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.

No Sugar. Refined or even minimally refined sugar is one of the worst things you can eat.  I won’t tell you to never eat it because I’d be a hypocrite.  But sugar is not good for you, no matter what form you take it.  It leads to obesity and various metabolic disorders including diabetes as well as tooth decay.  I do try to limit how much sugar I eat, and I try to make sure it is a more natural kind of sugar, like honey, maple syrup, molasses, evaporated cane juice, etc so at least I can get a little bit of minerals or something with it.  Eating the berries and bacon for breakfast gets you started without the sugar.  A much better choice than a cereal with sugar.  Yes, even so-called “healthy” cereals frequently list a kind of sugar as the 2nd or 3rd ingredient.

Antioxidants – I don’t eat berries because they are good for me.  I eat them because they are delicious; that they are so healthy is a bonus!  One of the things they have is antioxidants and lots of them.  Blueberries and black raspberries are particularly good in this area.  Antioxidants help prevent the signs of aging and can help prevent against cancer and heart disease.

Vitamins – Vitamin K, vitamin E and vitamin C are all found in black raspberries in good amounts.  More vitamins and minerals are in them as well, but these three are particularly plentiful.   Cream has a lot of vitamin A and Calcium, and since cream is fat and those particular vitamins and minerals require fat to in order be metabolized by the body, you know that your body is processing that full amount of vitamins and minerals.

Protein – It is good to start out your day with some protein.  The protein in the cream and bacon combined is almost the same as a cup of skim milk.  Protein is needed for your body to help rebuild itself and it also helps fill you up better than carbs alone do.

Fat – We’ve all been trained fat is bad for you.  That isn’t really true.  Fat from traditional sources is very good for you and is necessary.  Natural sources include dairy and animals (such as cream and bacon) as well as coconut and olive oil.  Vegetable oils made from corn, canola, cottonseed, and soy, to name a few, are not traditional and should not be consumed.  Why is dairy fat so good for you?  Cream from grass fed cows contains CLA and Butyric Acid which help prevent cancer.  Grass fed cow milk also has a better ratio of omego 3s.  Our bodies run on fat as it is a preferred fuel source.  Did you know that our brain is about two-thirds fat?  The nervous system depends on fat.  Besides, it just tastes good!  This is why people love bacon and cream.  Fat is also great because it really fills you up.  It sends a message to your brain to stop being hungry.  Have you ever eaten breakfast of skim milk and cereal only to find yourself starving an hour later?  It has happened to me.  But not when you eat bacon or cream!  You don’t need a lot.  Just 2 slices of bacon and less than 1/2 of a cup of cream was enough to keep me well satiated for hours.

Now, here is where you forget all of that stuff – when I make breakfast, I don’t think about all of these things.  I don’t think about the RDA for vitamin D or how much calcium I’m getting.  I don’t think about antioxidants or other cancer fighting micronutrients.  I just think about a few simple things – Is the food from a traditional source and prepared in a traditional way?  Berries have been foraged for hundreds of thousands of years, I’d bet.  Cream has been around for about 10,000 years.  A short period of time in the grand scheme of thing, but enough time for my ancestors to develop the mutation to be able to drink milk into adulthood (lactose tolerance).  Pigs were also domesticated around 10,000 years ago, but I bet wild boars and related animals were hunted for tens of thousands of years before that.  Since those are the only 3 ingredients in this breakfast, I think that is pretty good.  I also think about taste.  Do these things taste good?  You betcha!  And finally, I think about will this fill me up and keep me full until my next meal or snack?  Fat and protein help keep me full, where carbs, especially refined carbs do the opposite.  I also think about my meals for the past 24 hours or so.  I try and make sure I eat plenty of vegetables and fruit, protein including animal protein found in meat and dairy, and fat from traditional sources.   I don’t count calories, carbs or RDA amounts, and yet, by following this basic outline, I’ve lost weight and maintained myself at my ideal weight.  I’ve been sick less and had improved energy.   I’ve also eaten the most delicious food.

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.

Layering Nettles and Spinach on Purple Potatoes

Ingredients:

• 1 bunch of nettles
• Half a bunch of spinach
• 6 small purple potatoes
• 3 tablespoons of butter
• 6 large eggs
• 1 tablespoon of cream
• 1/3 cup soured milk (if you do not have raw, naturally soured milk, you can use yogurt, kefir, buttermilk, or turn fresh milk soured with a bit of vinegar or lemon juice)
• 3/4 cup cottage cheese
• Salt and Pepper

Boil the spinach and nettles until they are soft and turn a bright green. Try not to boil too long, just 3 minutes is about right. Chop them up finely and set aside. Slice the potatoes into thin slices. Melt the butter over medium heat and add the potatoes. Cook until they are nearly done. About 5-10 minutes. Preheat the over to 350 degrees. In a mixing boil, beat the eggs, then add the cream, milk, and cottage cheese. Arrange the cooked potatoes on the bottom of a baking dish. Top them with the chopped spinach and nettles. Then pour the egg mixture over the top. If you like, you can top with little dollops of cottage cheese. Sprinkle a little salt and pepper over the top, and then bake in the over at 350 degrees for about 30 minutes, or until done.

Finished Gratin Right Out of the Oven

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!

Ingredients:

• 2 Tablespoons ghee (or butter)
• 2.5 overflowing cups of sliced fresh mushrooms (any variety will work)
• 3 cups of beef stock (if you reduce your beef stock down to a demi glaze as I do, you will do about half beef stock and half water)
• 2 slices of sourdough bread
• 1/2 cup white wine
• 1 cup soured milk (see possible substitutions above)
• Dash of nutmeg
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Sour cream as garnish (optional)

Heat the ghee on medium heat and cook the mushrooms until they are cooked through (about 5-10 minutes). Add the beef stock and bread. You can tear the bread into pieces before you throw it in. If the bread was frozen (as mine was), let it soak up the broth and warm up, and then you can tear it apart while it cooks. Add the wine and let it cook about 5-10 minutes. Then puree the soup and add salt and pepper to taste, and a dash of nutmeg. Reduce the heat to low and let it reduce for 15-20 minutes. Add the soured milk. Don’t let it cook much longer, just another 5 minutes or so, to warm it back up. Serve with a small dollop of sour cream as a garnish.

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!

• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 1/2 cup sucanat, rapadura, or evaporated cane juice crystals
• 1/2 cup coconut oil
• 3 cups flour
• 1/2 cup cocoa
• 2 tablespoons baking soda
• 2 eggs
• 2 cups sour milk

Cream the sugars and coconut oil. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, cocoa, and baking soda. In a 3rd bowl, mix the wet ingredients together. Then alternating between the wet and the dry ingredients, add them to the oil/sugar mixture and mix until combined. Grease and flour a 9×13 inch pan and bake at 350 for 45 minutes.

This post is a part of Real Food Wednesdays.