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I love berry season. It is way too short, in my book. Someday I definitely want several berry bushes in my yard both for us and for the lovely birds they attract! Right now, where I live, blueberries are in season. I try to buy enough blueberries to dry and keep on hand all year, but the big baskets we get at the farmer’s market rarely get as far as the dehydrator before they get eaten!
At only 81 calories a cup, blueberries are relatively low in calories for the flavor punch they pack. They also have anthocyanins, which provide their color. Anthocyanins work together with vitamin C to neutralize free radical damage to your tissues and work with your body to repair collagen for healthy skin and connective tissues. Unfortunately, anthocyanins don’t survive the canning process, so be sure to freeze or dry (at low heat) extra berries. Blueberries have even more antioxidant action than red wine, so the teetotalers among us needn’t feel shortchanged!
Of course, berries are delicious in pancakes and muffins, but can turn your food strange colors when they are cooked. In acids (lemon juice, vinegar) they can turn reddish. In base combinations (baking soda), they can turn an even darker blue. If your muffin batter has too much baking soda, the blueberries will turn the batter greenish blue! But, to preserve the vitamin C in the berries and keep the B vitamins from leaching out, it’s best to eat these gems raw. Wash berries immediately before eating to protect them from spoilage.
We use dried blueberries to combat diarrhea and urinary tract infections. A tea of a few teaspoons of dried blueberries steeped in boiling water can be enjoyed a couple times a day. The tannins in the blueberries stop diarrhea very effectively, and the acids in the berries will keep bacteria from adhering to the urinary tract and colon (much like cranberry juice, but tastier!) There has been some research indicating one of the bacteria blueberries repel particularly well is our old nemesis, E. Coli.
Blueberries are a classic pairing with peaches, which are just coming into season here. I made this salad for lunch the other day. It combines fresh peaches with chicken leftover from making stock, some standard salad ingredients and is topped with blueberries. The dressing complements the fresh flavors with cinnamon and lemon.
Peachy Chicken Salad
serves 6 as a main course salad
1 head organic green leaf lettuce
1 thinly organic red onion
2 small organic cucumbers
3 ripe organic peaches
4 cups cooked pastured chicken
1 1/2 cups organic blueberries
For dressing:
juice of 3 organic lemons
rind of 1 organic lemon, grated
1/2 cup extra virgin organic olive oil
1 teaspoon flax oil
1 teaspoon dijon mustard
2 teaspoons organic cinnamon
1/4 cup creme fraiche
Combine the dressing ingredients in a pint jar, screw the lid on tightly and shake to combine. Set aside.
Wash all fruits and vegetables and chop small, leaving blueberries whole. Chop chicken into small pieces. Toss all fruits and veggies together in a bowl with chicken except blueberries. Serve salad, stream dressing over and top with blueberries.
A word on organic ingredients: Blueberries and peaches are on the Environmental Working Group’s Dirty Dozen list, onions are on the clean fifteen. I would not use the rind of a non-organic lemon for eating.
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop. Hey, lookie there…blueberries!
When the budget is maxed out, I have three choices when it comes to serving meat: buy grocery store meat, go meatless or stretch my grassfed meat. I believe too strongly in the importance of the good fats, CLA and protein of grassfed meat to do without. We do have many meatless meals, but once a day, I think a small portion of meat is important. I can’t bring myself to buy meat from the grocery store anymore. The Food, Inc. quote has become fact for me: If people knew where their food came from, they wouldn’t eat it.
So, stretching our lovely, delicious, grassfed meat we buy is a high priority for me. Most cooks and cookbooks recommend a quarter pound of uncooked beef per person. In our house, we aim for half that amount several times a week. One of the ways I’ve found to stretch a piece of meat is the stir fry. Here’s a very basic guideline, a recipe and some options:
Stir Fry for Four
1/2 pound meat, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tablespoon each naturally fermented soy sauce and cooking sherry
1 large onion, cut in half from root to stem and sliced
1 pound raw vegetables, cut into bite-sized pieces
1 tablespoon each minced garlic and ginger
2 teaspoons arrowroot powder
3 tablespoons homemade stock
3 tablespoons coconut oil
Soaked or germinated brown rice, cooked
The basic procedure is very simple. Cut up all your veggies and meats and have them ready before beginning. Heat a large skillet on high heat. Toss the meat in a bowl with soy sauce and sherry. Mix the arrowroot with the stock in a small bowl. By now the pan is really hot, so add 2 tablespoons of coconut oil and half the meat. You want to keep it moving in the pan for about 2 to 3 minutes, until it is just barely cooked through. Remove that batch of meat and add the other half. When that batch is done, remove it and add the last tablespoon of coconut oil to the pan with the onions. Stir around a minute, then toss in the ginger and the vegetable. Stir around for about two minutes and add the garlic. Return the meat to the pan. Stir the arrowroot mixture and add to the pan, stirring around until thickened and glossy. Serve immediately over hot cooked rice.
We like to use these meats:
- scallops
- shrimp
- pork tenderloin
- beef
- chicken
The vegetable choices are nearly endless, but some good ones are:
- asparagus – pencil thin to cook quickly and not be tough
- cabbage
- carrots – shredded or sliced very thinly
- celery
- green beans – those tiny skinny ones cook just right in a stir fry
- mushrooms – any kind. White ones go well with chicken, portobello with beef, etc. I add these with the arrowroot so they don’t lose too much consistency.
- bell peppers – these add color to the finished dish
- fresh pineapple – adds a lot of sweetness, so I’ll add a pinch of red pepper to the dish for balance
- sugar snap peas
- summer squash
- broccoli
I like to match the stock for the sauce with the meat I’m using. This is one great reason to store at least some of your frozen homemade stock in ice cube form!
I also like to make flavoring sauces to add to the stir fry. I add these with the cornstarch and stock near the end to add a little more flavor to the dish. For example:
Sweet and Sour Sauce
1/4 cup homemade stock
2 tablespoons naturally fermented soy sauce
2 tablespoons vinegar (cider, balsamic or wine vinegar is nice, my new favorite is coconut vinegar)
1 tablespoon honey
1/2 teaspoon red pepper flakes
Citrus Sauce
1/4 cup freshly squeezed orange juice
1 teaspoon lemon zest (or preserved lemon rind)
1/4 cup homemade stock
1 tablespoon naturally fermented soy sauce
1 tablespoon honey
Putting together different combinations of meat, vegetable and sauce make for an incredible amount of variety.
This post is part of the Real Food Wednesday blog carnival hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
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.
College Inn Culinary Broth by urbanbohemian on Flickr
Another food recall, this time for MSG-Free Chicken Stock that isn’t MSG-Free. For people sensitive to MSG, this is so frustrating. I was around in the 1970′s and 80′s when labelling laws were prompted many heated discussions. Citizens asked their government to standardize labels so that the information on them would be readable, comparable and trustworthy. Here we are 25 years later and we are still battling with food providers to put the food in the can that is listed on the label and to put the words on the label that accurately describe what’s in the can.
Here’s a better option. Buy a whole pastured chicken, a few stalks of celery, a couple onions and carrots and make your own. It takes a couple minutes and is superior to the mass-produced stuff available that you’ll never go back.
Put the chicken in the pot. Whole. Skin, bones, the whole shebang. If your chicken came with a liver, heart or other pieces and you don’t want to save those for other uses, toss them in there too. Cover the chicken with water and toss in a tablespoon of vinegar. Cover the pot and cook for 2 days on low. I use my oven set to 170°, but you can use a crockpot if yours is large enough. On day three, add celery, carrots and onion. Cook another 20 hours or so. Toss in a few stems of parsley for the last hour. Drain stock and freeze in quart (or pint, depending on your family size) glass jars.
You can use the meat for cooking, but check out the bones before you toss them. The connective tissue at the top of the legs, for example, should be gone. It’s dissolved in the broth, held in suspension waiting to be consumed. It will be used by your body to create new connective tissue for you. You don’t need collagen injections, just this collagen-rich broth! Get off the glucosamine pills and get yours in your diet!
Use your broth to replace water when cooking rice, making soups and sauces, or even just a cup in the afternoon instead of coffee. Delicious, health-promoting and MSG-Free, for real!
We had a perfectly charming Dutch Puff for breakfast. I started yesterday by soaking the flour.
Dutch Puff
2 cups freshly ground whole wheat flour
2 cups filtered water
2 tablespoons whey (or yogurt, kefir, or cultured milk)
8 eggs
Soak flour in water with whey 12-24 hours. In the morning, preheat oven to 425°, butter a 9×13 pyrex baking dish and put it in the oven to heat up. Add 8 raw eggs to the flour and beat well. Pour into sizzling hot baking dish and bake 20 minutes. This will puff up, but will fall as it cools. Serve with butter, milk and maple syrup.
This is just your base and pretty bland. You can add dried fruits, nuts, whatever suits your taste. Remember to heat the dish in the oven, that keeps the puff from sticking.
I started dinner when I took the Dutch Puff out of the oven by letting the oven cool down, then putting a bunch of potatoes in at 250° for two hours. (Note to self: two hours was only enough for the smallest baking potatoes.) Before I started the rest of dinner last night, I scooped and mashed the innerds of five of the potatoes with butter, a dot of kefir, some chopped, cooked natural bacon and some raw cheddar cheese. I stuffed the potato skins with this mixture and topped them with a little more cheese and set them in 150° oven to melt the cheese and stay warm. For my allergic daughter, I mixed the “tater guts” with some rice milk and bacon.
Our chicken tonight was simple breasts, dunked in egg, dredged in breadcrumbs and fried up in olive oil. I didn’t pound them first, so they took about 7 minutes a side. When I turned the last batch, I put some asparagus in about an inch of boiling, salted water and covered it. After five minutes, I drained it well and tossed them with some clarified butter. We passed a wedge of parmesan cheese to grate over the top of the asparagus. The kids have always preferred the green shaker cheese, but since it’s not in the house anymore, they are forced to eat the real stuff. Sneaky, ain’t I? Everyone was really thrilled with dinner, and no one even asked about dessert. Perhaps I’m making progress.
As I was doing dinner dishes, I slipped on some water on the floor (Note to self: When it’s time to replace that floor, look for something that’s not so slippery when it’s wet!) and tweaked my knee a little. So much for dancing tonight. Hubby took the older ones, leaving me home with the ones still recovering from a cold. I spent the evening making menus and a shopping list for the next week, planning our Oscar party and playing my favorite video game.
I was out of bed at a good, early hour and made scrambled eggs. I had a tomato that I hadn’t planned for another use, and some leftover green onions, so I chopped those up to add. Those of us who don’t have problems with milk tossed a small handful of shredded cheddar on top of our eggs. We enjoyed some 7 sprouted grain toast with our eggs. I love coconut oil on toast!
For lunch, I sauteed some mushrooms and shallots in the skimmed fat from a jar of homemade chicken stock. When they were softened and starting to turn golden, I tossed in a little white wine and a cup of stock and let it reduce some while I chopped up some leftover roasted chicken. I added the chicken and scooped out youngest’s serving before adding some cream to the sauce for the rest of us. Served over soaked and cooked rice it was just right for lunch.
I started some breadsticks in the bread machine to have with dinner right after lunch. I used the flour I’d soaked the other day to use in pancakes. I had about 3 cups that had been soaked in a little more than a cup of water. I threw that in the bread machine with 2 teaspoons of yeast, 2 tablespoons of coconut oil (my machine warms the ingredients with the first mix, so this will melt gently and be incorporated well without my having to melt it first and take the chance of scalding the yeast) and a pinch of sea salt. I set it on the “dough” setting and let it do its thing. When the machine beeped its “all done” sound, I took the dough out and shaped it into long twists. They went on a buttered cookie sheet in the turned-off oven to rise, which took about 2 hours. Just before baking them, I brushed them with melted butter and sprinkled on some garlic powder (and parmesan for the un-allergic). They didn’t take long to bake, about 10 minutes at 400° and they were so, so yummy.
A couple days ago I set some red lentils to soak in a mason jar on the counter. When I realized I wouldn’t use them the next day, I set them to sprout. The sprouts on them were about 1/4 inch long tonight, just right for cooking, so I made lentil soup. It was orange and beautiful and didn’t have the earthy flavor of brown lentils, but a bright, herbal taste.
Sunshine Lentil Soup
1 onion, peeled and sliced
3 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 tablespoon clarified butter
1 tablespoon coconut oil
1 quart beef stock
1 cup (presoaking measure) red lentils, soaked and sprouted
thyme sprigs
1/2 lemon, juiced
Kefir, to pass at the table
Cook onions and carrots in butter and coconut oil slowly for about 20 minutes. Add stock and lentils and bring to a boil, skimming off the foam. Reduce heat, add thyme and cover. Simmer 15-20 minutes until lentils are tender. Remove thyme and blend with stick blender. Add lemon juice and sea salt to taste. Pass kefir at the table to add to soup.
This post is part of the Pennywise Platter Thursday blog carnival hosted by The Nourishing Gourmet.
Mmm, the warm, buttery smell of roasting pecans is filling my kitchen. It’s a good thing, too, because I polished off my last Pepsi with lunch. It’s my intention to not purchase any more soda for home consumption. I need to cut back pretty drastically on my sugar consumption, and soda is the best place to start. I never really meant to start that bad, addicting habit again anyway.
I started out early this morning by setting 8 chicken breasts to soak in an orange juice/lemon juice/fresh garlic/fresh ginger marinade. For dinner I poured off and reduced the marinade while the breasts cooked and served it all with steamed fresh broccoli. The rice I soaked yesterday cooked, covered at the lowest possible heat for about 45 minutes during lunch. To two cups of it, I added a chopped red and green pepper, some chopped green onion and raisins, tossed in half of the fresh (and very, very not local) pineapple on the counter, and mixed it all up with some evoo and apple cider vinegar to serve next to the chicken. It won’t take long to make or create a lot of dirty dishes, which is good news because on Fridays we go dancing!
Early in the day, I started making Chicken Stock. I broke the wings and legs off a whole chicken, broke the wing bones and put the whole chicken in a stockpot. I covered the chicken plus an inch with cold water and let it set for about twenty minutes before turning the heat on. I brought it to a fast boil, skimmed off the flotsam, then turned it down to a very slow simmer and covered it. It will sit on the stove, simmering, for the next 24 hours. Before I left the kitchen, I cut up some local, tart organic Granny Smith apples and put them in the slow cooker for applesauce. I started the Bavarian Cream before I started the lunch dishes. After dinner I added a couple large-cut carrots and quartered onions to the stockpot.
My middle daughter and I are great fans of Wild Pacific Salmon. It reminds us of Oregon, which we both would like to call home. Our first Fish Tuesday featured some Wild Pacific Salmon I found at my grocery store at a wonderful price. While not a local ingredient, it was delicious and healthy. I made Buerre Blanc to serve over the fish, not only as a delicious sauce, but to educate dearest Hubby. He is preparing to be the next Ken Jennings on Jeopardy and food is a category he needs a little experience with. What better way to learn about food than enjoying it? I made some homemade cinnamon applesauce to serve with the fish, and some organic frozen peas, since peas and applesauce seem to “go with” fish in our house. Dessert was a very light Bavarian Cream.
The fish was surprisingly well-received, even one of my no-fish-please kids said it wasn’t awful! Hubby said I could make him homemade applesauce any time I wanted to, which is nice to hear. There were some complaints about the Bavarian Cream, as I used very little sweetening in it. But I thought it was just sweet enough to cleanse the palate without knocking you over. I used the following recipes directly from “Nourishing Traditions” and will not reprint them here:
Baked Salmon NT page 260
Buerre Blanc NT page 153
Applesauce NT page 541
I adapted the Bavarian Cream to our tastes, and the final recipe turned out thus:
Bavarian Cream
1 packet gelatin
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup maple syrup
4 eggs, separated
1 tablespoon vanilla extract
1/2 cup cocoa powder
pinch of sea salt
2 cups heavy cream
Place water in small saucepan over very low heat. Sprinkle gelatin on top, stir once and allow to melt slowly. Meanwhile, place egg yolks, cocoa, syrup and vanilla in bowl and mix with hand mixer for about a minute. Slowly stream in gelatin mixture while the blender is running, incorporate then place bowl in refrigerator. In spotlessly clean bowl with spotlessly clean beaters, beat egg whites with salt until stiff. Put that bowl in fridge, and remix first bowl for a second or two and return to fridge. In a third spotlessly clean bowl with spotlessly clean beaters, whip cream. Gently fold cream into the egg yolk mixture, then gently fold egg whites in as well. Cover and refrigerate at least one hour.
