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, [...]
We eat a lot of organic brown rice in our family, which sometimes gets boring. That’s when we remember quinoa! Quinoa is a “sacred, super crop“: sacred to the Incas, super crop to the United Nations for its high protein content. My family likes its nutty flavor, as well as its quick cooking time. It accompanies almost any meal, and it provides a complete protein containing all nine essential amino acids, which is important to a vegetarian family. Quinoa contains the amino acid lysine and is a good source of manganese, magnesium, iron, copper and phosphorous.
Quinoa is actually not a grain, but is related to beets, chard, and spinach. Quinoa is the seed from chenopodium quinoa, and I love it for breakfast, lunch, or dinner. It is good in porridge, served in soup, or by itself as a side dish. We buy it in bulk and eat it weekly.
To make three cups of cooked quinoa:
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
According to one study released last week, your answer doesn’t matter much: even if you walk to the burger joint, your food will have its own set of wheels—and an exhaust pipe.
While it’s now common knowledge that activities like driving conventional cars cause global warming, the environmental impact of what we eat continues to slip under the mainstream radar. The study, performed by Germany’s Institute for Ecological Economy Research, could change this with its comprehensive and comprehensible findings.
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.
It’s that time of year again, when everyone’s organic gardens are booming with summer squash. From zucchini to patty pans, I’m always looking for ways to use up a lot of summer squash in a delicious dish my kids will enjoy. Ever since I tried Kelli’s balsamic asparagus, I pretty much follow her instructions for any vegetable that is in season. Here’s my secret to success: I don’t measure anything.
Preheat oven to 420 degrees.
Cut up summer squash into large pieces (I cut a zucchinis into eighths). Pour olive oil into the bottom of a glass pan. Add the summer squash, then drizzle with more olive oil and balsamic vinegar (look for low or lead-free vinegar). Salt and pepper to taste.
“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:
As the human population continues to skyrocket and conditions on planet Earth get (proportionally) more troubled, we have heard about a lot of ways we can change our lifestyles to lessen our impact on the biosphere. Yes, we know that changing our bulbs to CFLs is great; we know that driving hybrids is great; we know that reducing, reusing, and recycling are all great. And they surely are!
However, one essential aspect of our human lives that often does not receive much attention is our diets. This is rather shocking, too, because whatever else happens, whatever we stick in our lamps or drive, we always need to feed. And as more and more of us pop up on the planet, Mother Earth is going to have a lot of hungry human mouths to feed.
Your dietary habits–what, where, and even how you eat–are profoundly important when it comes to sustainable living. I am not an accredited expert on economics, agriculture, or nutrition, but I have done more than my fair share of research on these and other topics (especially the latter two) related to sustainable food choices. In what follows, then, I share some ingredients I have come across in a recipe for an eco-friendly diet.
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.
As August turns to September, the seasons’ bounty becomes a mixed blessing of both summer and fall. The last of the sweet corn is sold alongside the first few small butternut squash. It’s time to relish the last of the beautiful heirloom tomatoes. The final week of berries, a longer lasting crop this year by the blessing of a milder summer. Eggplants and peppers fill the tables. And the zucchini, more than I could possibly ever cook, the zucchini. This has to be the most remarkable of times, this point where summer still bears fruit and autumn harvest begins as well.
There is simply no other time like it.
Here is a recipe that celebrates the last of summer’s bounty, all in one dish. The okra is a Cajun addition, giving the dish a twist on the classic French version of Ratatouille.
Recipe and links after the jump.
Lovin’ Fresh is a series of recipes designed to showcase produce gathered from local farms or grown in my own garden.
It’s almost here and I thought I’d better prepare all of you for it. It’s the ying to the yang of vegetable gardening. Those of you that are fortunate enough to have a little piece of ground to grow your own food will be very familiar with it. And those of you that visit farmers markets and can’t resist the siren song of all those amazing late summer vegetables know it too. Perhaps you shudder a bit just to think about it. Or, if you’re like me, you lie in bed, eyes wide open, conjuring up ways to creatively sidestep it.
“It” is that deluge of fresh produce that starts to haunt every corner of your kitchen, entryway, and basement, taunting you as it slowly deteriorates while you fret over and hunt out ways to use it up. By late summer, you’ve grown a tad tired of zucchini, yellow squash, cucumbers, peppers, and even tomatoes. Actually, I never tire of tomatoes, but I do get full before I can finish each new batch that comes off my prolific vines. That’s where this recipe, appropriately named Use ‘Em Up Cold Summer Soup, comes into play. How full of promise is that title? Question is, does it live up to the hype?
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