Yesterday morning, I got up a little late. I considered not going to the farmer’s market since I still had some vegetables left over from the previous weekend. But as I thought about it, I realized I could not go a week without quark, the creamy fresh cheese made from cultured buttermilk. And so, I made the journey to the farmer’s market after all. I ended up getting some sheep milk cheese, heavy cream, and berries in addition to the quark, so it was productive. I’m preparing a post on quark. It is something you can make at home, if you are so inclined. In the meantime, here are a few links that I found interesting: some local farms I love, a coconut milk cooking contest, misconclusions drawn from studies, nutrient deficiencies, supplies for preserving food, and why local food is awesome. See below for all the links.
Today I picked up a CSA share for someone on vacation. I was not prepared for the bounty of berries I was to receive! 2 pints of raspberries and 2 quarts of strawberries, plus other assorted vegetables and herbs. I had been prepared to make a currant quick bread, and had prepped some wheat the night before (soaked it in yogurt and left it out 24 hours), but when I realized I could now make a raspberry currant pie, I had to switch gears and figure out something else to do with my soaked wheat. I froze the raspberries and currants so I could make a pie with them later this week. The raspberries would not have lasted more than a day in the fridge, which is always the pity with raspberries. So delicate that they must be used or frozen right away.
Since I’m getting a delivery of meat in 2 days, I figured I should use something from my freezer to help free up space. Well, I did happen to have a little less than a cup of grated zucchini so I thought I’d make zucchini bread. Besides, here in the northeast, the zucchini have arrived at the farmer’s markets, and soon we will be up to our ears in it!
Now, this isn’t a recipe that uses heaps of zucchinis. It only uses about a cup of grated raw zucchini, or about 1/2 - 2/3 cups grated, blanched zucchini. So this is a good recipe for when you have an odd zucchini. Not enough for a meal, but you don’t want it to go to waste. Of course, you could make multiple loaves and freeze them for later…
Soaking the flour overnight in yogurt is an essential step. This neutralized the phytic acid present in the wheat. Phytic acid is an anti nutrient found in nuts, seeds, legumes, and grains that can cheleate minerals from your body. It can be neutralized by properly preparing these foods, such as soaking flour in yogurt. The other reason the yogurt step is important for this zucchini bread is that it really helped to leaven the bread. I would have used all soaked wheat in the recipe, but it would have thrown off the liquid to dry ingredient ratio. Since I couldn’t soak all of the flour without making the batter too runny, I used sprouted wheat. Sprouting will also destroy phytic acid.
I hope you enjoy it as much as I did, fresh out of the oven. Recipe below.
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.
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.
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.
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 »
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Food our grandmothers cooked, food our ancestors ate, food that has not been heavily processed or farmed in depleted soil — these are the foods that are Completely Edible. I collect vintage cookbooks and eat traditional foods because I believe that the best foods for us to eat are the ones people have been eating for thousands of years. It works out well that I love cooking!
Here you will find recipes, the results of my latest cooking experiment, tales of my trips to the farmer’s market, nutrition information I’ve found interesting, and the occasional food policy discussion. Note that I’m not a doctor, and though I have found increased health benefits since reducing processed foods and eating more traditional foods, I cannot recommend any particular diet as a cure all for all people. Please do your own research, work with your health processional and be aware of your own body to do what works for you.
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.
