Strawberry Shortcake

Today at the farmer’s market, I saw strawberries for the first time.  Not really having  plan, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with them if I were to get them.  I just knew I had to have them.  When I got home, I browsed my cookbooks for inspiration.  When I saw strawberry shortcake, I knew that is what I had to have.  But none of the recipes seemed to be what I wanted.  They had too much sugar, used refined white flour, or even used vegetable shortening!  No thank you!  So I went about creating my own recipe.

I also whipped the cream by hand – no kitchen aid here, sadly.  Though I must say, I felt a tremendous sense of accomplishment when I beat that whipped cream to stiff peaks.

This is a great dessert – one you can serve to your kids or guests and they will feel as though they are getting a decadent dessert, but you can feel good that you are giving them something that has some good nutrients for them with its coconut oil and sprouted whole wheat flour.

Coconut oil is preferable to vegetable shortening by the simple fact that coconut oil is a food, while vegetable shortening is a highly processed industrial product that was originally designed for candles.  Coconut oil has lots of amazing properties that make it a healthy choice, such as boosting metabolism and providing anti viral and antibacterial properties.  Sprouted wheat flour is preferable to white flour because sprouting changes the wheat in important ways – it gets rid of the phytates, allowing our bodies to absorb the minerals, and makes the flour easier to digest.  It also has a higher percentage of the B-complex vitamins.

Recipe, instructions and resources to purchase sprouted flour, coconut oil, and sucanat, rapadura, and evaporated cane juice below.

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Here is a good article about harvesting wild food and sustainability.  If I’m going to talk about eating wild foods and talk about how great they taste and how nutritious they are, I need to present the other side of it.  Humans have caused a lot of damage to wild ecosystems – over fishing and hunting the North American Bison down to just a fraction of what it used to be are two recent examples.

It would be devastating if those were lost to us forever, just as it would be if no future generations would be able to enjoy ramps or fiddleheads.

If you forage yourself, make sure to do so in a sustainable manner.  The article gives a few basic guidelines on how much of certain things you can safely take.  When harvesting ramps, for example, you take the entire plant, you must be sure to leave many more behind when you are finished foraging.  Fiddleheads can sustain more harvesting, but you still need to leave some behind for the plant.  Berries you can typically take a lot of.  I’m sure there are other books and websites that give more detailed information if you want to begin foraging for yourself.  There are also tours you can take with wildcrafters.  I’m sure many areas have these specialists, such as The Wild Man Steve Brill who offers tours in the New York and Connecticut areas.  His website also has great information about foraging, and he has written a few books as well.

If you purchase your wild crafted food from a vendor or farmer, talk to them.  Ask where it came from.  You don’t want something that was picked off the side of the freeway anyway, just for your own health!  After ascertaining it is safe for you, ask if it was safe for the plants.  Ask how many ramps they left behind, for example, and if this is an area many other people have access to.  Talk to them and see if they are knowledgeable about wildcrafting.  Hopefully if they are also farmers who use sustainable methods, they will apply that to wildcrafting as well.

fiddlehead ferns

This post is submitted to Fight Back Fridays and the No GMO Food Challenge Blog Carnival.  Eating wild foods takes me out of the industrial food system, and I won’t be eating any GMO foods.  I like that!

Eating fresh sustainable produce and grass fed beef feels good.  I’m getting superior nutrition because of the way the food is grown, and I’m supporting farmers who are good stewards to this earth so that nutritious food may grow year after year.  One step further is wild food, so long as it is foraged in areas away from pollution (don’t forage along the roadside – car exhaust) and the food is harvested/hunted in a sustainable manner, so new generations can be gathered year after year.

I recently purchased a bunch of wild foods: morels, fiddlehead ferns, wild arugula, nettles, ramps and dandelions.  A lot of these were new foods to me.

Morels are a kind of wild mushroom.  As I discovered, they have a rich and powerful flavor that reminded me of a perfectly cooked steak.  I’ll be eating morels again for sure.

Fiddlehead ferns are the top portion of a young wild fern.  When they are young and growing, they are curled up and look like the end of a violin.  They taste fresh and green and woodsy.  People describe them as being similar to asparagus.

Wild arugula is just like cultivated arugula – good cooked or raw.  A little spicy and quite good.

Nettles, as I described in a previous post featuring them, are green leafy vegetables with a flavor not unlike spinach or kale or some mixture of green leafy vegetables.  They are a bit prickly, so you need to boil them before eating.

Ramps are a member of the Alliaceae family – the same family that gives us the onions, leeks, garlics and chives.  They grow wild in many places and are so popular in Quebec that there is a limit on how many you can collect, so as to prevent them from being over harvested.  They taste somewhere between a leek and a garlic, and are completely edible.

Dandelion greens can be eaten raw or cooked, but they begin to get bitter as they get older.  Best to eat these young and fresh.

I wasn’t quite sure what to do with all of these, it being my first time cooking many of them.  I decided to saute all but the nettles (nettles weren’t included at all in this dish) and toss them with some pasta and lemon and topped with Parmesan cheese and another drizzle of olive oil.  It was delicious, though I realized at once that I could have easily made the morels and fiddleheads the star of the show.  In fact, I wouldn’t have objected to a plate filled with sauteed morels and little else!  Being my first time cooking most of these, it was a lesson in preparation as well as taste.

If you decide to go for any of these wild foods I’ve mentioned, a few tips:

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Wild Pesto

There is just something exotic about eating something that was harvested from the wild.    On top of that, we know that wild food by definition cannot be genetically modified, nor can it have pesticides on it.  However, when eating wild game, fish caught from the ocean, or plants harvested from the wild, one must be sure that everything is taken in a sustainable manner.  If we over harvest, over fish, or over hunt, there will be nothing left for future generations.  Of course, much like sustainable farming, if we harvest food from the wild in a sustainable way, we are ensuring that it will be around for years to come.

One of my recent Farmer’s Market finds was wild arugula.  Wild arugula seems to have a smaller leaf than the cultivated arugula I’ve had, but the overall taste seems pretty much the same.   It just has that wild mystique.

I also got some ramps, which I’ve been working my way through.  Ramps are like wild leeks or green onions.  I find their flavor to be somewhere between a leek and garlic, so I’ve been using them in place of just about anything that calls for garlics, leeks, or onions.  They are wonderful, and edible from the bulb to the leaves.

A great way to put these together is in an arugula pesto.  An arugula pesto is very similar to the regular basil pesto, just with the distinctive peppery arugula bite.  It is wonderful on pastas, salads, or as a way to dress up some baked chicken.  It is an incredibly versatile ingredient, and it should last a good week or two in the fridge, or several months in the freezer (freeze in individual serving sizes for ease of defrosting – I like using ice cube trays).  Make a couple batches and keep them handy in the freezer.  It makes for an incredibly easy meal when you don’t feel like cooking.

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Making Water Kefir

Everyone is talking about probiotics.  And with good reason!  Probiotics are good for us.  We depend on the beneficial microorganisms in our gut to help us digest food.  Popular name brand yogurt commercials tell us that yogurt helps regulate our digestive system and even is an important part of our immune system!  Healthy gut flora can prevent more dangerous strains of bacteria and viruses from multiplying and causing illness.  I’m sure you have all heard of yogurt as being probiotic.  Today I will discuss another one – water kefir.  Water kefir also serves other purposes – it contains vitamins and minerals, and since it tastes very similar to soda, it is a healthy way to satisfy your craving without all of the unhealthy ingredients of soda.

Water kefir is made by culturing water with water kefir grains – not grains like wheat or oats, but some sort of colony of beneficial bacteria and yeast that resemble small grains. There is also milk kefir (commonly just called kefir), which is made with similar grains put in milk.  I’ll discuss that at another time, but I wanted to mention them so you won’t be confused.

When you make water kefir, you get an effervescent drink that can be flavored with citrus, ginger, or vanilla, just like your favorite sodas. But instead of being full of sugar, high fructose corn syrup, and other nasty things, it is filled with probiotics. Soda that makes you healthier! The culture feeds off the sugar, so the resulting drink isn’t too sweet or sugary, and the process by which they do this creates carbonation. The benefits go beyond the probiotic benefits. The resulting drink is high in various minerals such as calcium and magnesium, B-vitamins and more. Read the rest of this entry »

A piece of rhubarb buckle

At the farmer’s market I bought a few pounds of rhubarb.  Normally, I would make a crisp, but since I had so much rhubarb, I thought I’d try something else first.  Enter the buckle.

A buckle is a dessert from the colonial times.  It is related to the crisps, cobblers, and brown bettys.    A cake-like batter is made with fresh fruit folded into it, and then a lovely crumble topping it added to the top of the batter just before baking.  It is essentially the marriage of a cake and a crisp.

The buckle turned out very well: a delicious large crumbed cake filled with bits of tart rhubarb and topped with a buttery crumble.  For my recipe I used sucanat for the crumble topping and as half of the sugar in the cake.  Sucanat retains more of the nutrition found in sugar cane, so it isn’t all empty calories like refined white sugar.  It also has a richer flavor, similar to molasses.  It works really well for this type of recipe.  Don’t be fooled though, sugar is still sugar and this is just a treat!

Here is my recipe, inspired by The Washington Post.

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I'm a food renegade

This post is submitted to Food Renegade’s Fight Back Fridays.  Check it out for more great posts on the subject of real food.

Allow me to step away from my usual posts with recipes, techniques, or ingredients.  I’ve had a busy few evenings and haven’t had time to post about the lovely rhubarb buckle I made, or how I cooked my morels and fiddleheads.  I’ll try and touch on those things in upcoming posts.  But for now, this article from the New York Times caught my eye and I wanted to share it with you and share some thoughts on the topic of food safety and packaged/processed foods.

Food Companies Are Placing the Onus for Safety on Consumers

The article proposes a few solutions for making our food safer, such as “ingredient passports.”  It all seems so silly.  There has to be a better way.  Good thing there already is.

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Radishes at the farmer's market

What do you do with a chicken breast to make it more exciting?  I thought about this last night and decided to make a cream sauce.  The end result was fantastic.  This cream sauce would probably work with fish and vegetables as well.  It is a pretty free form recipe.  Once you’ve made the roux to your liking, everything else is just included in quantities your taste buds see fit.

The roasted radishes are wonderful and extremely easy.  I always thought I didn’t like radishes.  I don’t like their spicy bite.  Then my uncle taught me to roast them.  Roasting them takes the bite away and leaves a sweetness behind.

Finally, I hate kitchen waste, always wanting to stretch my dollar and prevent usable things from ending up in the garbage.  The radishes came with green tops, so they must be eaten as well.  Radish greens, like radishes, have a bit of a bite that is diminished with longer cooking.  If you don’t have radish greens, other spicy greens like mustard could be used in this recipe.

Recipes for all 3 dishes below.

This post is submitted to Real Food Wednesday.

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Rhubarb at the Farmer's Market

Last week was a pretty easy cooking week for me.  I didn’t go to the farmer’s market because I had plenty of fresh produce from my last trip and  I ended up cooking enough over the weekend to last until Saturday.  But a week without cooking and without the farmer’s market had me really itching to go this morning.  I arrived as soon as it opened.

What a great week it was to go!  There were wonderful cheeses, baked breads, several grass fed/pastured/organic meat stalls, and of course, the vegetables.  I walked in and rhubarb immediately caught my eye.  My dad used to grow this in his garden in Alaska when I was growing up.  I ate rhubarb cobblers, pies, crisps, and sometimes, I’d just go into the garden, pick a stalk and eat it raw, dipping the stalk into a bowl of sugar with each bite, to offset the tartness.  How wonderful is rhubarb!  I could hardly contain my excitement and bought 2 lbs.  Now, what to do with it all?  This is the kind of problem I like to have!

Then the asparagus.  Waves and waves of asparagus, all bundled up.  Every stall had a huge selection.  I had to get some of that.  I also got some sweet potatoes, inspired by Delicious by Nature, some radishes, and some apples.  I  got enough greens for a couple of salads, so I grabbed a cucumber to help round out the salad.

On my way out, I spied another section of the Farmer’s Market I hadn’t seen before.  There were never this many stalls before, so there was one section set a bit apart from the others.  There was the mushroom stall.  I love mushrooms, and I try to eat some regularly.  The man there was very friendly and helpful.  I got a bunch of portobellos.

Then it was off to my farmer’s pickup, where in addition to some beautiful fresh eggs, and dairy, I got a pint of wild morels he foraged on his farm land!  How amazing is that?

What a fantastic morning, and all of this by 10am.  But still, by the time I got back home, I still had an ache in my heart.  Fiddlehead Ferns -I wanted some.  Desperately.  And the farmer’s market I went to failed to have any.  A huge disappointment.  No matter, I put my food away and set out again, this time for the biggest and best farmer’s market the NYC area has to offer – Union Square.

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Cooking Purple Potatoes

It seemed that all at once, I had a number of ingredients that had to be cooked.

At the farmer’s market last week, I picked up a bunch of stinging nettles. The food blogs have been a-flurry about stinging nettles, so I wanted to see what that was all about. (It turns out, I love them.) I also picked up some purple potatoes because they were just so beautiful. And somehow, I found myself with about 3 dozen eggs, and a fridge with little room for them all! Finally, I still had about a quart of soured milk to use. I had to come up with something.

I trolled the food blogs until I found this on Cook Local. It seemed just about perfect, though I would need to make a few modifications. My final recipe left out the onions (because I don’t really like onions), and it added spinach, soured milk, cream, and cottage cheese. It came out wonderfully! The nettles give it a wonderful wild, herby flavor, and the spinach brings familiarity, almost a Florentine type flavor, especially when combined with the farm fresh cottage cheese.

It is a flexible dish, hearty enough for a dinner, but also suitable for a breakfast or brunch. There is a lot of room to play with this one – for a more breakfast style casserole, add bacon or sausage. Use a different kind of cheese instead of cottage. Don’t have nettles? This would also work with kale, chard or all spinach.

This post is submitted to Real Food Wednesday – wild crafted greens, heirloom potatoes, dairy the way our grandparents drank it – these are real foods.

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