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At last, a field guide to identifying and selecting more than 200 fruits and vegetables from around the world!
The perfect companion for every shopper, Field Guide to Produce offers tips for selecting, storing, and preparing everything from apples to zucchini.
When an unfamiliar edible appears on your grocer’s shelf, simply flip through the full-color insert until you’ve found its photograph. Turn to the corresponding page to discover its country of origin, common uses, and season of harvest.
This practical guide includes more than 200 full-color photographs of the world’s most popular fruits and vegetables, cross-referenced to in-depth descriptions and selection tips. Step-by-step preparation directions tell you whether the item must be peeled, washed, trimmed, or blanched. Grocery shopping—and dinner—will never be the same again!
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Aliza Green is a chef, food writer, and teacher based in Philadelphia. She is the author of The Bean Bible: A Legumaniac’s Guide to Lentils, Peas, and Every Edible Bean on the Planet! and co-author of Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails with a Latino Twist.
Aliza Green, the Philadelphia-based cookbook author, journalist and pioneering chef, is the author of thirteen highly successful cookbooks including her newest, The Soupmaker's Kitchen, to be published July 1st and available now for pre-sale on Amazon. Her Making Artisan Pasta, a step-by-step full color guide to making a world of fresh pasta has been garnering outstanding reviews and strong sales. It was selected by Cooking Light Magazine as one of its Top 100 Cookbooks of the Last 25 Years--quite an honor in a field of thousands!
Researching Making Artisan Pasta in Italy inspired Green to gather a small group of food lovers to explore the Southern Italian region of Puglia, which she calls, "land of 1,000-year-old olive trees", in a tour taking place October 2 to 9, 2013. The group will be visiting wineries, experiencing the region's best and most authentic restaurants, markets, and artisan food producers, exploring world cultural sites, and will join in two cooking classes. For details, visit WWW.ALIZAGREEN.COM and click on the Puglia tour page.
Green's book, The Butcher's Apprentice, (Quarry Books, 2012) contains fascinating interviews with a rancher raising Japanese Wagyu cattle, a couple who produce Italian-quality prosciutto in Iowa because that's where the pigs are, a Jewish deli owner, a "new wave" hunter, a humane slaughterhouse designer, and an chef in Umbria who serves only meat from her family's farm. Interspersed are clear, full-color step by step techniques for cutting and trimming various types and cuts of meat and poultry that even the novice will be confident enough to try.
The perfect companion book is her Field Guide to Meat: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Meat, Poultry, and Game Cut (Quirk Books 2005) earned top praises from Food & Wine and Real Simple.
The Fishmonger's Apprentice (Quarry Books 2011) is full of step by step techniques for working with everything from geoduck to swordfish, from abalone to crayfish, flatfish and round fish. Interviews with experts in fishing like the five Portuguese families who started the sustainable American Albacore Tuna Association, a third-generation lobsterman from Maine, the manager of the Honolulu wholesale fish auction, and person who runs London's Billingsgate Fish Market, which has been in continuous operation for over 1,000 year! The book comes with a DVD showing Aliza preparing a dozen fish and seafood dishes plus recipes from renowned chefs.
Field Guide to Produce: How to Identify, Select, and Prepare Virtually Every Fruit and Vegetable at the Market (Quirk Books 2004), was recommended by the New York Times, Men's Health, and Shape and has sold over 50,000 copies. Her personal favorite is Field Guide to Herbs & Spices (Quirk Books 2006), a compact guide to common but also rare and unusual spices from around the world. Field Guide to Seafood (Quirk Books 2007) is a complete guide to choosing fish and shellfish, whether you live in the US or abroad. The series of four food field guides is a must on the shelves of food writers, editors, and culinary students.
Her masterly Starting with Ingredients: Quintessential Recipes for the Way We Really Cook was published to outstanding reviews. With over 550 recipes and detailed, practical, information about the background, culture, history, and uses of 100 important ingredients, this book flies off the shelves in the United Stated and Canada. Starting with Ingredients: Baking does for baking what the first book did for general cooking in 60 chapters. Find uncommon international recipes, detailed ingredient information, and dozens of invaluable tips.
¡Ceviche!: Seafood, Salads, and Cocktails With a Latino Twist (Running Press 2001), which Green co-authored with chef Guillermo Pernot, received a James Beard Award for "Best Single Subject Cookbook." Her book, The Bean Bible: A Legumaniac's Guide to Lentils, Peas, and Every Edible Bean on the Planet! (Running Press 2000), was described by Booklist as "a comprehensive guide to the world of beans and bean cookery belongs in every cookbook collection." When Running Press re-released it as as Beans: More than 200 Delicious, Wholesome Recipes from Around the World with new photographs and recipes, the book appeared in a New York Times feature on top holiday cookbooks.
The beautiful oversized book, Georges Perrier: Le Bec-Fin Recipes (Running Press 1997) features a collection of recipes from Philadelphia's landmark restaurant that Green co-wrote with the renowned French chef.
Green has conducted numerous cooking classes, had many television appearances and radio interviews, and is a highly reputed television and print food stylist. As one of the pioneer chefs who helped make the city of Philadelphia a dining destination, Green began her career in the mid-1970's as Executive Chef at the renowned Ristorante DiLullo, where her culinary achievements landed the restaurant a prestigious four-star rating. In 1988, The Philadelphia Inquirer inducted Chef Green into its Culinary Hall of Fame, citing her as one of the ten most influential people in the city's food industry for her uncompromising efforts at working with local farmers.
Green cites her childhood, which she spent traveling and living abroad, as the inspiration for her culinary pursuits. She has been reading about, writing about and preparing and perfecting food for most of her life. Today, Green spends her time writing food guides and cookbooks, consulting to restaurants and institutional food service providers, teaching, and leading culinary tours.
A pocket-guide, small enough to fit into your purse, filled with fantastic information about fruits and vegetables.
Aliza Green is a chef, teacher and food writer based in the Philadelphia area. This is her third book.
The Field Guide to Produce is an excellent guide if you are looking to educate yourself on the produce available to you at your local market. There are photographs to help you identify the item at the store, as well as a description of each item, the season it is available, how to choose it at the store, what to avoid when selecting your produce, how to store it, serving suggestions, flavor infinities and other names the item may use!
This is not a cookbook. There are no recipes inside. Yet, there are clear color photographs helping you to identify some of the more exotic items at your store, and even the most familiar.
If you are new to cooking, or want to educate yourself further in newer more exotic items, then check out this book. It is extremely useful!
I generally expect to find one or more deficiencies in small guides like this volume from Aliza Green, so I was not surprised to find some. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the book also covered a lot more ground than I expected.
The first positive aspect of the book is the title, `Field Guide to PRODUCE'. It would have been easy and misleading to say it was a guide to fruits and vegetables, when many items in the book such as chestnuts and mushrooms are neither fruits nor vegetables. The book should have taken this positive title one step further and not divided entries up into fruits and vegetables. As I said, chestnuts and mushrooms are neither, and other products such as tomatoes are classified under their commercial category of vegetable instead of their botanical category of fruit.
The next positive aspect of the book is that the only product I could not find in either a primary entry such as `cabbage' or as an entry type such as `Brussels Sprouts' was the truffle. I will forgive them this omission, as it is the rare megamart that even carries truffles. On the other hand, the book did include such rarities as durian, loquat, and mung beans (although I thought the coverage of mung beans could have been a bit better).
Another positive aspect is that for produce such as apples, pears, cabbage, and tomatoes, several major cultivars are cited, with the best uses for each given.
The single biggest use for this book would probably be to find out when produce is in season, how to choose the best specimens, how to clean them, and how to store them. I will not be searching this book for the best fruits for a particular dish, although I may refer to the properties of apples to pick the best variety for a tart. On this subject, the book is excellent.
... It tends to be very conservative in specifying storage times. It gives apples about two weeks in a refrigerated produce drawer, while I have successfully kept some there for two months with little degradation.
Another use may possibly be to help identify a particular item in the grocery store. I often run across tamarind in South Asian recipes, but I would be hard pressed to describe exactly what it looks like, and most written descriptions really don't seem to hit the mark. A picture here is truly worth a thousand words. For this reason, there is probably a virtue in bringing all photographs together in a single section rather than having them accompany the article of the product. Another reason is probably because this was cheaper to publish.
Useful aspects of many articles are things like the climates in which the plants flourish, the land in which the product was first cultivated, the origin of `manmade' products such as grapefruit (from orange and pomelo), the scientific name, and best uses for products. I am constantly amazed at how many of our most commonly used fruits and vegetables originated in or near the Fertile Crescent formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Several alternate names like `aubergine' for eggplant are given; however, the author would have made this feature immensely more useful by including the alternate names in the index. Great help for people scratching their heads over `rocket' in Italian salads.
One `expected oversight' is the absence of cross-reference entries. Brussels Sprouts, for example is in the index, pointing to a paragraph in the article about cabbage, but there is no entry for `Brussels Sprouts, See Cabbage' in the main text. Broccoli and Cauliflower are derived from cabbage and even have the same scientific name, yet they get their own articles. This rant is probably due entirely due to my fondness for Brussels Sprouts, so you can take it with a grain of salt. Missed opportunities are the absence of a tabular presentation of produce seasons and tables of uses versus varieties for major families of products such as apples, pears, cabbage, oranges, and tomatoes. A fun feature, albeit somewhat difficult to accomplish may have been a table or `tree' of food preparation techniques with most useful products.
I could add more nice things to see, but most of these would lead to a full-sized volume, loosing the utility of the `field guide' size.
This is a better than average book of its type. If you need something to make the best of finding, selecting, cleaning, and storing produce, this is your book. It will also help you pick the best apple for the pie and the best potato for your salad.
My husband and I rarely stopped in the produce section of the grocery store. We never knew what to buy, and when we did buy something, it usually went bad before we figured out what to do with it. (We're not big on recipes; we just generally throw a few things together and call it a meal.)
This book has been a *huge* help. We're so glad we found it.
This book explains what produce is in season, how to pick it out, what to avoid, how to store it, and how to prepare it. Plus, it even gives suggestions on how each kind of produce could be used and lists "flavor affinities" to let you know what other flavors the produce is generally compatible with.
Thanks to this book, the produce section is now a regular stop when we go shopping, and we're actually getting our recommended servings of fruits and vegetables. Huzzah.
This book gives good, basic, brief information about a variety of fruits and vegetables. I feel it pales in comparison, however, to Elizabeth Schneider's books on produce because her books are more detailed. I would say that if you like brevity you will like this book by Aliza Green, were it not that I feel your hard-earned money is better spent on the more detailed Schneider books.
I'm a Philadelphian, like the author, and have taken cooking classes with her. She's as good a writer as she is a teacher.
This book is pretty complete, even to including things as exotic as African horned cucumber, caltrope and yautia. Her advice on using each item is clear and specific, accesible to the rawest cooking beginner and still helpful to the expert. The pictures are beautiful, full-color photos that make identification very easy. I only wish she had ncluded more pictures of different kinds of beans, squashes, tomatoes, greens and so forth. Of course, the book might just get too big to carry to the produce vender's. At Philadelphia's justly famous Reading Terminal Market, such a book is particularly useful as the venders regularly offer all sorts of unusual produce. This lovely book will make the explorations much more fun. Anybody who goes to farmer's markets will find it useful. It's a good read, too; I've read it cover to cover.
The Field Guide to Produce is exactly what it claims to be. Roughly CD-jewel-case sized and about 2 in. thick, it's perfect for keeping in your car or reusable shopping bags for those random grocery trips. Without this book, I would never have had the courage to try fiddlehead ferns (fantastic sauteed with butter) or dinosaur kale - though I would often find unusual items such as these in the produce section. Now, I no longer get to stare curiously as I get another head of broccoli, but am forced to break out of mediocrity and try something new and exciting. Yay! The other side: This book is honest, at least - it doesn't step a hair over covering produce. (You need to get the 'Field Guide to Herbs & Spices" for that - no kidding.) The other morning, I was amazed to not find "chives" listed and realized that it doesn't cover any herbs at all. A pity, really, as it would be perfect all in one.
