Local Foods

We’re still a few months away from the cheerful little radishes of spring, but right now you can find their hardier, spicy siblings in markets.

Byrma Braham discovered the mojito—with its rush of mint and lime and its sunny taste of rum—during a trip to Cuba nearly twenty years ago. She began to perfect her own version, growing just the right kind of spearmint and serving her handiwork during parties at her now-closed Avisca Fine Art, a Marietta gallery.

I stare at the partially-mashed glob of sweet potatoes, immersed in a bowl of water. It looks like Jabba the Hutt is taking a bath. This can’t be right. I consult the recipe card from Garnish & Gather, a new Atlanta business that provides cook-at-home kits with local, organic foods and pre-measured ingredients for simple recipes from notable chefs like Seth Freedman and Julia LeRoy.

Not everyone likes super-sweet sweet potatoes. That casserole we all grew up on, with the marshmallows and brown sugar, always tasted more like dessert than a proper side dish to me. But not quite as good as pie.

If you follow the local food scene, you probably know that, while our vegetable supply is steady and varied, our fruit options are notably more limited. We get a brief, decadent rush of strawberries in the spring, followed by a smattering of blueberries and blackberries in the early summer, a few weeks of melons, and then a trickling of figs and muscadines in the fall. Throw in some backyard green plums, peaches from central Georgia and apples from the mountains, and that’s pretty much the entirety of our fruit repertoire.