Chicken bones

Carrots, onions, celery, garlic ends and peels (the usual)
Corn cobs
Bunch cilantro stems
Cucumber ends and peels
Tomato ends and seeds
Pepperocini tops
Red pepper tops and cores
Lime and lemon halfs (will fish out after 30 minutes or so, so they won't make the stock bitter)
Eggplant peels and ends

I am having all sorts of success with the dandelion experiment underway around here at the moment.  Enough time has passed for my thumb to no longer be dyed brown/purple, the cookie recipe was a huge hit with my kids, the syrup tastes very much like flower honey, buds are pickling their little hearts out on my counter...the one big error was the lemonade recipe.  I made the mistake of leaving the flowers sitting in the top of the bottle for a couple of days, and the result was pretty bitter.  A mistake I won't make twice, to be sure.

Just as interesting have been the ways I've been trying to sneak the greens into my unsuspecting children's stomachs.  A couple of years ago, I tried wilting them like mustard greens or collards, but they were just too bitter.  This year, I've been a little more successful--small, young greens stepping in for spinach in scrambled eggs with cheese, or getting diced fine and added at a last moment to soups or pasta sauces.

The real success, though, has been as a variation on my favorite Gyoza Recipe.  The strong garlic, ginger and soy sauce rendered them totally invisible other then a slight earthy flavor, and we had no leftovers even though I'd made a double batch.

 Hey everyone!  Sorry for the break in posting...it's been a bit busy around here.  I have pictures of what I've been up to, though, so expect a rush of posts as soon as I find my card reader. 


Jicama ends
Onion and garlic skins
Green onion ends
Jalapeno ends
Corn cob
Dandelion stems
Ginger shavings
lime peel
peach and nectarine skins
the last strawberry stems

Chicken bones and shrimp shells

Meat Stock for SouthWest food.

Meat:  Beef bones, chicken bones from thighs last week, one split pig foot (made menudo yesterday...story and pictures on Saturday).

Vegetable matter:  celery, onion and garlic peels, carrot tops (the usual)

Sweet potato ends
Thick stems from mustard greens
Woody asparagus stalks
Tomato stem-ends and seeds
The peels and ends from roasting some Anaheim peppers last week.
Cucumber ends
Mushroom stems
Chayote squash cores
Jicama peels

The way I make stock can be found here.

 Dandelion Wine. The words were summer on the tongue. The wine was summer caught and stoppered...Hold summer in your hand, pour summer in a glass, a tiny glass of course, the smallest tingling sip for children; change the season in your veins by raising glass to lip and tilting summer in.                                          --Ray Bradbury

Yes, they come late here in Idaho...the past week or so and they seem to be coming up all over, little specks of gold in every nook and cranny.  Most people hate them...especially when they infect one's lawn from a less-scrupulous neighbor.  The dandelion, however, is easy to recognize, completely edible, and very nutritious. 

From Thalassa's Herbal at Musings of a Kitchen Witch (very useful information, plus recipes)

Most dandelion recipes call for the young leaves--slightly bitter, like radicchio, rather then the tear-inducing citrus pith quality of the mature leaves.  However, I missed that window this year.  So what to do instead?


Dandelion Syrup

Dandelion Flower Cookies

Pickled Dandelion Buds (scroll down)

Dandelion Lemonade

Roasted Dandelion Root "Coffee"

Dandelion Wine

More Recipes (including soup, cake and baklava)

And, if you can still find young leaves in your part of the globe, the excellent traditional dandelion salad with bacon and hard-boiled eggs.  

 As always, if you're going to wild-gather, make sure that you pick an area that has not been sprayed and is far enough away from roads to avoid contamination!

Looks like I have some edible exploring to do... any other links anyone cares to share?

From JoJoNinja

I was recently introduced by a friend to the concept of the Paleo Diet.  It's a fascinating idea, one that takes (or at least, attempts to take) what is consumed back as far as possible, via educated guess work.  Rather then early Industral Age, or Pre-Industrial/Medieval, which I usually discuss (which would be within the past, say 10-20 generations of human existence), fans of the Paleolithic diet argue that human beings have only been eating grain in great quantities since the advent of agriculture, and that we spent a much longer time before that in hunter-gatherer tribes.  They also point to the health of modern hunter-gatherer groups such as the Hazda people of Africa, or Native Australians...who, so long as they follow a traditional diet, are virtually free of many modern diseases such as heart disease, obesity, cancer, etc.

Being a fan of Michael Pollan's similar synopsis of the modern diet, I set out to give it a try, and found the positive and negative aspects to be more complex then I suspected:

FOODS IN SEASON NOW

List from Eat The Seasons, North America , a quick way to check in on what's in season, with tips on storing and preparing(not to mention recipes!).  It updates regularly.  Another great resource is How to Pick a Peach: The Search for Flavor from Farm to Table by Russ Parsons.  Check out the side links, too!


Why eat seasonal?