Hugelkultur!

Last week on The Weekend Gardener with NikiJabbour we talked about my hugelkultur. No, that’s not German for Culture of Hugs and Bagels (close, though!) Hugelkultur is a method of building a raised bed with a base of logs. I was too punk-ass lazy to photography my bed when I first built it out of the logs from the backyard spruces I trimmed last winter—and now it’s completely camouflaged with squash vines—but this picture gives you the basic idea.

The advantages of the method are manifold: first, it’s a fairly quick and easy way to make a large raised bed. If you have mobility issues or simply value comfort, a high-built hugelkulture can be a comfortable way to garden from a standing position (once it starts to decompose, you can just add more logs or other organic method on the top to maintain height). Second, the logs soak in moisture and then release it slowly over time, allowing the bed to become essentially self-watering in dry times. I have watered my hugelkultur this summer, but only about half as often as my “unenhanced” beds. Third, as the years pass, the logs will slowly decompose, releasing nutrients into the soil, maintaining the fertility and productivity of the bed.

Fun! Easy! (Okay, not easy easy, but easier than most other ways to build a big, raised bed). Permaculture-y! Amusing to pronounce!  Hugelkultur. A definite success so far. 

Listen Up!

Haven't you ever thought, "Boy, the experience of knowing Elisabeth would just be that much better if I heard her on the RADIO?" Well, tomorrow's your big chance: My brief interview with Nick Yorston about the Growing Green Festival is airing on CKBW 98.1 around 8 and again around 9, then from 11:30 to 12 I'll be on The Weekend Gardener with Niki Jabbour on News 95.7 talking about my book, A Taste of the Maritimes, and various garden-to-kitchen adventures. Both stations stream live online on the internet, so you can listen in no matter where you are.

Raspberry Sour Cream Ice Cream with Hazelnut Croquant

My raspberry patch is busting out all over with berries. We eat lots of ours straight off the bush, but  the occasional lucky pint makes it inside to the kitchen. One of those met its delectable fate in this ice cream just the other day. I am so ruined for Haagen Dazs. Amateur punks.




Raspberry Sour Cream Ice Cream with Hazelnut Croquant


 This recipe is a modification of the Strawberry Sour Cream Ice Cream recipe in David Lebovitz's The Perfect Scoop. 


Ingredients


1 heaping pint fresh raspberries
1 tablespoon lemon juice
1 cup sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla vodka (I make my own; simply immerse a split vanilla bean in a 750 mL bottle of vodka and let it sit for a couple weeks)
1 cup sour cream
1 cup heavy cream (35%--also, if you live in Nova Scotia, "the purple one")
1 batch hazelnut croquant (recipe below)


Directions


Combine all ingredients and blend until evenly combined. Refrigerate for 1 hour, then process according to your ice cream maker's instructions. Add croquant during last minute of churning.




Hazelnut Croquant


Ingredients


1 cup sugar
1 cup toasted chopped hazelnuts


Directions


Line a baking dish with aluminum foil and set aside.
Melt sugar in a cast iron pan over medium heat until completely liquid, stirring carefully from time to time. Add toasted hazelnuts and stir to combine, then quickly transfer mixture to prepared baking dish, spreading it out as thinly as possible. 
Once croquant has cooled, seal it in a freezer bag and crush with a hammer into pieces small enough to work for the recipe above, according to taste.

Kahlua

You know I love a simple recipe, and it doesn't get much simpler or more rewarding than this five minute recipe for homemade kahlua. I make mine with Laughing Whale Seventh Wave Espresso. It's much less sweet than the commercial version--I think it's ideal for sipping straight.

Ingredients

1/4-1/2 cup sugar to taste

1 1/4 cup espresso or coffee brewed at 2 1/2 times regular strength,hot and fresh

2 tablespoons vanilla extract

1 1/4 cup vodka



Directions 


Stir sugar into hot espresso and stir to dissolve. Add vanilla extract and vodka. Stir to combine, bottle, and enjoy at your leisure.

Notes: Vodka quality is not terrifically important for this recipe, so use what you can afford!

To make your own version of Tia Maria, simply substitute a favourite rum for the vodka.


Really. So. Easy. 

Next week: Cherry Bounce! 

Lemon-Pickled Scapes

1.    I don't like pickles. Or at least I didn't until I realized that what I really dislike about them is A) vinegar and B) the bendy quality vegetables get after a pickle jar is immersed in hot water in order tobecome shelf stable. In fact, neither of those aspects is at all necessary to enjoy a pickle! In recent months I have been going pickle-crazy, immersing all my fave veggies in a lemon juice brine and putting them directly in the fridge. They won't keep longer than a couple months and they can't be kept on a shelf, but they're an easy, fantastic bit of something something to have on hand for anytime snacking. If you're simply not a scapes person, try this recipe with carrots, cucumbers, or any other vegetable you like.
   
   
   Ingredients
   ·         1/2 pound garlic scapes 
   ·         2 hot chile peppers, sliced with seeds (jalapeno, serrano, or whatever crops up in your garden or farmers' market)
   ·         2 " cube of fresh ginger, sliced 
   ·         3/4 cup lemon juice
   ·         3/4 cup water
   ·         1 tablespoon salt
   
   
   Directions
   Trim the heads and cut ends off the scapes and cut into short pieces so that they resemble green beans.
   Toss scape pieces with sliced peppers and ginger. Fill mason jars nearly full, packing mixture tightly.

   Combine lemon juice, water, and salt in a separate container, then pour over mixture in jars until full to the brim. Cover tightly and transfer to the refrigerator immediately. Allow pickles to flavour up for about a week before opening. Enjoy!
   
   

Cranberry Apple Pickles

This is a perfect side dish for the holidays--all three main ingredients (apples, cranberries, and lemon juice) have a detoxifying effect to combat your holiday indulgences, and the taste is a lovely complement to roast turkey and ham alike.


Cranberry Apple Pickles


Ingredients (per 500 mL jar)


1/2 cup lemon juice (substitute rhubarb juice for a completely local choice)
1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons sugar or honey
2 teaspoons salt
2 large or 3 small-medium apples, any varietal
1/2 cup fresh whole cranberries


Directions


Combine lemon or rhubarb juice, water, sugar, and salt in a small saucepan and bring to a simmer over medium heat.


While brine is heating, peel apples and slice into long strips or chunks, according to taste. Slice cranberries in half. Place half of cranberries at the bottom of jar, followed by a layer of apples, then topped with remaining cranberries.


Pour simmering brine over fruit mixture to a level 1/2 inch from the top of the jar. Allow to cool for 10 minutes, then cover tightly, label, and store in the refrigerator.




This recipe will keep in the refrigerator for up to two months, so make it now, put it away, and forget it until Christmas! It even makes a lovely food gift for those of you who want to impress friends and family with your craftiness. They don't need to know how simple it was--I won't tell if you don't.

Watch the Author

All the publicity work I'm doing for A Taste of the Maritimes is a blast! I'll be on CTV Morning Live this Tuesday, the 13th, at 8:15 AM, so don't forget to tune in. Until then you can satisfy yourself with my author video from the Nimbus East Coast Reads series.

Cookbook ahoy hoy

The book is launched! Blogger doesn't like my fancy photographs, but you can sneak a peek at the photos from the launch here.


If you are new to this blog and have bought the book, please feel free to ask a question or leave a comment. I'm always happy to chat about local food, where to find it, and how to prepare it. Welcome!

Apple Pie Gelato with Caramel Stracciatella

We don’t drink a lot of juice at my house, but I couldn’t resist the amazing apple cider from Suprima Farms at the Lunenburg Farmers’ Market this week. As long as we were having a treat, I decided to go whole hog. And ended up with this:

Ingredients

2 ½ cups apple cider

1 teaspoon vanilla

4 cinnamon sticks

2 cups heavy cream

½ cup milk

6 egg yolks

½ cup white sugar

½ cup caramel sauce (store bought or homemade—it’s easy! Try this recipe).

Directions

Heat apple cider in a saucepan over high heat. Reduce the cider to 3/4 -1 cup, stirring frequently. Remove from heat, add vanilla, stir, and set aside.

Place the cinnamon sticks in a closed plastic bag and smash to shards with a hammer. Combine cinnamon shards with heavy cream a in a saucepan. Bring mixture to a simmer over medium low heat and simmer, stirring frequently, for ten minutes. Remove pan from heat, cover, and set aside to steep for one hour.

After an hour, strain shards out of the cream. Return strained cream to a clean pan. Whisk in yolks and sugar. Cook over low heat, stirring frequently and scraping the bottom of the pan, until custard thickens, about ten minutes.

Remove custard from heat and whisk to combine with milk and reduced apple cider. Refrigerate mixture overnight, then process in an ice cream maker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Just before removing from machine, pour caramel sauce into the machine in a slow stream to form a ribbon. Remove to a container and freeze until hard, 2-3 hours.

This one passes the self-control test—as in, you won’t have any, so proceed with caution. Enjoy!

Seed Starter

...is it already that time again? The garden has turned from slushy to boggy, the birds are singing, and little pink nubs of rhubarb are sticking their heads obstinately from the half-frozen soil. So yep, we're starting seeds.

I owe a great debt of thanks to the fine folks at Hope Seeds, Annapolis Seeds, and Broadfork Farm for all the excellent heritage plants we're putting in the ground this year. Our gardens will include raspberry canes, grape vines, two varietals of kale, rhubarb, strawberries, rainbow chard, rutabaga, corn, pumpkins and two other winter squash, zucchini, cauliflower, 5-7 varietals of tomato (we'll see what comes back from last year), parsley, dill, cilantro, lavender, basil, mint, chives, rosemary, two varietals of sweet pepper, three varietals of hot pepper, and 200 heads of garlic.

Jeez louise, it's starting to sound less like a garden and more like a farm! Now if only we could keep chickens in the town of Lunenburg...

The Real Food Diet

One of the (many) reasons I became a local food advocate has to do with body weight. Like many of us, I have struggled with weight issues since I was a teenager. In the decades since then I have had periods of being slender and periods of being heavy. The slender times, however, have never been healthy ones--I lost weight eating heavily processed "diet" meals and smoking cigarettes. Whenever I returned to eating regularly I put weight back on, and when I quit smoking I put a lot of weight on. I have only lost weight sustainably--in other words, been able to lose weight and keep it off without extreme effort--by eating whole, organic, local, fresh foods, the kinds I blog about here and for South Shore Now.


It seems evident that human beings have an instinctual drive to eat not just to satiate hunger, but to meet our nutritional needs. Most nutrients and micronutrients (not all of which we even yet understand) are refined out of the foods featured in a Standard North American Diet. Eating low quality food while trying to lose weight is like trying to pick up a tree limb with tweezers--the tool just isn't up to the job. When you change your body, you need extra energy to effect the change, not less!

I still struggle with my weight, and it's higher than I'd like. What I can tell you, though, is that I now easily maintain a weight far below my all-time high, thanks to my focus on real foods. I also have far more energy, better health, and happier moods than I did during my cigarette smoking, Lean Cuisine eating, size 8 days. It's a trade-off I'm happy to take.

Winter Dishes

I've been working on food styling for my most recent project... here's a bit of what I came up with this weekend.

Slacker Update

This blog has been quiet lately... mostly because I've been busy promoting the Lunenburg Farmers' Market on facebook and keeping a local foods blog for the newspaper--visit it here! I'm also working on a book proposal about eating local in Nova Scotia to pitch at Word on the Street next month, so I'll be back soon with updates about that. Cross your fingers for me!

Extra Local Yum

Have I mentioned recently how much I love farmers' markets? There's just nothing that can compare with actually getting to know the people who produce your food. I recently began facebook groups for both markets in Lunenburg (summer and winter) and will be writing producer profiles for them soon. I'll be sharing them here, but in the meantime, enjoy this little piece of Canadiana:

Farmers make this country great!

Scape it Up

It's garlic scape season, and most folks here on the South Shore are eating them left, right, and centre before they turn tough on the stalk. Since we're growing all our own garlic for the year we have a loooooooot of scapes... I decided to come up with a way to save them for a rainy day. Or a snowy day. Or, in the case of this particular recipe, a snotty, sniffly, need-food-as-medicine day.

Scape and Ginger Bisque

Ingredients
2 cups garlic scapes, snipped into half-inch pieces
2 cups chicken stock (I used a homemade stock that was already made with ginger, but plain old stock from the can or box works just fine. For you local peeps, I recommend the convenient-yet-fresh stock made and sold at The Biscuit Eater.)
1/2 cup pieces of fresh ginger, peeled and chopped into rough chunks
Salt and pepper to taste

Directions
Combine scapes, stock, and ginger in a stock pot. Heat on medium to a simmer, and simmer until scapes soften and just begin to turn drab green, about 20 minutes. Turn off heat and remove ginger chunks. Puree with an immersion blender (If you don't have an immersion blender--buy one! They're fabulous, save work and dishes, and cost about $15. OR simply pour into a stand blender, puree, and return to pot.) Salt and pepper to taste. Enjoy immediately, or freeze until so moved by your palate.

Town and Gown and Field and Mountain

My new article on sustainability and university/community relationships is out! Having the conversations with the sustainability coordinators and professors at these schools is such an enjoyable part of the job.

Gin Rhubarby

The rhubarb is bountiful in the garden again, and so we're breaking out the gin. This springtime treat is too easy to even write out as a formal recipe--simply dice about two cups of fresh, clean rhubarb, pour a bottle of gin (we always use Bombay Saphhire)over it, cover, and refrigerate for a week. At the end of the week, strain the gin and enjoy with tonic. It's pink perfection. It's the taste of earth in the morning of the year. It's the soul of spring.

(Note: do not get carried away with the beautiful simplicity of this cocktail and try to replicate it with strawberries or some other bossy fruit, unless you're particularly fond of Kool-Aid. In which case I'd recommend making Kool-Aid with vodka--no sense wasting the juniper delights of gin.)

Dandelions Four Ways

Yellow blossoms are just starting to pop up in my yard and I'm determined to make the most of it this year. Nova Scotia is full of incredibly nutritious and tasty wild foods (I just realized that half the "weeds" in my garden last year were yummy lamb's quarters!) but I'm especially excited about dandelions--I can find and eat these virtually anywhere I go. We'll be making at least the first three preparations listed here in the coming weeks, as I already have a capper and bottlecaps. We'll see how much the wine-making equipment costs before committing to dandelion wine. If you try any of these, drop me a note and let me know how they turned out!

1. Dandelion Greens

Dandelion greens are best eaten early in the spring before the plant flowers (in other words, NOW!) Once the plant starts to flower the greens become much more bitter, although they are still edible. Pick and rinse dandelion greens to enjoy on a salad, or saute them for 20 minutes in olive oil with garlic and/or onions, finishing with a splash of wine. Delicious and ridiculously nutritious!

2. Dandelion Root Beer

Ingredients

• 1 gallon water
• 1 1/2 cups molasses
• 1 teaspoon yeast
• 4 ounces clean, peeled dandelion root

Directions

Mash the dandelion roots with a potato masher (alternatively, put them in a plastic baggie, give your five-year-old a hammer, and stand back). Put the mashed roots and the water in a pot, bring to a boil, and simmer for 20 minutes. Strain into a large container, add molasses, and cool to lukewarm. Once it is lukewarm, add the yeast and stir. Cover the container with a cloth and put it in a warm, draft-free spot. After two hours, pour the mixture into clean bottles to within 1/2 inch of the tops. Cap with capper and metal caps (available at any of these beer-and-wine shops that have popped up all over the place). Place the capped bottles on their sides in a warm, draft-free spot for 5 days, then set upright in a cool place. Root beer will be ready to drink in 10 days. Enjoy all summer long!

3. Dandelion Jelly

Ingredients

• 2 cups dandelion blossoms, separated from leaves and bracts (essentially all the green stuff) Pick midday when the blossoms are full.
• 2 cups water
• 1 cup sugar
• 2 teaspoon fresh-squeezed lemon juice
• 1 1/4 teaspoons pectin
  

Directions

Boil flowers in water on medium heat for about 10 minutes. Strain petals from liquid and return liquid to a clean pot to boil. Add sugar, lemon juice, and pectin as per the instructions on your box of pectin. Boil and stir vigorously with a wooden spoon, skimming the foam, until the top surface becomes blobby and glasslike (2 or more minutes). If you know how to can, you can put this jelly in sterilized jars for year-long storage. If not, simply pour the jelly into containers and store in the fridge. This also freezes well, so feel free to stock some in your freezer for anytime! Dandelion jelly is dandy on toast and also as a condiment for meats.

4. Dandelion Wine

Ingredients

• 1 quart dandelion petals
• 3/4 pound chopped golden raisins
• 2 pounds sugar
• 3 lemons
• 3 oranges
• 1 teaspoon yeast nutrient
• 7 1/2 pints water
• wine yeast
  

Directions

Combine dandelion petals and water, bring to a boil, and simmer for two hours. Strain the liquid to remove the solids, return the liquid to the heat, and bring to a low boil. Zest the oranges and lemons and set aside. Juice the oranges and lemons and add the juice and the sugar to the boiling liquid, stirring well to dissolve. Add the zest and raisins, then remove from heat and set aside to cool. When the mixture reaches room temperature, stir in the yeast nutrient and activated yeast. Cover the mixture and put in a warm, draft-free spot. Stir 3 times daily for two weeks. After two weeks, strain the liquid again to remove solids and pour into a fermentation vessel (such as a bottle or jug) with a fitted airlock. After three weeks, remove airlock, skim any foam from the top of the liquid, and put the airlock back on. Repeat until fermentation is clearly finished, then store for a year before drinking. Worth the wait!

A tweet tweet

Here's my new article on sustainability and social media on campus. Any excuse to mess around on twitter...

Sriracha-cha

Now that I have a nanny here on weekdays, I have regained something resembling a weekend. And when I have a weekend, I can spend a good chunk of a day cooking meals ahead for the week. This weekend I made: 20 servings of a turkey, spinach, mushroom, onion, carrot, and green bean stew (about half local/organic and half conventional); 12 servings of pancakes fully loaded with last year's local organic strawberries and wild blueberries; and 2 family dinners worth of local, organic pork tenderloin with a Jack Daniel's, maple syrup, and Sriracha marinade.

Now it's that last item that I really want to talk about, see. I recently researched Tennessee whiskey for a work project. When I learned that it is A) filtered through maple sugar charcoal, then B) aged in oak casks that have been charred internally to caramelize the wood sugars, I thought, "Aha! Perfect affinity with maple syrup!" I've been playing around with sauces that balance maple syrup against Sriracha, and even trying to drum up a good liquor to throw in the mix. This did the trick in spades. Possibly the best damn pork I've had in my life--and the recipe couldn't be easier. Here ya go, folks:


Happy Jack Pork

Ingredients
1 -2 pounds of pork tenderloin

Marinade
1/2 cup Jack Daniel's
1/2 cup Sriracha
1/2 cup maple syrup

Sauce
1/2 cup Jack Daniel's
1/3 cup Sriracha
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup heavy cream

Directions
Mix the ingredients for the marinade thoroughly, then submerge the tenderloin in the marinade and refrigerate for 5-8 hours. Prehat oven to 375 F/190 C. Place pork with marinade in a baking pan and bake until no pink remains in the center (depending on the size/shape of your tenderloin, likely 45-80 minutes--if you aren't tenderloin-experienced begin checking at 45 minutes.) Remove pork from oven and prepare sauce by thoroughly combining the whiskey, maple syrup, and Sriracha in a saucepan and bringing to a boil. Boil for 4-5 minutes, remove from heat, and whisk in cream. Plate the pork, drizzle with sauce, and serve immediately. Enjoy!

***April 29, 2010: I hear from my aunt Sallea that you can substitute soy milk for the heavy cream in this recipe with good results. Thanks a bunch, Sallea! I love hearing from folks who try my recipes.***