Reviving Traditional Foods
Whole wheat sourdough challah, fragrant with olive oil and honey, is a nourishing bread – rich, flavorful and worth the extra effort it takes to lovingly prepare the dough, roll out the strands and intricately braid the loaves. While typically prepared from refined white flour, vegetable oil or margarine and refined white sugar, challah is, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Tomato and cucumber salad, sparkling with the bright flavors of parsley, fresh lemon juice and a subdued and earthy olive oil, finds its way to our supper table several times a week during the height of the tomato season from early August through mid-September. Our family loves the simple combination of some of summer’s best [...]
Easy roast chicken, using the most minimal of ingredients and techniques, has found its way into our kitchen more than once in the past month. When time is limited, as it has been for our family lately, nourishing foods become ever more important, and while we strive our best to eat well and to celebrate [...]
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.
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.
Labneh – a yogurt cheese of middle eastern origin – is remarkably versatile and very easy to make at home. Alternately known as lebni, labni or laban, labneh is found all across the middle east where it’s popularly rolled into small balls, served with unrefined extra virgin olive oil and used as a condiment. [...]
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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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