought flats of Springcrest and Fiesta Gems to the market. Elberta peaches will be here soon, and look for the fantastic O'Henrys later on in the summer.

Of course the best way to eat a peach is to do nothing to it at all -- eat it out of hand or slice it up on the spot as you stand in the market, peach juice falling as it may. If the peaches aren't quite ripe, take them home and let them ripen in a bowl, then eat them like apples. Or if you have an abundance of fruit, or want something fancier, you can crush a peach to make a Bellini, fan slices out into a tart shell, or pile your fruit into a pan for a cobbler. Turn the page for 5 recipe suggestions. The peaches will be here all summer.

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Felicia Friesema

Ume plums from K&K Ranch at the Hollywood market

Louis Anderman, owner and chief blender of Miracle Mile Bitters, walked up to Terri Kashima of K&K Ranch a couple of weeks ago at the Hollywood market and bought her entire, but diminutive, box of Ume plums. That box had only around 10 pounds of the green and fuzzy plums, but it contained Kashima's entire harvest for the week -- and it was gone before 9 a.m. Ume plums may not bring in the masses, but the few who crave their unique sourness, or the salty tang of preserved umeboshi, snag every last fruit they can find during their super short season.

The fuzzy exterior belies the name. The Ume plum is actually an apricot. Very few orchards have Ume trees -- Kashima's still exist thanks to her grandmother, who made umeboshi every year -- so when you find one, make nice and arrive early. This will likely be the last week for the fruit until next year and demand is high.

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Felicia Friesema

Bi-color corn from Yasukochi Farms at the Hollywood market

When you Google Monsanto, the website link has both the company's name and its slogan -- A Sustainable Agriculture Company. It's a website that works very hard from the first click to reframe the conversation around the most controversial issue in worldwide agriculture. Perhaps with good reason. The search was prompted by overheard conversations at the market last week as customers eyed the season's first corn with unmasked suspicion, asking if it was genetically modified. A quick survey of farm employees revealed that few even knew what GMO crops were. And the customers who asked didn't know exactly why GMO corn might be bad for them. They had simply been told to avoid it, either by friends or via one of thousands of links on the Internet.

According to Monsanto's website, more than 16 million farmers are growing genetically modified or biotech crops in more than 28 countries, including the U.S. And according to the Non GMO Project -- North America's only third party verification and labeling for non-GMO foods -- 40 percent of the sweet corn market in the United States is grown from genetically modified seed. Monsanto claims that people have been eating GM crops since 1994 with no ill effects. Unsurprisingly, many beg to differ. The Non GMO Project says there's "a growing body of evidence connects GMOs with health problems, environmental damage and violation of farmers' and consumers' rights." Neither website provides access to impartial third party info that might shed some light on the issue.

Bottom line: Is the corn we so desperately want to toss onto the grill and slather with butter and salt genetically modified? And what does that mean? Is one of summer's most cherished farm foods actually a pesticide?

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Felicia Friesema

Morels at the Hollywood market

Acclaimed American poet William Jay Smith has so far painted the most accurate picture of the morel mushroom, in a short excerpt from his 1969 nature poems series. "Not ringed but rare, not gilled but polyp-like, having sprung up overnight -- these mushrooms of the gods, resembling human organs uprooted, rooted only on the air."

The air in which the rare, mud-colored polyp is rooted has unfortunately experienced some of the same annoying irregularity that keeps the cherry season short this year. Some rain followed by long stretches of bone dry and even hot weather have made treasured morel clusters scarce. You may see them at the markets one week. But the next, nothing.

"Buy them when you see them," advises Karl Oldnettle of Clearwater Farms, one of California's most reliable sources of high quality wild edible fungi. "We can promise nothing this year. The weather has been so inconsistent in northern California. Same with the harvests."

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Felicia Friesema

cherries

Steinbeck once opined that summer's warmth -- or for our purposes, fruit -- wouldn't achieve its sweetness without the cold of winter. Truth is revealed in the harvests; without a decent chill time and hibernation, stone fruit trees don't yield their best. Last year's first cherry harvests were amazing, thanks to long, steadily cold weather and perfectly-timed rainstorms followed by a gentle springtime warming. Cherry season puffed out deep into late June with gorgeous, rich and creamy fruit. It was the kind of year cherry farmers will get wistful about a decade from now.

This year, not so much. There were no significant weather tragedies -- no late frosts or heavy rains to split near-ripe fruit still on the trees -- but the winter just wasn't quite right in some regions, and there wasn't nearly enough rain. A little bit of localized heat in other areas has caused fruit spurring or doubling. Not a deal killer -- the fruit is still good eating -- but given the choice, consumers prefer a nice round single fruit.

Generally speaking, the early crops do look good, but the season will be short. Some say four weeks, tops. Given that we started seeing the first cherries -- some early Burlats from Mark Boujikian Farms -- last week, it's advisable to get your cherry fix in now.

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Natasha Subramaniam and Alisa Lapidus

A still from Reverie

Faced with presenting at a Star Chefs event in New York last October, Red Medicine chef Jordan Kahn called upon filmmakers Natasha Subramaniam and Alisa Lapidus to collaborate on a film they eventually titled Reverie. They had previously showcased his technique in their stop-motion animation film Assiette, and Kahn knew from that experience that the filmmakers would be able to help him express ideas that were otherwise difficult to communicate.

"I wanted to figure out a way to show people the process that I go through, and the best way to translate it would be through moving images," Kahn says.

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Felicia Friesema

loquats

There are a few people who would argue against calling loquats the first stone fruit of the season. It does have giant pit-like seeds -- anywhere from one to 10 -- enveloped in juicy, peach-colored flesh with a thin, slightly fuzzy and edible skin. Sound familiar? Plant classification is an exacting science, with a maze of family ties that put the loquat in the same group as roses, so similarities be dashed. Stone fruit it is not. Science has spoken.

Ken Love, president of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers and in town for some press work before the L.A. premiere of the rare fruit documentary The Fruit Hunters (which he's in), has also spoken.

"I LOVE them -- easily in my top 5 of fruits," said Love. "They are virtually unknown in the US but considered one of the top in Japan."

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Felicia Friesema

Helio radishes from Windrose Farm

California chefs -- think Alice Waters and Suzanne Goin -- have led the way in using seasonal, locally-sourced ingredients, practically inventing the concept of "California cuisine" in the process.

And so it's surprising to learn that our state placed a miserable 42nd of 51 in a national index ranking accessibility and dedication to local food.

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