Reviving Traditional Foods
Homemade sauerkraut, in all its funky humility, is a favorite food in our home – particularly in wintertime when fresh, local produce is a rare treat and we rely on what we’ve put by over the summer and autumn months. For us, this means lots of fermented foods and sauerkraut in particular. We grow cabbage [...]
There’s an old-fashioned charm to homemade root beer with its odd array of roots and bark, flowers, leaves and berries. It, like many other fermented beverages, once enjoyed position as a staple of American cookery. Water, as you know, was not always potable and raw milk, small beers, cider, perry and other fermented beverages were [...]
Fermented beets, dank and earthy and sour, number among my favorite ferments of vegetable. While I will always love the fetid odor of a true sauerkraut, the clean and salty sharpness of Moroccan preserved lemons or the brackish must of a home-cured olive, it is fermented beets – lovingly spiced and brine-pickled – that makes [...]
Homemade potato chips find their way to our kitchen only very rarely, but what a heavenly indulgence when they do appear. You see, I’m a potato chip addict. I may blend a killer kombucha, spend my afternoons brewing water kefir and culturing raw milk yogurt, but it’s the humble potato chip: salty, crunchy and wonderfully [...]
Homemade ketchup – it sounds complicated as though you’d spend all day in the kitchen pounding your way through vats of tomatoes and slowly simmering them away in kettles on a wooden stove. Making homemade ketchup from scratch seems complex, almost unfathomable in an era when quick-fix, all-in-one bagged skillet dinners constitute “cooking from scratch.” [...]
Fermented hot chili sauce – explosive with heat and teeming with food enzymes, beneficial bacteria, vitamin C and carotene. Traditionally, all hot chili sauces were prepared through fermentation – and many of the world’s most renowned and well-loved sauces are still prepared through this time-honored technique of combining hot chilies with salt and allowing it [...]
Home-cured olives are one of those rustic luxuries, those simple charms from a time gone by – a lost art, really. Sure, any grocery store will stock those painfully acidic pimento-stuffed Manzanillas and dull pitted black olives in cans – which, incidentally, are picked green and “ripened” through industrial means. The better stores may even [...]
Brine-pickled garlic scapes, a near-perfect example of waste-not, want-not thinking, makes excellent use of a seemingly obscure food – one cherished only by gardeners and only the most enthusiastic of farmers market goers: the humble garlic scape. The garlic scape, a long and serpentine stem that protrudes from garlic as it grows before opening into [...]
Homemade horseradish found its way to our table this week, and it’s hot – painfully hot, pleasurably hot, perfectly hot. When fresh horseradish root appears at market, which is rarely, I fight my way to it – elbowing into the stand before the other Weston A Price Foundation and fermentation enthusiasts in my community can [...]
Allioli. Allioli. Allioli. I love how the vowels and lulling Ls roll off the tongue – softly and whimsically – almost like a child’s nonsense word. all-ee-oh-lee. It’s a melodic sound. Allioli is a Catalan version of classic aioli, and it differs fundamentally from Provençal aiolis in that it is made without egg yolk – offering just a combination of good quality olive oil, fragrant garlic and unrefined sea salt.
free resources to get started
The Thing About Blueberries . . . is that they don't grind their Harleys over the hot desert tarmac, … [read more]
Confused about grains? You're not alone! It seems that everyone is telling you - to either get … [read more]
Did you know that a simple process can actually increase the nutrients your body absorbs from whole … [read more]
Jenny McGruther is a wife, mother and cooking instructor specializing in real and traditional foods. Her work has been featured on CNN, the Globe & Mail, the Atlantic, the Christian Science Monitor, Denver Post and WebMD. Click here to learn more.
What People are Saying