Dates are considered to be the oldest known tree crop to be cultivated. For more than 6,000 years dates have been an important food source, allowing portability, long-term storage and most importantly, sugar and flavor. Unlike many fruits, dates are already intensely sweet when harvested, and their high sugar content makes them self-preserving and extremely long lasting.

Fresh Bahri dates on the "string" or stem. Unripe, they look like little golden tomatoes, turning brown, sticky, and wrinkled as they ripen. Bahri is a date which integrates fully with fresh fruit.

Bahri dates are a specialist product reserved for consumers who know the product. Its particular taste and the bitterness of the fruit do not count in its favour with someone tasting it for the first time. When ripe they become sweet and luscious, however, most Middle Easterners prefer to eat them when they are underripe, crunchy and mildly astringent.

Chard, along with kale, mustard greens and collard greens, is one of several leafy green vegetables often referred to as "greens". Similar to spinach and beets with a flavor that is bitter, pungent and slightly salty, chard is truly one of the vegetable valedictorians with its exceptionally impressive list of health promoting nutrients.

Chard has shiny green ribbed leaves, with stems that range from white to yellow and red depending on the cultivar. The leaves are generally treated in the same way as spinach and the stems like asparagus. Fresh young chard can also be used raw in salads. It is commonly known as Swiss Chard, even though it isn't Swiss. It's actually native to the Mediterranean area, but is now cultivated worldwide.

It's thought to have been given the "Swiss" part of its name because the Swiss botanist, Koch, gave it its scientific name in the 1800s.

This fruit usually ranges in size from an orange to a large grapefruit. It has a leathery skin that must be peeled to reveal the hundreds of tiny red seeds. The seeds are entirely edible, crunchy, sweet and berry-like in flavor. Makes wonderful syrups, sauces and juice, or may be combined with other fresh fruits for exciting compotes. Rich in potassium.

Every pomegranate is composed of exactly 840 seeds, each surrounded by a sac of sweet-tart juice contained by a thin skin. The seeds are compacted in a layer resembling honeycomb around the core. The layers of seeds are separated by paper-thin white membranes which are bitter to the tongue. The inner membranes and rind are not generally eaten due to high tannic acid content, but they are useful as a skin wash.

Many people eat the fresh fruit by chewing on the seeds to release the juice from the sacs and then swallow seeds and all. The seeds are considered good roughage to help cleanse the body. In India, the seeds are dried and ground into a powder to be used in meat dishes.

The thick-walled peppers are about 1 3/4 inches wide and long with a medium-hot flavor that is just perfect for pickling or stuffing with cheese as a "hot" appetizer. The cherry peppers are fleshy and heavily seeded. It matures from green to red. It is considered an extremely good processing and pickling pepper.

Fresh Black Eyed peas are a shelling bean and legume and a subspecies of the cowpea. These fresh beans are not a pea but rather a bean surrounded by a long and green pod. Some Black Eye pods can grow to two feet in length, although they are rarely found fresh. The beans themselves are a petite white legume with a curved shaped and a narrow black circle in the center of the bean's structure – this is the signature 'eye'. The eye is developed at the exact spot where the bean attaches to the pod. The color of the eye may be black, brown, red, pink or green. All the peas are green when freshly shelled and brown or buff when dried. Black eyed peas are firm when cooked and have a slightly nutty flavor.

Most Black Eye peas are sold as a dry legume and are a traditional meal for the New Year.

Deliciously sweet, this orange tends to be less acidic than more commonly available oranges. Its tasty, inviting pulp offers a raspberry undertone and its juice can be quite dark. The color of the blood orange is due to a pigment called anthocyanin, a naturally occurring chemical not usually present in citrus but common in other red fruits and flowers. Blood oranges have been slow to catch on commercially in the United States, perhaps because of their quirky need for cold weather and their unpredictable harvest commencement. The red pigment in this variety of orange does not develop until there has been sufficient cold in the groves, making this a late harvest citrus. Generally available from January – May, the first harvest may be a lighter color of red if the weather has not been sufficiently cold.

Blood oranges are an excellent source of vitamin C and dietary fiber. The peel may be used just the same as any other orange for adding flavor to relishes, salads and baked goods with zest. A classic Mediterranean use of this orange is to combine it with sliced fennel in a salad.

Grown mostly in Mediterranean countries, the Moro blood orange is the most common commercial variety. There are other varieties, including the elongated Tarocco and the egg-shaped Sanguinelli. Each type differs in climate preference, size and flavor. Temperature, amount of light and the variety seem to affect coloration and intensity of blood oranges. It is believed the first mutation of the blood orange occurred in Sicily in the seventeenth century. Easy to peel and medium-size, blood oranges are usually seedless.