Summer’s fleeting, but we’ll undoubtedly still have a few hot days and men are still selling watermelons off trucks by a gas station near my house. I love watermelon, and I love agua fresca, the fruity, refreshing beverage sold at taquerias on Cherokee Street in St Louis that are easy to make and easier to drink. You can use any juicy fruit you like, but as long as watermelons are around, [...]
Tis the season . . . for harvesting wonderful herbs that is. There are many books, articles and probably millions of blog posts on the many ways to use and abuse herbs.
Other than drying or freezing them, another way to use fresh herbs to create delicious herbal taste into the colder months when we may not have as hearty a harvest available (although window herb planters are kind of cool for winter-fresh herbs.
Herb-Infused Vinegars
As Kelli Best-Oliver wrote earlier this week in her ‘five cool things to do with herbs’, making herb-flavored vinegars is pretty easy. She suggests heating the vinegar slightly. I’ve never done that, but it seems like a good idea!
I usually use white wine, white balsamic or champaign vinegars for these. My current favorite (and the one people are getting for x-mas this year) is tarragon vinegar, which of course makes an awesome bernaise sauce (always served at our traditional McWilliams family Christmas eve dinners).
We try not to do takeout meals often at our house except for our weekly pizza. There’s always a lot of packaging waste with takeout food and the nutrition value is usually poor. Somewhere along the line however, we started the tradition of getting Chinese takeout on the first day of school. And yesterday was it.
I’ve been paying much closer attention to the amount of food waste that my family of four produces lately. As I wrote about in The Shocking Statistics of Food Waste, about 30% of the food produced in America gets thrown away. The environmental impact of wasted food is immense.
As I cleared the table after dinner last night, I thought about the three cups or so of white rice that came with our takeout that nobody touched. Nobody ever touches it. It usually gets put in the refrigerator only to be thrown away a week later.
It’s perfectly good rice so I decided to spend a little time finding some recipes that could use it up. Here are five recipes that you can make using leftover, cooked white rice next time you faced with one or more of those uneaten containers.
Garlic Rice - This is a simple Philippine fried recipe that calls for adding pantry staples plus some ground pork, but after reading comments made on the recipe from users, the pork can be omitted and vegetables such as mushrooms and green peppers can be added.
Many home gardeners gratefully complain about having too much zucchini during the summer once their plants’ fruits ripen. They just don’t have enough to do with it. In my house, it’s even more of a problem because my husband, like Jessica Seinfeld’s kids, only eats “green things” if I hide them. He will actually eat this dish twice a year or so, mainly because it’s deliciously creamy and cheesy. It’s kind of a sauceless lasagna, and it’s pretty hard to mess up. It makes a great meatless main dish or a substantial side dish, and can be altered to use whatever you happen to have on hand. The recipe, after the jump
You’ve got that garden of herbs, in containers, in your windowsill, in your garden. You’ve made basil pesto, and added some parsley or oregano to pasta sauces. Well, there’s more you can do with those herbs you’ve been growing. A woman in my recipe swap got me thinking about other things to do with herbs to make your meals more flavorful. Thanks to Lisa at 47 Thoughts for getting the ball rolling on this. Those tips, after the jump…
As I walked through the farmers market this weekend I saw the first pumpkins showing up alongside the still abundant tomatoes and even corn and peppers. I love this time of year where it feels like everything is in season all at once especially zucchini. Except, perhaps, the fresh berries that I will miss. As the corn and peppers give way, we get a short “second season” of greens to pair with the winter squashes that are just coming in. It’s all good, the harvest, the weather, the food.
We got no less than NINE cucumbers in the CSA bag. So, this week, of course I am doing a recipe for cucumbers. The taste of this is not unlike a “fresh pickle.” It uses a LOT of cucumbers
Recipe and entries after the jump.
I’m a coffee addict. When it gets too hot in the summer, I’ll stop drinking hot and make myself some iced. There’s several schools of thought on making iced coffee at home: some make regular hot coffee, then chill it, some pour hot over ice, some cold-brew. In my younger, naive days, I would make hot coffee, let it cool, then chill it further with the addition of cold milk. But wisdom–and experience–tells me that cold-brew is the path of least resistance and provides the best buzz for your buck. Seriously. You won’t go back. And you can save a few bucks by making your own at home. The all-too-simple directions, after the jump.
We show up at parties and cookouts, inspecting the grill and asking about ingredients. If you didn’t plan to feed us, we’re probably going home hungry. Savvy vegetarians will bring along some veggie burgers to grill, but only if you can scrape the grill clean…
Chances are, you’ve got a vegetarian on your invitation list. Or maybe a flexi-tarian who chooses veg over meat most of the time. If you plan ahead with a good vegetarian grilling recipe, you’ll be prepared to feed all of your guests.
Veggie kabobs are one of the easiest vegetarian recipes to make. Feel free to improvise with the veggies you have on hand. You really can’t go wrong.
Is it a cake, a pie, or a wrongdoing for which a legal claim for damages may be brought? A torte - not to be confused with a legal tort - is a sweet, rich Austrian cream cake covered with nuts or fruits that originated in Austria. This savory version resembles a vegetable pie. I use the best of summer’s bounty, layer it with fresh mozzarella and enclose it in pastry. The flavorful roasted red pepper sauce adds a touch of sweetness and color.
Legend has it that mozzarella was first made when cheese curds accidentally fell into a pail of hot water in a cheese factory near Naples. For this recipe, use fresh, high-moisture cow’s milk mozzarella that contains more than 52% moisture, or Capriella (half goat’s milk, half cow’s milk mozzarella) from the Mozzarella Company in Dallas, Texas. Paula Lambert founded the business in 1982, using the same exacting methods for handcrafting fresh mozzarella that she witnessed while living in Italy.
“Free organic fruit. Perfectly ripe. Locally grown. Yours for the taking.”
Your ears perking up yet? If this showed up on your local Craig’s List or Freecycle would you be frantically e-mailing, “When can I come over”? Amazingly, such an opportunity probably exists right now, perhaps right down your road, as fruit trees ripen and – too often – fall to the ground and rot.
Like an archeological remnant of a past generation, industrious homeowners often planted these fruit trees several decades ago, before our era of mega-supermarkets and the universal concept that we can, and should, buy everything 24/7. Seems these trees tend to fall into two categories: either they belong to senior residents who can’t physically pick and process the fruit, or newer residents who bought the house with the tree and don’t have the time to pick, much less know what to do with four bushels of pears. Other folks even go as far as considering these trees a nuisance, as overripe fruit falls to the ground and attracts bugs and rodents, eventually chopping the tree down.
Don’t anger the Lorax, make pear pie instead. By connecting with these untapped fruit sources, you cook up something bigger than your private food stash – you will be an ambassador for building community, one bite at a time. I made my annual pilgrimage yesterday to local seniors John and Mary’s house to raid their pear tree, coming home with three five-gallon buckets of fruit. No secret invasion needed; Mary calls every year right before Labor Day to let me know the pears are ripe and we’re welcome to harvest.
Here are three tips for foraging a fruit tree near you:
I’m eating a lot of oat groats these days. I found a source for locally-grown oat groats, but the minimum order was 25 pounds. Oat groats are the least processed of all edible forms of oats, so they store a very long time (some sources are giving them 30 years under the right conditions.) So even though I’d never tasted them before, I decided to give them a try. I figured any minimally-processed food was a good addition to our diet, and even if it took us years to use them up, it’d be okay. And in the meantime if the apocalypse arrived, there’d be something to eat. Win-win-win.
Oh. My. God. This is what oats taste like. I like good old-fashioned oatmeal just fine — I’ve eaten it for years, still happy to eat it if that’s what’s on the table. When I discovered pinhead oats and stone ground oatmeal, though, I realized just how much regular oatmeal had lost in the process of being…well, processed. (Don’t speak to me of instant oatmeal. That’s not a food.) So it comes as no surprise that getting closer to the whole grain results in an even more interesting taste and texture.
Even so, oat groats were a revelation.
Subscribe to our RSS feed or newsletter
