Felicia Friesema

You probably know that this week is the 30th anniversary celebration of the Santa Monica Farmers Market, scheduled to be feted with the week-long Good Food Festival & Conference, gallery shows, and of course, food. The Santa Monica Farmers Market may not have made the top five in a recent......

Fresh field peas, like the Black-Eyed and prehaps more interestingly, the Purple Hull Pink Eyed pea, debuted at the markets a couple of weeks ago. Black-Eyed and Pink-Eyed peas are a favorite holiday food or comfort dish for displaced southerners, served up with a generous chunk of bacon or fatback......

K&K Ranch is getting a nice reputation for bringing serendipitous harvests to the market. Their previous crop of red-skinned walnuts came from trees gifted to them from a friend, and it wasn't until harvest time that they realized they were something special. The same goes for the Granny Annie. Or......

If your only exposure to a pickle has been via Vlasic or some gargantuan soft deli dill, it's high time for home brine. Prime pickling season peaks right around Labor Day, even though cucumbers, in the general, salad sense, have been in season since the end of May. But a......

Crisp, unripe fresh dates, still clinging to their fronds in golden yellow cascades signal a seasonal shift. Crispy, sweet and sometimes pleasantly (or unpleasantly) astringent, these yellow khalal stage (full-sized and crunchy but not ripe) dates are only around for a month before they head into their rutab stage, when......

Eggs? Yes, eggs. This week is National Farmers Market Week, and while the bulk of what you see piled high on tables at your local market is more flora than fauna, here and there you'll likely see neatly stacked cartons of farm fresh eggs. In some cases, it's a secondary......

We're currently smack dab in the middle of what has been a pretty enjoyable tomato season. Last year, it seemed like everyone was experiencing a similar stagnation of homegrowns -- the fruits just took forever to mature -- and were looking to the local markets to help them sustain a......

Cherries are to the start of summer as grapes are to the end of it. Yes, we're still in July, but this is when we start to see the seasonal harvests switch gears into later-bearing crops. This past week we noted -- in part because a woman next to us......

K&K Farms out of Orosi semi-debuted a striking new walnut at the Hollywood farmers market this season. They've actually had the Yolo Red walnut for a few years now, but haven't consistently brought it to market. This year is the first time they've had it in Hollywood, and they may......

It wasn't that long ago that the only place you could get good, freshly harvested bitter melon was as the local Asian grocer, or someone's backyard. Bitter melon, a lumpy-skinned cucurbit related to cucumbers and pumpkins, is a Southeast Asian summer crop with a somewhat unfortunate English name that prevents......