Berry Breakfast

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday.  This breakfast just has 3 ingredients, all natural!

At the farmer’s market on July 4th, I purchased black raspberries and heavy cream.  Put them together and you have a wonderful breakfast!  It is also quite suitable for dessert.

It really couldn’t be more simple.  Take the organic, in season black raspberries, or any berry variety (raspberries, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries), pick through them and discard any ones that have gone bad, and put them in a bowl.  Pour heavy cream over the top and serve.  No sugar needed.  I rounded out the breakfast with 2 pieces of humanely raised, pastured pig bacon.  No nitrates.  (I also do variations with 2 pastured eggs instead of bacon, but that is a topic for another day!)

What makes this breakfast so good?  Let’s break it down.

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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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Making Soured Cream of Mushroom Soup

In my effort to use up my soured milk, today I played around in the kitchen and came up with this nourishing and filling soup. I call it soured cream of mushroom soup because instead of using fresh milk or cream, you use soured milk. If you have raw milk at home, you may naturally get soured milk after a week or so. If you don’t have any raw milk, you can use store bought sour cream, yogurt, buttermilk, or just sour some regular milk with a bit of white vinegar or lemon juice. This soup is very filling, and the base of beef stock makes it very nutritious as well! Read the rest of this entry »

I'm a food renegade

It is a wonderfully satisfying trip to get food when you arrive and are greeted by the farmer who not only owns the farm that produces the butter and cheese and vegetables and meat and so forth, but he also works in the field and with his animals daily. You can ask him, “how are the animals doing?” and he will tell you. You can ask him how the grass is coming in. He helps you put your newly purchased food in the bags and thanks you for the purchase.

This is why these days about 90% of my meat, dairy, eggs, vegetables, and fruit comes from CSAs, co-ops, and farmer’s markets. I want to know how the animals are treated before the eggs or milk is collected, before the animals are slaughtered. I want to know what vegetables are fresh and in season. I want to know how they were grown. Meeting the farmer gives me that chance to find out. It also makes me feel safer – I can avoid the massive industrial foodchain that can easily become contaminated (peanuts, anyone? Or the latest warning, sprouts? Before that was tomatoes, peppers, and spinach, not to mention the regular e. coli and salmonella scares…). He is running a smaller farm, so it is easier for him to keep a good handle on quality control. Also, since he is producing less food, if there is an issue, it is likely to be small and since his number of customers is small, it is easily contained. On the rare chance I could get sick from something I ate, it will be easy for me to track down the source of it. I have absolutely no fear for the safety of the food I purchase from farmers. I cannot say the same about the industrial food I purchase.

It is about as real as it gets – having that direct personal connection to the farmer. The only way you could be closer to your food source is if you grew it yourself. Unfortunately, that isn’t an option for me at the moment, living in an apartment in NYC. So I’ll take shaking hands with the farmer instead.

Yes, I am a food renegade, and this post is part of Fight Back Fridays.  This post is also part of Food Roots because I like to know exactly where my food comes from.

Soured Milk Chocolate Cake

Most of the milk I consume is raw milk. This means that it has not been pasteurized. I buy it from small farms who keep their cows on grass. I like raw milk for a number of reasons – I like that the vitamins have not been destroyed from the heat of pasteurization (vitamins are added back into pasteurized milk, but why not get the real vitamins inherent in the milk?). Raw milk also contains beneficial enzymes and probiotic bacteria. Plus, I just like the taste better. So there are lots of reasons to drink raw milk.

Fresh raw milk is wonderfully sweet and delicious. At some point, it starts to sour. It differs from batch to batch (since it is a real food, not a food that has been packed full of stabilizers and preservatives, or cooked before refrigeration). But when raw milk starts to sour, it isn’t bad. Sour cream is, well, soured cream. I’ve made cream cheese from soured milk before. When pasteurized milk goes sour, don’t drink it!

Since I don’t want to drink a glass of soured milk or pour it over cereal, the question becomes, what do I do with it? I recently had a full half gallon sour on me since I didn’t drink any for about a week. I couldn’t bear to throw it down the drain, so I had to figure something to do with it. A half gallon is a lot, so I needed several ideas. This was one use for it – a chocolate cake made with soured milk! If you don’t have sour milk, or if you don’t have any raw milk, you can sour regular milk by adding a tablespoon of plain white vinegar or lemon juice to one cup of milk. I imagine that kefir, yogurt, or buttermilk would also work in place of sour milk.

The resulting cake is incredibly moist, light, and fluffy. It is chocolatey and sweet, but not overly so. Make, and enjoy! Read the rest of this entry »