Now that we have lots of beef, it will be easy to find recipes in La Cuisine to try. As R. Blondeau says, “Beef is the base of our cuisine; if the flavor and quality changes with the cuts of meat used, it remains nutritious and enjoyable.” Most of the beef from last week is…
Tag: Real Food
Oxtail Soup
Everything went well on Friday – and yes, I do have a pot of oxtail soup on my stove right now! I made some changes to my usual recipe and used soaked cassava instead of potatoes, pumpkin instead of carrots, and Shungiku (an edible chrysanthemum) and cutting celery instead of celery. It made me happy…
Eating From The Earth
My garden is finally starting to look like something. I was so behind this year, and the cold weather was a long time coming. A lot of the brassicas really didn’t like the heat. They are finally looking happy. It’s a small garden this year, compared to other years, but we are getting so much…
OEUFS DUR AUX CREVETTES – Hard-Cooked Eggs With Shrimp
With Valentine’s day just behind us, all the stores seem to have seafood on sale. Ethan found some good shrimp for me. Shrimp was my favorite childhood food. Ethan was always crazy about salmon, but he feels funny if he eats shrimp. On the rare occasions we get seafood, it’s invariably salmon, not shrimp. So…
POTAGE AU POTIRON (Pumpkin Soup)
Here is the next French recipe from “La Cuisine,” featuring two things we’ve got from the farm: Pumpkins from last year’s summer garden (I still have six! The Seminoles keep so long!) and milk. According to Chef R. Blondeau (the author), soup must be served at the beginning of dinner if it is not part…
Soaking and Fermenting Cassava
I started growing cassava three years ago. My friends and fellow gardeners Paul and Ginny Campbell gave me the first stalk. Cassava is propagated that way – by saving the stalks to plant the next season. The trick is to store them until the spring without them drying out or molding. Some people wax the…
POULE AUX OIGNONS
I have an ambitious idea for this year – and I hope that you will also be excited about it. My grandmother was French – she was born in Nice, France, but immigrated to the US after meeting my grandfather while he was there as a US soldier in WW II. She passed away when…
First Attempt At Bacon
Inspired by the River Cottage Curing and Smoking Handbook, Ethan cured some bacon last week. It’s good, but not quite what we expected – it’s a little heavy on the juniper berries and bay leaf. Not bad at all, but I guess we’re used to Southern-style bacon. We’re going to try it again with…
Handmade Mayonnaise
As soon as Christmas was over, the chickens decided it was spring and started laying. We don’t usually get that many eggs so early in the year. They were such beautiful shades of pink and brown I had to get a picture. My little lettuce plants are finally just big enough to start getting salads. …
New Year’s Calamondin Cake
Welcome 2016!!! We had a wonderful New Year’s Eve dinner with my family. We had a big ham bone from a ham Ethan brined, so I made the traditional Southern New Year’s meal: Black-eye peas (with the ham bone), cornbread, and greens (turnip greens this time – I think they are supposed to…
Experiments with Fermented Cassava
We stopped by our friend PJ’s house the other day while we were on her side of town looking at a chest freezer we found on Craigslist. She loaded us up with more grapefruits, showed us her chickens and her garden, and insisted we take all the pablano peppers that loaded the five or so…
Key Lime Pie – A Real Food Recipe
A few weeks ago, my dad took Mirin, along with a fellow entomologist enthusiast, for one of their crazy bug-hunting trips to Cedar Key. Along the way they discovered a key lime tree, covered in limes and entirely ignored/unappreciated/forgotten at the edge of a school yard. The limes were falling all over the ground, and…
Toadstools And Fairy Rings 