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I loved the dish we had for dinner last night. It was fast because I used my grass farmer’s tenderized turkey breast cutlets. It was chop-and-drop easy and included some of my favorite nutrient dense foods. It’s a seasonal autumn dish, perfect for right now. Round out the meal with a coconut pumpkin muffin and a glass of cold, raw milk.
Turkey Cutlets on Kale with Mushroom Sauce
6 tenderized turkey breast cutlets
1/4 cup sprouted wheat flour
1 bunch of kale, stemmed and chopped
2 cups homemade chicken stock, divided
1 pound mixed mushrooms, chopped
1/4 cup dried porcini mushrooms
3 tablespoons pasture butter, divided
1 small onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
sea salt and pepper to taste
In a large pot, bring 1 cup chicken stock to boil. Pour half a cup of hot stock into a bowl and add dried mushrooms. Add chopped kale into remaining stock in the pot, set on medium low and cover. Give the kale a stir when you flip the turkey cutlets later.
Heat 1 tablespoon pasture butter in skillet. Add chopped onion and mixed mushrooms. Squeeze porcini mushrooms dry (reserve soaking water) and chop, adding to skillet. Stir around over medium high heat until mushrooms give off their liquid and onion begins to brown. Remove onion mixture from skillet.
Melt 1 tablespoon pasture butter in skillet. Dredge turkey cutlets in sprouted wheat flour and add to skillet. Brown on one side over medium heat, then flip over and cover the pan to brown the second side. The cutlets will be done in about 5 to 7 minutes total cooking time. Remove cutlets to a plate and keep warm.
Deglaze the skillet with remaining cup of chicken broth and mushroom soaking liquid. Scrape up all the good bits off the bottom of the skillet and allow liquid to reduce by half. Add mushroom mixture back into sauce, melt remaining 1 tablespoon pasture butter into sauce. Serve cutlets over a bed of kale, and topped with mushroom sauce. Serves 6
If you don’t have access to pastured turkey breast cutlets, you could use a couple chicken breasts that you’ve pounded thin. I used curly kale, but any variety would work well. The mushroom sauce mixes with the kale so deliciously! I had this dish on the table in less than 30 minutes.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
A view of the carrots
Spring has its bountiful early greens, summer its fast growth and ripe, red tomatoes, but the autumn garden has joys to share as well.
The lack of hungry flea beetles is the first joy I notice right away. The hungry critters that were munching my plants right down to the ground in July have all gone, lulled to sleep by the first frost. I can work in the garden in mid-afternoon without breaking a sweat, and what a joy that is! Tasting the intense sweetness that a frosty morning has brought to the stevia leaves is a pleasant surprise, as are the gentle rains this time of year brings. Most mornings the dew is so heavy that I don’t water but once a week. Most of the weeds have died out, so weeding is a quick job. And once established, the carrots, lettuce, mustard, spinach and kale grow so quickly it can be a challenge to keep them from taking over the backyard.
So, if you think the gardening season ends when the last tomato is picked, I want to encourage you to try growing some of your own autumn foods next year.
And to entice you to use what’s already in the garden or at the market, here’s an unusual recipe based on the premise that foods that grow together belong together! People don’t usually eat the greens of carrots, but they are edible and have the same zingy bitterness that dandelion has. If you like dandelion in your salad, give carrot tops a try as well. And if you find your diet deficient in potassium or vitamin C, don’t toss the carrot tops as they are rich in both as well as a host of other nutrients.
Eat Your Carrot Greens Salad
Serves 2 to 4, depending on how large the carrots have grown
3 carrots with their leaves
a stem or two of fresh mint leaves
1/4 cup raisins
2 tablespoons olive oil
the juice of 1/2 lemon, freshly squeezed
Scrub the carrots clean and rinse the greens. Chop the carrots in very thin rounds and place in a bowl. Chop the carrot leaves finely, like you would parsley, removing any hard stems. Add to the bowl with the carrots, and mix in the raisins and chopped mint leaves. Season to taste with lemon juice, olive oil and salt.
This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by the inimitable Food Renegade.
Being in the learning stages, my method of food storage is kind of simplistic. I like to store what I eat and eat what I store. In April, that means buying two quarts of strawberries a week at the farmers market. We eat from one quart daily as raw whole snacks when a sweet tooth hits. No, I still can’t bring myself to cook with strawberries. They’re just too rare and precious to water down with other flavors!
The second quart is cleaned and hulled and dried or made into preserves. Dried strawberries can be reconstituted for smoothies in the dead of winter or sprinkled onto a bowl of homemade granola or yogurt. Dried fruit takes up very little space, is shelf stable, (not requiring refrigerator or freezer space both of which are at a great premium at my house) and can be stored in unbreakable containers if you’re into the plastic thing. Home canned preserves are wonderful on toast or stirred into kefir. Even mixed with peanut butter, strawberry preserves are a taste of April on a snowy winter day.
It is my short-term goal to have a rotating stock of dried and home canned foods year-round to choose from. This goal is two-fold. First, the nutrients and flavors of seasonal foods would be available year-round without requiring massive container ships to carry food to me from countries halfway around the globe. Second, my emergency preparedness food supply would benefit from some perking up to avoid dreariness. Sure, one could live on plain beans and rice for a time, but would you really want to? Wouldn’t some home canned sweet potato mixed in add just a touch of sweetness and flavor to perk up that meal?
My long-term goal is to eventually home can all the tomatoes we use over the course of the year. Since we stopped using canned tomatoes due to BPA (and other endoctrine disruptors in the plastic lining of cans) concerns, I find we use one or two glass quart jars of spaghetti sauce a week. I can sometimes find coupons and store specials, but when I can’t, the organic variety often costs nearly $4 a quart. Canning my own would save our budget upward of $200 a year, a sizable chunk.
Achieving this goal, though, will require most of the 64 square foot garden I am preparing for next spring and perhaps more. Of course, I’ll still grow other vegetables and herbs in my container garden on the patio, but for now that’s the plan.
So, my dehydrated strawberries are on the shelf next to winter’s dried kale and fall’s dried sweet potatoes. It’s becoming quite a lovely rainbow in my basement!
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop and Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.
Shopping List by LexnGer, on Flickr
I don’t plan to do this every week, but I wanted to post my menu plans for this week. Sometimes in the middle of winter it can be hard to come up with ideas. I hope there’s inspiration here for someone!
Breakfasts
- Smoked Salmon Omelette with Shallots and Hollandaise sauce
- Porridge (soaked the night before, with a pantry full of choices for toppings: nuts, seeds, dried fruit, a couple chocolate chips, etc.)
- UFOs (also called egg in a hole, depending on your part of the country)
- Scrambled eggs with bacon and toast
- Fried eggs on torn up bread
Lunches
- Bologna sandwiches (my meat farmer makes the yummiest bologna!)
- Chicken breast chunks (marinated overnight in a combination of citrus juices), brushed with butter and baked, with homemade ranch dip
- Crab dip (from Nourishing Traditions) poured over toast
- Pasta with jarred tomatoes, kale and olives
- Quesadillas
- Salmon spread (from Nourishing Traditions) on sourdough crackers
Dinners
- Stir fried bison steak and cabbage on udon noodles, green salad
- Squash and Sun dried tomato soup (from Nourishing Traditions), hamburgers and broccoli
- Carrot salad (from Nourishing Traditions), Roasted chicken, sauteed parsnips
- Dr. Connelly’s soup (from Nourishing Traditions), Seared Pork Tenderloin medallions with apple cider pan sauce, brussels sprouts with cream and bacon
- Baked Salmon with Egg Mustard sauce (from Nourishing Traditions), frozen peas, a salad of sliced oranges and fennel bulb
- Clean-out-the-fridge meal with Sweet potato dollars served with leftover sauces from the week for dipping
It’s pretty easy to turn all this low-carb by just skipping the bread and crackers when they are offered. The two roasted chickens midweek will find their way into the slow cooker for stock, and the leftover meat will be put aside for a meal next week.
I find it easy in the wintertime to have soups frequently. Summer is a much more salad-friendly time of year. But that general plan leaves me with a longing for tomato soup! I haven’t really found a recipe for tomato soup that uses jarred tomatoes and still tastes really rich and good.
In addition to these meals, I also made some pineapple chutney (yeah, I know pineapple isn’t local, it’s one of my cheat foods), queso blanco, crispy pecans and walnuts for snacking on, and I soaked and roasted the seeds from last week’s acorn squash. The rind from the pineapple is soaking away in whey, turning itself into pineapple vinegar to be used in cortido next week. My apple cider vinegar using the Thanksgiving apple pie’s peels and cores is still working, not quite the acid level I’d like, but getting there.
And John has asked for some homemade marshmallow fluff before he goes back to college. How can I say no?
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I made another great in-season find at the local market this week! It’s called Red Kuri Squash. It’s a hard-rind squash, slightly larger than an acorn squash, and about the color of a pumpkin. I read up on it on various sites, and the consensus was that it tastes like chestnuts!
I cut it into eighths after removing the seeds and pulp and sprinkled it with some ground fennel seed. Each slice received a half piece of raw bacon. It has a nice, dark orange flesh, which tells me it’s full of vitamin A and antioxidants, which the fat from the bacon will help our bodies utilize. It roasted in a 350° oven for about a half hour. My squash lovers loved it, my squash haters said it was too “squashy”.
The mature seeds are thicker than pumpkin seeds and have a very nutty flavor when roasted. From one small squash, I filled a 10-ounce repurposed jelly jar of roasted seeds. Not a bad haul at all! I like nibbling on a few roasted squash seeds when I feel like a salty snack. They are low in calories and have compounds that reduce inflammation, something this old body has in abundance!
I probably won’t be buying Red Kuri on a regular basis because too many members of my family don’t like winter squash. But the seeds are delightful!
Savory Roasted Red Kuri Squash
1 Red Kuri Squash
4 pieces bacon
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
Cut squash in half, remove seeds and pulp, reserving the seeds. Cut each squash half into fourths, making eight pieces. Crush fennel seeds in a mortar and pestle or grinder and sprinkle over squash. Cut bacon in half crosswise and place over the cavity of each squash piece. Roast at 350° for 30 minutes, until bacon is cooked and squash is fork-tender. Before serving, pour of any excess bacon fat. Serves 8 reticent squash-eaters, or 4 squash lovers.
Seeds can be soaked overnight in salted water then drained and roasted at 300° for about 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
This post is part of Fight Back Friday, hosted by Food Renegade.
Rose adores eating pomegranates, and although they are not grown locally, they are in season from about Thanksgiving through Christmas. They are a very special holiday treat for us. Some people complain that they are a lot of work for a little reward. Rose generously offered to show us just how easy it is. After the photo essay, I’ll give you some good reasons to enjoy them.
Score the outside of the pomegranate in fourths along the top half of the fruit, near the blossom end. You don’t need to cut deep, just enough to “peel” back the leathery outside, called the exocarp.
Pry back a little of the blossom end between scores so you can get a good grip on the pieces.
Fill a bowl with water. Hold the pom under water and grab the part you’ve pried back to pull off the leathery rind. (We’ve removed the pom from the water so you can see it better.
Now just peel chunks off. The delicious arils of juicy goodness will beckon to you!
Holding the pom underwater, use your fingers or a spoon to scrape off the most tenacious arils.
Here’s what the water was for: the seeds will sink and little pieces of the rind will float, making them much easier to pick out!
Now, just scoop off the floating pieces of rind to add to the compost pile,
drain the seeds,
and share with a friend!
Choose pomegranates that are bright red and which feel heavy for their size. If a pom is dry-looking or wrinkly, or the color is pale, put it back. At home, store your poms in the fridge. If you go on a pom-prepping binge, you can pat the seeds dry and freeze them for later use. Pom juice can be pressed out of the seeds with a sturdy strainer and the back of a spoon.
The seeds make a lovely topping for a salad or decoration floating in a soup. The juice is a staple of Middle Eastern cooking. Arils have a good potassium content and their dark color reminds us they are full of antioxidants. Rose says they are really, really good with chocolate. Hm. Double antioxidant punch! The seeds also inhibit dental plaque and the tannins firm the gums.
If you want juice, please don’t buy the kind encased in BPA-laden plastic containers, pasteurized for “safety.” The vitamin C content of that juice is destroyed and after exposure to air and processing, some of the more delicate nutrients in the juice are damaged.
So, cook-up and peel a pom today!
One of hubby’s favorite after-Thanksgiving lunches in a sandwich made from canned cranberry sauce and cream cheese. I’ve been a fan of homemade cranberry sauce for a long time, but it’s hard to find the right balance of tart to sweet. And then there’s the sugar. When I started looking for recipes, I found the average ratio to be 12 ounces of cranberries to 8 ounces of white sugar. That’s a LOT of sugar!
Last year, I made a fermented cranberry relish by lacto-fermenting cranberries in whey for a few days. But it was so very tart. Even adding honey at the end barely took the edge off. This year I wanted something fruitier and sweeter, but I sure didn’t want all the sugar.
This year I decided to combine fresh cranberries with another seasonal fruit for sweetness. Pears added just the right touch. I chopped four pears and added them to three cups of cranberries in a blender. But they wouldn’t blend!
Hm. What I needed is a little liquid to get this mixture moving. But what? There was time to add whey and ferment it a little, but I didn’t want the pears going alcoholic on me. I didn’t really want to add a fruit juice, which is just another form of concentrated sugar.
Water kefir! I had a batch ready on the counter. I strained off the grains and got another batch brewing and added a little of the finished kefir to the blender—just enough to get the blades moving.
When it was all blended up, I put it in a canning jar and set it on the counter, covered with a towel, to age overnight. In the morning, it was perfect! Not too sweet, not too liquid, and just the right tang.
The “good bugs” in the kefir will help us digest all that turkey (and cream cheese later) which is always a big help with a large meal!
That’s what’s twistin’ in my kitchen this Tuesday. Come join the carnival and tell me what’s twistin’ in yours! This post is also part of Real Food Wednesday hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
What to do with the hundred tiny green tomatoes left on my cherry tomato plant at the end of the season?
When I first harvested them, this small Corningware casserole dish was 2/3 full of tiny green tomatoes. I put an apple in the middle and surrounded it with the tomatoes. Eight or nine at a time, they would ripen, seemingly overnight. My cavies loved these treats!
Seems the apple “breathes out” ethylene gas, which encourages the tomatoes to ripen. Laboratory-produced ethylene gas is what is used to ripen grocery store tomatoes (which are picked and shipped unripe because they are less delicate.)
Sure, I could make fried green tomatoes, except that these are tiny, tiny things. Can you see me rolling a pea in flour and frying it? Me either. Maybe next year I’ll be prepared with a recipe for green tomato jam, but for this year, the apple trick will have to do.
What IS that thing?
I love eating soup for lunch, but rarely have much time at midday to cook. I used last night’s dinner meal prep time to roast a bunch of veggies which then today I tossed into some chicken stock, warmed and blended with a hand blender for a very quick and easy soup. Roasting brought out the sweet, nutty flavor of the squash, and provided a very different flavor profile from squash that is only simmered in stock.
Roasted Vegetable Autumn Soup
1 small Blue Hubbard Squash (5 pounds)
4 Granny Smith apples, halved, cored and peeled
2 yellow onions, peeled and halved
3 generous tablespoons bacon fat (rendered from cooking)
2 quarts homemade chicken stock
1 inch knob of ginger, peeled
2 cups raw (or at least non-ultrapasteurized) cream
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
Sea salt and pepper to taste
Halve the squash and remove the seeds and strings. Save the seeds for roasting later! Rub the squash, onion and apples inside and out with bacon fat. Roast the squash and onion for 1 hour at 400°, add the apples to the pan in the last 20 minutes. Vegetables may be cooled and refrigerated at this point if you wish to make the soup later.
Heat chicken stock gently on stove. Scrape squash from its shell and add to the stock. Chop the roasted onion before adding with the apple to the soup for easier blending later. Grate in ginger and allow soup to heat slowly. Blend with hand blender or in batches in countertop blender. Add cream and rewarm slighly. Season to taste. Serve topped with parmesan shreds.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop and Whole Foods for the Holidays, hosted this week by Gnowfglins.
Riffin' on Bruschetta
Kate is getting to be quite a good cook! She had this great idea for a meal: some bell peppers and onions on toast. We kicked it around for a few minutes and the idea blossomed into this delicious meal.
Riffin’ on Bruschetta
3 ripe tomatoes, chopped
2 bell peppers, diced
1 onion, diced
1 pound grassfed ground beef
Several stalks fresh basil, leaves stripped
Sourdough baguette
butter
salt and pepper to taste
olive oil
Fry ground beef with onion in large skillet, breaking up into small pieces as it cooks. Melt butter in a second skillet and slice baguette into one-inch thick rounds. Cook bread rounds in butter for two to three minutes on a side, just long enough to toast. When beef is nearly browned, add bell pepper, season with salt and pepper to taste and continue to cook for about three minutes. Turn stove off and add tomato and basil. Toss around and pile onto toasted bread rounds. Give the sandwiches a quick squirt of olive oil before serving.
We used heirloom tomatoes, green bell peppers, Vidalia onion and lemon basil. The lemon basil really brightened up the flavors. Delicious!
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
