All the news that's fit to eat
By Chris Mittelstaedt Citrus season is in full swing now, with all sorts of farm-fresh specialty fruit coming in. We’re seeing everything from Navel Oranges to Satsumas to Clementines to Ruby Red Grapefruits to Cara-Caras. We’re also cycling in Murcotts, Minneolas, and a host of other citrus varieties as well. If you don’t recognize them, [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt The 1878 edition of A Domestic Cyclopædia of Practical Information, published by Henry Holt & Company, explained to eager readers the uses for the banana: “It is eaten raw, either alone or cut in slices with sugar and cream, or wine and orange juice. It is also roasted, fried or boiled, and is made into [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt The college application process was not an easy one for me. I didn’t know where I wanted to go to school, and I had no idea what to say to encapsulate myself in an essay. I finally settled on telling the story of the summer I spent rehabbing houses in the Appalachian Mountain towns [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It’s hard to let go of things that were ingrained in my brain as a kid. I still feel nervous if I take food out of the kitchen to eat somewhere other than the table (“not on the rug, Chris!”), and oftentimes I find myself humming an old Sesame Street song from Cookie Monster: [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt My wife is on the East Coast for FruitGuys business, and I’m flying solo. My teen and preteen zombies, formerly known as my children, start rising at 5:45 every morning and usually grunt through the breakfast routine. I’m surprised when my daughter raises an eyebrow (complex motor skills aren’t usually seen at this hour) and asks: [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It was the kind of month that gave a grown man a hangnail—the really nasty kind that snags easily on wool sweaters in dry fall air and requires Neosporin and a superhero Band-Aid. I had been working a case that had me stumped. Ginny Grapefruit had rolled into my office looking for her roots. [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt Yes, this is Conference Room A, Building 12. It’s about 10 o’clock in the morning. That’s the Strategy Squad. They’ve been here since 5 a.m. Something about reassessing their core. Some confusion was reported from one of the other buildings. Maybe it was a gas leak, maybe it was something more. People [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt It’s a strange feeling when someone dies who affected your life but whom you never knew personally. I’ve found myself grieving over the passing of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955–2011). In the early 1980s, I spent countless hours on my family’s Apple IIe playing Time Zone and Dig Dug. I can still remember the “beep!” [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt I’ve always been a pretty active person—something that made coming down with a random medical condition all the more humbling. About a month ago I had an acute onset of achalasia, an uncommon disorder in which the muscles around the lower esophagus clamp down like a boa constrictor and restrict food and liquid from getting [...]
By Chris Mittelstaedt When O’Henry peaches start to appear, I think of O. Henry—the turn-of-the-century American short story writer who wrote The Gift of the Magi, a story about a young married man who sells his watch to buy his newlywed wife a beautiful set of combs for her long hair. Of course at the same time, without [...]
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