Pickled Beets with Caraway & Onion

7/3/10

A couple years ago, when I made pickled beets for the first time, I gave a jar to my Grampa for Christmas, who loves pickled beets. But he told me that he loves them even more with caraway and onion. These were for him.

Boiling the beets.

Skinned gemstones.

The spices: Cinnamon, peppercorn, allspice berries, cloves, and carraway.

Ready for pickling liquid.

I didn't take a picture of the final, but I'll post the recipe soon!

Sorrel-Molasses-Jamaica Beer

6/16/10

This was my first completely experimental homebrew project. It was inspired by my urge to make beer out of sorrel, a sour tasting green that's usually used in soups and salads. I thought its tangy flavor would make for a good drink. Ultimately, you couldn't really taste it in the finished product at all, because even with six bunches of it, boiling it for a four-gallon batch didn't yield much flavor.

Which is why I added jamaica (pronounced ha-my-ca), a dried hibiscus flower that's sold in Mexican markets to make a sweet tea that has kind of a cranberry flavor. Basing my made-up formula off of my prior experience with nettle beer, I started to sweeten it/give it fuel for fermenting with sugar, only to discover I didn't have more than several cups. Because I live several doors down from the local food co-op, running out of things is never really a problem, but this time I decided to innovate instead. What I did have in abundance was blackstrap molasses. The flavor combinations swirling in my head, I envisioned a dark, rich, and tangy beer. So I added it to round out the "tea," as I like to call the base for my pre-fermented beverages.

This is what the tea looked like. The sun in my kitchen was giving my project its blessing.

The liquid itself was an incredible deep burgundy. Once in my 3-gallon carboy (the big glass fermenting vessel) and a few smaller jugs, I pitched the yeast.

Here it is on its third day. As evidenced by the giant inflated condom on the back carboy, it was bubbling away.

Just under two weeks later the fermentation had finished and it was ready to bottle.

My friend Davi had a beer she had made that was ready to bottle too, so we teamed up and sterilized a whole bunch of bottles together.

Here's Davi siphoning her beer. Mine looked about the same.

And then I left my house in Oly to go to Kentucky for the summer! I let my bottles sit in the basement to carbonate off the excess sugar and hang out til my return. About two months later I came back to one highly successful project. Tasters of this beer all deemed it a quirky hit. The molasses definitely added to the flavor and the body, but wasn't too sweet and didn't overpower the jamaica which came through in an extremely refreshing way. I'd do it again!

Serbian Musaka Dinner Club

6/13/10

Musaka is a dish that lots of different eastern European nations have versions of. This is a Serbian version, similar to the kind I grew up with my Dad making.

You start with some olive oil in a baking dish and a layer of potatoes.

Then you add more potatoes. And spices.

Then well-seasoned ground beef sauteed with onions. I added green peppers to mine.

Then you add another layer of potatoes and pour an egg-yogurt mixture over the whole thing and bake it. The full recipe is here.

Meanwhile, I made baklava for dessert. This is fillo dough getting spread with melted butter.

Layering walnuts and raisins.

Instead of topping with traditional honey, however, I drizzled the finished baklava with dandelion syrup.

The finished meal started with some store-bought stuffed grape leaves.

The finished musaka.

Greek salad.

And here's the inside of the musaka: you can see the way the egg mixture fills in all the cracks.

Baklava!

Edible Flowers

5/30/10

Did you know...


There are some flowers you can eat! Well, if you caught my dandelion posts then you probably knew that already. But there are lots of flowers you can eat. When gardens' leafy greens are on their way to seed, they of course produce flowers first. If you're trying to save your seeds for future plantings, then the flowers have to be left alone to mature their precious reproductive nuggets. But if you've been eating off your plants all season long and aren't seed-saving, then you can keep reaping the bounty of your greens as they start to flower.

In my experience, edible flowers usually resemble the flavor of the vegetable they come from, although sometimes the flavor can be different or even stronger than the vegetable itself (e.g. broccoli flowers may be slightly sweet, while the flowers of mustard greens may be intensely spicy). They make beautiful additions to salads, though when I have them around I find it hard not to devour them all straight. I picked these beauties from kale, broccoli, and arugula at the beloved Mad Tom community garden this fall, before it was sadly torn up by the city :(

Deer Steak

5/30/10

I don't even have any "after" shots from this grill-out, but I still can't resist posting this beautiful venison meat.

Thanks to my friend Clayton for sharing the wealth (shot by his father in Texas and mailed to him all the way in Olympia in a box of dry ice!) with my friend Tori who further shared it with me.

I let the steak marinate in papaya juice, tiny bit of olive oil, garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper, and oregano from my garden. Tori told me about the papaya juice secret: apparently, papaya has special enzymes that help to break down the meat so it's not as hard on your digestive system, particularly since it's wild game.

I let it marinate for two whole days before I grilled it. It was still relatively tough, but super savory. What a treat!

Creamed Spinach and Bacon

5/28/10

Growing up in Kentucky at my parents' house, these two things would usually be served at different meals.



But some things are meant to be together.

Ginger-Rhubarb-Peach Pie

5/14/10


Ok, maybe not having recipes is making the standard of this blog a little less than you'd come to expect. But hey, consider this one inspiration. I believe this was the happy ending to a warm spring night's grill-out. By mid-May I could get my hands on local rhubarb at the farmer's market. Of course, everyone loves strawberry-rhubarb pie, but after my success with peaches canned in rhubarb sauce last year, I had another delectable flavor combination in mind. And let me tell you, busting out the home-canned peaches (different than the sauce, these were peaches in light honey-syrup) still a few good months before peach season, for a pie, was pretty damn satisfying. The only thing that could have possibly made the sweet-tart combo any better would've been the zing of candied ginger. Oh wait--it did!