Greens out, Oranges in

Date: 06/03/2018

Good bye greens, hello oranges

We are at the height of the twilight season for organic agriculture, metaphorically, of course: it is now the seasonal transfer and crop exchange period for organic farming. Winter crops gave a last farewell wave and evacuated their place on the shelves, while the organic summer crops are still hiding behind the scenes, looking shyly to the front of the shelf, tentatively sending one representative or another. That is why one week we have, both in the store and in your boxes, organic plums, for example, and the following week, none. In organic agriculture, we listen to what nature has to say. One week the farmer decided that the fruits looked ripe for picking and brought plenty of them to us (and we smelled, tasted and loved it) and the following week he decided that the fruit on other trees was still immature and gave them more time to ripen and become juicy.

So, what will be from now on? The organic greens will gradually diminish and soon disappear. They are still with us, but not as varied, less plump, less green…. Imagine yourselves standing outside in the heat all day.

Also the cabbage family is completely wintry and gone. If you planned to make a broccoli or cauliflower casserole, find a plan B. instead of them, please welcome these organic summer fruits, the gourds!

The gourds are a warm and loving family. One that gives excited hugs all around – because these are plants that use tendrils to pull themselves up towards the light. This family includes cucumbers, melons, zucchini, watermelons, and squash. Some of them we like to eat raw, some should be cooked, some are good for salad-soup-casserole, and some for dessert, and some bring with them added value in the form of their seeds – which we affectionately call פיצוחים. There is no end to all the good that they bring. We can use the flowers of organic pumpkins for the preparation of beautiful gourmet dishes; different types of pumpkin are used for sculpture (both for Halloween and others), and some cultures use pumpkin fruit to store water, like a bottle.

The gourd family is very suitable for the diet of those who live in the Mediterranean climate, and is native also in our tiny country, as evidenced by mosaics from ancient times which include images of watermelon, melon, kara and lupa. The zucchini, the pumpkin, the cucumber and the watermelon were mentioned in the Mishna, although apart from the watermelon, these were different crops from what we now call by the same name: the fruit that Hazal called "zucchini (קישוא)" is what we call an Armenian cucumber (fakus), Hazal’s pumpkin is the Kara, and what they called cucumber is what we call today “melon”, sweet, round and refreshing.

One of the more intriguing representatives of this family is the fakus, the Armenian cucumber. The fakus is actually the answer to the question "what looks like a cucumber, smells a bit like a cucumber, and tastes kinda like a cucumber, but is actually a kind of zucchini?”. Fakus is the true guest of summer, unattainable out of season. It is cool, delicious, a little hairy and crispy. It can be eaten as it is, with a little salt or in a salad, and can be treated like a zucchini – cooked or fried, and then the taste will be more like a zucchini. We recommend that you declare the arrival of the summer season with an organic fakus salad: chopped in a bowl, along with some purple onion and tomatoes, swimming in good olive oil and lemon… and what good luck that it arrived exactly during the annual shortage of cucumbers.