The Food Network’s Chopped has a reasonable premise. Great chefs do not need recipes to work with good ingredients. We amateurs in the audience can learn from how the pros handle the ingredients. That’s the premise of the successful “Iron Chef America” program, and it works in that show. … The problem with Chopped is that it artificially overconstrained in a way that diminishes the culinary craft in favor of unrelated skills. How about adding a hungry dog to the kitchen or having only two burners on the stove? That might be fun, but it would have nothing to do with good cooking.

A simple plan: pick up a few basic ingredients at some market near the park and drive up to a picnic spot. I hope you have done the same thing. The point of this post is to encourage this particular delight. I had in mind bread, salami, cheese and olives, great low-fuss stuff. No chaffing dishes required. Good fortune helped make a good thing better.

70% of California’s Oysters come from Humboldt Bay on the north coast, about a hundred miles from the Oregon border. The Arcata Bay Oyster Festival (Arcata Bay is the north end of Humboldt Bay) was held last weekend, and attending reminded me that I have not said enough about oysters. Famous chef James Beard said his two favorite foods were raw apples and raw oysters. There is much to be said.

The Loco Moco is a Hawaiian breakfast dish of a hamburger patty on rice topped with fried eggs and brown gravy. There are many substitutes for the hamburger, but there is no know low calorie version. Wikipedia says the Loco Moco originated in Hilo, Hawaii in 1949 at the request of some local boys who were after some quick cheap eats. Loco, Spanish for crazy, was a nickname of one of the boys, and moco was picked to rhyme.

Periwinkles are a family of marine snails. They are popularly consumed in Europe and the Far East, but they have not caught on as regular menu items in the U.S. Recently I happened upon a bag of frozen cooked periwinkle meat in market near San Francisco. Traditionally, periwinkle eaters have extracted the cooked meat from the shells with a special two-tined fork or, if forced to improvise, a toothpick. Having the meat extracted is a convenience.

I expect that someday we will be buying watermelons that have been bred to include the store bar code on the skin. For now, we have some interesting varieties of orange raspberries, white rhubarb, and black rice. Beets are on the cutting edge, with red, white, gold, and candy-striped. Our local farmer’s market didn’t have the candy-striped kind, no doubt a step towards the built-in bar code, so I made do with some golden beets.

I noticed a package wrapped in white paper in the meat department of a Save Mart supermarket. What could be more mysterious in a meat product not wrapped in plastic? It turned out to be spiced pork double wrapped in heavy paper and tied with a string. The instructions were place the package in a 250 degree oven and cook for eight hours. Now there’s a recipe I can follow!

When you see fennel in the market it may be labelled anise. Both fennel and anise taste like licorice, but anise seeds are a spice used in Chinese five-spice powder. The vegetable is best called fennel, or more precisely fennel bulb. Fennel seeds. which are not anise seeds, are sold as a similar-tasting spice.

Celery root, also known as celeriac, is not the root of our common everyday celery plant, but rather another variety of celery grown especially for the root. That’s probably why this knobby baseball-sized root vegetable is not so common in American markets. It has a mild celery flavor and is eaten both raw and cooked. It’s tasty and easy to use.

An Hangtown fry is an egg scramble made with bacon and oysters. The origins date to the days of the California gold rush circa 1850. Placerville, California, in the heart of the gold country was then known as Hangtown, thanks to a local judge with a summary concept of justice. The Hangtown fry originated when a gold miner struck it rich and asked a Hangtown eatery to prepare something with the most expensive ingredients at hand. That turned out to be eggs, oysters, and bacon. Those are fine ingredients, so why not try it out?