Uh Oh

I think my Mulberry Root Beer is a little closer to Mulberry Beer. I just slammed one after a workout and now I'm feeling a bit tipsy. Our sodas always taste yeasty like beer, but never make you feel like you drank a beer- they just don't ferment long enough. Perhaps my kitchen is just too hot for making non-alcoholic beverages?

Good thing I chowed down on a big bowl of millet and eggplant/yellow squash/onion/tomato/kale with my "soda".

Green Tamales

Tonight's meal was brought to you by the sweltering summer heat and an oven turned up to 400F.

I'm currently trying to avoid buying anything at the store, as I've already surpassed our grocery budget for the month. So everything in this meal was already in our garden, pantry, or fridge. Feel free to substitute things that are in YOUR house when you make this.

I was going to just make some collards, some beans, and some polenta...but decided to put it all together inside the collard leaves for a tamale-like dish. I love how it turned out!


Green Tamales (serves 6)

12 collard leaves

Filling
4 cloves of garlic, finely chopped
1 mild chile, finely chopped
2 cups polenta
4 cups water
1 tsp. salt

1 cup cooked kidney beans (I pressure cooked some)

Sauce
1 red pepper, seeds removed
2 medium tomatoes
1/2 sweet onion
1 tsp. smoked paprika
1/2 tsp. salt

Start by preheating the oven to 400F. To prepare the filling, heat 2 Tbsp. olive oil in a saucepan over medium heat. Add the garlic and mild chile, stirring as it cooks to prevent any burning. When the garlic is fragrant but not browned, add the polenta, water, and salt. Stir to completely combine. Continue stirring until you have a thick, pudding-like polenta- about 10 minutes should do it. Stir in the cooked kidney beans and remove from heat. Taste the mixture (careful- it's really hot!) and adjust salt to your liking.

Fill a wide, shallow skillet about 1/2 way up with water and heat until simmering. Then wash 12 collard leaves and remove the largest part of the stem- about 1/3-1/2 of the way up the leaf.

Then drop the leaves in the shallow pan of simmering water for, oh, maybe a minute. The leaves should still be bright green. Now it's time to assemble your rolls.

Place about 1/2 cup of filling closer to the stem end of the collard leaf.

Fold in the two lateral sides of the leaf.
The fold up the stem end and continue rolling up and over the filling. Roll them tightly for a nice looking finished dish.
Pack the rolls into a lightly greased 8x11 baking dish. Then prepare your sauce.
Puree red pepper, tomatoes, onion, smoked paprika, and salt in a food processor or blender until smooth. Spoon over the collard tamales and bake, uncovered, for about 20-25 minutes.
We had ours with some tasty sweet corn smothered in Miso-"Butter".
Here's an inside shot:
As you can see- the polenta firms up nicely to mimic a tamale. Except with these tamales you can eat the wrapper!

Drinking Local

Just about everytime an Eat Local Challenge comes up in public conversation, someone mentions upping their percentage of local beer or vodka to meet the challenge guidelines. It's true- we have a decent number of small breweries and even some hard liquor made nearby, I'm told. But I'd be hard pressed to name a single local alcoholic beverage.

The only alcohol in our house is a 2 oz. mini-bottle of tequila I use for making margarita cupcakes and some vanilla extract- neither of which are local. My partner is straight edge, so no alcohol for him. And me- I come from a long line of alcoholics (recovering, thank God) and keep my drinks to about one per year. So I won't be kicking back with a cold local brew anytime soon.

I will, however, be kicking back with a cold Mulberry Root Beer, though!

We started making our own root beer a few years ago. It's not hard to do and the supplies are pretty cheap. Northern Brewing on Grand Ave. has everything you'll need as far as equipment goes and the roots/herbs can be procured at your local co-op. There's a gazillion combinations you can use, but we thought it'd be fun to use up some mulberries in this one.

Mulberry Root Beer
1 quart mulberries, washed (sub any berry)
1 1/2 cups brown sugar
1 1/2 cups cane sugar
1/4 cup date syrup (sub 1/4 cup raisins if you don't have this)
2 cinnamon sticks
2 Tbsp. sarsparilla
1 vanilla bean, scraped and the remaining pod
2 Tbsp. licorice root
2 star anise
1 Tbsp. juniper berries
2 gallons filtered water
1/4 tsp granulated ale yeast or champagne yeast

Stir together all fruits/herbs and 1 gallon of the filtered water in a large stockpot. Bring to a simmer and boil for 30 minutes. Then remove from heat and allow to cool to room temperature. Prepare a strainer over another larger pot, carboy, or empty bulk peanut butter bucket. Strain the mulberry-spice liquid, gently pressing the mulberries to get the juice out. Discard strained solids. Add the remaining gallon of water to the jug and stir. Make sure the temperature is lukewarm- no hotter. Then stir the yeast with 1/4 cup of water in a little cup. Add to the jug and stir vigorously. Your brew is now ready to bottle.

It takes some strong bottles to package this up as the carbonation can get pretty fierce. I really recommend only using bail-top bottles designed for this purpose. These should be sterilized with hot water and soap before bottling. We use a spigot rigged up on an old 5 gallon bucket and put a plastic hose over the nozzle that attaches to a bottling wand. But you can get creative about how to get the soda into the bottle- just keep it sterile.

The soda needs to stay in a warmish place (no problem in summer) for a few days. Usually they take about 48 hours for the carbonation to build, but we check after 24 just in case. You might want to open them outside as they can be lots of fun to open- like champagne that's been shaken up.

Once you know they're at the right fizzy consistency, bring them into the basement or a refrigerator to stop the yeast and get those brews ready for drinking!

PS- I can't really guarantee how this brew will taste when finished because it's still sitting on the kitchen floor growing bubbles. But my temperature-test taste was rockin good- kindof like a spiced cherry vanilla soda.

FYI- yes, I cross posted this on the Eat Local Blog. Lazy, but necessary.

There's nothing for dinner...

Do you ever have those days when you've spent so much time working on a project in the kitchen (homemade bread, a cake, jam, etc.) that you're too tired to cook dinner? I've had a few of those lately. I've had some serious fun making jam, baking for other folks, and gardening, but sometime after all that I just want to order pizza. And since I'm still taking the Eat Local America challenge, I should really focus on making practical meals.

Yesterday I realized that we had a TON of cucumbers. I pick 2-3 per day and we only eat 1 every few days. So it was time to make pickles. This time I used this recipe and added some chili peppers and grape leaves (to keep the pickles crisp). I'm always on a hunt for the perfect pickle recipe. Today after weeding the garden, I found another quart's worth of cucumbers. Of course- AFTER- I make pickles I find the hiding cukes.
Amazingly enough, I still cooked some actual meals after making the pickles.

So here are some of the foods I've enjoyed in the last 2 days. Yesterday the kids and I went to the Farmer's Market and found some really awesome stuff. Perhaps our favorite thing to get is garlic bread from some folks that use local, organic flour. We sliced it up with some Veganaise, fresh local tomatoes, and basil from the garden to make some super good tomato sandwiches. I love that lettuce-leaf basil.


Last night I wanted soup for some reason (maybe because it was nearly 90 in our house and, like, 100% humidity). So here are the local veggies I rounded up for the soup:

Carrots from the farmer's market (hooray for local carrots!)
The first sweet corn of the season
local purple scallions from the co-op
Garlic from the backyard
local shell peas from the co-op
pasilla chilies from the garden

I just simmered this up in a soup pot with a vegan bouillon cube. It sure was tasty.
This morning I got to spend some quality time with the boys. We had tofu scramble with the aforementioned veggies, sesame semolina bread from the farmer's market, and "apple dippers" as mcdonald's would call it: Early crop tart apples dipped in wildwood plain yogurt with maple syrup and cinnamon. Plus some local raspberries.


So I didn't feel tempted to order pizza today- Mission accomplished.

Strawberry Jam Forever

At work we have a little something we like to call "buddies". Sure, we have friends at work, too, but buddies might rank higher than friends...Buddies are free food. Now, buddies are bittersweet. We all love free food, but if it's free at the co-op, that means that our co-op is losing money from the dented, slightly smashed, past its expiration date products. So while I shouldn't have been excited (actually, thrilled) over the 16 quarts of local strawberries sitting in the buddy bin on Wednesday, I was.

I snagged all those strawberries in a heartbeat and promised I'd bring people jam the next day. I decided to use a "Basic Strawberry Jam" recipe from a book called something like "The busy person's guide to canning" (I'm just busy because I'm canning, so I don't know if this book is for me).

I thought it was odd that the recipe didn't call for pectin, but it called for astronomical quantities of sugar, so I figured that would help it set up once it reached the jelly point (220F). So I purchased 36 cups of fair trade, organic cane sugar, 3 more cases of canning jars (I had one) and high-tailed it home. At this point it was 6pm. Probably a little late to start a quadruple batch of jam, but nevermind that.



The jam went according to plan until I had it all sealed up and processed. It had passed the "does it run off a cold spoon in single drops or sheets" test decently. It was a little thinner than usual, but I figured it would just be a softer set kind of jam. Wrong. More like a not-set-at-all type of jam.

So my 42 jars of strawberry jam were delayed until last night. I opened each jar, resterilized the jars, reboiled the jam, and added plenty of pectin this time. Bingo! Forget any risky low acid fruit jams without pectin for this girl. I'm sticking with the sure thing.


As I was eating the jam straight-up out of a spoon last night, I realized that I'd never had homemade strawberry jam. Usually I'll try something before I make 42 jars of it. But, really, who wouldn't like homemade strawberry jam?

A proper Southern meal

This is how I want to eat every day. This is simple food that is rich, satisfying and highly nutritious.

I pressure cooked some black-eyed peas and then seasoned them with Bragg's and a little liquid smoke. For the greens, I fried up some little pieces of marinated tofu, onions, and garlic and then added an assortment of collards, mustard greens, and overgrown lettuce from the garden.

The cornbread is the Southern Style cornbread I always make from Gluten-free cooking school. I eat my cornbread with my meal because I like savory cornbread. Mike and the boys like theirs for desserts, smothered in maple syrup. They were a little bit mad at me for serving the peas on top of the cornbread, but I really wanted them to try it. Instead, the kids scraped the peas off and saved the cornbread for last.

Cucumber "Pickle" Salad

4-5 pickling cucumbers, roughly chopped
2 small cippolini onions, thinly sliced
2 Tbsp. minced fresh dill
1 pasillo chile (or other chili you like- these are mild), minced
1/2-1 tsp sea salt (salt to taste)
1-2 Tbsp. rice vinegar

Stir everything together and let it marinate at least 30 minutes before serving.

Take my word for it

I've cooked up a storm this week, but have nothing much to show for it. You'll just have to take my word for it. I made a Peanut Butter Cheesecake for some friends, but forgot to take a picture. Then I made a tofu quiche for an event and again forgot to take a picture. I was even going to take pictures of some yummy road trip food yesterday again forgot.

Now, I know I could tell you all about these foods without pictures, like how the peanut butter cheesecake batter was so rich that I felt sick after licking a fair amount of batter from the inside of my food processor (Don't worry, guys, this was after your cheesecake was safely in the oven).

And I could tell you about how I got home at 11pm last night after a long day at a Wisconsin Bluegrass festival and still needed to make a quiche for an event at 9am this morning. I almost didn't make it, but then decided I just couldn't pass up an opportunity to make quiche. The crust of a quiche is really my favorite part, so I had to make it from scratch. I filled the crust with sundried tomatoes, (local) broccoli, onions, garlic, and (local) mushrooms. The quiche itself was the tofu, soy cheese, turmeric base from The Garden of Vegan.

But describing food is not nearly as much fun as looking at it (or eating it, for that matter).

So finally tonight I took a picture my dinner!
I love polenta because it cooks up relatively quickly and can be seasoned with anything your heart desires. This polenta has sage and thyme from the garden along with salt and pepper. That's it. The green bean, tofu, mushroom mixture was the best part.

Lately everything I've been making has been seasoned with maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, tamari, and a touch of sesame oil. So guess what the sauce on this is...?

The tofu was marinated in this new favorite sauce and chopped up kinda little. I heated some olive oil in a cast iron skillet and fried up the little tofu pieces, then added the green beans from the backyard. Next I threw in 2 thinly sliced cippolini onions (local), sliced creminis (local), and a pasillo chili from the garden. As soon as the mushroom started to wilt, I poured in the sauce and took it off the heat, scraping up the bits from the bottom of the pan into the sauce.

This meal came together really quickly and I'm hoping it will taste even better in my lunch tomorrow. I was really surprised how much the sage from the polenta really stood out, even with the assertive balsamic vinegar & maple flavors. Yum!