A Jersey Girl in Portland

Pickled green walnuts? Yes please.

My neighborhood has become a foraging paradise.  Plums from the neighbors tree, green walnuts from the house-with-the-old-VW, figs from Gray's tree.  It's a bonanza this time of year.

Plums are dried (to make prunes, delicious with chicken) and green walnuts are turned into vin de noix or nocino.

This year I wanted to try something different with my foraged green walnuts.

Today I started an unusual English pickle; pickled green walnuts.  Our friend Max had the idea and then I looked it up myself and saw the recipe was posted by one of my favorite bloggers, hunter, angler, gardener, cook.

The immature nuts are stabbed (aerated), brined, dried and pickled.

The whole process takes at least a month.

The blogger, Hank Shaw, recommends eating a slice with cheddar cheese.  I'd add a strong, dark stout. 

Are they not lovely?

Eat well

&

love

big.

 

Nancy

 

PS: Look for these pickles on the table at my Robert Burns party on January 25, 2019.

 

Vin de Noix. Nocino

I love neighborhood walks that result in additions to dinner.  Green walnuts -- the kind that make Vin de Noix -- exist for the picking (legally, over the sidewalk) right across the street.

For what to do with them? Ask an expert. David Lebovitz.

If you're too lazy to click through, here's his recipe.

2 1/2 cups (500g) sugar

1 liter vodka

2 sticks cinnamon

10 whole cloves1/2 vanilla bean, split lengthwise

Thin zest of one organic lemon (removed in wide pieces with a vegetable peeler)

30 green walnuts; washed, dried, and quartered

 

I made a half-batch a few days ago.  It looks pretty green and the sugar is just barely melted (I used turbanado). (Photo on the right)

Today, it looks like absinthe.  (Photo below)

What fun!

xoxo

Nancy

 

Why is making stock so deeply satisfying?

Although I've lived in very hot places (Dallas Texas in the summer) I've lost my taste for the heat. So this week, as the temps creep close to 100 degrees, I'll probably find a pool or river to dunk into.

But last week, when the high temp hovered around 70, I was cold. And I felt an unquenchable desire to partake in an Autumnal activity,* so I made stock. 

Chicken stock. I got a sale priced organic, happy chicken that I brined** with lavender.  When it was brined (overnight), I butchered it and put the carcass in a pot with some lamb bones I found in the freezer and the last twist of reishi mushroom.**  I didn't have mirepoix (two parts onion, one part each carrot and celery) so I put in what I had -- carrots and onion with a few odds and ends like yellow beet greens. 

Books are written about the making of stock. Pre boiling the bones to remove excess blood. To roast or not roast the mirepoix. White mirepoix (parsnips vs carrots)? There are so many "rules" to stock making that one could follow!

I'm really relaxed about stock at home. Sure, I avoid boiling any stock, preferring the gentle bubbles that render lovely, clear(ish) stock.

The only thing that I never leave out is remouillage, literally re-wetting the bones in French. After the stock is cooked and strained in a chinois, I pour filtered water over the bones and stuff and cook it again for at least an hour. That's my remy and the reason my soups are fantastic.  

If there is one wish I would have for any cook, it's a freezer with stock and remouillage. I freeze stock in various containers (depending on the amount of stock I have) with amounts marked in Sharpie.

The frozen remouillage (Remy -- as it's labeled in my freezer) melts in a separate pot as the veg browns in the oven with the bones  (or not -- sometimes I just throw it all in a crock pot and go to work).

However one makes stock (but please don't let it boil too much) is less important than simply making stock.  It's good for the soul to have a pot of chicken stock on the stove. And your next batch of stock, flavored with remy, will be better yet.

 

Yours in food love,

Nancy

 

* My ex-husband's grandfather, whose nickname was "Kicky" had all sorts of funny sayings.  This is my favorite:  "In the summer when it's hot and sticky, is not time for dipping dickie.  But when the dew is on the pumpkin, is the time for pippy dunking."  What a riot!

** My basic brine comes from Ruhlman:  7-1/2 cups of water, 6 Tbspns salt.  Then I go nutty and add lavender, herbes de provence, garlic, herbs from the garden like rosemary, hot chilies, bay leaves. Any combination of things that catch my fancy. And a tablespoon or so of some sugar either agave, honey (tho I don't use it, my sweetie's allergic), maple syrup, sugar.

*** This fungus has amazing antioxidant properties so I've used it in all my stocks for about a year or two. 

Dope Soap

Since marijuana became legal in Oregon on October 1, 2015, it's been my great joy to celebrate dope culture.

One of the ways I do so is by growing marijuana plants. In this, I am not alone (shout out to my stoner peeps). Alas, my success at growing as been less-than-stellar. 

But, my plants this year are off to a roaring start.  I had great clones (cuttings), a new raised garden in our (very private) back yard, great soil and a secret weapon.*

I have three plants in dirt right now; Mount Hood Magic, Cherry Pie, and Sour Urkle.  Mt. Hood Magic is on the left, Cherry Pie on the right.  Sour Urkle is tiny and in the back.

Today I pruned Cherry Pie**  and walked away with a handful (26 grams of leaf) of cutting.

What to do with the leaves?

Make a tincture!

I blended the leaves with 80 grams of Everclear to make a slurry, and poached it for 20 minutes. The yield was 1/4 cup of dark green tincture. 

The next step is soap making as usual.  As I write this, the lye is coming down to 90 degrees (from 200) and the coconut oil is holding on a sunny windowsill at 90.

I combine lye and fat and affix a hand blender.  The blender will saponify the two in about 30 minutes, creating liquid soap.

The tincture is so green it stained the small plastic strainer I strained it in.  I wonder if it'll turn our skin green?

(One Hour Later)

The soap saponified big-time as soon as I added half the tincture. It looks like green mashed potatoes.

This has happened before -- the soap seizes up as soon as an additive is blended in. The soap 'works,' -- the suds are abundant, it's just rough and looks home made.

I'm going to try an olive oil soap (this one is coconut oil) to re jigger the recipe.

I'll report back in a month when the soap is cured and we'll find out if it stains the skin (oh my!)

 

Cheers &

 

Love Big!

 

xoxo

Nancy

 

  

 * A fertilizer called "Monterey Fish and Guano" (it's also marketed under the name "Fish and Poop." Yup. Fish and Poop.  It smells exactly like what's in it.

** Cherry Pie is a hybrid of Granddaddy Purple and Durban Poison.

 

Seaweed Sauerkraut & where have I been?

Hello Again!

I've been cooking up a storm these past few months, I just haven't blogged about it. Been busy!

One of the most fun things we've done here at the Undisclosed Location is use alternative salt sources for making sauerkraut.  My favorite to date is wakame (from any Asian market) mixed with Jacobson Salt. The photos are of my least favorite seaweed kraut blend: nori! It broke down completely and made the kraut dingy brown and mushy.

close up of the nori kraut

ceramic fermentation weights that Max made

But! Even if you use seaweed, the process is the same.  Shred the cabbage, mix with salt and seaweed, pack in a jar, weight down with a bag of salt water or fermentation weights

Here are the specifics:

One large cabbage head (about 2.5 pounds)

1-1/8 ounce salt

1-1/8 ounce wakame

That's it. Mix in the mixer, pack into a jar and wait two weeks.

The kraut is beautifully balanced by using salt and seaweed.  I'm hooked.

Eat well and live large!!

xoxo

Nancy

 

Tripe - Honeycombed fabulous deliciousness

  I'm having a tripe kinda day.

Maybe I'm thinking about tripe in the aftermath of making haggis for Robert Burns birthday.

Maybe I long to be back in Rome where we had a hearty and delicious tripe dish last year. It was called, oddly enough, Trippa alla Romana.

For whatever reason, I have stomach on my mind.

Roman tripe...Simple tomato sauce, honeycomb tripe and grated cheese. Back in Rome I loved it so much I ate half of it before I remembered to snap a photo.

It was magnificent. 

Yes, tripe is cow stomach. Reticulum tripe, aka honeycomb tripe, is the second of the ruminants four stomachs.  Although all stomachs are eaten, the most popular are honeycomb tripe and book tripe, which is the third or omasum stomach. Book tripe is used in my fav dim sum dish. It's lighter than honeycomb tripe, with filaments like bits of sea grass waving from the sand.

I do think the very first tripe I had was as dim sum. It was billowy and had a slight crunch. It was toothsome and mild, cooked with ginger and jalapeno. Like the picture.

But last night was the first time I cooked with it.

I used one of Mario Batali's* recipes that mimicked the dish I had in Rome. It was so simple.  So delicious too.

Roman-style tripe

Rinse the tripe inside and out.  It may smell a little like a wet dog, just a slight funk, but that's OK. I used less than two pounds of tripe and two quarts of sauce to feed three with leftovers.

Simmer the tripe for 1.5 hours in water to cover (plus two inches), a cup of white vinegar and a Tablespoon of vanilla. (I don't know what the vanilla does but the resulting tripe smells not at all gamey)

The recipe uses a simple home made tomato sauce of tomatoes, onion, grated carrot, a little red wine and garlic.  Batali doesn't even add wine in his recipe (but I did).  No sugar either because the carrot is the sweetener.

Cooked and cut in 1/4 inch strips, honeycomb tripe is sauteed with onion and simmered in the sauce for 20-30 minutes. The dish is finished with grated Parmesan and Romano cheeses.  As always, season with salt to taste.

The photo shows the tripe before being sauteed with onion simmered with sauce.

Offputting offal?

I don't know why tripe is so maligned. I suppose it's lumped in with other offal as 'weird,' 'stinky,' or every cook's favorite, 'gross.'

Maybe because it was the food of poor folk.

But tripe is relatively inexpensive, easy to work with, and takes on the flavor of whatever it's cooked with.

It doesn't have a bloody, earthy, bold taste like liver. What it lacks in flavor, it adds in texture, adding low-fat, zero carb protein to a dish.

So... make menudo. Make Roman tripe, make dim sum tripe. But make tripe.

Love big and eat well.

xoxo Nancy

 

* I have always loved Mario Batali's recipes. Never had one that didn't do exactly what it was supposed to do.

Natural cough remedy AKA the beauty of honey

Honey is magic. You can put it on burns, it's a natural energy source and antioxydent powerhouse.  If you have a persistent cough, reach for the honey pot, not a cough drop. Alone, a teaspoon of honey will quell a cough.

For the dry cough that lingers long after the cold is over, try this recipe for...

 

Cough Syrup

1/4 + teaspoon cayenne pepper

1/4 + teaspoon ground ginger

1 Tablespoon honey

1 Tablespoon apple cider vinegar

2 Tablespoons water


Mix and take by the teaspoon. 

About three teaspoons is a good first dose.  

Cheers!

Nancy

 

PS:  I adapted this recipe for cough syrup from 'Herbally Yours' by Penny C. Royal (June 1982).

Holiday bacon

I don't know what other people make for friends at the holidays, but I make bacon. This year, four kinds of bacon.

Top to bottom we have...

Pomegranate lavender

Cumin, garlic, turmeric

bottom right: Maple garlic

bottom left: Dill & mustard (dill seed, mustard seed, red pepper flakes, black pepper & cumin)

 

... but isn't it difficult to make bacon at home?

... No!

In a nutshell, you prepare a rub, marinate for a week, roast or smoke. You're done. That's it.

At the bottom of the photo is my recipe for each batch, my notes to be archived in the cookbook source of the recipe.*

The base brine formula is simple. 2.5 pounds of belly, 1 1/2 Tbsp kosher salt, 1 Tbsp sugar (half that for the pomegranate or maple), 1/2 tspn pink salt.

Add to that about 1/4 - 1/2 cup of various herb combinations and you're done... for now.  Rub the pork with the brine. Label each bag and flip it (and squish the brine around) every day or so for one week.

Pull it after a week and rinse off the brine. Decide which batches will be smoked and which will be roasted. The belly headed for smoke (I'll smoke only half of each of the three savory varieties), will air dry so that the smoke will have something to stick to (called the pellicle).

The bellies headed for the oven will be roasted, uncovered, at 200 degrees, for three hours, fat side up.

The smoked bellies will smoke for one-to-two hours at a the low heat - 180 to 200 - then finish in the oven as above for as long as it takes to reach an internal temp of 150 degrees.

When done roasting or smoking, chill thoroughly** and slice into bacony-slices. Or leave whole and cut lardons from fat slices.

Mmmmm bacon!

Eat well & love big!

xoxo Nancy

(I think I'm most excited to try the pomegranate/lavender and the dill/mustard varieties)

 * I adapted my recipe from Michael Ruhlman's "Ruhlman's Twenty," an instructional cookbook that illustrates basic cooking technique.

** the fat will slip off the meat and you'll have an ungodly mess if you try to cut it before it has had a chance to chill.

Considering potatoes.

I have lately been thinking about potatoes. Maybe because they're such a winter staple. Perhaps because they're such a blank canvas, a go-to starch that will complete  the plate you are building. 

Starchy/mealy? Waxy? Whipped, mashed, smashed, boiled or baked? Idaho potatoes? Baking potatoes? Fingerlings? Yukon Golds??

(See what I mean?) There is much to consider about potatoes.

In the 1970s & 1980s the height of suburban chic was the New Potato. With it's sleek red skin and white interior, it was the darling of every meat-n-potatoes dinner party*.  

When once we had baking potatoes or new potatoes, now we have a rainbow of varieties!

This summers CSA (Gathering Together Farm) taught me a lot about differing strain of potatoes. We had Cara, Huckleberry Gold, Purple -- and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head.

I remember because..... Cara, with it's pink skin and creamy flesh, is delicious roasted or boiled.

Purple taters boil poorly. They break down to mush quickly and turn a sickly gray.  But!  They make great mashed potatoes -- bright purple. Got a kid who won't eat potatoes? Try purple potato & cauliflower mash.

My absolute favorite local (Oregon) variety is Huckleberry Gold.  It has purple skin and yellow flesh. It's perfect boiled (see the recipe at the bottom of this post published a few weeks ago), then crisped in a saute pan for 20 min or so as in the photo above taken at the coast while camping. 

I think the secret of perfect fried potatoes is to cut the boiled pots into chunks then saute them in OO and butter (2:1 OO to butter), flat sides down. Crisping the skin yields a less satisfactory potato chunk. You've got to crisp the sides. 

We had duck for Thanksgiving so tonight the potatoes will be crisped in duck fat.

Potatoes have personalities and attributes that suit them to differing applications.

Yay! & Spud-out.

Cheers,

Nancy

 

* Truth be told, I still roast them with olive oil, garlic and rosemary with just a pat or two tossed in on the way to the table.

My CSA: What I got and what I did with it Part 5: Winter salads

Disclaimer: I wrote this a month ago and forgot to post it. In the interest of honesty, I'll not edit the stuff I wrote at that time.

Radishes are my new favorite autumn fun food.  Strong, spicy-hot watermelon radishes. Tangy black-skinned   radishes. French breakfast radishes (yes, French breakfast radishes are the first radishes of spring but they are also the drum major of autumn).

Right now, I want a toothsome salad. No lightly dressed butter leaf, no delicate Miners lettuce.  I want hearty, robust (think: undercooked kale...), crunchy bits that make me glad to have good teeth. 

Right now I love pairing cold, warm and crunchy. Interesting winter salads.

Current favorites are: salted radishes with warm sauteed kale. And nuts.

Wilted kale and cipollini onion combined with julienne radish, almond, toasted delicata, salt and lemon.

Toss roasted delicata squash* into any hearty salad for the Perfect Winter Salad.Toss in roasted delicata squash*. Perfect winter salad.

Back to the CSA. For breakfast I made a chickpea hash topped with sunny side up duck eggs. I made a mish-mash-hash of stuff from the fridge: romanesco, Brussels sprouts, onion made some parsnip chips that I topped chic pea hash.

In fact, I liked it so much I took the idea camping at the start of November.  Look for an upcoming post about potatoes to see some lovely, crispy 'taters.

 

 Live large & wear pajama pants whenever possible.

xoxo Nancy