Home Cooking Full of Pith and Vinegar (with Kate Lebo)
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Nov 7, 2025 In this lively discussion, poet and pie maker Kate Lebo, known for her book *The Book of Difficult Fruit*, dives into the intriguing world of unusual fruits. She highlights the quirky medlar and reveals how foraging inspired her writing. Kate shares delicious ways to prepare meddlers, from making a paste with cheese to crafting liqueurs. The conversation also touches on the many uses of pomegranates and prickly pears, offering tips for reducing waste and flavoring dishes with vinegar. Get ready to reconsider your relationship with fruit!
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Celebrating Difficult Fruit
- The Book of Difficult Fruit frames fruits as worthy despite being tricky to harvest or eat.
- Kate Lebo's approach treats recipes as rituals that transform challenging produce into meaningful food.
The Meddler Obsession
- Kate Lebo hunted meddler trees around Seattle and ate bletted fruit as part of a years-long obsession with the fruit.
- She experimented extensively, making paste, jelly, liqueur, and a meddler-chevre tart that she liked.
Turn Excess Meddlers Into Liqueur
- When overwhelmed by meddler fruit, macerate in neutral spirits to make a liqueur and forget it for months to develop flavor.
- Long aging often improves homemade fruit liqueurs, similar to nocino practice.
