Reviving Traditional Foods
Dandelion greens, like all greens, love fat. Their robust bitterness and peppery undertones are muted, to some degree, by the liquid smoothness of unrefined olive oil or – even better – the smokiness of a good quality bacon fat, free of added nitrates and nitrites and produced from hogs raised outdoors and under a vibrant [...]
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.” [...]
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 [...]
Beet salad with fresh basil and olive oil, sweet and fresh and earthy, becomes the center of our supper tables in late summer and early autumn when both beets and basil appear at market in abundance. Farmers sell half-pound bags of fragrant Genovese and Violetta basil for as little as four dollars, and you can [...]
This giveaway is now closed, and the winner is Jenn W who’ll be crocking up a batch of beet sauetkraut in no time! In the mean time, Cultures for Health is offering Nourished Kitchen readers a great discount. . I love fermentation, the whole entire process: the mysterious and nearly magical way invisible microbes transform [...]
A fresh fig tart, earthy and mildly sweet, is a hard thing to resist. And when fresh figs are paired with honeyed yogurt and almond meal, it’s even harder to resist, especially for four-year-old fingers. So when we made this fresh fig tart, filling an almond flour tart shell with honey-sweetened strained yogurt and slices [...]
Wild mushroom butter. There’s something about wild mushrooms and dishes made from them like wild mushroom butter, something faintly alarming and decidedly adventuresome. It’s a disquieting food, like raw milk, and it takes a certain amount of culinary fortitude to walk into the woods, scratch your way through the pine needles, the brush and slowly [...]
Kombucha vinaigrette, may seem like an unusual take on the classic combination of olive oil and balsamic or red wine vinegar, but, when complemented by the unique flavors of clove and allspice it can become a nourishing, if unique dressing for any salad. I find it pairs particularly well with the sweetness of beets, apples, pears and nuts. Reminiscent of apple cider vinegar in combination with club soda, kombucha offers a unique flavor that is growing in popularity as more and more natural foods enthusiasts learn to cherish the beverage – a sweetened tea that undergoes a unique fermentation process through the use of a mother or symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast.
Prebiotics and probiotics represent essential aspects of a wholesome, nourishing diet. Though not the same, prebiotics and probiotics complement one another and work together to improve overall health and wellness. Simplistically, a prebiotic promotes the proliferation of beneficial bacteria while probiotics contain live beneficial bacteria that help to recolonize your intenstinal flora. [...]
Has a lost love of soda pop been nagging at you too long? We’ve developed a love of water kefir or tibicos in our home. A fermented beverage teeming with beneficial bacteria, it’s easily flavored, remarkably simple to prepare and more palatable than kombucha, offering a pleasant alternative to commercial sodas. Similar [...]
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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.
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