"david karp" news and stories

Blood-orange season in Sicily makes many of us long for plane tickets to Catania, where the delicate, sweet Tarocco variety grows and rarely travels beyond the Italian border. However, we have options -- Spain provides us with the tender and sweet Sanguinello and California offers the ruby-colored Moro variety. Let the juicing begin -- or just plain peeling and eating.

Recipes abound. Fennel pairs well with blood oranges, in a salad with pomegranate and Pecorino. You can use it in an intensely flavorful marinade for a pork tenderloin, or try a dessert of pound cake with blood-orange glaze. Martha Stewart suggests mixing the juice with citrus-flavored vodka and simple syrup for a blood-orange martini.

If you'd like to know more about the magical blood orange, read this terrific Saveur magazine story by David Karp (a.k.a. The Fruit Detective).

Become a member of the Slashfood Flickr pool to get a shot of having your photos featured in Feast Your Eyes.

I had almost forgotten about an old New Yorker profile of David Karp, Fruit Detective, until Bad Things posted a link to it along with a new Karp article on heirloom strawberries. As his title suggests, Karp is an investigator of fruits, a scout for specialty stores and a writer. By all accounts, he's very passionate, some would say crazed, about finding and tasting rare or outstanding fruit specimens. The strawberry piece finds him following a horticulturist around fields outside of Miami in search of new crossbreeds of prized musk strawberries. The photo of Karp comes from a short Smithsonian interview, wherein he explains the pith helmet, among other things.