It's that time of the year again. Shorter days, colder nights and the realization that yet another year is slipping away.

For those of us who clutch to whatever hope we can find, it's also the time to begin thinking about all the promises ahead for 2008. To help mark the months, calendars that inspire and move me are a basic necessity. How else to make the wall over my desk a place for change rather then an endless list of tasks?

For the third year in a row, I'm ordering a copy of Celia Roberts' wonderful calendar celebrating farm workers across the country. Fully bilingual with Spanish and English text, this year's calendar, Gracias por los Campesinos, describes the daily labor of immigrants with honesty, respect and quiet gratitude.

Next year's calendar is especially close to my heart, for Celia came to the Ferry Plaza Farmers Market while I was still teaching in the kitchen there. She helped me welcome the women from Las Salsitas the day they demonstrated recipes from their cookbook, and while she was there, she snapped a photo of Carl Rosato from Woodleaf Farm. If you flip to December in the 2008 calendar, you'll see him helping some customers as they pick out peaches at his booth.

Every year's calendar has a different visual theme, but the feeling is always the same: thanking community members for their valuable contributions. One of my favorites was last year's collection of photographs, Gracias por los Abuelos, when Celia honored grandparents.

I highly recommend this year's calendar for offices or kitchens where eating and cooking has become the mere stuff of work. It's a warm reminder of the faces and lives and stories that bring us our food.

Love is in the air: peaches are here, and all is right with the world. Yes, my sunglasses are rose- tinted, why do you ask?

I've been on the road, taking my show with me. First NYC, then Portland and most recently, Chicago. It's been fun, educational, hot, and delicious, but I've missed being home. Home is where the peaches are. Home is where I know the season's signage at my local farmers' market is. I wait and pine for strawberries, cherries soon follow, and after cherries, O Glorious stone fruit arrives, bang! a cornucopia drops out of the sky and lands on my head! It's fast. It's furious. And no one can keep up. Chefs and pastry chefs change menus daily, attempting to think of newfangled dishes to highlight summer's overwhelming, non-stop conveyor belt of tree fruit to farm, to market. It's all about pitting and prepping and ripening, and those of us who really care, trying to keep our fruit out of walk-ins.

We want our diners to get a taste of what we felt when scooping up the first apricots, felt their soft downy skin and licked our chins attempting to keep every last drop of apricot nectar, spilling out like the well which Micky and the sinister brooms let loose in the night.

This past weekend I had the extraordinary pleasure of working for my favorite peach farmer, Carl Rosato of Woodleaf Farm. On Saturday and Sunday I joined an exceptional crew to sell August's first Cassie peaches, pears, a few undercover Pink Pearl Apples (!!!), tiny sweet green grapes, red pears, mixed figs, white peaches, a dozen or so nectarines and Suncrest peaches.

Cassie peaches, in my humble opinion, are a reason for living.

While working at the markets this weekend I gave out a lot of peach advice. Peach advice for ripening, baking, storing, freezing, jamming, eating, and handling. I received a funny email, in fact, from my friend Guy today,
"That was cool running in to you yesterday, selling peaches. Can't imagine what the customers though when they asked, 'Do you have any good ideas what to do with them?' AHAHHAHAH."

A fruit-inspired pastry chef could not be happier having a job wherein he was surrounded by exquisite fruit all the day long. Fruit is an exciting field of study because not all fruit is created equal. One must know the inner workings of the family of fruit when one approaches a new branch.

Some fruit must always be picked unripe from the tree, the best example being pears. Certain fruits will continue to ripen off the tree, two examples are pineapples, and most stone fruit. There are cranky fruits who do not like to be picked with a machine, cherries, for example. And there are laid back fruits which can go either way, they're easy, like oranges or walnuts.

Peaches will ripen off the tree, on your counter, if you so wish. A good farmer will pick fruit right at the moment where she/he can get it to market looking alright and then allow the eater to ripen it a bit more to get it where it's desired. Many fruits will get softer but not sweeter if picked too early; mangoes are a great example of a fruit whose perfume is stolen when picked green or green-ish.

This weekend, in the midst of excitedly talking a mile-a-minute about peaches, I heard some great peach advice from customers. My favorite tidbit came from a fellow at the San Rafael market in Marin named Patrick. It made me stop dead in my tracks and so I wanted to share it with y'all.

What works for me, and so I share it with others is this: place peaches shoulder side down (aka "stem end"), on a flat surface, at room temperature, just until there's a bit of give under the skin, then refrigerate or eat.

But Patrick had a brilliant idea. Refrigerate peaches/stone fruit all at once and take out, placing on counter (or plate) as I've described, a few days before eating. Refrigerating fruit at home, (as opposed to the massive cold storage facilities in the "produce stream" wherein "refrigerators" are the size of private airplane hangers and temperatures are kept between 30-34F), means the fruit's ripening process is slowed down, but not stopped. With Patrick's method you don't have a lot of really ripe fruit in the fridge at once. And, also, you horde a some power over the ripening process, therefore giving yourself more time to relax, find recipes you love, and do with that fruit what you want without the pressure of doing that right now!

Patrick's method also allows you to buy a little more fruit than you might need or want to consume in one day or week. (Which of course makes the farmers happy.)

Every peach is a snowflake. Every varietal is different, every farm growing a particular varietal grows them differently. Every soil and location and method will produce a different peach. Every tree on in that orchard growing that peach will ripen and concentrate its sugars and acids differently. Depending on how much of one kind a farmer has, and which market they're selling them at, will determine or fetch a different price. And every mouth eating that peach like a snowflake will react to it differently.

We all know at what point exactly we like to eat a banana. Even within one family each member will like a slightly more or less green specimen.

My Peach Advice? Jot down the names and details of the peaches and the farmers with whom you interacted with this year so that next year you will leap at the chance to buy your favorites, have mouth notes from which to comparison shop/eat, and ripen gently and slowly the fruit you choose to buy.

And if you see me selling peaches, please stop by and say hello, I'd love to expound further, or just introduce you to my favorite fruit!

As one of my colleagues said the other day, the farmers markets are "lousy with strawberries." I don't mind the glut, as my own last meal would be a bowl of strawberries, a taste of life short and sweet.

The best way to eat the fruit is whole, out of hand, one after the other until they're entirely gone. There are, of course, many ways to gild the lily: strawberries and balsamic vinegar, strawberries and brown sugar, strawberries and red wine, strawberries and cream, strawberry shortcake, strawberries and rhubarb pie....

If you're driving on Highway 1 just north of Santa Cruz, be sure to stop at Swanton Berry Farm. Next to their U-pick strawberry fields in Davenport, you'll find their Farm Stand. With its old-fashioned honor till, the store offers fresh-made pies, shortcake, cobbler and jams. Everything there is made by the farm's own staff with berries they grow themselves. A flat of sweet, ripe strawberries costs only $15 dollars. They have the best berries around, but there are a couple of other reasons why I support their farm. Swanton devotes itself to strict organic standards, and they employ field laborers who all belong to the United Farm Workers.

The last time I was there, I went a little crazy and got two flats and a blackberry pie. (For non-gluttons: 1 flat = 6 baskets.) Finishing three baskets myself on the winding road back, I macerated a couple more baskets in fresh orange juice for shortcake and then sugared the rest for jam as soon as I got back home. I've learned the hard way that organic strawberries don't last as long as conventional, but making jam is my own way of stretching out their flavor as long as I can.

My cheater's strawberry sherbet is another recipe that I only make when the freshest, sweetest strawberries are coming to market. Food Editor Pasty Jamieson gave it to me over a dozen years ago, while I was her intern at Eating Well Magazine in Vermont, far from California's warm fields. Back then, all I owned fit into three cardboard boxes and one suitcase. I still make this treat every spring and summer because it's so easy and so good. There have been flirtations with fancier versions, like lemongrass syrup or thyme-infused buttermilk, but I've always returned to the flavor of simpler times.

Strawberry Buttermilk Quick Sherbet

Trim calyx leaves from a pint of strawberries and arrange them in a single layer on a tray or baking sheet. Freeze until hard entirely through. Transfer the strawberries to the bowl of a food processor. Sprinkle in 2 tablespoons of buttermilk, 1 to 2 tablespoons of sugar, and a squirt of fresh lemon juice. Pulse until smooth, scraping down the sides as needed. For a softer texture, add up to 1 more tablespoon of buttermilk, and then adjust sweet and sour to your taste. Serve immediately or transfer to an air-tight container and freeze up to a week.

It's that time of year. When Bay Area markets are jumping with stone fruits. Names whimsical, actual and unpronounceable and downright silly fill signage over mysterious glowing orbs. People want to know, "What's the difference between a pluot and a plumcot, a nectarcot and an aprium? Why all the funny names? What happened to the straight up plum, apricot, nectarine and peach?"

The full answer is too wordy for this medium. But, truth be told, there are almost no fruits we eat out hand today which are their true selves in their original form. All stone fruits are hybrids of the bitter almond tree, and all have been developed by horticulturalists for hundreds of years to withstand certain weather conditions, soils and various interfering pests. And in the last one hundred years or so, farmers have been juggling/gambling with different trees in an attempt to provide Americans with what appears to be one fruit during the course of a season. The peach you eat in May is not the peach you eat in June or July. But the hope is that on each of these hot summer days, you can find, buy and eat a peach.

It's almost impossible to keep up with all the stone fruit hybrids once summer begins. They rush at us like stars in a meteor shower. Some varietals last a month, but many come and go within a week or even days! My favorite farm for stone fruit is Blossom Bluff. Ted and Fran Loewen grow dozens of varietals, oftentimes experimenting or sticking with more difficult trees and fruit to provide their customers with a delicious spectrum of complex, aromatic, texturally sensuous fruits.

It's been as big a surprise to me, as anyone else, that peaches and various plum-apricot hybrids are arriving at the farmers' market as early as this. It's May; still spring by the calendar! But here they all are, available for the picking, and in wide sweeping arrays and displays at Berkeley Bowl, Monterey Market and local farmers' markets.

Unless a farmer has stayed loyal to calling these hybrids their proper names, what you buy here will be named something different there. As of yet there's little regulation to insure names stay consistent. Train your nose and mouth to recognize new varietals. Pick fruit that has a strong scent when you go in for the smell. All stone fruit can ripen off the tree. Unless your house is very hot or humid, ripen fruit further by setting fruit on its shoulders, stem side down, until, when pressed, flesh has a bit of give. If the fruit you buy is very ripe, be sure to refrigerate it immediately.

Early fruits will be smaller and higher in acid than their later cousins. Fruit whose color bleeds right down into the stem end will ripen sweeter than those whose color is yellow or green by the stem. Look for fruit with saturated color. The sun's blush is what determines sugar in stone fruit.

But remember, some of these varietals will be gone before you can decide if you'll like them! Buy a few of each as the season progresses and jot down the name on the placard as well as the name of the farm stand. These notes will help you get a head-start on next years stone fruit onslaught.

If you have an interest in the history of these quirky hybrids, Mr. Floyd Zaiger is the first person to learn about. He has contributed more to stone fruit hybridization than any other person to date.

Short Pieces on Floyd Zaiger:

Your Produce Man
News from The Dave Wilson Nursery (where many California farmers buy these various hybrids.)

And if you are a nerdy (budding) fruit historian (pun intended) like me, you'll enjoy words written by and about the infamous David Karp, Fruit Detective extraordinaire:

California Heartland . Org
John Seabrook from The New Yorker spends a few days with our man.
Smithsonian Magazine interview.

On Friday, March 23, The California Report discussed the Farm Bill.

Go listen to the stories at the CA Report website!

Host: Scott Shafer

Farm Bill Changes To Be a Lesson in Cascading Consequences
Every few years Congress tinkers with the Farm Bill, which determines how much federal money farmers get to subsidize their crops -- and a whole lot more. Host Scott Shafer talks to with author Dan Imhoff about his new book "Food Fight: A Citizen's Guide to the Food and Farm Bill."

Organic Farmers Want a Place at the Farm Bill Table
California farmers grow more fruit and vegetables than growers in any other state, but when it comes to the Farm Bill, they're pretty much left out in the cold. Legislation introduced this week by Central Valley Congressman Dennis Cardoza aims to change that by redirecting federal dollars to marketing and research for fresh produce. But some of the state's organic farmers are saying "what about us?"

Reporter: Sasha Khokha