Last Chance Foods

Artichokes can be intimidating and downright dangerous to prepare. The tough, sharp leaves create a formidable fortress protecting the plant. Artichoke hearts are so tender and flavorful, though, that it’s well worth learning how to get past the scary outside.

On Tuesday, the summer solstice marks the official start of a new season. While the warm weather is great for fruit and berries, leafy greens don’t fare as well and will soon begin to bolt. Sorrel, a tangy herbaceous green, is a particularly nutritious, and it’s just at the end of its season.

As spring quickly turns the corner to summer, flowers everywhere are popping into bloom. Many do more than add color to the landscape. Flowering plants like calendula and anise hyssop also boast healing properties and culinary uses.

Simply put, preparing live soft-shell crab is a morbid chore. First, you must cut the faces and eyes off the crab while the little creatures are still alive. Unpleasant as it might be, the task is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the messy and sometimes complicated issues involved in eating crab meat.

About five years ago, artist Frank Meuschke was exploring a Minneapolis farmers' market when he came across a stand selling bundles of mysterious looking greens for a $1 each. The greens were pea shoots and the farmers selling them were Hmong people, a minority group from China and parts of Southeast Asia. Although the leaves and tendrils of pea plants are less well known in American cooking, they are popular in a number of different Asian culinary cultures. Now is the time to get them at the farmers' market.

As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. That was the case when Atlanta native Drake Page couldn’t find the Southern-style chutneys of his childhood on the shelves of New York City grocery stores. Craving the sweet-and-sour tang of those jam-like condiments, Page took to the kitchen and created The D.P. Chutney Collective, a brand of small-batch, Southern-style chutneys made in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lovage is a strange, oft-overlooked herb. Easily confused for parsley, it tastes strongly of its relative celery. In early spring, lovage plants produce their first and lushest growth, according to farmer Bill Maxwell of Maxwell’s Farm in Changewater, N.J. Maxwell has been selling lovage at farmers' markets in Union Square and Brooklyn's Grand Army Plaza for several years and notes that it’s been growing in popularity.

A morel mushroom by any other name would taste delicious. And that’s fortunate, since the prized wild funghi are also known as dry land fish, molly moochers, hickory chicks, and pine cone mushrooms. In the mountains of Virginia and West Virgina, mushroom hunters call them “merkels” to express what a divine miracle it is to find one.

The appearance of jaunty, yellow daffodils is one of the first signs of spring. For farmers, their appearance also means it’s time to plant parsnips again, which, like daffodils, do best in soil that's around 40 degrees.

Spring parsnip planting means winter’s parsnips have been harvested and the local greenmarkets can be scoured for the few remaining root vegetables of the season. Spring brings the sweetest parsnips of the year due to frigid winter temperatures and mounds of snow on the ground.

On Monday evening, many Jewish families and communities will gather for Passover's traditional Seder meal. Passover, which is a week-long holiday marking the Jewish exodus from slavery in Egypt, is a time when leavened bread is not eaten, since it’s believed that bread did not have time to rise during the flight from Egypt. Instead, matzo, a cracker-like unleavened flat bread, is often the center piece of a Passover Seder.