Reviving Traditional Foods
Sole meunière is heavenly – slightly crispy, dripping with brown butter and infused with lemon and parsley. For all its flavor of citrus, butter and fresh parsley, sole meunière is so simple to prepare at home, and like all of the most nourishing dishes, it s its very simplicity that is so appealing. And everything, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Roast lamb is, without a doubt, one of our very favorite dishes. In the spring we serve it with young vegetables: carrots, English peas, parsnips and fennel, but we’ve recently started serving it with Greek-inspired ingredients: olives, lemon, garlic and oregano. And it is heavenly. There is nothing quite light the vibrant perfume and flavor [...]
Over the past few weekends, the snow has cleared from the high country (yes … it takes that long for winter to recede up here), and what time I’ve had that hasn’t been occupied by the online cooking class (there’s still time to register, you stragglers …), I’ve spent planting my new herb garden. My porch is littered with fragrant terra cotta and glazed ceramic pots, bursting with charming herbs: rosemary, rose geranium, sweet bay, peppermint, spearmint, curly parsley, flat leaf parsley, dill, sweet basil and violetta basil, thyme and chives and nasturtiums. I think wistfully about finding French tarragon, stevia for teas, marjoram and sweet cicely (for its charming name alone).
Soaking grains, beans, legumes, nuts and seeds is a traditional practice that can positively impact the nutritional qualities of these foods for those who consume them. Grains, beans, legumes, nuts and seeds can all add great value and variety to the diet, yet they contain antinutrients – particularly phytates and enzyme inhibitors – which detract [...]
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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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