Archive for Cookery

30 Oct 2011
Cookery • Garden • locavore log

October 29 And It’s Snowing

October 29 and it is snowing – wet heavy snow. Plenty of leaves yet on many trees — although the birches are denuded by now. Still, some under story trees or ornamental ones like crape myrtle sport lots of green. It’s an unusual sight, snow on leafy trees. Will winter be short? Or will it be a long one?

The next few days promise to be mild, and with ground still warm from summer, there will be no lasting accumulation; yet, the falling snow and the frost predicted for tomorrow morning are firmly ending the summer garden. I hurried on Thursday and Friday to pick up all of the remaining peppers and green beans, cut up big bunches of basil and chayote squash vine, and dug up the last few sweet potatoes that I had planted in my tropical bed. Also dug up, potted and dragged those same perennial tropicals or Mediterranean plants to the greenhouse. Barely in time. But in time. They will survive winter – just, sometimes – in the minimally heated greenhouse to be planted out again next spring. What can I say? I love ferns, lantanas, daturas, citruses, jasmines, geraniums, agapanthus, gingers and bananas. I do! Read more

sylvie | 8 comments | Tags: , , , ,
16 Jun 2010
Cookery • Harvest • locavore log

Le Temps Des Cerises

It’s sour cherry time – or rather, sour cherries are just over here in the Virginia Piedmont. A kind cherry tree owner offered me their tree to pick, and I gratefully enjoyed the privilege. But as the garden is going gangbusters (with  planting, harvesting, cleaning and maintaining – ALL AT THE SAME TIME!!!), I have little time to write down recipes, so photos is all we get. Maybe I’ll scribble down some of the recipes in the next few posts…

When sour cherries are in season, one rushes to pick, pick, pick and then pit, pit, pit and process. Because the season is very brief: on Memorial day they are blushing, on June 15, they are over!

So what to do with sour cherries:

- pit them, toss them with sugar, other berries and enjoy as a sweet-tart refreshing dessert

- pit and freeze for later use

- sour cherry preserves

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Read more

sylvie | 5 comments | Tags: ,
22 May 2010
Cookery • locavore log • Main Dish • Meat/poultry Recipe • Recipes

Fast Food My Way (Tongue it is!)

We eat plenty of fast food here – especially for lunch. Don’t believe me? well… take a look at the picture of one of our not unusual lunches.

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  • Green salad from the garden (Pick early in the morning, wash, dry, refrigerate, ready to go in seconds) with hard boiled eggs from the hen house (hard boil, refrigerate – they will keep several days and only take seconds to chop and add to the salad)
  • Various homemade pickles: curried zucchini pickles, dilly green beans, cornichons and green tomato relish. Made last summer. 3 seconds to open each jar.
  • Sliced Beef Tongue with really good mustard. Tasty (really! don’t knock it off until you try it), easy, inexpensive. What else do you want? Prepare the tongue up to days in advance, keep it in the fridge, ready to slice at a moment’s notice for sandwiches or just for a cold cut platter with pickled veggies.
  • Sun tea: steeped in the sun in 1/2 gallon jar and rebottled in recycled glass bottle for more convenience.

Voila – that is slow food, but it is also fast food. Better: it’s real food.

The how to on cooking beef tongue (or other tongues for that matter like lamb), you may find here at DC-based The Slow Cook. Ed Bruske gives very detailed instructions on how to cook tongue and brine it first – if you want.

But really, it’s easy to cook tongue; in a nutshell, this is what you do: Read more

sylvie | 3 comments | Tags: , ,
26 Apr 2010
Cookery • locavore log • Meat/poultry Recipe

Roasting a Spring Lamb

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Roasting a whole lamb in the spring is the epitome of the outdoor party (although a whole pig comes pretty close too).

We just did that this week-end for the benefit dinner organized by Flavor Magazine to benefit the Rappahannock Food Pantry.

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Read more

sylvie | 11 comments | Tags: ,
13 Jan 2010
Cookery • locavore log

On Sauerkraut and Other Fermented Food

I had never eaten homemade sauerkraut until I started to make it last year.

I can’t say that I really like the store-bought canned stuff – but I really like a Reuben sandwich, and you do need sauerkraut for that.

sauerkraut

In my quest for more local homegrown or homemade food and in learning new (to me) ways of preserving food (and prompted by a post of Food in Jar on Home-Made Sauerkraut), I decided to give homemade sauerkraut a try and turned some of my spring cabbages into sauerkraut in early July last year. I used whey to kick-start the process as my research indicated fast fermenting was needed in warm temperature.The whey was supposed to introduce lactic acid right away to help fermentation takes over before spoilage happens.. I made several small batches experimenting with the amount of salt and the spices used. Some were so-so, some were OK, and a couple were darn good. The big surprise though was fermented spicy ginger carrots. THAT was terrific, and hooked me onto fermented vegetables. I decided I would try again come fall. Read more

sylvie | 4 comments | Tags: , ,
23 Nov 2009
Cookery • locavore log

There is More to Turkey Than Roasting it for Thanksgiving

I have to confess that I do not have the proper respect for Thanksgiving.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy that food-centric holiday. It’s just that – not having grown with it – I am not enough imbued with its traditions, and I am trying to make it… well… gasp! too… French. You see, many of the French holidays end up being a celebration of food, but in the US, only Thanksgiving – distantly followed by Christmas – really gets the family around the table.

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When I cook the Thanksgiving dinner, I always end up with multiple courses served not all at once but in succession – to stretch the fun of eating and the dinner. That’s a no-no: Thanksgiving is meant to have many many dishes all served at once (except desserts). Thanksgiving means that the table is groaning under the sheer quantity of the dishes. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: ,
23 Jul 2009
Cookery • Harvest • locavore log

On Beeing A Cicada (or: Food Preservation)

La Cigale, ayant chanté
Tout l’été,
Se trouva fort dépourvue
Quand la bise fut venue. *

Jean de LA FONTAINE (La Cigale et La Fourmi)

While I don’t think you have to toil the entire summer to put some food by, this is certainly the time to practice food preservation.

Why? Self-sufficiency, thriftiness, budgetary contraints, desire to eat well, and convenience are all factors in my desire to do so. And yes, I do mean “convenience”. What’s more convenient than going to one’s pantry to pick up a jar of tomato juice, a pint jar of vanilla peaches, and a bag of dry zucchini chips and cherry tomatoes, open the freezer for some roasted peppers, and pesto cubes, and proceed to make a good soup full of summer flavors and a peach cobbler? It’s late and the closest country store is an 18 miles return trip (it’s closed at this hour anyway) and the closest grocery store is 60 miles away… so yes, it is convenient to have a pantry. Even if grocery stores are not that far, it still make sense to put food up now, when so many veggies are abundant, at peak flavors and with peak nutrients.

- Dry: herbs, tomatoes, zucchini, peaches, plums, blueberries etc

- Can: tomatoes, peaches, plums, nectarines, tomatilloes, etc

- Freeze: cherry tomatoes, strawberries, wineberries, blackberries, blueberries, raspberries, corn, green beans, swiss chard, pesto etc

- Jam: all the fruit you can think of

- Pickle: peppers, cucumbers, okra, beans, purslane (either can or make refrigerator pickle, or even lacto-ferment – the original pickling at which I am trying my hand this summer)

- Make liqueurs & syrups: herbs & fruit

yes, it does take some time, but it’s much easier to tackle if you just do a little every day. Then it won’t feel like this unsurmountable mountain. For example, after dinner, chop, bag & freeze 2 bagful of peppers, or cherry tomatoes, or slice enough zucchini for one dehydrator batch.That may take only 20 minutes – quite manageable. Then, maybe twice a month, set aside a morning to do some canning. And watch your pantry fill… just like the garden, start small, get used to the different techniques. And of course, only preserve things you will eat!!! (no need to make 10 quarts of Salsa if your family might only eat a pint or two the entire winter…)

* The Cicada, having spent the whole summer singing
Found itself rather without food
Once the winter winds started to blow

sylvie | 8 comments | Tags:
19 Jul 2009
Cookery • locavore log • vegetable

Summer Lunch

Summer has been cooler here than in prior years. So while tomatoes are really just starting to ripen and yield – finally!!!! – for real (a good 2 weeks past my usual tomato target date though), cabbage, kale (kale!!! in July! edible!) and lettuce greens are doing just well. On the other hand, the sweet potatoes are looking anemic, and the okra… well, we won’t talk about the okra. Frankly, there isn’t much to talk about!

Let’s talk instead about the colorful lunch (or dinner) plate that one can make from the garden at the moment . Everything can be cooked, days in advance, and assembled just a few minutes before serving. Perfect for when one feels lazy or is hurried. For example, today’s lunch:

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First, spread a variery of lettuce leaves on the plate; Read more

sylvie | 6 comments | Tags: , , ,
18 Jul 2009
Cookery • Harvest • herb • Kitchen Garden • locavore log

it’s summer, you eat … WHAT???!!!

Purslane: I call it a nutritious easy to grow crunchy little green (now officially renamed par moi a “super gourmet green” !). Add it to green salads, or – my favorite – to potato salad. Other people like it too: El - of course! (go to this post for a picture … if you need one) – and Chelsea whose post of Warm Potato & Purslane Salad inspired me to try purslane with potato salad. Nonetheless, he calls it a weed. He eats it, though – gingerly. Me? I am going to pickle it, having found a recipe in one of my French cookbooks.

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Radish seed pods: I call them tasty little bits, great for salads and stir-fries. He just shrug them off and eats around them. But then he has no particular fondness for radishes, any of it (except the quick pickled ones). Make sure to pick only young and immature pods: they toughen as the seeds mature. There is actually a radish bred for its pods, with the evocative name of Rat’s Tail Radish or sometimes – less poetically – podding radish. I use my standard French breakfast style radish and let them go to seeds. Flowers are pretty, attract pollinators and beneficial insects … and are edible too.

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We both agree though that green coriander seed is a short live treasure. Short lived in the garden, as you need to pick the young green immature seeds before they start to mature, and once picked must eat them within a few hours, before they start to dry. The taste is something between cilantro and coriander – which is no surprise since it is both – but without the toughness of the mature coriander shell. The younger the seed (smaller and more vibrant green, with no tinge of yellow), the brighter the taste. I use them in rillettes (just cooked for a few minutes), add to sautéed pork chops or chicken, salsa etc – again adding them just for the last couple of minutes of cooking. I like them so much that I am collecting some and freezing them for future use. The ones I don’t harvest green will become coriander: some will end up in the pantry, others will reseed themselves for a fall crop.

sylvie | 13 comments | Tags: , ,
27 Jun 2009
beverage • Cookery • locavore log • Recipes • Wild Food

Elder Blossom Lemonade

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A plant of our hedgerows and abandoned fields that are being reconquered by the forest, the elder favors the sides of ditches and embankments – especially those with a bit of shade. Oh, it grows well enough in full sun, but it seems to appreciate the extra moisture that accumulates in ditches.

Elder is a plant of the edge – maybe a plant ON the edge – making do with full sun or part shade – unable to decide whether it wants to really be in the meadow. Because of its widespread natural habitat, Sambucus (the botanical name for the genus) plays a role in many folklores: Scandinavians, Mediterraneans, North American Indians all had legends of the Elder … giving rises to conflicting stories of goodness and evil, stories that bellies its sun/shade qualities. At the edge, neither sun nor shade, neither evil nor saintly.

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Even its name – both the common and the botanical name in fact – harks back to old times. Read more

sylvie | 9 comments | Tags: , ,
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