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A Clever Gift Idea For Cooks

Nancy Leson
Nancy Leson loves these cookbooks but they're not the clever idea.

It's not the three cookbooks pictured above, though Nancy really loves them and recommends them swooningly and from a great height.  Nope, this is an enjoyable DIY project.  Click "Listen" and all will be revealed.  Now let's talk about saffron,

I'm just wild about saffron

But not the price, which is said to be more costly than gold.  I don't know if that's precisely true but it's close enough.   Saffron is very labor-intensive to harvest.

Saffron is made from the stigmas of the crocus sativus.  With just three of those little threads per flower it takes between  50 and 75 thousand of them to make just one  pound of saffron.  And each one of those teeny little threads must be extracted by hand.  So next fall I'll be the guy out in the garden with magnifying goggles and tweezers.  But I'll have grown my own saffron -- cool!

"A man who is stingy with saffron is capable of seducing his own grandmother."

– Norman Douglas

Dick Stein joined KNKX in January 1992. He retired in 2020 after three decades on air. During his storied radio career, he hosted the morning jazz show, co-hosted and produced "Food for Thought" with Nancy Leson and wrote and directed the Jimmy Jazzoid live radio musical comedies and 100 episodes of Jazz Kitchen.