Archive for the ‘urban homesteading’ Category

22 Mar

Greens: Early Spring Horta

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, edible landscaping, front yard gardening, greens, herbs, home food production, Perennial edibles, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, Vegetable dinners, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , .


For gardeners, early spring is a time of great anticipation. This is the season when the growing season to come glows with perfection in your mind, completely removed from hard weather, pests, and general exhaustion. But it is also the time of the very first harvest, if you grow some perennial plants. At about the time that the crocuses bloom, the perennial green onions are forming a thick forest about 8 inches high. The garlic in my semi-permaculture garlic patch is about the same height and is tender and sweet. It’s time to start eating from my home ground.

I have written roughly a million times about the Greek mixture called horta, a mass of assorted greens cooked and seasoned together. This time of year the perennial greens are sprouting but are too small to bother picking, but a horta based on alliums is a very delicious thing. When I make horta  with summer greens later in the season it is more elaborately flavored, but these first hortas  are simple and sweet.

Gather a large bunch of green garlic and green onions. I use about half each, but use what you have.

Chop them in cross sections of about 1/4 inch.  Heat a skillet over a medium flame with about a quarter cup of good olive oil. Put the white half of the chopped greens in the skillet, add a generous pinch of salt, and sauté for a couple of minutes. Naturally the division into white parts and green parts is going to be very inexact, and this doesn’t matter. Just try to get most of the white end of your cut greens into the skillet. After a couple of minutes, add the green parts and another bit of salt. You can add a teaspoon of fresh thyme leaves at this point if you like, and I usually do. Now turn the heat down and sauté over low heat for about 15 minutes. Alliums contain a fair amount of sugar and sugar can easily burn, so do not walk away and leave them to tend themselves. After 15 minutes, taste. If they are soft and chewable and tasty, they are done. Otherwise, keep sautéing for another few minutes. Taste, add salt as needed, and you’re done. It really was that easy.

For a light meal or substantial snack, I like eating them as is with some crumbled feta on top.
For a more substantial meal, a fried egg on top is delicious.

If you want to know a little more about polyphenolic compounds of interest in green garlic and green onions, you can read a past blog post here that has a few references. However, I have to point out that I am extremely dubious about taking any one polyphenol too seriously, especially when it comes to medical claims. In my opinion you are not medicating yourself, you are eating vegetables, and they are very delicious.

4 Apr

Early Spring: Collards

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, front yard gardening, greens, Uncategorized, urban homesteading, Vegetable dinners. Tagged: , , .

My yard is full of perennial greens ready to harvest, but the first greens I harvest every year are last year’s collards. Kale may be a good winter green in snowier areas, but in my nearly snowless windy desert, kale has desiccated to death by mid-December. My winter stalwart is collards, and I’ve never had a year in which they didn’t live through winter and produce a good crop. I plant in summer, harvest the majority of the leaves in late summer and fall for chicken greens but don’t remove the topmost leaves or the growing crown, and leave the stalks in place. By late February each stalk is crowned with a cluster of leaves like a loose cabbage. The leaves are thick, crisp, meaty, and sweet. Nothing tastes quite as good as late-winter collards. I often cut the leaves in strips and sauté them with green garlic, which appears around the same time, and a little salt. I seldom get any fancier than grating a little top-quality Parmesan on top. At this point in the year I haven’t had fresh greens for a couple of months, and gorging on them in their simplest form tastes best. If I have leftovers I toss them with homemade egg noodles, good olive oil and Parm, and a generous quantity of freshly ground black pepper.

In my area, by April aphids have moved in, so I make sure to eat them up while the nights are freezing. Any that I don’t eat go to ecstatic hens.

 

12 May

Living in Interesting Times: Using What You Have II

Posted by wooddogs3 in cooking, home food production, kitchen staples, Uncategorized, urban farm animals, urban homesteading. Tagged: , , , , .


This weekend I was corresponding with a friend about marinated tofu, and it caused me to think about the importance  (especially now) of using what I produce. On a half-acre suburban lot, I won’t be growing my own staples or raising large meat animals. Nor is growing grain rice or soybeans feasible. But I do have chickens, and in season they lay like crazy and the eggs start to pile up. I started to wonder if I could make a proteinaceous food somewhat akin to tofu out of eggs or egg yolks.
My concentration is on yolks because they are the most nutritious and delicious part of the egg. So if you have any belief that yolks aren’t good for you, this post won’t be for you. But to me, a wasted yolk is truly unfortunate.

My first attempt was to beat up 20 egg yolks with a little salt and bake them in an oiled loaf pan at 225 degrees until set. After cooling, I sliced pieces off the resulting yolk cake and used them like tofu in a stir-fry, seen at the top of this post. The result was a little bland and chewy, in my opinion, but my husband liked it okay. He is very polite. The problem is that yolk cake is very dense and seasonings don’t penetrate it well. If the yolk mixture was preseasoned in some way I might like it better, but I decided to experiment with other cooking methods.

Currently, I’m using an omelette  method. I beat up 10 yolks and one whole egg with a pinch of salt and heat up my 12” nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. When the skillet is hot I put in a glug of avocado oil, stir it around, and pour in the yolk mixture. I turn the heat to medium, let it cook until partially set, and flip it over with a spatula. Cook on the other side for a minute or two until just set in the middle and turn it out onto a plate to cool. When cool, I cut it into strips about 2”long and a quarter inch wide. They can be stored in a ziplock in the refrigerator for a few days. They are a good size to add to a stir-fry in the same way that you would use meat, or to add to a fried noodle dish like this one. I especially like them with thin noodles, and if I plan to cook them with broader noodles I cut the yolk strips to match the width of the noodles. Put them in a soy marinade the same way you would treat meat, and add at the same stage of cooking that you would add pork strips but cook them for a shorter time. They absorb flavors better that the yolk cake described above.

Any leftover yolk strips that are still good and unspoiled make great dog treats.

The whites aren’t wasted when I use yolks, and neither are the shells. I put them in a microwave-safe bowl, chop them up some with a stick blender, and cook them a few minutes in the microwave to make a concoction that we call “chicken cake.” The hens gobble it up and get back some of the protein and minerals that they put into making eggs.

14 Apr

Living in Interesting Times: Improvisational Stir-fries

Posted by wooddogs3 in Books worth reading, cooking, edible landscaping, farmers market, front yard gardening, greens, urban homesteading, Vegetable dinners, vegetable gardening. Tagged: , , , , , , , .


The current world travails started me thinking about thrift. The most financially difficult period of my life was when I lived in Manhattan on a beginning designer’s salary and paid over 3/4 of my salary in rent. It probably goes without saying that I had no health insurance or paid sick leave and lived in constant fear of illness, and couldn’t afford any of the usual entertainments. It was one of the most useful periods of my life too, because it’s when I learned to make reading and cooking fill my entertainment function. I spent wonderful hours digging through the NY Public Library’s collection of cookbooks (free entertainment,) walking miles to Manhattan’s Chinatown (exercise +health maintenance+entertainment/sightseeing,) shopping in the wondrous markets there (thrift+entertainment,) then walking back and cooking dinner (nutrition+health maintenance+delicious entertainment.) I bought a huge carbon steel wok and cleaver for less than $10 each and with one thrift-shop pot to cook rice, one rice bowl, and one set of porcelain-tipped chopsticks, I was ready to cook anything.

I wouldn’t want to live like that now, and I’m appropriately grateful to have health insurance and sick leave. But I still love to channel the spirit of a thrifty Chinese spiritual grandmother and cook up a tasty stir-fry now and then. Rice is in very short supply in my area right now, but I have enough to cook up a pot of rice, add condiments to vegetables from my garden, and have a delicious meal for under $5 for two people. I wanted to use up some of the rich gold yolks that my chickens produce abundantly, and it occurred to me that frying them quickly into a sort of yolk pancake would yield a texture that could work well in a quick, explosive stir-fry.
Last year’s Fordhook Swiss chard is throwing up beautiful meaty leaves right now, so I started with four big chard leaves and four fat perennial green onions.

I tend to divide improvisational Chinese dishes into cooked rice (the base,) vegetables (the bulk,) protein (meat, eggs, etc.,) texture foods (often mushrooms in my kitchen,) and seasonings.  As with any improvisation, don’t throw stuff in at random. Think carefully to create a harmony. And everything has to be prepped and ready before you start. I assemble everything in little piles and pinch dishes on an 18×24” cutting board. I pulled the chard leaves away from the stems, cut the leaves in crosswise strips, and chopped the stems in 1/4” cross sections. The white part of the green onions were cut in 1/4” sections, and a few of the leaves cut into diagonal slivers.  I cooked five beaten egg yolks into a pancake in a hot skillet with avocado oil, let it cool, and cut it into long 1/4” wide slivers. A handful of sliced dried tree ears were hydrated in hot water. Tree ears are a texture food, and if they aren’t available, just omit them.  A couple of tablespoons of fermented black beans were soaked in cold water to reduce their salt load a little, then squeezed dry. A piece of ginger 1”x2” was cut into cross sections, a bulb end of green garlic likewise, then the two chopped together into pieces the size of coarse crumbs. A half cup of water had a tablespoon of rice vinegar, two teaspoons of sugar, a heaping teaspoon of cornstarch, and about 2 teaspoons of oyster sauce stirred in, and avocado oil, soy sauce, and Asian roasted sesame oil were standing by. I used some chile oil too, but you can leave it out if you don’t care for heat.

The rice is cooked and served up into heated bowls, and your prepped ingredients stand ready next to the wok or skillet. From here it goes so fast that you can’t believe it. Heat the cooking vessel fiery hot over highest heat, pour in some avocado oil, wait 30 seconds, put in the chopped ginger and garlic and fermented beans, and stir with a cooking paddle for a few seconds, just until the ginger scent reaches your nose. Throw in the drained tree ears, the chard stems, and the white part of the scallions, stirring vigorously for a few seconds after each addition. Add a few shakes of soy sauce and stir all this around for about 30 more seconds, then stir in the chard leaves and slivered egg-yolk pancakes. When the chard leaves look done, about a minute later if you were bold and kept the heat at maximum, add the water mixture (stirring hastily to get the cornstarch in suspension before adding to the wok,) and stir while it boils fiercely and thickens, another minute or less. Stir in the scallion leaves and serve over hot rice. Sprinkle with soy sauce and finish with a drizzle of sesame oil. Add some chile oil if you want to. The clarity relies on keeping the heat explosive. If you lose your nerve or pause at any point, your sauce will get sludgy and the purity of the taste  be lost.

If you want a serious education in Chinese cooking, I recommend any book by Fuschia Dunlop, and her Hunanese Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook may be my favorite. I dislike Chairman Mao (and all other dictators) pretty intensely but his home province has created some of this world’s truly delicious food. The old classic that I first learned from, Mrs. Chiang’s Szechwan Cookbook, is still around and turns up on EBay and used book sites. It has excellent discussions of ingredients and achieving the true taste, and the recipes are as good as ever.

Explosive frying, stir-frying at very high heat, is a good technique to have in your back pocket for almost any vegetable. They have to be sliced and trimmed to appropriate sizes so that they will cook through. Therefore, the technique doesn’t save kitchen time, it just shifts time to prep, with the cooking happening in 5-10 exciting minutes at the end. It does add a special flavor of its own, the famous “breath of the wok.”

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