Reviving Traditional Foods
In the spring, our CSA brings us tender greens, young lettuces, small roots and huge bunches of herbs. As I picked through the farm’s choices of herbs that week: angelica, rose geranium, wormwood and mountain mint, I found myself taken by lovage. Its clean and almost antiseptic scent and celery-like undertones appealed to me. Not [...]
Portable soup, a sort of homemade bouillon, sustained travelers before Cup O’ Noodles lined rest stop shelves and salty powdered bouillon cubes gave home cooks a short cut in making soups, stews and sauces. Modern cooks who seem to favor time saving packaged ingredients over more elaborate traditions have lost their taste for laborious culinary [...]
Bone broth is a staple of my family’s diet. As with healthy fats, heirloom vegetables, grass-fed meats and a good old-fashioned fermented cod liver oil, we consume a lot of bone broths – usually aiming for one quart per person per day, at the recommendation of our nutritionist. Broth, you see, is a nutritional powerhouse. [...]
I have a confession: I have no idea what’s in my CSA box this week, and, I’m confident I’m not alone. Sure, I can recognize the sugar snap peas and carrots, the lacinato kale with its pebbled dark green leaves, the baby collards (which we’ll combine with cream and the last of our overwintered shallots [...]
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 straight to [...]
Braised brisket with tzimmes, a classic dish for Rosh Hashanah, takes a new direction with the addition of hard apple cider. Slowly cooked and tenderly watched, grass-fed beef brisket is first seared in tallow then doused in homemade beef stock and hard cider and roasted in a clay baker or Dutch oven for several hours. [...]
A good stock is the backbone of a good kitchen; it provides flavor to your dishes as well as sustenance and nourishment for your body. Broth features in the traditional foods of peoples across the globe. Stock is the foundation of classical French cooking and provides critical sustenance in peasant cooking among traditional peoples everywhere. [...]
Chicken feet – gnarly, repulsive and disturbing – make for the very best stock. Devoid of little else but tendons, bone and cartilage (sound appetizing yet?), chicken feet produce a fine golden broth that’s rich in all those obscure nutrients that make a good stock so nourishing: glucosamine chondroitin, collagen and trace minerals. Moreover, [...]
Beef stock – especially homemade beef stock is remarkably easy to prepare especially using this tried-and-true classic beef stock recipe. You don’t need purchased beef base to prepare a decent beef stock any more than you need those hateful little granules of chicken bouillon to prepare a chicken stock. Just a lazy Saturday [...]
Money woes are everywhere. Healthcare costs are rising. Food costs are increasing. Electricity is higher now than it used to be. Between lost jobs, shortened working hours, missed bonuses and the ever-increasing costs of living, it seems everyone is looking for ways cut back. Of course, we’re no exception. Money’s [...]
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