Fall

Prominent throughout the Deep South and up through Virginia to Connecticut and back down towards Florida and west to Kansas and Texas, the common Persimmon, Diospyros virginiana, makes for a Farmer’s favorite with its growth habit, bark, leaf shape, and fruit color…that fabulous color holding the rank somewhere between terra cotta, salmon, apricot, and orange.

“Don’t you EVER bite into a green persimmon…it will turn your mouth INSIDE OUT!!!” That is what Grandmother, Mimi’s grandmother, my great, great grandmother would exclaim about this fruit. Tart and sour, the unripe persimmons are about as useful as a boar’s teat, but the ripe persimmons are lovely, flavorful, and quite delicious. “They’ve got to be DEAD ripe,” according to the grand dame Mimi herself.

Because of their extreme astringency, the persimmon will most often make you pucker, but once the sour cells within the fruit are “bletted" or partially rotted the fruit becomes much more palpable. Killed by cold, the astringent cells actually rot somewhat and cause the fruit to take on a sweeter flavor, and, thus, the old adage that persimmons are not ripe until the first frost. There is a whole chemistry lesson here but I shan’t attempt to explain the how’s and why’s – just know persimmons most often become ripe after the first frost.

Firm Fuyus can be eaten like an apple; they taste like one too -- mildly sweet but with hints of cinnamon. Fuyu persimmons are ideal for savory dishes, such as salads and salsas, where they add color, flavor, and texture.

The first time I made this salsa, I used just persimmons and no onion, and I thought it needed a bit more splash. This time I added some savory scallions and tart pomegranate seeds.

It was pleasingly splashier in both taste and presentation. This refreshing salsa pairs especially well with pork, though it would be good with roasted turkey, grilled lamb, or a mild white fish, such as mako shark (which Jeff had and loved last night).

Persimmons aren't just pretty, they're nutritional powerhouses too--especially high in potassium, lutein (for ocular health), and lycopene (a cancer fighting antioxidant).

One of my favorite things about Fall is apples…and trips to the apple orchard. This year, without a trip to one of my favorite apple orchards in the Twin Cities area marked on the calendar, I was beginning to think it would be the first time in many, many years that I didn’t get to an apple orchard. The sign along Highway 10 that made me turn my car down a winding country road in search of my favorite fall fruit, turned into a wild goose chase. But then, an angel appeared and offered me all the apples I could possibly want or need.

With the big bag of apples I brought home, I made an apple tapioca sauce with a handful of the fruit. I could have moved on to the apple crisp that has been a family-favorite for years. But, I decided to pull a church cookbook off my shelf. I have a bunch of them that I’ve collected over the years. I randomly pulled a book from the tightly-packed row lined up on the shelf. I paged through the one that wound up in my hands: The Centennial Cookbook (1887-1987) from St. Olaf Lutheran Church in Devils Lake, North Dakota. I stopped at Swiss Apple Pie Cake that was submitted by Berdelle Nelson.

From the LA Times

My mom has a recipe on Epicurious. At first I found that amusing. Epicurious, after all, is the holy grail of recipe websites, the collected works of some of the best food writers in the country. And, to put it most kindly, my mom was not a gifted cook. At least not by the definition we most usually apply today.

Oh, it's a good recipe. Maybe a great recipe. We printed it in the Los Angeles Times for the first time in 1992 and most recently in 2000, and I still get calls and emails every Thanksgiving asking for Mom Parsons' Cranberries.

It has just the right balance of sweet and tart, with the spice of cloves, cinnamon and allspice coming up from the background. I can — and sometimes do — drink the syrup straight. The texture is like a loose jelly, but the cranberries are cooked briefly, so they still have pop. It's so good that I know my mom couldn't have thought it up herself.

When I say something like that, people sometimes gasp. It sounds cruel, particularly these days when culinary ability is regarded as being next to godliness.

But even if my mom had had the inclination to be a good creative cook, she probably wouldn't have had either the time or the resources. She was too busy raising four kids on my dad's Air Force salary — for most of his career a modest paycheck that still required us to pack up and move almost every year.

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