Reviving Traditional Foods
Winter squash soufflé, sweet and mild yet robust with the complex flavor of roasted garlic, finds its way to our kitchen table towards winter’s end every year. It’s this point in mid- to late-winter that we sort through the remnants from autumn’s harvest gleaned from the last days of our farmers market: stray turnips [...]
This is not your lunch lady’s Salisbury steak recipe. No. Not by any means. In this Salisbury steak recipe, we pair grass-fed beef with earthy oyster and shiitake mushrooms, fresh thyme and mineral-rich homemade beef stock. It’s a luxurious dish – rich and robust. For a woman who lives food, dreams food, revels in food [...]
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 [...]
Election cake , like a bite from American history, makes its rounds every November. I make it every year, but only once a year – the first Monday of November. Preparing Election Cake is a celebration of love, of patriotism, of politics and of history. And for those of you who’ve read Nourished Kitchen for [...]
Gluten-free chicken and dumplings swimming in a salty, creamy broth of herbs and aromatic vegetables found its way to our kitchen a few weeks ago. A cold-weather food, good for the changing of the seasons, gluten-free chicken and dumplings can satisfy hungry bellies on chilly autumn evenings – fulfilling the roles of both company food [...]
Staititai, sweet, tart and perfumed by sweet bay and fragrant olive oil, is, perhaps, the ancient grandfather of modern day pizzas. Soured spelt dough is first fried in olive oil, brushed with even more oil and topped with crumbled ewe’s milk cheese, sesame seeds and honey. The combination of whole grain spelt flour coupled with [...]
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 [...]
Pelmeni, traditional dumplings that hold a near-sacred place in the hearts of the Siberian people inhabiting the Ural mountains, have made their way to convenience stores and the freezer sections of grocery stores all across Russia and Eastern Europe. But the modern convenience food and even homemade versions of pelmeni bare little resemblance to the [...]
Onion gratin with fresh herbs is one of those special indulgences: fragrant, rich with cream and herbs. It’s an old-fashioned dish with no pretense. It’s comfort food at its best: sweet and savory and salty all at once. Warm for the growing chill of mid-September, onion gratin, humble as it is, deserves a place on [...]
Cream of chicken soup, real cream of chicken soup, doesn’t come from a red and white can, folks. Real cream of chicken soup is homemade, from scratch and lovingly tended as it simmers. Buttery, rich with the flavor of chicken, and irrepressibly smooth, it’s a nourishing dish with an old-fashioned, and almost timeless charm (skip [...]
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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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