The best part of winter in California is the citrus. Every year my family and I celebrate the season by ordering a box of tarocco blood oranges from Frog Hollow Farm for sorbet. Their juice makes a delicious dessert: sweet, tart, refreshing and cold as the snow we never have here in San Francisco.
This time of year there is usually an influx of turnips from our CSA, which my family tires of eating quickly. Tonight, with a little help from Twitter (where there are always plenty of people willing to tweet about food) I discovered a new dish that everyone in my family will eat!
My kids love blood oranges because they are a little bit disgusting. “Mommy! Get some really bloody ones!” By this late date in winter they are no longer interested in eating plain old oranges: only the red variety or fresh squeezed juice of the orange one will do.
Homemade polenta can be an intensive affair, it requires half an hour of near continuous stirring. Deborah Madison's Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone has a walk-away version, but it needs to simmer for an hour and a half, after two separate pots of water are brought to a boil, one at a time, on top of each other. That takes more pre-planning than I can handle.