Felicia Friesema

It's not often we get to advocate eating sugar in this column. Often, it's the opposite: fruits and veggies. But sugar cane is finally in season, the last big seasonal sweet bomb before we hit the big citrus harvests in December. It's an uncommon sight, and it's a pain to......

It has one of our favorite species names. Pachyrhizus erosus (erotic root elephant?), or the jicama which comes from the Aztec Nahuatl word xicamatl, is an ancient native root vegetable from Mexico, but it is very common in much of southern Asian cuisine thanks to invading Spaniards who brought the......

Second only to fireworks and the old Victorian tradition of lighting actual candles in a dead pine tree (the stuff of California nightmares), the Halloween jack-o'-lantern tops the list for ways to make your local fire department squirm. Anything that involves an open flame inside an easily tippable gourd placed......

California orchardists just cannot get a break this year. The long, very cold winter we had was followed by a finicky spring that teased trees into blooming and then spanked them with a hard frost. Some crops were lost altogether; some were delayed. The latter is the persimmon grower's lot......

Good pastis, the anise-flavored, double-distilled French cousin of ouzo and sambuca, is a long, slow labor of love that needs a steady, experienced hand to blend a complex array of infusions and distillations to make a velvety apéritif. Once, all the best pastis all came from France, where it has......

It has all the physical charm of a warthog,all bumps and sinewy tendrils, blotchy and pallid, and most often treated with suspicion by dubious customers. But we nodded vehemently in the affirmative when a fellow market goer stood next to us, holding up a large bulb of celeriac and asked,......

The early season pomegranates, piled high in crates like gigantic jewel-toned berries, have arrived at the local markets. Several vendors -- Mark Boujikian Farms, K&K Ranch, Walker Farms, Burkart Organics, J&J's Lone Daughter Ranch, and many others -- grow some early-bearing varieties of the ancient Persian fruit. Happily, "early" in......

Looking and tasting like an apple and a date fused into one species, the Jujube has fast become one of L.A.'s multicultural fruit treasures. Originating in China, and transplanted here with very limited success in the early part of the 20th century, it's taken the Jujube almost a hundred years......

You can count on the arrival of Bartlett pears to signal the official end of summer, at least in Southern California. This year, they showed up just one week prior to the autumnal equinox; non-fall weather aside, it is nice to see them, even if the weather change that they......

Laura Avery has seen a lot change and evolution in farmers markets since she started managing the Santa Monica Farmers Market back in 1982. In part one of our interview, Avery gave us a window on some of the bigger changes that she helped bring about for small farmers in......