There’s a cold bug making its way through the family. Well, some of the family. Those of us who have been taking our cod liver oil and elderberry syrup daily are not experiencing any symptoms at all. Ah, but those who balk have got it good. This year’s bug starts with a dry cough and a whopper of a headache just before the nasal drainage sets in for days and days.

There are some good food remedies for a cold in this recipe. Garlic and onion strengthen the system and can help your body keep a virus from developing into secondary infections. Strong spice like cumin can help clear the sinuses. Homemade bone broth, rich in flavor and nutrition provide a sickly body the strength it needs to heal. And lard is very high in vitamin D, which both helps the body heal and avoid viruses.

I’m not a fanatic about the whole “Meatless Monday” movement. But I do like to make a meatless dinner once a week. It keeps the budget on an even keel. Sickies in the house like meatless meals as well, for they don’t tax the digestion as much as rich meats do.

I made this Congri, a Cuban Black Beans and Rice meal, this week. I made it strong on purpose. You might want to take the spices a little easier, tasting as you go. A few notes after the recipe on some variations.

Congri (Cuban Black Beans and Rice)

2 cups cooked black beans
2 cups cooked brown rice
1/2 cup homemade chicken stock
2 teaspoons oregano
2 tablespoons cumin
sea salt and pepper to taste
2 tablespoons lard
1 large onion
1 cup chopped frozen bell pepper
4 cloves garlic, minced finely

Warm the beans and rice in chicken stock and spices over low heat. While it heats, separately melt the lard in a medium frying pan. Add the chopped onion and allow to soften, about 10 minutes. Add the bell pepper and garlic when the onion is nearly done and cook for about 2 minutes. Add the cooked onion mixture to the beans and rice and serve.

If you have days to plan this meal, your healthiest option is to sprout the beans and germinate the rice before cooking both in stock. If you have only hours, cooking the beans and rice in stock from dried works fine. If you have leftover rice in the fridge or freezer and feel a bug coming on, you can still make this with canned beans, but please rinse the beans thoroughly first.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop. No balker, she!

Swedish Meatballs

2 tablespoons whole raw milk
4 pieces sourdough bread, dried
1/2 pound grassfed ground beef
1/2 pound pastured ground pork
1/2 pound grassfed ground lamb
1 onion, peeled and finely chopped
1 pastured egg, beaten
sea salt, freshly ground pepper and nutmeg to taste
6 tablespoons butter, lard or tallow
6 tablespoons sprouted wheat flour (or regular wheat flour)
1 cup whole raw milk
whole cream

Whiz dried bread in blender until it becomes crumbs. Pour into large mixing bowl. Pour 2 tablespoons milk over the crumbs and allow the crumbs to soak it up. Add meats, onion, egg and seasonings to meat and mix with your hands until well incorporated. Form into meatballs about an inch in diameter.

Heat butter, lard or tallow over medium heat and cook meatballs, turning frequently, for about 15 minutes until well browned all over. Remove the meatballs to a platter and keep warm.

Add flour to the drippings in the pan and allow the flour to soak up the juices and brown slightly while stirring constantly. Whisk in the cup of milk gradually, allowing to thicken between additions. Season sauce with additional nutmeg, if desired. Thin sauce with whole cream, if needed. Return meatballs to the pan to warm, basting with the gravy. Serve over cooked noodles.

This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.

I did two things differently than the original recipe. The first was to sprout the lentils. Just about any grain or legume can be sprouted, and it is well worth the extra step for the increased nutrition you’ll reap! Lentils on their own have a very good protein profile, deficient in just two amino acids, and these two are boosted greatly by sprouting. The other thing I changed was to cook the lentils in homemade chicken stock rather than water. I work hard to get stock into as many meals as possible here because of its tremendous health benefits.

I topped the salad off with some ricotta cheese I had leftover in the fridge. Feta would have been better, but ricotta’s what I had.

A Tuesday Twister post, at Gnowfglins!

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.

Featured on the Two for Tuesdays Recipe Blog Hop.

The Long, Albino Carrot thing

I’m glad I did! I scraped them, like you would a carrot, and julienned it, like you would a carrot, and sauteed them slowly in butter, like you would a carrot. And they tasted…not unlike carrots! There was a definite carrot flavor in there, but it was tempered with a lovely anise-like licorice flavor. This root veggie will be a welcome addition to our winter local fare.

Sauteeing gently in butter

Okay, so the idea of planning a category of food a day is a good one, but sometimes life intervenes. For example, this weekend I was straightening up my food storage area in the garage with Christy. Our garage stays a pretty even temperature year-round, probably because it is underground on three sides. I found some dried white beans as I was straightening a shelf and handed them to Christy saying, “Here, take these upstairs to the kitchen. I’m going to soak them for baked beans later this week.” I guess I was mumbling, or thinking out loud or something, because she proceeded to bring the beans up and soak them herself! I didn’t notice what was in the bowl (she covered it just like she’s seen me do) until I got out the soaked flour for today’s pancakes.

Pancakes for breakfast are such a mixed blessing. I don’t like making pancakes for breakfast because it can take a whole hour to cook as many as I need for my family. Someday I’d like to find a gigantic cast-iron griddle that will work on my electric stovetop, but I’ll bet it’s something I’d have to invent. I like making pancakes for breakfast because it gives me a whole hour standing at the stove to do prep for other meals between flips. I boiled eggs for egg salad, flip; I checked on my fermenting foods in the cupboard, flip; I rinsed my sprouting wheat berries and sunflower seeds, flip; I chopped and sauteed a couple onions and garlic cloves, flip, to which I added the drained soaked beans and got it boiling, flip. I even managed to do the dishes between flips! After everyone had all the pancakes they wanted, I put the leftovers on a cookie sheet in a 150° oven until they were crispy, which took about two hours.

I added some tomato paste, soy sauce, maple syrup, molasses, apple cider vinegar, red pepper flakes and dry mustard to the beans and scooped it into my slow cooker. It cooked away on High until dinner. They were good but something was…missing. Hm. I’ll have to think on that. I’ve never been able to make baked beans like my mother’s, partly because she uses white sugar and brown sugar and molasses and maple syrup and that’s just way too much for me. Don’t get me wrong, they are wicked good, but it kind of takes the health benefits away from the beans to drown them in that much sugar.

The crispy cakes went over well with all but John, who turned up his nose at the idea of pancakes for snack. Christy said, “It’s like having honey on a spoon, then eating the spoon!” Rose ate four of them, but not with honey, with blackberry fruit-only preserves. John has put in a request for scrambled eggs with cheese and toast for breakfast. That with a cup of his special eggnog should give him a really good start on the day tomorrow. I think I’ll go grate that cheese tonight, though, for safety’s sake!

We’re trying to get more veggies in our diet. To help that along, I am trying to serve at least two vegetables at each dinner meal, and devote one day to meatless (but not animal-fat-less) meals per week. I started this recipe several days ago by soaking a pound of black beans in water to which a little kefir was added. I left the beans at room temp for 24 hours. Now I’ve heard that some people have trouble getting beans to cook to the soft “done” stage soaking in cultured milks, but we didn’t have that problem. I don’t know if it was because we used mostly water with a little kefir for soaking (to accommodate milk allergies) or because I got stuck in traffic and the beans cooked for four hours instead of two! But they cooked up soft and delicious.

We went out in the afternoon and didn’t get home until right before dinner, so I wanted to just throw something together fast. I’m glad I had those black beans ready! In one serving bowl, I tossed together three tomatoes, a half bunch of cilantro and half an onion, all chopped into smallish pieces. I juiced three lemons and tossed the juice of two of them with the veggies. I took the other lemon’s juice and stirred it into a mashed avocado in another serving bowl. That all set while I fried a bunch of whole wheat tortillas in coconut oil and warmed the beans in a pan. Then it was time to call everyone to the kitchen where they assembled their tostados buffet-style.

Turns out I was the only one to eat the guacamole, but that’s fine with me, I love the stuff! The salsa recipe was something I asked about at Baja Fresh. They told me what was in it and I couldn’t believe it was that simple. I don’t mind onion, but spicy just isn’t my thing, so regular salsa is just not something I’m interested in.

Oh, the other half bunch of cilantro? It didn’t go to waste. My two cavies (guinea pigs) loved it!