Melissa's Specialty Vegetables

The food experience in travel continues to improve.

With each passing year there are more chefs and wine makers who are considered major artists.

The materials they are working with evolve and advance, and the delivery of these quality products becomes ever more widespread.

Specialty vegetables, especially baby vegetables, are one aspect of the story.

When one consumes some delectable baby vegetable in a restaurant, the question arises: how could I get this for my own home cooking?

Recently I learned part of the answer.  My sister Colleen Foster, who writes about food as well as enjoys it, sent me a basket of miniature vegetables under the Melissa's brand.  See this at www.melissas.com, 800-588-0151.

In my basket, packed in Vernon, CA and sent two-day UPS there was a cornucopia of perhaps ten pounds of baby cauliflowers, beets, carrots, beans, green zucchini, yellow zucchini, and "gemstone" potatoes.

I stir fried and steamed them for a week, storing the basket in my frig to keep everything fresh.  The taste was outstanding, as in generally true of baby vegetables.  One forgets also how easily and quickly one can cook such miniature, bite-size food.

It was as if a week of fine dining had been brought to my own kitchen.