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I never did catch the wing crazies going around. I mean really, they need a whole restaurant for buffalo wings? I tried them once. They were pretty unpleasant. Gooey sweet, painfully spicy and lacking in anything I’d call flavor. We’re pretty wimpy here. Bell peppers are about the only peppers we eat, even pepperocini is too hot for us.
But, my pastured poultry producer had a great sale on their wings and I just had to pick some up. These aren’t little grocery store wings, they include a nice chunk of breast meat (they call it breast bits) and I found one wing was plenty for me and the kids, the boys had two wings apiece and were plenty happy. They turned out just lovely, but next time I’ll adjust the recipe a tad.
Wings for Wimps
3 oranges, juiced
2 tablespoons naturally fermented soy sauce
1 tablespoon freshly ground peanut butter
1 teaspoon raw honey
2 teaspoons molasses
1 teaspoon rice wine vinegar
2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil
2 cloves garlic, finely minced
1/2 inch knob of ginger root, peeled and finely minced
10 pastured chicken wings with breast bits
Mix together thoroughly all the ingredients except the wings. Put wings in a glass baking dish and use mixture to marinate the wings overnight, covered in the refrigerator. Remove the wings from the refrigerator about an hour before cooking to allow the pan to warm up a bit. Bake 45 minutes at 325°, basting with the juice occasionally.
It turned out very well, but next time I think I will use the juice from 4 or 5 oranges, then after marinating, reduce it by boiling a few minutes first, and maybe add some grated orange peel too.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, this week hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
We picked up some local burdock root last week. I’m familiar with it from my herbal medicine study, which recommends burdock for clearing congestion in the circulatory, lymphatic, respiratory and urinary systems. But I was fascinated to read that it could be eaten raw or cooked as well!
Burdock gets its name from its burrs, which inspired the invention of Velcro, and “dock,” a name common to plants with a certain leaf shape. Because it is a taproot, it digs deeply into soil and brings up nutrients from deeper than shallow-rooted plants. Medicinally, burdock is used as a blood purifying agent, an excellent tonic for spring.
The first adventure came peeling the roots. I heard that scrubbing them was sufficient, but because they were narrow, I only managed to scrub my fingers. I tried a vegetable peeler, but the soft roots had too much “give.” The method I finally used was the “whittle” method. If you’ve ever had to sharpen a pencil without a mechanical sharpener, you are familiar with the whittle method.
I cut them into 2-inch lengths, just long enough to get a taste without committing to a lengthy string, and put them into cold water as they were peeled. I was thinking this might crisp them up, like a carrot, but as the water turned muddy (along with the creamy white roots) I did a little more research. A touch of vinegar or lemon juice keeps the root from browning, just like one would do with apple.
The taste of the root before soaking was very tannic, but once it came out of the water it was much less so. It was also very reminiscent of jicama. If you haven’t tried jicama, and can find it reasonably locally, you should, it’s yummy. We think it tastes like the love child of an apple and a potato! Burdock tasted much the same, but needed just a little more chewing than jicama. We had the first batch raw.
My next experiment was to cook the julienned roots. I cooked them very slowly in butter with some parsnips, here cut into rounds. They were very chewy, and the sweetness was much less pronounced.
My conclusion? If burdock grew wild here, it would be a great addition to a foraging menu. I don’t have garden space to commit to it, though, and we weren’t so taken with it that we will be purchasing it on a regular basis. It is a bit labor-intensive in preparation as well, making burdock root a rare treat instead of daily fare.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted this week by Cheeseslave.
ICK01-at244by-Anna Sattler on Flickr
Stop making that face. Do you want your face to freeze like that?
No, I’m not talking to you, I’m quoting my mother’s response to my face every time she said liver was planned for dinner. Mom* made liver no one could love. First she fried the onions. Then the liver hit the pan and didn’t come out until it was black through and through, curled up like a dessicated jellyfish and about as tasty as shoe leather. Just the smell of it cooking was enough to send us on bended knee to beg Daddy for a special trip to McDonalds.
Now, you gotta give me credit: I’ve made and enjoyed raw meat, beet kvass, beef tongue, all manner of sprouted, soaked, fermented things with odd rubbery-mushroomy-scobys floating on top. I’ve even made pate with chicken liver that was scrumptious. But evil, maroon, stomach-churning beef liver? EEK!
But, still it’s a powerhouse of a food. Few food sources can compete with liver in the nutrient density arena. If I could only find a way to cook it…
When Kimberly of Hartkeisonline came for dinner, she told me about her mom’s liver recipe. It went something like this:
Fry up a package of bacon, remove from pan. Fry a sliced onion or two in the bacon grease, add chicken livers that have first been dredged in flour with salt and pepper added. Fry until brown and crispy on the outside, still pink on the inside. Remove liver and onions from pan. Add slices of fried pineapple to the pan and fry both sides until browned. Serve fried pineapple with the liver and onions and squeeze fresh lemon juice on top of the liver.
The idea of pineapple with liver intrigued me. I mean, sure, liver and onions is classic. And there are few in our family who can contain themselves when bacon is frying. But sweet and tart pineapple (with all that great bromelain for digestion) alongside? I made a few little adjustments to the recipe and came up with Our Liver Experiment:
3 slices grassfed beef liver
4 organic lemons
1 pound uncured pastured bacon
1 whole organic pineapple
2 organic sweet onions, sliced into rings
3 tablespoons sprouted wheat flour
Juice three and a half of the lemons and pour over the liver slices in a shallow dish. Cover and refrigerate overnight. Turn partway through the marinating process if the liquid doesn’t cover the slices.
Slice the bacon into 1-inch wide pieces and fry until crisp. Remove from the pan and pour off (and reserve) most of the fat.
Slice the pineapple into half-inch thick rings, 
removing rind and core, 
and saute in bacon fat in the same pan over medium heat until just browned on both sides. 
Remove from pan.
Add back half of the reserved bacon fat and toss in the onion rings. 
Saute the onions until just browned and remove from pan.
Dry off the liver slices and dredge them in the sprouted wheat flour. 
Add all the remaining bacon fat and cook the liver just until browned on both sides. Plate the liver, topped with onion, pineapple and bacon. Pass with big smiles, the remaining lemon half for squeezing a tad of juice over and “YUM!” noises.
How did we like it? Well those of us who love liver (me) thought it was fantastic and had two pieces! Those of us who enjoy strongly flavored foods (Rose) said it was not bad at all! Those of us whose palates are less refined (Blair, Kate and Christy) ate three bites each, the required minimum, and begged off gracefully. The boys? Hubby was out of town and John was at work. Little do they know I saved them some…
*Not MY mother. MY mother is a gourmet cook and would NEVER overcook liver.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Kelly the Kitchen Kop
I’ve been making the Winter Root Soup recipe from Nourishing Traditions a couple times a month since the winter root vegetables became available at the Farmer’s Market. Hubby wasn’t thrilled, so I’ve been tweaking the recipe. I haven’t been able to get the flavor right, though. So today I tossed out the recipe and started from scratch.
First, I used roasted veggies that I had cooked last time I made a roast chicken. (I try to combine oven uses, and fill the oven to make use of the heat, rather than heating it up twice or three times.) Roasting the veggies instead of boiling them intensified and sweetened them. I used a different set of veggies, different seasonings, different just about everything! Hubby gave it a thumbs up, even though he does not like some of the ingredients on their own. Tip: if someone in your family is anti-beet, try using a golden beet. The tell-tale deep red won’t be there to clue anyone in to the sweet, mellow flavor they can’t quite put their finger on!
Roasted Winter Root Soup
5 large roasted organic carrots
2 roasted organic potatoes (I used small russets)
4 roasted golden beets
1 quart homemade chicken stock
1 orange
2 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1 tablespoon black walnut oil (optional)
fish sauce
Parmesan cheese
Puree the roasted vegetables and stock in a blender or with an immersion blender, warm gently in pot and thin with water if desired. Grate a tablespoon of orange peel into soup. Add vinegar and oil and continue heating until hot. Remove from heat and let cool a few minutes, then add the juice of the orange. Add a dash of fish sauce to each serving (it takes the place of salt and doesn’t taste fishy at all) and top with a grating of Parmesan cheese. Makes about two quarts of soup.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Cheeseslave.
O God, sir, here’s a dish I love not. I cannot endure my lady Tongue.
Clearly, Benedick from Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing is referring to the acerbic wit of Beatrice and not the tender delicacy we ate tonight! We’ve been branching out a bit in recent days, and tonight’s experiment was beef tongue.
Okay, it was a little unnerving to pick up the tongue from its package and see how much it looked like…a tongue! Tastebuds and all. I called Rose, my little scientist, to come examine it with me. She was enthralled!
I cooked it slowly for about two and a half hours with onion, celery and carrot. The skin turned a very unappealing gray, but peeled off easily. Under the skin was meat that separated into strings, rather like a skirt steak that’s been pulled apart with a fork. I took this meat and diced it and put it in a skillet with a cup of water, a half cup of apple cider vinegar and a teaspoon of Rapadura. The liquid boiled off and left the meat so incredibly delicious. Biting into the meat was like biting into a forty-dollar filet. I served it over noodles and the sweet/sour of the meat was a wonderful foil to the bitterness of Brussels sprouts cooked with cream and shallots.
And lest you think I’ve lost my mind, tongue is a fatty part of the meat, and a traditional food. Tongue sandwiches were popular during the Great Depression, when muscle meats were hard to come by and expensive. I paid about $8 for a grassfed beef tongue that weighed in at just less than two pounds.
I had to add some other meat to stretch the meal in the photo for guests, so you’ll see in the photo two distinct types of meat. The tongue meat is the lighter brown with fewer “lines.” By the way, for those of you who cook for the very young, very old or otherwise dentally challenged, tongue meat is very easily chewed.
So, try some tongue, as Psychic Lunch said in a recent Twitter post, “It’s the meat that licks you back!”
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
So, between the broken toe and the chicken pox, you can see we are eating a LOT of dark, leafy greens. I thought I’d share with you my very favorite recipe. It works just as well with collards, kale, spinach, mustard greens or anything else in the greens family, and leaves them slurpfully delicious!
Coconut Greens
1 pound organic dark, leafy greens of your choice
sea salt
2 tablespoons coconut oil
1 small organic yellow onion, diced
3/4 cup coconut milk
1 tablespoon lemon juice
pepper to taste
Bring a large pot of salted water to boil while you stem and roughly chop the greens. Toss the greens in and cook about 5 minutes and drain. Set aside. In the same pot, heat coconut oil over medium heat. Add onions and cook until softened and translucent, about 5-7 minutes. Add the reserved greens, coconut milk and lemon juice (I don’t measure this, I just squeeze half a lemon into the pot) stir well and simmer. The greens will be tender in about 5-7 minutes, but I like to let it cook until the coconut milk gets really thick and boiled down. Serve with the knowledge that you are feeding yourself some of the healthiest food on the planet!
I also like to make this by sauteeing the onions first, stemming and chopping the greens while they cook. I wait until they are chopped to wash them and toss them in the skillet with the onions. The water that adheres to them after washing is just enough for cooking, but you could also dry them and toss a tablespoon of homemade stock in the pan. Cooked covered on medium, they are ready for the next step in about 5 minutes. This method leaves the greens slightly firmer than boiling them, and the “green” flavor is slightly stronger. Another super-yummifying option is to substitute saved, strained bacon fat for the coconut oil (reduce the salt at the end). Oh man, is that good!
For another way to use kale that’s even more kid-friendly, check out my Green Smoothie recipe.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Cheeseslave.
I’ve been wanting to add more coconut oil to my diet for a while now. I cook with it almost exclusively and add it to the occasional smoothie. But from what I’ve seen from the literature, I need to start at about 2 tablespoons a day, and increase slowly up to about 5 to get the maximum health (and weight loss) benefit. I calculate I’m getting a good 1/2 tablespoon a day just from eating what I’ve cooked in it.
When it was time to put the Christmas decorations away for the year, I found the plastic mold from a box of Advent calendar chocolates hanging around. Although I like the flavor of coconut oil, it is difficult for me to eat plain because the texture just doesn’t feel right. One thing I can always eat plain, though, is butter! Yum! So, I melted equal parts of butter and coconut oil, washed up the mold and poured the delectable solution into the little hearts. Isn’t it cute? Each heart holds about 1/2 a tablespoonful of mixture. Can I eat two of these a couple times a day? Oh yes, I certainly can!
I’m still considering going grain-free. Anna commented on my Low Carbing It post with some really fascinating info that I’ve been researching. The more I study this issue, the more I think I need to cut out the grains. Totally at first, at the very least for a few weeks. But I’m pretty chicken about asking my family to go down that road with me. Funny, I didn’t think twice about offering them a raw meat meal, but a meal without bread just seems beyond the pale.
So, I’ll start with my coconut oil treats and see what happens.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted this week by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
Earlier this week I finally mastered hollandaise sauce. I was so excited that I tried Bearnaise sauce. Oh, it broke horribly, turning into solid yellow gunk in floating fat, but even then I was able to save it, thanks to a tip I read in Ratio. I added just a few drops of cold water and boom, it re-emulsified beautifully. I got a kick out of all the whisking involved. It really felt like I was “cooking” not just “reheating” and I giggled about all the calories I was burning off that would allow me a double portion of the sauce on my fish!
Hubby, a fan of neither lentils nor salmon, really liked this dish and I thought it was yummy! I like to sprout legumes so they are very easily digested and the phytic acid in them is broken down. Once sprouted, legumes take even less time to cook. This meal was on the table in less than 30 minutes. I know it looks like a big, hairy deal, but it went very quickly and the sauce was exciting to make!
Salmon on Sprouted Lentils
2 cups lentils
salmon filet
1 medium shallot, minced
1 ounce dry white wine
1 ounce white-wine vinegar
pinch freshly ground black pepper
1 tablespoon dried tarragon
Salt to taste
5 oz. unsalted pasture butter
2 small egg yolks
1 1/2 tablespoons water
Three days before serving, set two cups of lentils to soak overnight in body-temperature water. The next morning, pour off the water and lay the lentils out in a single layer on a paper towel. I put mine inside a colander for easy rinsing, but you could also lay them in a glass bowl. Twice a day, rinse the lentils and return them to their towel or bowl and cover them. On the third day they should have sprouts about a half inch long and that is the perfect length for eating.
Preheat oven to 350°. Bring two cups of stock and two cups of water to boil and skim. Add sprouted lentils, turn down the heat to simmer and cover. Let lentils cook until tender, about 20 minutes, drain and keep warm.
While the lentils cook, place your salmon filet skin side down on a baking pan. Dot with butter and squeeze lemon juice over. Bake 15 minutes, or until the fish is just opaque and flakes easily with a fork.
Bring water to simmering in the bottom of a double-boiler.
Combine the shallots, wine, vinegar, pepper, and tarragon in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and simmer over medium high until reduced by half (you’ll have about one tablespoon of liquid left.) Strain the solids out of the reduction and reserve the liquid.
In the same saucepan, melt the butter. Simmer it rapidly for at least 10 minutes. The water in the butter will evaporate and the milk solids will clump together. Let the melted butter sit for a few minutes so the solids will fall to the bottom. Pour the melted butter through a cheesecloth-lined strainer to save just the ghee and toss the solids.
Put the egg yolks and water in the top of the double boiler. Off the heat, whisk the eggs and water for 30 seconds, whipping in lots of air. Put the top on the bottom of the double boiler and cook over very low heat, whisking constantly and scraping the bowl until thick and fluffy. When the whisk leaves tracks that hold for a few seconds, take it off the heat and whisk rapidly for 30 seconds to cool it slightly. Add the clarified butter a very little at a time, whisking constantly. Be sure the butter isn’t too hot or it will break the emulsion into yellow goo and floating butter. (If you do, remember the cold water trick – a couple drops will do the trick.)
Whisk in a little of the reduction and taste. Add as much of the reduction as suits your taste. Season with salt and pepper.
Scoop lentils onto serving plates, top with salmon and drizzle sauce over the top. Serves four generously or six sparingly.
Warm, smoky, cheesy Baked Potato Soup!
Lots of potatoes in storage, a cold, blowing wind and snow on the ground. Time for Baked Potato Soup! Back when we ate from boxes and cans, the chunky version was one of our favorites. But since it’s particularly easy to make if you have leftover baked potatoes, why not drop a few extra in the oven next time it’s on. It’s not hard to personalize, just close your eyes and picture a big, fluffy, steaming baked potato. What do you like on it? Butter? Sour cream? Green onions? Bacon? Cheese? Everything? That’s what you want in your soup!
Baked Potato Soup
8 to 10 slices bacon, diced
4 tablespoons butter
1/2 cup diced celery
1 cup diced onion
8 green onions, thinly sliced
3 tablespoons potato starch (or cornstarch, arrowroot, etc.)
3 cups chicken stock
2 cups raw cream
4 large baking potatoes, baked, peeled, and diced
sea salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
8 ounces creme fraiche
8 ounces shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
Sliced green onion for garnish, optional
In a Dutch oven or large kettle over medium heat, cook the bacon until crisp. Drain bacon on paper towels and pour off all but 2 tablespoons of the fat (save it, it’s great for cooking with!) To the bacon fat in the pan, add the butter, chopped onion, and celery. Cook, stirring, until vegetables are tender. Stir in the sliced green onion. In a small bowl, whisk together the potato starch with a few tablespoons of your cold chicken broth, or shake in a jar until the lumps are dissolved. Stir in remaining chicken broth then add the chicken broth with the potato starch and stir well. Cover and cook until the soup is thickened and vegetables are very tender, stirring frequently. Stir in the diced potatoes, salt, pepper, and cheese. Continue cooking over low heat until the cheese is melted and the soup is hot. Use an immersion blender or regular blende to puree the soup until it is smooth. Remove from heat, add cream and mix in thoroughly. Add creme fraiche just before serving, and garnish with bacon and extra sliced green onion, if desired. Serves 8 shivering loved ones.
I didn’t add the creme fraiche to the pot, but to individual servings after they were ladled into bowls. Not everyone in my family enjoys a good bowl of soup, so I wanted the leftovers to be reheatable without losing the great enzyme content of the creme fraiche.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesdays, hosted today by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
I’m guest blogging at Nourished Kitchen today while Jenny takes a long walk on a sunny beach. Not jealous. Nope.
Come visit and read about my six favorite local winter salads, including this one:
