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I am, at several points of any day, lazy, busy and distracted.
I’ve been meaning to try making ketchup, but my family has a favorite brand and doesn’t like me messing with it. So, even if I went to the trouble to make it, they probably wouldn’t eat it. Eating food that has been cultured is very beneficial to health, though, so when I saw this fermented salsa idea on the Cheeseslave blog, I kind of ran with it.
You can add probiotics to foods you eat everyday without having to think about it. Your kids won’t have to develop a taste for sauerkraut, your husband won’t have to wrinkle his nose and suffer through kombucha, you won’t get a case of newbie panic or have to learn difficult new cooking methods to get started. Ready?
Go to your refrigerator. Got ketchup? Mustard? Salsa, maybe, or guacamole? Ranch dressing? Barbeque sauce? Pick one that you’ll be using in a meal about two or three days from now. Pour it out into a bowl and put the empty bottle back in the fridge. Add a tablespoon of whey for each cup of condiment and stir. Cover with plastic wrap (or a towel secured with a plate for my plastic-free friends.) Leave on the counter at room temperature for 24 hours. Scoop the condiment back into the jar or bottle and put back in the fridge. Done.
If you have some pickles in your fridge, you can pour out the vinegar/sugar solution they are sitting in and add water and whey to cover them. Dilute to a tablespoon of whey per cup of water and leave them out for 24 hours as well. The flavor won’t leech out, but you’ll end up with a probiotic pickle!
I’ve really gone bananas with this method and have cultured everything I can find in my fridge! There is no difference in flavor, but a huge difference in the healthfulness of my condiments. While the sauce is fermenting, good bacteria are growing, eating excess sugar and leaving behind a bounty of probiotics to feed your intestinal tract. Vitamins C and K are being created and made easily assimilated.
Other than a slight reduction in sugar content, there’s not really any point in culturing things like spaghetti sauce that will be heated before eating as heating kills the good bacteria.
Where to get whey? The #1 gold standard whey comes from raw milk yogurt, hung in a cheesecloth bag overnight over a bowl. The whey collects in the bowl while the yogurt becomes thick like cream cheese. We call the solids yo-cheese. Here’s a post I did with a yo-cheese recipe and use. Raw milk yogurt is very easy to make, some types of cultures don’t even need the milk to be heated first! Here’s a great source of information and cultures. (I don’t get any remuneration for the link, it’s just a source I trust.)
The second best source of milk is from raw milk, allowed to stand for a couple days at room temperature until it separates. The “curds” are the milk solids and the nearly clear “whey” is the liquid that drains from them.
If you don’t make your own yogurt or have access to raw milk, a good enough whey can be made from storebought plain organic yogurt. Check the ingredients carefully and make sure there are no colors, flavors or other things listed. You just want organic milk and cultures. Then, make yo-cheese and use the whey for culturing.
After the whey has been separated, it keeps in the refrigerator for about a month. If I haven’t used it all by then, I’ll freeze it in ice cube trays and store it, covered, in the freezer. The healthy bacteria will survive freezing just fine.
Enjoy!
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, 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.
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.
Slurp!
I found a variety of cucumber that grows well in containers. It’s called Little Leaf and it’s been great. We don’t eat a lot of pickles, but I do like them occasionally. I started eight seeds and selected them down to just one plant. It has been very hardy and produced one pickle-sized cucumber every day for weeks. The smaller leaves make it easy to see the fruit and it has been growing on a six foot stick I’ve stuck next to it (poor man’s trellis) quite happily.
I used the basic lacto-fermenting recipe to make these different varieties (left to right in the photo above):
Dill Garlic slices – Fermented with fresh dill and quartered garlic cloves
Lemon slices – Fermented with lemon basil, lemon thyme and some preserved lemon peel
Tzatziki slices – Fermented with mint, garlic and dill
Sweet Dill spears – Fermented with dill, then a tiny pinch of sucanat before refrigerating
The sweet dill spears were a request from my hubby. He’s not a big pickle eater and I figured a pinch of sweet would encourage him to eat these healthy, probiotic pickles!
I don’t like to can my pickles and kill all the good bacteria in them with the heat of canning, so this is definitely a shorter-term storage solution for the summer’s cucumber bounty.
Lacto-Fermented Pickles
The procedure is almost too simple to post. Slice the cucumbers into the desired shape and put them in a small canning jar, a few slices at a time. After each layer, sprinkle on a pinch of sea salt and any desired herbs. The entire 2-cup jar takes a little more than two teaspoons of salt. Keep layering until the jar is full.
Cover the jar with a piece of cloth or paper towel and leave at room temperature for an hour or two. The cucumbers will begin to weep out their natural juices. Push down gently but firmly on the pickles with a pounder (I use a wooden spoon) until the juices almost cover the pickles. Add a tablespoon of homemade whey if you have it, water if you don’t. You want the liquid to come up over the top of the cucumbers. Cover again with cloth or paper towel held on with a rubber band.
Now the hard part: wait. Somehow, some way, find the strength to ignore your pickles for three days. At the end of three days, cover them securely and refrigerate.
Tzatziki Salad Condiment
1 cups homemade yogurt
1/4 cup tzatziki pickles, chopped
pepper
Hang yogurt for several hours to let the whey drain out and make yogurt cheese. Scrape the cheese into a bowl and add pickles and just a little pepper. Stir well. Delicious with lamb.
This post is part of Tuesday Twister, hosted by Gnowfglins.
The kombucha was done brewing but not yet cold, and the 100° weather was drying me out faster than a swimsuit hung in the sun. I longed for a sip of sweet, tart, tangy elixir to both cool me off and help my body recover from too long in the heat. So, I poured a jar of plain kombucha and grabbed the ice cube tray. Someone put it away empty again, one of the perils of living in a house with other humans, I suppose.
Then the bag of strawberry cubes caught my eye. Fruit I’d juiced and frozen in a spare ice cube tray was sitting there, cold and sweet and ready to drop in my drink! I grabbed one and dropped it in my drinking jar. It began to melt and meld its lovely color and sweetness into my brewed and fermented tea. The taste was heavenly, like biting into a fresh berry that had been splashed with balsamic vinegar! Each sip was restorative and restful, stimulating and sensual. I felt restored, renewed and ready to face the kitchen for dinner prep.
Ah, sweet strawberry kombucha, you are ambrosia!
This post is part of Real Food Wednesday, hosted by Kelly the Kitchen Kop.
Just Cheese for Me
I got a call from a pizza place yesterday. $3.99 for a one-topping pizza. Wow! For only $4 I could eat:
Enriched Flour (Wheat Flour, Iron, Thiamine Mononitrate, Niacin, Riboflavin, Folic Acid) Water, Vegetable Oil (Soybean), Sugar, Salt, Yeast, Vital Wheat Gluten, Less than 1% Dough Conditioners [Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Whey, Enzyme (with Wheat Starch), Ascorbic Acid, L-cysteine, and Silicon Dioxide added as processing aid], Corn Meal (used in preparation).
And that’s just the crust! Ew, no thanks.
But still, pizza…yum. What about a personal pizza with a soaked crust? Everybody makes their own, gets just what they want and with a little front-end prep I get an afternoon away from the kitchen! Honestly, why a pizzaria charges so much is beyond me when it’s so easy to make fresh, whole wheat, real food pizza!
Soaked Crust Pizza
Be sure to start this 24 hours before you plan to use it
Dough
1 teaspoon honey
1 cup warm water (about baby bathwater temperature)
1 tablespoon organic dry yeast (I like Rize)
1/2 cup buttermilk (or other cultured milk)
3 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 teaspoon sea salt
Proof the yeast by mixing together honey and water. Sprinkle yeast over the surface of the mixture and wait about 10 minutes. If the yeast mixture bubbles, it is active and ready for use. Add buttermilk, then mix in freshly ground flour a half cup at a time until the dough cleans the sides of the bowl. (You can use a bread machine or mixer for this step if you’d like.) Cover the bowl with a cloth and leave in a warm place overnight.
After rising, add the salt to the oil and allow it to dissolve a little before adding to the dough. Knead in thoroughly and divide into two large or eight small balls. Allow the balls to rise until they are doubled in bulk. (When you push your finger into the dough it doesn’t fill right back in.)
For mini pizzas, take a plate and coat the underside in olive oil. Press the dough onto the back of the plate until it’s about 1/4″ thick. (I hate rolling pins ever so much, but you may use a rolling pin instead if it works for you.) Brush the top of the crust with olive oil. This will be the bottom of the crust in the next step. Turn the crust over onto a cookie sheet that’s been sprinkled with cornmeal. Roll or fold over the edges if you desire.
Toppings
I use tomato paste that’s been thinned just a little with water or beef stock for sauce. Sometimes an unsweetened ketchup stands in. I don’t go to a lot of trouble with the sauce because the real star here is the cheese and toppings!
Top your pizzas with sauce and grated cheese and whatever toppings you like. Bake at 450° for about 15 minutes, but watch closely to avoid burning. Cut into wedges and enjoy!
Our favorite toppings include fresh pineapple, bell peppers, black olives, crumbled bacon and a blend of mozzarella and parmesan cheeses.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays, hosted by Food Renegade.
I’ve been making Thanksgiving dinner for a lot of years, but this year was really, really different. I didn’t open cans, jars (other than foods I’d jarred myself) or boxes. Nothing came from the freezer. Very few things came from the store. Most of the foods I prepared came from farmers and the farmer’s market. It wasn’t any harder than previous holiday meals, but the methods were very different. And the flavor? No comparison.
When did the kids get so TALL?
First, the turkey: I pre-ordered a “medium” pastured turkey from West Wind Farms, my local meat provider, a couple months ago. It was about 14 pounds, more than enough for our family, with enough meat for Thanksgiving and at least 3 meals of leftovers. I was a tad nervous about roasting it, since I know grassfed and pastured meats cook very differently from conventional meats. I’ve wet-brined turkeys before and thought about perhaps a dry brine, but, this being my first pastured bird, wanted to keep it very simple this year. The cooking process was very easy: a quick coconut oil rub before 30 minutes at 450° then 20 minutes per pound, or until internal temp hit 180°, covered for all but the last 35 minutes. During its 20 minute “resting” period, the meat reached 190°, perfect.
The skin was crispy, and the whole bird was very flavorful, but the big difference my family noticed was how moist the meat was. For all it’s injected flavor enhancement, conventional turkey couldn’t compare. Personally, I noticed the flavor was drastically different than a conventional bird. I don’t know what it is that gives conventional turkeys that chemical aftertaste, but to me it tastes the way preserved lab specimens smell. This turkey had not a bit of that, even cold and rewarmed the next day. The moistness was achieved without brine and without basting (I did baste once when I took the cover off to brown the skin, but that was it.) Amazing. Some chicken broth I’d made earlier this month rounded out the pan drippings for lots and lots of gravy.
I made a fermented cranberry relish this year from cranberries I purchased through West Wind Farms as well. On Monday I washed the cranberries and chopped them roughly. I put them in a quart canning jar with a scrubbed, quartered organic lemon, a couple tablespoons of whey, a tablespoon of sea salt and filtered water to cover. By Thursday, the fermented “zing” was most pronounced, so I dumped the contents of the jar into the blender and added a little drizzle of local honey. Delicious!
Delvin Farm‘s potatoes got the traditional mashing with some Hatcher’s Dairy cream and butter I’d made from skimming my raw West Wind Farms milk. I was thankful hubby was available to mash when the time came. He’s such a pro! It was hard to eat these potatoes without crying thankful tears that Hank Delvin is at home with his family for Thanksgiving after his brush with death earlier this year.
I made dressing from Twin Forks Artisan Expedition Bread. I’ve posted a photo recipe for this because I’ve never made anything but open-the-bag-dump-in-the-soup type of dressing. I’m glad I didn’t make more because although a one-day feast is a blessing, having leftovers around that taste that good for too many days might quickly become a curse!
I caught a good bit of flak from one of the kids for my decision to skip the Martinelli’s sparkling apple cider this year. I understand that tradition is important, but I wanted to keep this meal close to home, and as near as I could tell, Martinelli’s comes from California and that’s just not local enough. I started a batch of plain water kefir on Monday. Wednesday night I juiced a couple pounds of local fruits and added the juice to the kefir after the grains had been removed. By Thursday afternoon, the kefir was sparkly and delicious, a light sparkling apple juice with probiotic benefits! I made three bottles with apple, three with grape and one with pomegranate (boy, those seeds really don’t put out much juice, do they?)
Bottle of white, Bottle of red, perhaps a bottle of pomegranate instead...
After all that, we needed a couple hours to breathe before digging into the apple and pumpkin pies. I’ve never been a pie crust maker, but this recipe worked just great! More local apples from Rainbow Hill Farm (or as Rose calls him “The Apple Guy”) and a couple small pie pumpkins from the farmer’s market filled the crusts most beautifully. The dark orange egg yolks from Three Meadows Farm‘s chickens made a delicious custard, indeed! The flour wasn’t local, but I ground it in my own kitchen, so that’s local enough for me. Also not local were the cinnamon and allspice used in the pies. (Haven’t figured out local spices yet.) More West Wind Farms cream became whipped cream, and topped my very welcome cup of dessert coffee as well as the pie. Those beautiful beeswax candles were handcrafted by a bee farmer who frequents our market and they smelled wonderful as their glow lit our table.
I’m thankful for the warm sun, nourishing rain, living soil, sleeping seed and the farmers who know how to work their alchemy on these to coax food from them to bring to market. I’m grateful for my year of Real Food, the newfound knowledge of local providers and the fellowship of friends, neighbors and family. I’m thankful, too, for the electronic media of blogging that permits me to wax philosophical about those things that make me laugh, cry, and fume. Life is good.
This post is part of Fight Back Fridays hosted by Food Renegade.
The Dreaded Beet Kvass
While reading Nourishing Traditions, I came across a strange drink made with lacto-fermented beets. Now, my family doesn’t even eat beets at all, in any form, ever. I kind of chuckled and read on.
Then I downloaded an article from Wise Traditions that said there was a family out there drinking this stuff as part of their “snack” at least once a week. My interest was tickled, but not piqued.
The real kicker came when I read that beets purify the liver and blood. Now, I’ve known for years that hubby suffers from low liver function. I’ve had him taking milk thistle and/or dandelion herbs to help with that. But if I could get some of this in him…
So, I planned it. I’d make the kvass then find something to mix it with. Sure enough, at my health food store I found Black Cherry Concentrate. It’s unsweetened, just pure juice. I know cherry helps with inflammation, something we both experience, so that’s a plus.
Today was the big day. My kvass was done and it was time to serve it up. I wanted to make six servings: two four-ounce servings, two eight-ounce servings and two servings of whatever was left over. I carefully measured out a cup into a two-quart pitcher. I took a small taste. Ooohee! Yeah, that needs some help. I added half a cup of cherry concentrate, and two and a half cups of water. Needed more cherry, still too much beet, so another 1/4 cup of concentrate went in. That was good, I thought, but a little concentrated still, so I added another two cups of water. Just right, I thought. I served the concoction over ice with popcorn, hoping the salt would make hesitant snackers thirsty enough to at least try it.
Here are the comments:
Rose: “Yummy! I’ll have that anytime! Can you make it less sweet next time, though?”
Christy: “Yeah, it was a little too sweet, but it was good.”
Kate: “Got any more!?!?”
John: “Ew, Mom, are you trying to kill me? Why can’t you just make Kool-Aid like a regular mom?”
Hubby: “I drank it, but I didn’t like it. It’s too much like tea, too watered-down.”
I’m thinking next time of trying it with pomegranate syrup, or a berry syrup that is more tart, and not adding that last two cups of water. Here’s how the final recipe worked out:
Can’t Beet a Kvass with Cherry
1 cup beet kvass
2/3 cups black cherry concentrate, unsweetened
4 1/2 cups water
Mix all together, serve over ice.
We had High Enzyme Salad made right out of the NT cookbook for lunch. It was heavenly! Dinner was apricot almond bread with butter and a big pot of vegetable soup made with just green beans, zucchini, celery and parsley in chicken broth. We are still trying to get over the bug that swept through the house, and I think a lighter dinner might help us sleep better and recover.
The Dark Side of Fat Loss
