Archive for the ‘sustainable’ Category

7 Apr

Seasonal Seasoning Butters

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, farmers market, fish and seafood, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, passing pleasures, Perennial edibles, recipe, sustainable, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .


At this glorious time of year, perennial edibles are coming up everywhere. Many of them are herbs used as seasoning for generations, and at this time of year I start making seasoning butters to take advantage of them at their best. The butters change throughout the season, according to what is available and fresh and goes well with other herbaceous ingredients that I’m considering.

I used to make a lot of the classic Montpellier butter, and I still make it sometimes, but overall I tend to prefer something a little more spontaneous. I do think that the anchovy fillets ground into the classic butter add a rich and savory resonance to nearly anything, without being identifiable as anchovy. But I don’t keep the fillets around much anymore, so instead I substitute a good grade of fish sauce actually made from anchovies. Do not use the inexpensive ones made from hydrolyzed fish protein, which range from execrable to mediocre. Red Boat is a good grade of fish sauce made in the classic fermented fashion, and it’s not very expensive when you compare it to true Italian colatura, which taste very similar and costs at least three times as much.

The other things you need are a clove of garlic, about 8 ounces of good butter, 1/4 to 1/3 of a cup of good olive oil, half a lemon, and herbs. Which herbs depends a lot on what is fresh, good, and available to you. Give some thought to whether the flavors can harmonize. Personally, although rosemary is throwing out fresh growth right now in my area, I don’t find rosemary to be a good team player and if I use it, I use it by itself. Other people view this very differently, so see what you think. For this amount of butter and olive oil, you need the equivalent of a large bunch of fresh herbs, and for herbs I consider a large bunch to be the amount I can just barely get my thumb and forefinger around.


My most recent butter included a large bunch of half garlic greens and half perennial arugula, with several sprigs each of tarragon and thyme. At this early point in the year the new growth of thyme is tender and just needs chopping, but later in the season I would pull the leaves off the wiry stems. If I didn’t have a permaculture garden, I would use the green parts of a bunch of green onions and a few large leaves of mustard greens with the center stem removed.

Set the butter out to soften a bit. Chop the garlic, and separately chop the herbs. Heat a small saucepan over medium heat, put in the chopped garlic and sauté until it’s cooked but not colored, add the chopped herbs, turn the heat to low, and cook for a few minutes until the herbs look definitely cooked but still bright green. This usually takes about five minutes for me. Put in one or 2 teaspoons of fish sauce and a good pinch of salt. Set the pan aside and let cool to room temperature. Put the cooked herb mixture in the food processor, add the butter cut up into pats, and process until the butter is well incorporated but you can still see distinct pieces of the herbs, not green mush. Squeeze in some lemon juice; I use about a tablespoon. If you want to, you can grate off a little of the lemon zest and blend that in too.
Pack into a small airtight container or bowl, store in the refrigerator, and use within a week or two. As for how to use it, it can go on almost anything else that you are cooking in a simple fashion and want to add a little extra pizzazz  to. Generous globs melting on top of cooked green vegetables are wonderful, and it is good on scrambled or fried eggs or on top of omelettes. Some slices of the butter put on top of broiled fish or seafood are very good, and it’s also good on roast chicken or chicken pieces. It is excellent folded into plain white rice. Try it on egg noodles with some Parmesan and maybe a little bit of cream. For all these applications I use generous amounts, but of course you can use a lighter hand if you prefer.
Every week, walk through your garden or farmers market or a good grocery store and see what flavorful herbs are around, and make seasoning butter accordingly. Bronze fennel is beginning to leaf out on my property, and fennel butter with some thyme and a small amount of tarragon is going to be delicious. My lemon balm is just coming up, and I am speculating about whether a generous amount of lemon balm and green garlic and a bit of rosemary would create a context in which rosemary could shine without taking over.
Personally I think that some alliums are always needed for a really good flavor, and if green garlic was not in season I would use perennial green onions or garlic chives, both of which will grow extremely happily in almost anybody’s soil. But don’t get too concerned about specific ingredients, just think about what is fresh and what tastes good together. The whole idea is to have the pleasure of something on your plate that tastes of the growing season.

7 Apr

Passing pleasures: Hops shoots

Posted by wooddogs3 in edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, home food production, passing pleasures, Perennial edibles, sustainable, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , .

I decided to re-up this post on hops shoots without change because this is their brief season and because I still think that this is the best way to cook them.

Many years ago I planted hops vines along my fences, planning to use the flowers for brewing. Not long afterwards, I gave up beer for weighty reasons, but in my difficult climate I’m not likely to get rid of plants that grow lustily with no attention. There was also the delightful bonus of hops shoots every spring. Gather the young shoots by snapping them off at the point where they snap easily. This is usually about the terminal 6-7 inches of the vine.

When it comes to cooking them, I’m very opinionated. After trying other ways, I’m convinced that this way suits their rich-bitter flavor best. Rinse the bundle of shoots and cut them in cross section, 1.5-2 inches long. Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat. You don’t want to crowd the pan too much. A 12” skillet is right for one large bundle of shoots.  When the pan is hot through, add a glug of good olive oil, swirl it around, and add the shoots. Toss them around, sprinkling them with a good pinch of salt. Toss the shoots every couple of minutes.

Here’s the part that many find difficult. When they look like this, keep going. Taste them at this stage and, if you like them you can stop here, but I think that you haven’t yet tasted hops shoots at their best. Instead add a pat of butter, at least a tablespoon, and keep cooking.The butter will brown a bit and is important to the flavor.

This stage, in my opinion, is their point of perfection. They have shrunk considerably. The stems are browned in spots and many of the little leaves are brown and crisp. Taste for salt and serve. I find them delicious. They are especially good alongside ham or bacon, and I like them with fried eggs for lunch.

Hops plants are known to contain an estrogenic compound and chalcones. The latter are an interesting group of chemicals with anti-tumor properties, and you can read more about them here. What this means in practice is anybody’s guess, and my own opinion is that it means very little, since the shoots are only in season for about 3 weeks and no one person will eat enough of them to make much difference one way or another. They are a springtime gift of the earth, thrown up exuberantly in great quantities with no effort on the gardener’s part except providing them with something to climb on, and I cherish them as such.

If you plan to grow them, remember that hops are intent on world domination and need a sturdy support. Also, they spread and come up in unexpected places. This is fine with me, since I keep a very untidy yard anyway, but if you like things to stay neatly in their assigned places, the bold independent nature of hops may not be to your taste.

14 Jun

Using What You Have IX: Pantry Stuff

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, home food production, kitchen staples, sustainable, Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , .

Now and then I run into new must-have pantry items, and recently I had a throw-together meal that incorporated several of them, so here are some brief descriptions. I do not accept any advertising, free samples, or other freebies. If it appears on this blog, I paid full price and thought it was worth it.
First, the beans: any black bean from Rancho Gordo is going to be delicious. They are always the current year’s crop so you never heard the problem of beans that cook forever and never get soft.  I like a bit of epazote from the garden cooked in with black beans, and if you have some homemade chicken broth and home-rendered lard, so much the better. Nothing else but salt to taste. Delicious. Rancho Gordo works with some farmers in Oaxaca to give them a good market for the heirloom beans that they grow, and I’m happy to help out on the eating end.

The chilequiles are made with nixtamalized heirloom corn tortillas from Masienda.I can get the tortillas at Whole Foods. Or, if you’re a purist and plan to eat lots of tortillas, you can go to Masienda’s shop and buy heirloom corn, ingredients and instructions to nixtamalize it, and even a mechanical stone grinder that will set you back over $1500. Personally I eat tortillas once every two or three weeks at most, so I keep a packet of their fresh tortillas in the freezer for when the mood strikes.
In making the chilequiles, the tortilla pieces are fried crisp in avocado oil or lard and then turned in a hot pan with chile or salsa. My current pantry pet is salsa from Barnacle Foods made from kelp. No kidding, kelp, and it tastes good and not like seaweed, even though kelp is the main ingredient.

I’m increasingly interested in seaweed and filtering shellfish because they are products that can be ocean-farmed and will clean their area of ocean rather than polluting it further as fish and shrimp farming does. You can read more about this in the entrancing book Eat Like a Fish, which I plan to review soon. But while I recognize this as ecologically sound, I dislike the taste of most seaweed quite a lot. Here, however, is a food based on kelp that I can eat and enjoy.

Finally, I try to keep a bag of Stahlbush Island Farms Crazy Corn in the freezer for special treats. I don’t grow corn because I try not to eat corn too often, but when I do, this mixture of white, yellow, and purple corn is the corn I want. Just stirred over medium-high heat until cooked, with minimal water and a little butter and salt, it completes this brunch extravaganza.

For the fried eggs, a good sprinkle of fleur de sel on top is necessary, in my view.

It probably goes without saying that any two of these dishes would be enough with the fried eggs, maybe even just one extra dish. But I like extravagance at times, perhaps even frequently, and after a meal like this, a light snack in the evening will finish the day. Plus- here is the best part of being an adult- you don’t have to clean your plate. Our foremothers may  have thought that was virtuous, but we have refrigerators for leftovers and no need to eat more than we want.

 

6 Jun

Using What You Have VII: Primary and Secondary Consumption of Elm

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, home food production, Perennial edibles, sustainable, Uncategorized, wild food. Tagged: , , , , , .

I’ve become more and more intrigued by culinary uses of tree leaves, since there is nothing more ecologically sound: the soil is never disturbed, carbon is sequestered, soil biota is preserved, and a small tree can produce an awful lot of leaves. The drawback is that there is little information about how to use them or even which ones are safe to use. I’ve written recently about my elm leaf pasta.  Today I experimented with spaetzle, the firm eggy dumplings made in Eastern Europe but highly adaptable anywhere.

Here I will make my usual disclaimer about eating wild foods or foods that you have never eaten before: never trust your safety to a stranger on the Internet. Do your own research, be aware that your tolerance may be very different from mine, and experiment cautiously before you eat a lot if you do decide to eat wild foods. All green leafy foods can be laxative to people who don’t usually eat them. The decision is yours.

I refer in the title to “primary and secondary consumption” because not only do I eat the leaves directly in the spaetzle but the eggs come from my chickens, who eat a lot of elm leaves. So this is double-layered tree-eating.

I couldn’t find my spaetzle maker, so I tried a potato ricer, which I had read would also work. It doesn’t really. Have a spaetzle maker and life will be simpler.

This was a freewheeling experiment and quantities aren’t exact. Basic proportions for spaetzle are a cup of flour, two eggs, a quarter cup of milk, and a half teaspoon of salt whisked together, but this one is different because of the leaves. I started with all the elm leaves that I could squeeze into one hand, about two cups when fluffed up more loosely. They were steamed for seven minutes and cooled.

Then I put one and a quarter cups of flour in the blender, added the leaves, and chopped as finely as possible. This is a bit tedious, with some stopping and stirring required. Then I added half a teaspoon of salt and five egg yolks, and just enough water to make a very thick batter. Run the batter through the spaetzle maker into salted water at a fast simmer, cook until the spaetzle rise to the top, and simmer until done. Take one out and bite it and examine the interior. They should be cooked through when finished, no longer wet and sticky inside. This is usually 2-4 minutes tops. Drain, and spread out on a flexible cutting board to cool. Don’t use wax paper, as I show here, because it turns out they stick to it and it is a bit annoying getting them off again.

At this point you can proceed or refrigerate them for a day until needed. I wanted to try them right away, so I heated up a skillet to a bit above medium and chopped up a bit of celery, two healthy sprigs of marjoram, and two small cloves of garlic. Two tablespoons each of butter and olive oil went in the skillet, the garlic went in to sizzle for a few seconds, and the herbs were added and tossed around for a minute. Then the spaetzle went in. At this point you can either cook them at medium heat until heated through as seen here,

or do as I prefer and keep cooking until the little dumplings have some browned spots, as shown here:

Serve as a landing with something nice on top. My preference is fried eggs with runny yolks and nice crisp brown rims. My husband’s plate is shown at the top of this post, and yes, he really does like that much pepper on his eggs. I can also imagine the assemblage looking even more colorful with some deep red chile drizzled over the green dumplings and eggs.
There is no strong or objectionable flavor in elm leaf spaetzle, and there are certainly far more fiber and fewer carbohydrates than in all-flour spaetzle. My mother’s objection to nearly all my leafy foods is that they are green. Well, leaves are green. Maybe we just need to get used to eating some green food, and given that people love some odd colored things like deep blue potatoes, I don’t see any reason why green food is beneath consideration. Green is the color of growth, so maybe we can come to think of it as “growth food.”

no doubt it goes without saying that if you don’t wish to experiment with wild foods, you can use chard or similar mild greens instead. Steam, squeeze dry, and proceed as above.

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