Cobble Hill CSA Haul

I want the recipes I create and post to be recipes that can be made by anyone.  However, I realize that a lot of the ingredients I use might not be readily available.  I would recommend that you purchase them if you can.  I put them in the recipe because they are nutritionally superior or important to the taste/texture of the dish.   Many are available mail order (such as sprouted wheat flour and coconut oil).   Others can be found at organic specialty shops if you have one in your town.  But if your shipment hasn’t come in yet or you can’t get to an organic grocery store, here are some substitutions.

Ramps - Ramps are small bulbs and leaves of a plant in the onion family.  To me the taste is somewhere between a garlic and a leek.  Depending on if you want your food to be more garlic-y or more onion-y, you could substitute with a clove of garlic, a green onion, or a leek at about a 1:1 ratio.

Rapadura/Sucanat/Evaporated Cane Juice - These are just types of unrefined sugars.  Any one of them can be substituted for another.  You could also use “Sugar in the raw” or even regular white sugar.  I prefer not to use regular white sugar because of the extra refining that takes place.  The unrefined versions will have a slight molasses flavor, but other than that, there is really no difference for the recipe.  You can replace at a 1:1 ratio.

Fiddleheads - Fiidlehead ferms are highly seasonal and not available everywhere in the country, so don’t fret if you can’t find them.  Just replace with an equal amount of chopped asparagus.  The flavor and color is similar.  They even have a similar texture.

Stinging Nettles - Any green leafy vegetable such as kale, chard or spinach will achieve much of the same flavor and texture.

Sour Milk - You can only use sour milk if you buy raw milk and let it sour.  If you cannot or do not buy raw milk, you can substitute with an equal amount of buttermilk, plain yogurt, plain kefir (they sell it in some stores now - it is similar to a drinkable yogurt), or 1 cup of regular milk + 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar.

Sprouted Flour - I purchase this from the internet, so don’t worry if you can’t find it locally.  You can order it.  If you don’t have it, you can substitute for an equal amount of regular whole wheat flour.  You will not be receiving the superior nutrition of the sprouted grain, however.

Masa Harina - This is a traditional corn meal made by soaking the corn in an alkaline solution before grinding into flour.  This helps release more of the nutrients in corn to be bioavailable to you.  If you don’t have this, you can substitute for an equal amount of corn meal or corn flour.

Coconut Oil - This is an ingredient I would recommend you purchase, even if you don’t get anything else.  It has such wonderful health benefits and is so good to cook with since it can work even in high heat.  If you don’t have it, you can replace with butter.  However, you cannot cook butter on high heat like you can coconut oil.  You will either need to lower the heat or cook with ghee.

Ghee - many Asian grocery stores or organic/gourmet grocery stores will carry this.  It is clarified butter, so it can withstand higher temperatures.  If you know how to clarify your own butter (I do not) you can use that.  Otherwise, use butter (and keep the heat on medium) or use coconut oil.

Are there any other ingredients that I use that you don’t have? Let me know what other substitutions you need to know!

hummus on a sourdough cracker

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays.

I love hummus.  Whether it is a dip for crackers or crudites, a spread on a sandwich, or an accompaniment to falafel, it tastes so good.  One day I came home from work and announced I was going to make some.  I’d never made it before, but I’d become disenchanted with the store bought brands as they had a lot of highly processed ingredients in them.

I figured it couldn’t be hard to make hummus, and I was right.  You just put the ingredients in a Cuisinart and let it do all of the work!  The best thing about making it yourself is you can make any style or flavor of hummus you like.  Add lemon juice, extra tahini, pine nuts, peppers, different spices, different kinds of beans - it is all up to you.

I served it on a sourdough cracker, but it would be a great dip for carrots or celery, or a spread on a sandwich, or a sauce for chicken.  There are so many possibilities with this one.

This is what I did for the basic hummus recipe that you can use as a jumping off point for your favorite flavors.

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Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp

I love making crisps; if I were to have a “signature dessert” it would be crisps.  I make them so much because they taste great with the fruit and brown sugar combination, crispy topping, and fruity bottom and they are so easy.  I’ve never really exactly followed a crisp recipe, but if I did, it would be the one in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone by Deborah Madison.  By the way, I highly recommend that cookbook.  It is filled with lots of great information, tons of inspiration, and everything uses real foods.  I’m not a vegetarian, but her cookbook can be used for side dishes, meatless main dishes (for those of you, who like me frequently have “Meatless Meals” or days), and everything tastes great.

Crisps are great all year round.  Any kind of fruit can be put inside to make them suitable for spring (rhubarb and strawberries, tada!) to fall and winter (apple crisp, anyone?).  This recipe will work for all seasons and all fruits with a little bit of know how - really juicy fruits will benefit from the addition of some sort of a starch such as flour or tapioca in the filling to help hold it together a little bit, and the sweeter the fruit, the less sugar you need.

Strawberry season is in full force here in the northeast.  Almost every stand at the farmer’s market has pints lined up, and more to replace the ones that are purchased.  Rhubarbs are still hanging on, as they will until the weather gets too hot for them in another month or so.  I never grew up eating strawberry and rhubarb in combination, but it seems it is a classic, so I made it into a crisp.

This post is submitted to Tempt My Tummy Tuesday, Tasty Tuesday and Real Food Wednesday.

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Farmer's Market Haul

I got up early this morning and went to the Farmer’s Market at Union Square.  The Union Square one is the biggest around.  There are the most vendors, and it is definitely the most crowded.  I do not enjoy that aspect of it.  However, when you get there as soon as it opens, it is not crowded.  I was able to take my time.  I like being able to walk the entire market before purchasing something.  This helps me plan meals in my head and know what to get.  It also allows me to find the best source for each item.  I’m concerned about price and I want good quality.  Getting there early also means the vendors aren’t too rushed.  They can take their time and you can too.  Ask about the meats - are they grass fed?  Do they receive routine antibiotics, or only if an animal is ill?  Is the milk homogenized?  What sort of pest management do you use? Where is your farm located?  I ask these questions and so many more.  It opens up a dialog and helps me understand more about the food I’m purchasing.  It puts them in touch with their customers so they know what things are important to consumers.

I saw a lot of fabulous things - non homogenized, lightly pasteurized, grass fed, organic milk; grass fed buffalo, beef, sheep, and goat meat; raspberries; blueberries; strawberries; the first cherries of the season; piles and piles of greens of every size, shape, and shade of green; edible flowers; tomatoes…  Oh, if only I had an endless wallet and an endless stomach.  I would spend my days cooking and eating everything there is to cook and eat.

Here is what I got (as seen in the photo above, left to right):

• Apricot juice from Red Jacket Orchards
• Currants
• Purple carrots (with tops)
• Beets (with tops)
• Purslane
• Feta goat cheese
• Rhubarb
• Almost 2 lbs of ground lamb
• Lamb sausage

The apricot juice comes from Red Jacket Orchards that sells a lot of juice and fruits like apples.   I don’t drink a lot of juice, preferring to just eat the raw fruit,  but every now and then I’ll get some.  It usually goes into my smoothie, which is what happened to a little bit of this when I got home!

The currants excited me.  I remember my grandma once made a current pie.  I LOVED it!  I need to do some research with my cookbooks and the internet and find a good way to use the currants.  My only concern is that I might not have enough for a whole pie.  If that is the case, I could probably add some other berries to the mix, or instead make a quick bread or something else with the currants.  Any suggestions for my currants?

Purple carrots.  Purple!  Why buy regular carrots when you can buy purple carrots?  Did you know that carrots used to come in a much wider variety of colors?  And our familiar orange carrot wasn’t even the dominant variety?  In the 1500’s or so, the Dutch started selecting for the orange carrots because of the ruling family, The House of Orange.  Clever, isn’t it?  I want to be a food historian; I find this stuff so fascinating.  Purple carrots have more beta carotene than orange carrots.  You can usually look at the color of vegetables to find out how much they have - the darker/deeper the shade, the more beta carotene.  If you are like me and love reading about the history of food in addition to its nutrition, check out The Carrot Museum for more information than you knew existed about the carrot.

I love beets with the tops because then it is like getting 2 vegetables in one.  Beet tops are essentially chard and can be cooked like any leafy green.  The roots I’ll probably boil and put in salad.  I love a good beet salad.

The feta cheese came from a farm full of happy goats.  I got to talk to the lady running the stand and I got to see pictures of the goats.  Goats are actually not grazers if they can help it - they are browsers.  They prefer bushes, weeds, even tree bark to grass, though they will eat grass if they have to.  Sure enough, the goats in the pictures were on weedy pastures on the fringes of forested areas.  No wonder the goats looked so happy and the cheese tasted so good!  These cheese will go in my beet salad.

Purslane is back!  I got this once from my CSA last year and loved it.  It is a weed and is unceremoniously tossed from many yards.  But it is delicious and nutritious!  The flavor is herb-y and lemony.  Very moist and delicate.  For nutrition, it is one of the best source for ALA omega-3.  ALA is the vegetarian source of omega 3.  Purslane is great in stir fries or as an accent to soups, meats, and so many other dishes.

It is still rhubarb season!  I’m so happy.  I haven’t even touched on all of the rhubarb things that can be made.  Rhubarb pie, rhubarb bread, rhubarb sauce to put over yogurt or anything else really…  Any suggestions?

Finally, I stopped by Catskill-Merino Sheep Farm’s stand.  They sell wool and meat, and the occasional plant item that grows on the farm.  They have an online store and they ship, if you don’t live nearby.  The sheep seem to be happy, grazing on very green grass, just as sheep are meant to do.  I haven’t eaten lamb in a long time, so I purchased some ground lamb and a lamb sausage.  I figure I can just use lamb instead of beef when making tacos, spaghetti, meatloaf, stroganoff, or anything that calls for ground beef.

Any suggestions for any of the things I got?  I’m particularly interested in ideas for the currants and rhubarb.

Ground Beef and Mushroom Stroganoff

I love ground beef and mushroom stroganoff.  It is such a simple meal, but it is so very satisfying.  It is such a great comfort food to me.  I used to cook my ground beef, throw in a can of mushroom soup and a cup of sour cream and call it a day.  But as I was looking through my vintage cookbooks, I knew there had to be a better way.  The old cookbooks gave a lot of inspiration, but they didn’t deal with ground beef, but rather strips of steak or chunks of beef.  I didn’t have any of those cuts, besides I grew up eating ground beef stroganoff, so that is what I wanted.

A few things about this recipe - I wanted to boost the nutrition up without altering the flavor too much.  Liver and heart are such powerhouses of nutrition, so I added small amounts of those.  Not enough to change the flavor, but hopefully enough to make a difference, however small, nutritionally.  If you want to, you can eave those out, but you might want to increase how much ground beef you use.

There are a few reasons I included those organs.  The first is that the more aware I become of the industrialized food chain and our society’s disconnect from where our food comes from, the more involved I get in food activism, I feel like if I am going to eat an animal’s meat (which I do because it works for me and I feel healthier in doing so), I should respect the animal and use every part of it’s body.  Not just the choice muscles.  I put the bones in stock, and people used to eat organ meat a lot more frequently, so why can’t I?

As for nutrition, organ meats are fantastic sources of vitamins A and D.  It is a great source of CoQ10 which is getting a lot of press these days in the supplement world.  Personally, I always prefer to get something from a whole food source.  Additionally, iron, vitamin B12 are found in organ meats, and so much more.  Check out what the Weston A. Price Foundation has to say about liver.

And always, always get your beef grass fed (and most importantly, grass FINISHED).  Personally, that is more important to me than the organic label, as grass fed/finished cows are frequently organic without the certification, but an organic cow could have been fed massive amounts of corn and soy, which are not part of its natural diet.  Grass fed cows have more omega 3 in their meat and a special fatty acid called CLA which helps protect against cancer (among other things).  Get to know your farmer.  That way you can make the best decision about your food.

Please keep in mind that you should play around with the flavors in this recipe to suit your own tastes.  Like a more onion-y or garlic-y flavor?  Add more ramps and/or garlic.  And so on.  Also, I did not have worcestershire sauce, so I approximated the flavor with my own ingredients.  Feel free to just use worcestershire sauce, or play around with my proportions to make it sweeter, saltier, tangier, etc.   Just be sure to use traditionally fermented soy sauce, as soy has anti-nutrients such as phytic acid that are only removed during fermentation.

A final note, sometimes flavors take time to mingle.  I found that this was the perfect leftover food as it tasted even better the second day!

Here is the recipe:

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A quick thanks to Nourished Kitchen for featuring me a few days ago.  What a lovely surprise!  She also reviewed 6 other great real food blogs, so take a look at her post and add the rest of those great blogs to your reading list.

I have a couple of recipes queued up to share with you, but I wanted to write a review of the movie Food, Inc. I saw it this weekend and was impressed.  The movie is about the industrialization of our food supply.  It is a topic I’m quite passionate about, and the topic that lead me to create this blog.  I thought the movie did a great job of summing up many of the reasons I have chosen to remove myself from the industrial food chain. I even learned some new things! Though it won’t affect my own eating habits (because I’m already off the industrial food chain), it has made me more steadfast in my beliefs, and it is an excellent tool to open the minds of people who may not be aware of all of these issues.

The movie presented the following theses:

• Factory farming is bad for the animals, bad for the environment, and ultimately bad for us as well.
• Foodborne illnesses have not gotten any easier to prevent in this industrialized system, and in fact, the industrialization and centralization of our food supply has made it even easier to contaminate.
• Some food processing plants treat workers poorly and often exploit the poorest people or immigrants (legal or not) with unsafe working conditions, low wages, etc.  The food they produce costs less at the grocery store as a result.
• We spend less on food than we used to, but at the same time  health care costs have ballooned.  Instead of spending so little on food (and eating the worst quality food - junk food laden with high fructose corn syrup and/or trans fats for example) and spending so much on heart medications, diabetes medications, etc, we should eat properly in the first place to make those medications unnecessary.
• A lot of corn and soy are GMO - Genetically Engineered Organisms.  They are built to withstand spraying of pesticides and herbicides.  Farmers cannot save seeds and are forever beholden to the seed corporation.  GMOs are generally bad.
• Farm subsidies currently benefit large monoculture farms (farms that produce one product, such as soy or corn).  This is why soy and corn are ingredients in almost everything, and why the unhealthiest food is frequently the cheapest.

I’m sure there are a few points I’m forgetting.  But there was hope at the end of this seemingly bleak tunnel.  One of them was in the form of Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm - one of my personal heroes.  He described his farming methods that honor the animal;s biology.  Food produced this way is easier on the land, safer to eat, and healthier to boot.  He has a beautiful reason for respecting the animals biology that goes beyond the impact to the environment or nutritional value of the meat :

A society that views its plants and animals from that manipulative, egocentric, mechanistic mindset will soon come to view its citizens in the same way.  How we respect and honor the least of these is how we respect and honor the greatest of these.

The other was a case study of Stonyfield Farm, the yogurt company.  The (former) owner explained how consumers buying his yogurt propelled him to success.  The company was bought out by another multi-national yogurt company as a result.  Even the dairy buyer for Wal-Mart explained that if people demand a higher quality or different quality product, Wal-Mart will deliver.

All of the topics had excellent supporting material.  And in some cases, the audience was left to drawn their own conclusion.  For example, while large industrial slaughterhouses were shown, so was the slaughter of chickens on Polyface Farm.  Sure, there were gasps from the audience.  Killing an animal can’t be described as pleasant.  But it was done quickly and cleanly.  It was presented for anyone to make their own opinion.  Same with the piece on Stonyfield Farm.  Many people would say that it is just a part of the industrial food chain as Cheetos.  But it presented the organic industrial food chain in a way that let the audience decide of this was completely acceptable, just as bad as any non-organic major food corporation, or somewhere in the middle.

The movie left me feeling more empowered, more knowledgeable, and more passionate than ever before.  The movie is in limited release right now, but it will be made more broad as the month goes on.  Keep a watch out and see it when it comes out.  In the meantime, this passage from the companion book sums it up best.  This portion written by the aforementioned Joel Salatin:

Perhaps the most empowering concept in any paradigm-challenging movement is simply opting out.  The opt-out strategy can humble the mightiest forces because it declares to one and all, “You do not control me.”

Go plant a garden.  Join a CSA or visit your farmer’s market on a regular basis.  Read my blog (and many many more) for great recipes using real food.  Many even feature great real food on a budget.  Write to your local or federal government representatives to have them change the way we subsidize farms so that real food is more affordable.

If you want to read more about the film, I’ve linked to various interviews, reviews, and articles below.

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Hens on the farm

As much as I wish I did, I don’t live on a farm.  In fact most Americans don’t live on a farm and have become increasingly cut off from the food they consume.  Food comes in boxes or bags.  Meat comes deboned and deskinned.  Many cows are fed grain to fatten them up, and they live in crowded conditions.  Many chickens live their lives in windowless sheds.  They are packed beak to tail in this horrifying shed.  They never see the light of day.  And so on.  And because they are in so much emotional and physical stress from the unnatural diet and crowded conditions, they are more prone to infection, thus the standard feeding of antibiotics.  The products we buy from stores have gone through so much processing that they no longer resemble the food it comes from.  In fact, I’ve taken to calling much of the processed food you’ll find at a supermarket a Food Type Product.  It just doesn’t seem right to call something made with heavy machinery and chemicals food.  It makes me sick.  That stuff isn’t food.

I think we need to get that connection back to the farm.  We need to see vegetables growing in the garden.  We need to see cows out on pasture, and then connect that with the food we eat.  I also believe it is important so that we can know and approve of the conditions in which our food is made.  I want to make sure that the eggs I eat are from chickens who actually spend time foraging outdoors.  Partially because I believe that all animals have the right to be treated with some basic respect, but also because eggs that come from clean conditions, from hens who receive sunlight and are able to forage for bugs and grass and weeds in addition to chicken feed are so much healthier!

In my effort to get closer to the food I eat, I visited one of the farms that provides me with milk, milk, eggs and other homemade or farm grown products.  What I found was nothing short of delightful.

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I’m back!  Not that you ever realized I was gone!  I was gone, though.  I took a short vacation to Pennsylvania to visit a friend and a farm.  I had  a wonderful time out of the city.  I got to eat some wonderful real food, much of it grown at the house where I ate it!  I’ll have more to share about the farm I visited, and maybe some photos, but for now I wanted to share a few links.

I read quite a few blogs, and there were a lot of interesting posts waiting for me when I came back.  These are a few posts that I thought were full of good and interesting information I simply must pass on.

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Sorrel Avocado Soup

One of my goals when going to the farmer’s market is to try new foods.  I always try to get something that I’ve never eaten before, never cooked with before, or I have limited experience with.  It broadens my palate and stretches my creativity in the kitchen.  Recently, my new ingredient was sorrel.

Sorrel is a really neat green leafy vegetable.  It looks quite similar to spinach, with its rich green color and broad smooth leaves.  The taste is tart and a bit lemony.  When cooked, sorrel falls about completely, which is why it is commonly used as a sauce or in soups.  It does not look very attractive cooked as it turns into a muddy green color - but at least the taste is good!  It can also be eaten raw, but because the flavor becomes more tart with age, younger leaves are best eaten raw. The flavor of the older leaves can add flavor to soups and sauces.

For my recipe, I also used ramps, nettles and fiddleheads since I’m still enamored with these wild vegetables.  The avocado lends a rich creamy texture to the soup without any dairy.  I used beef stock because that was all I had, but chicken stock would probably be preferable to give it a lighter taste.  To make this a truly vegan soup, the ghee could be replaced with coconut oil or even olive oil if you cooked at a lower temperature and the stock could be replaced with vegetable stock.

This post is part of Try it Tuesday.

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