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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I gave up bread -- not bread fruit

Steamed bread fruit from Jamaica has a pleasant, dough-like consistency.

In Jamaica last weekend, I made sure to order my favorite dish -- a breakfast of ackee and salt fish.

Unfortunately, the highly acclaimed kitchen at Round Hill Hotel & Villas was unable to serve us two of the traditional accompaniments -- boiled green bananas and bread fruit.

It's one or the other, so today at home, I enjoyed steamed bread fruit with breakfast. Next week, I'll have soft, boiled green bananas that mash easily under my fork.  

At Round Hill, ackee and salt fish are served without boiled green bananas.

With green bananas or bread fruit, the dish is a winning combination of flavors and textures: bland, soft ackee; salty dried cod or pollock; and sweet and hot peppers.

Bread fruit is baked first, then sliced and roasted, fried or steamed.

I gave up bread and pizza to lose weight, but enjoy an occasional breakfast of ackee, salt fish and unusual bread fruit.

Our garden is yielding tomatoes and hot peppers, above, and black figs, below.

Late-summer harvest

At the traditional end of summer, we're enjoying tomatoes, green and hot peppers, cucumbers and black figs from our garden.

I like the figs with cheese, such as shavings of Parmigiano Reggiano from Italy or slices of Manchego from Spain.

We haven't had too much success with okra plants, but the flower is gorgeous.

The flower of an okra plant.

If okra are allowed to grow too large, they become tough and fibrous.

We've started to get a lot of tomatoes, and we also have tomatoes I bought at Fairway Market in Paramus.

So I've started to add tomatoes to omelets and frittatas, and plan to buy fresh mozzarella cheese to have with them.

A frittata with Campari tomatoes, cheese and dried Italian herbs.

Campari tomato halves added to a simple egg-white omelet.

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It pays to comparison shop for fish, shrimp and rotisserie chickens

Whole Foods Market in Paramus has the best seafood counter in northern New Jersey (2018 photo).



By Victor E. Sasson
Editor

You'll find some of the freshest seafood at Whole Foods Market in Paramus -- and some of the highest prices, too.

I was looking over the wonderful fish display on Tuesday and noticed wild-caught Gulf of Mexico shrimp for $16.99 a pound.

I just happened to be carrying the sales flier from Fairway Market in Paramus and pulled it out to show the Whole Foods fishmonger.

Fairway has wild-caught Gulf of Mexico shrimp on sale for $7.99 a pound through Sept. 5. 

Fairway calls its shrimp "jumbo," while Whole Foods says there are 16 to 20 shrimp in a pound. They could very well be the same shrimp.

Whole Foods does have wild bay scallops from Mexico on sale for $7.99 a pound, a discount of $4 a pound -- as part of a "Madness Sale" that ends today.

Wild-caught, meaty hake fillets from the U.S.A. are $5.99 a pound, a savings of $3 a pound. I've tried these and they are terrific eating.

Whole Foods also has a sale on Jersey Fresh peaches at $1.19 a pound -- about what I paid on Monday at Costco for large peaches that were distributed by a New Jersey company, but appear to be from South Carolina.


Image via Wikipedia
I also noticed Whole Foods' naturally raised rotisserie chickens now are $8.99 each -- up a dollar -- but you can save $3 by buying two for $14.98. I rate this chicken tops in North Jersey.

On the coffee line at Whole Foods, I said to the woman in front of me, "This store should give out more free samples."

She agreed, and said that's why she likes shopping at Costco. I told her she'd find great free samples, especially cheese, at Jerry's Gourmet and More on South Dean Street in Englewood, and not to miss Balthazar Bakery on that same street.

This morning at H Mart in Little Ferry, I picked up two dozen black figs from California for $7.99, and the ripe one I ate after breakfast was like sugar.

I had a cheese omelet filled with pesto, accompanied by the Korean supermarket's stewed tofu in red-pepper sauce, and cabbage and radish kimchis.

Costco almonds, dry espresso beans and more

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Shelled, left, and unshelled almonds.

Costco has improved the package for its Marcona almonds from Spain. These blanched, shelled almonds are seasoned with sea salt, and cost $7.69 for just over a pound of nuts (500 grams) in a plastic bottle with a screw top.

The old container was a canister with a loose-fitting plastic top. Costco also sells roasted, unshelled California almonds with sea salt, but I don't have the price.

Earthbound Farm's restaurant-quality, organic spring mix, which I buy at Costco in Hackensack,  seemed to be rotting before its expiration date, but in the last three or four weeks, I haven't had that problem.

I look carefully at the salad in its clear-plastic tub, to make sure it looks dry. If there is a more delicious salad mix, I haven't found it. It cost only $4.49 a pound, and it's pre-washed, so you can just grab some and put it on a plate or into a sandwich. 

Lately, I have been trying to cut down on bread, so I've been enjoying this salad for breakfast with smoked wild salmon, reduced fat cheese and sun-dried tomatoes in oil from Costco.

Espresso-bean dilemma

My built-in Bosch coffee machine seems unable to handle oily coffee beans, which get hung up in the chute of the grinder, prompting an "add beans" message and necessitating my sliding out the chassis and "stirring" the beans with my fingers.

I found some non-oily beans from Brazil at Fairway Market in Paramus and others from amazon.com. The 2.2 pounds of Lavazza Super Crema espresso beans cost less than $7 a pound, with discounts and free shipping, if you agree to have them sent to you periodically.

I'm trying the Lavazza beans from Italy first.

Black figs and tofu

I picked up two dozen black figs from California for $6.99 at H Mart in Fort Lee on Wednesday, as well as a new prepared-food item -- sweet-and-sour tofu balls with red pepper ($4.99).

I tried the tofu balls at room temperature, but I like them better after heating them in the microwave for about a minute and a half. The microwave also lends a new dimension to small blocks of stewed tofu with scallion and red pepper ($3.49).

For dinner Wednesday night, I cooked three small, wild-caught croakers ($1.99 a pound) on my stove-top grill, and ate them with a salad. What a mess.

The tomatoes are coming!

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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.

Tasting and shopping notes

I sliced six or seven pieces of giant bluefin-tuna sashimi as part of my dinner last night and wasn't disappointed. Veined with fat, the raw fish just melted away in my mouth with a minimum

of chewing. Heavenly. I also had small, green obah leaves (wrap for the sashimi), seasoned fish eggs, cooked eel sushi and roll, and a triangle of seaweed-wrapped cooked rice stuffed with spicy cod roe, all from Mitsuwa Marketplace in Edgewater, where I bought the tuna Sunday ($62.99 a pound). See earlier posts.


Clementines from Spain and black figs grown in the U.S. have begun appearing in markets, but at higher prices than I remember from last year. I haven't seen clementines for less than $9.99 for a 5-pound box. My wife bought domestic clementines for half that at ShopRite in Englewood, but they are sour and full of pits. An employee of H Mart in Englewood said the price of the imported clementines will fall next month.


I bought a box of 24 black figs at H Mart in Little Ferry yesterday for $9.99. I saw then for 99 cents each at Mitsuwa Marketplace that morning as I gathered items for my sashimi and trimmings dinner. The figs I bought were ripe and sweet, and I'm storing them in the fridge. I want to try them with Manchego sheep milk's cheese and almonds for dessert one night or split open and drizzled with honey.

I have been buying California rice for two or three years now to avoid rice from the South, where it is sometimes grown on old cotton fields laced with arsenic, which was used to kill the boll weevil, a beetle, according to Consumer Reports. The problem is many bags of rice don't specify where it is grown. That's not the case at H Mart in Little Ferry, which has a large selection of California rice in all sizes, but it can be expensive, especially after a price spike last year.

Yesterday, I picked up a 20-pound bag of Kokuho yellow rice that was over a price sign of $19.99, one of the lowest I saw, and it rang up as $12.99 (it was on sale). The reference to yellow rice may have something to do with the yellow seal on the bag. The rice looked the same as other brands when we prepared it.