Boll weevils in rice, brown mangoes, moldy peaches

Lundberg Organic Brown Long Grain Rice is grown in California, but Della Organic from Costco Wholesale comes from Arkansas. Consumer Reports says some rice growers in the South use old cotton fields, where arsenic was applied to kill boll weevils, leaving traces of the poison in the rice crop.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

We're having a run of bad luck with spoiled food -- from boll weevils in organic brown rice to fruit not ripening or sprouting mold.

Most troublesome are the tiny beetles my wife found when she was preparing Della-brand Organic Long Grain Brown Rice from Costco Wholesale.

When she added chicken broth to the brown rice in an electric cooker, she saw live boll weevils floating to the top.

Old cotton fields?

I recall that when Della brown rice first appeared at my Hackensack Costco, I tried unsuccessfully to reach a company official to find out if it came from old cotton fields in Arkansas.

I stopped buying white rice grown in the South many years ago after Consumer Reports told readers about tests that found traces of arsenic from use of the poison to control boll weevils in cotton fields.

H Mart, the Korean supermarket chain, sells several brands of California-grown white rice, including the deeply discounted Kokuho Yellow Label.

Rice from Amazon

This year, I ordered California-grown Lundberg brown rice from Amazon.com when the Della brand disappeared from the shelves at Costco in Hackensack.

Then, when the Lundberg product finished, I bought another 12-pound bag of Della brown rice, and that's the one with the boll weevils.

This morning, I again ordered Lundberg Organic Brown Long Grain Rice from Amazon.com, even though it is more expensive (about $24 for six 2-pound bags).

Spoiling fruit

Last Sunday, I bought a box of eight jumbo mangoes from Brazil at H Mart in Little Ferry for $9.99.

When my wife cut open two of them, they were brown inside, and I plan to return the spoiled fruit for a full refund today.

A second batch of Jersey peaches from the Paramus ShopRite took days to ripen on the kitchen counter -- like the first -- and were mealy or not that sweet.

One got moldy and had to be thrown away.

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A late-summer bounty of tomatoes and black figs

Black figs and tomatoes from our garden with Costco Wholesale's Earthbound Farm Organic Spring Mix and imported, aged Pecorino Romano sheep's milk cheese.

By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

We've managed to rescue a fair number of tomatoes and black figs from the critters that inhabit our garden.

We're having better luck with them than with the peaches from a tree that is very popular with squirrels, and they don't even wait until the fruit grows.

The tomatoes are great in salads and frittatas or paired with a good cheese and dressed simply in extra-virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar.

We cut back the black fig tree every fall, but it comes back stronger every year.

Birds get to many -- but not all -- of the figs before we do.

Sweet and savory.

Transforming the daily salad with organic baby spinach.

I love figs in any form -- dried from Costco Wholesale, in Spanish fig cakes with nuts from Fairway Market and Whole Foods Market, both in Paramus; and in a fig preserve with anise from Fattal's Bakery in Paterson.

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The tomatoes are coming!

Image via Wikipedia

We haven't had much luck growing produce in our back yard since we moved to Hackensack in August 2007.


We planted peach and black-fig trees a couple of years ago. We got some figs, but squirrels ate all the peaches before they ripened. In the spring, I put a net over the peach tree, and now the unripened peaches are falling off.

We bought a greenhouse from Costco last year, but we had trouble assembling it, and then a nor'easter blew it down. (Costco gave us a full refund after I returned all the pieces to the Hackensack store.)


But we're doing much better with cucumbers -- long, curly ones a foot or more long -- and now tomatoes. I've been enjoying three or four dozen small, ripe cherry tomatoes this week, dusted with za'atar thyme mixture for breakfast, added to leftover Thai fried rice from Wondee's in Hackensack and cut up to supplement bottled pasta sauce for tonight's dinner.