Sweet kumquats! Tender broccolini!
Peaking
Meiwa kumquats: Kumquats are a contrary fruit. Unlike almost every other citrus variety, the sweet part is the peel, while the pulp is extremely tart (or at least sour enough that the peel seems sweet in contrast). When you eat a kumquat, you find yourself nibbling, squirrel-like, around the outside of the fruit, discarding the center. That’s not necessary with the Meiwa. Its pulp is much sweeter than that of most kumquats. For this reason, the variety has long been considered the best for eating out of hand. (An alternate name is the Sweet Kinkan, which sounds like something out of “The Mikado.”) You can spot Meiwas because although most other commercially available kumquats are oblong, they are nearly round.
Garcia Organic Farm, $3.50 per basket
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Kishu mandarins: One of the most exciting developments at farmers markets in the last several years has been the proliferation of new types of mandarins, formerly known as tangerines. Once you could find only two or three types all year -- and rarely varietally labeled -- but now there are many. One of the most sought-after is the Kishu, which is often served for dessert in the winter at Chez Panisse Cafe -- just a blue Moroccan bowl of orange fruit mixed with caramel-colored fresh dates. The Kishu is a tiny fruit never much bigger than a pingpong ball. The flavor is intensely candied, and the fruit is reliably seedless.
Mud Creek Ranch, $2 per pound
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Broccolini: Though it is sometimes called “baby broccoli” and in fact looks like it might be a vegetable that was simply picked very early, broccolini is actually a fully mature example of a variety called Italian sprouting broccoli. It’s got the same delicious mixture of sweet and bitter that regular broccoli has, but in a form that is concentrated more on the long leggy stems than fully flowering heads. The main drawback with most broccolini is that those stems can get big and tough enough that they need to be peeled. That’s never a problem with the Calabrese broccolini that Jerry Rutiz grows. Blanch it, chop it and saute it with olive oil, dried red-pepper flakes and garlic to make a quick winter pasta sauce.
Rutiz Family Farms, $4 per pound
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