Archive for locavore log

02 Feb 2012
locavore log • Meat/poultry Recipe • Recipes

Roasted Rabbit

This recipe first appears in the Dec 2011-Jan 2012 Seasonal Table column I write for Flavor Magazine.

Roasted Rabbit, Braised Escarole, Cheesy Polenta & Roasted Carrots. Photo by Molly Peterson, mJm Photography, for Flavor Magazine.

Rabbit is intimidating for many people. Sure, it’s not as available as chicken but a growing number of farms (who often raise poultry) offer rabbits in our area. You can also find them through custom butcher shops. On a per pound basis, rabbit is more expensive  than chicken. But a 3-lb rabbit has more meat than a 3-lb chicken, or rather I should say, that a 3-lb rabbit has denser, more filling meat than a 3 lb-chicken.

Rabbit does not taste like chicken. Not even close. Sure it is a white meat with a lot of flavor, but it is dense and lean. Roast a young animal, braise an older one. Rabbit is both meaty and bony, muscle meat tightly attached to the bones. But if you like eating blue crab, you probably won’t mind all the bones in a rabbit.  When served in a restaurant, rabbit is often deboned and served as a pate, rolled, pulled, or in some other way where using a fork and a knife is breezy. In my home, we don’t mind using our fingers (mostly).

In this recipe, based on a classic French country dish, I use gin and juniper berries. But sometime I will use one of our  local whiskey or rye. Omit the juniper berries if you can’t find them. The mustard is used both for flavor and to help the meat keep moist.

And a bonus – it’s done in a hour: 5 minutes to prep, 50 to cook, 5 to cut up and plate. Cook the veggies while the rabbit is roasting. Read more

sylvie | No comments | Tags: ,
06 Jan 2012
locavore log

The Tenth Day of Christmas

Pitting cherries!

2011 was an outstanding cherry year here in Rappahannock, the kind we get every five years or so. Back in June, I made both sweet and sour cherry liqueur. They need to age with the fruit for 6 months or so. At bottling time, I was loath to just throw out the cherries that had been macerating. They still had a good color, firm texture, a decent cherry taste… although a little too boozy to just eat, and a distracting pit. The solution: pit them, cook them gently and briefly in a simple sugar syrup, and now I have a great dessert topping. Lets’ call them Tipsy Cherries!

In the process I confirmed that the cherry pitter I bought after the season was over last year, is indeed a great purchase because it pits not only fresh cherries, but also canned cherries, boozy cherries, and thawed cherries! I generally dislike single purpose gadget, but this was was worth the $20 I paid for it!

Tpisy Cherries

Eating local in winter! What a gift!

sylvie | One comment
03 Jan 2012
locavore log • Recipes • Side Dish

The Sixth and Seventh Days Of Christmas (more lemon recipes)

On the Sixth Day of Christmas, with still over 7 pounds of Meyer lemons left from my citrus order orgy, I made Réunion Island Lemon and Onion Salad.

Lemon and Onion Salad from Reunion Island

Lemon and Onion Salad (Reunion Island Style)

In winter, I often hunger for bright spicy flavors to liven up the stews and braised dishes that are characteristics of this time of the year. Which is often when I return to my roots of Reunion Island, when I particularly reach into the spice cabinet for pungent curcuma, floral vanilla beans, fresh ginger and other flavors reminiscent of Reunion Island. Truth be told, I use those flavors all year long, but I crave them in winter. Read more

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , ,
30 Dec 2011
Fruit recipe • locavore log • Recipes • Side Dish

The Fourth and Fifth Days of Christmas (of Breads and Limes)

The Fourth Day of Christmas was mostly spent cooking dinner for a group of hungry hunters, out for a pheasant shoot. It is the second time I have cooked for that group. It’s always a good thing when a client wants you back!

On the menu:

Alsatian Tarte Flambée and hot gulf shrimps with a spicy sun-dry tomato sauce. I love making that Alsatian Tarte Flambée – it’s easy and it’s always a winner! How can it not be? Slow cooked onions; bacon; crème fraiche. For informal groups like this one, I make a big rectangular tart on a large rimmed cookie sheet or a large free-form pizza. For smaller plated dinner, I make small individual perfectly round tartelettes served with a mache or frisée salad.

Free-Form Alsatian Tarte Flambee

Read more

sylvie | One comment | Tags: , ,
15 Nov 2011
locavore log • Recipes • Soups • Vegetable recipe

Mushroom and Spinach Soup

 

This recipe was originally published in the Seasonal Table Column that I write for Flavor Magazine (Oct-Nov 2011 issue).

As the weather cools off, spinach is happily growing for us again, a versatile green delicious raw or cooked. I love the earthy combination of spinach and mushrooms, in salads, stews or soups. And since cultivated mushrooms are available year long in the Mid-Atlantic, some foraged, some grown outdoors like shiitake on logs and others in mushroom houses, local mushrooms are fairly easy to find. You can use any mushroom for this soup, including white mushrooms or a combination of mushrooms. And for a splurge, go for shiitakes or oyster mushrooms or any other that strike your fancy.

 

Mushroom and Spinach Soup Read more

sylvie | One comment | Tags: , ,
10 Nov 2011
Harvest • locavore log • Rant

For Everything There Is A Season

A local Thanksgiving with roasted duck. Photo by Molly Peterson, mJm Photography, Sperryville, VA

This is the introduction to the current Seasonal Table, a column – with recipes -  that I write for Flavor Magazine. The recipes are appropriate for any autumnal meal, and certainly, together, would make a local Thanksgiving feast in many parts of the US.

Harvest Festivals have all but vanished, at least in our society. Thanksgiving Day is sometimes derisively nicknamed “Turkey Day”. For too many people the event means wolfing down a huge plate of indifferent food prepared hurriedly and harriedly. And then go do something else, away from the table, and away from others.

Thanksgiving Day is not about turkeys. Not… really. Read more

sylvie | 5 comments | Tags: ,
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: , , , ,
25 Oct 2011
locavore log

Chestnut Memories

Chestnuts are special.  They are here when the year is falling – promise of sustenance for the months to come.  They are beautiful – and so is the tree they grow on. They were a staples for centuries – millenia? – allowing people to survive winter.

I was almost 15 when I first encountered a chestnut tree, fallen fruit littering the ground all around it. Which is about the same time I saw my first snow, frozen, in a few compacted drifts, high up on Mont Lozère, in the southern Massif Central of France. Read more

sylvie | 3 comments | Tags: , ,
09 Sep 2011
fruit • Kitchen Garden • locavore log

I Do Give A Fig!

This post first appeared – with minor modifications and without pictures – as an article “A Fig Tree In Virginia” in the September 8, 2011 issue of the Rappahannock News. It’s a tad late (I know!) since we are at the end of fig season here in the Northern Virginia Piedmont. I originally wrote the article in mid-August but it had to be bumped a few times… Still, there are figs to be harvested at the moment, although the recent massive rains have not done them any good…

Everyone should have a grapevine and a fig tree, said one of my favorite writers, Henry Mitchell. I – and a long list of people, some quite famous – thoroughly agree.  In fact, Mitchell was only repeating a biblical phrase, long used to mean peace and prosperity:  ”each man under his own vine and fig tree” (1 Kings 4:25).

Figs have a longer history in Virginia than you might have thought. They actually go back, quite a bit in human history – and prehistory: figs may well have been the first cultivated plant. Read more

sylvie | 4 comments | Tags:
07 Sep 2011
fruit • locavore log • Wild Food

Post Card From The Woods

In season now: pawpaws – ripening along the creeks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a creamy luscious fruit redolent of mango, guava and banana…

sylvie | 7 comments | Tags: ,
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