Chigae

This will only be exciting to fellow Korean food o philes.. Kimchi Chamchi Chigae from scratch! Translation: Kimchi stew with tuna, but I used wild salmon instead. It worked alright, although salmon is stronger tasting than tuna so I don't know if I'd do it again. It came forward a bit more than I would have liked. But wow, the face-burny deliciousness of kimchi stew really did it for me the other day. Perfect for when the winter blehs take hold. Any cold that is thinking about getting in your head will flee.

I used this recipe and the kimchi I made myself a few weeks ago. I'm also flipping through a new book, Wild Fermentation, and have lots of ideas for the season ahead. I'm definitely going to try my hand at injera after watching my Ethiopian friend make it at home. It's really tricky to make flat bread at home that is chewy instead of crispy.. but injera is wonderfully soft and holds together well when used like roti to eat lentil stews etc. Like a crepe, essentially, but the dough is fermented for two days ahead of time.

My favorite Korean food blog is One Fork, One Spoon. Makes me homesick for my other home.

Kraut redux and other adventures

These are beets I put into our mini root cellar in September. Not bad, eh? As you can see, they went soft on the stem ends (where the sand is obviously sticking), but that leaves 3/4 of a beet for borscht! I guess this means I should have been more careful that there was no water or broken peel on the stem ends. Also, the 'cellar' spent September on the floor in our rather warm kitchen, as I was unwilling to lug it to the basement only to lug it back up in November when we moved. The remainder of the beets are not at all soft, and still tasty. The sand is a messy pain, as I suspected it would be. The last thing one wants to do is wash beets in a basin (to avoid getting it down the drain) and dumping it outside when it is - 25 C. I hope to switch to perlite when I find some at a reasonable cost.

Another experiment, fermenting in the cupboard. Poor E, every time he opens a cupboard or fridge door there is another unidentifiable concoction bubbling away...

This one is Kimchee-style kraut. I used this recipe again, but learned from my last failed attempt to add brine if salting the cabbage doesn't create enough liquid to cover the veggies. More in-depth information on the joys of letting cabbage go funky can be found here. I added garlic, ginger and Korean hot pepper powder, hoping that the potent combo will serve as an immune booster in a few weeks. The only unfortunate side effect (for those around you, anyway..) is garlic coming out your pores for a few hours.

Speaking of human being repellent... have you heard that eating a raw clove of garlic kills a cold? I started coming down with one a few days ago and tried a home remedy suggested by our Ethiopian friends.. crushed garlic in hot milk! Bleargh, you may be thinking. That's not too far off. However I found the addition of milk a vast improvement over chewing a raw clove by itself, which is the most common approach for insane/brave North Americans. The sniffles were gone 4 hours later.

We got the beet

I'm not sure how to feel about our week of plus thirty temperatures... it is nice in some ways, but seems to portend of future water shortages and wacky growing seasons. Learning to simply accept what happens is something I need to work on. Chris Vester is a great example of that. The fundraiser was fantastic, kudos to Sunnyside Market for putting it together. It was heartwarming to see so many people willing to lend a farmer a hand. And he is the epitome of grace, really... not angry or discouraged but simply accepting that his living is at the mercy of the earth and willing to accept that risk in order to live the way he does. Pretty admirable.

I had forgotten how much I like Matt Masters. He sang odes to the Bow River and a great riff on Johnny Cash's I've Been Everywhere called I Can't Go Nowhere, all about traveling post 9/11. I'm loving the roots country music these days, thanks in part to listening to a fair bit of CKUA. Corb Lund is another great Alberta artist. There's something special about listening to songs about the place you know.

This week we pulled up the beets. Which, we learned the next day, when we had record breaking temperatures, was a bit early. Ah well. The harvest this year was twenty five pounds.. not to shabby..

So far we have enjoyed roasted beets as sweet as candy and beet fritters when it's too hot to turn on the oven. (too simple to require a recipe. grated beets, breadcrumbs or a bit of flour, egg, ginger, salt, pepper. fry up in spoonfulls.)

We are experimenting with cold cellar techniques this year. The basic approach is to cut the tops off, leaving an inch of stem intact, brush off excess dirt, and leave them out to cure for a few days. We then buried them in a large bin of sand, which is bloody heavy but what can you do. The other options are sawdust, which sounds messy to me, or vermiculite, which costs a lot more. Perhaps we will move to vermiculite when we get tired of sand in the kitchen sink.

Here are some recipes I am interested in trying:

Cypriot Beet Preserves

Chocolate and Roasted Beet Pudding Cakes

I'll have to make another batch of kvass as well. That stuff is weird and addictive and I don't know why. And of course, borscht. The Moosewood Cookbook recipe is my favourite. I think the secret is caraway seeds and apple cider vinegar.

Beet Beer

Is it just me or has this blog been a bit booze obsessed lately? Ah well, no need to question that at all.. LOOK WHAT I FOUND! This may be the holy grail of my local foodie aspirations. Beet beer? How crazy is that. Or should I say, wacko. I have participated in beer making, thanks to the ghost of boyfriend past (like the ghost of Christmas past but more awkward on facebook..). It's easier than you'd think. Albeit smelly, or at least grain based-beer is when it's burbling away on the stove. I am getting used to brewing funky concoctions (see kvass, yogurt, vinegar, and kraut..) so what the heck. One day I'll have to take this strange brew on. Also, what a charming website name.. The Local Beet.

Fun with Fermentation

Reading In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan has almost convinced me to give up on vitamin pills entirely. He points out the giant holes in the science of nutrition, and argues that eating the food itself is the best way to go. I'm going to try to be more conscious of getting enough nutrients, since I'm a vegematarian... I should be keeping an closer eye on my consumption of zinc, omega fatty acids, and minerals.

Enter beet kvass, which I read about on Doug DiPasquale's site. Apparently kvass is good for the blood, liver and digestion. Fermentation makes the nutrients from the beets more available for absorption. DiPasquale lists a really easy way to get whey, which you need to get it started.. you simply strain some organic yoghurt with cheesecloth, use the solids as fresh cheese, and use the liquid as your starter.

I have to say, I really like the stuff. I've been having 2 oz of it a couple of times a day. Rather hard to describe, it tastes like beet juice mixed with salty tonic water. Not delicious, exactly, but refreshing in a strange kind of way. I knew that it was addressing some gap in my diet when I got home from a long day at work and thought to myself "I really want some beet kvass right now." Wierd. It may be the sea salt that I'm craving -- I have read that people with 'delicate constitutions', ahem, benefit from drinking sea salt and water as it supports proper adrenal function. I am going to add ginger juice to the kvass next time around and I think I'll have a winner.

I'm going to have to try some other lacto-fermented recipes, like ginger ale and homemade orangina. Googling the topic led me to www.culiblog.org, an amazing blog, and her awesome post on kefir, called "Water Kefir is Like Fresca for Hippies". So now water kefir is on the list now too. I am NOT a fan of yoghurt kefir, I thought it was pretty nasty. But I'll try anything once.

Saurkrapp

My epic fail of the season was an attempt at saurkraut. I followed this tutorial by Doug DiPasquale, and as you can see it looked real purty. However, after a week in the cupboard it was nasty and far from a delicious macrobiotic snack. I suspect it was due to a lack of brine, there was a lot of air still in the jar. I'll have to try again sometime with the help of knowledgeable friends. I recently met Malcolm Saunders of The Light Cellar, and will have to ask for help on the fermentation front.

Word to your mother

The new year begins with experiments in vinegar... we had a stanky half box of wine so I decided to try my hand at making wine vinegar with it. How hard can it be, right? After some online searching, I learned that I need a vinegar mother to get things started. I had heard about mothers before, a sludge of microorganism goodness that is supposedly good for you, which is why cloudy cider vinegar is preferable over the filtered pasteurized kind. The internets told me to find bottled vinegar mother at wine and beer making stores, but no one in the city knew what I was talking about. Other websites said to just use cider vinegar. In the end, I realized that there was mother at the bottom of my organic white wine vinegar in the cupboard (it's that gooey stuff you can see in the pic), so I poured that in a bottle with the wine. I put a cheescloth over the top to allow for air circulation and put in on the shelf in the basement near the furnace (warm air is supposed to help..). So I'll let you know what happens, when it's done in six months!

Picklefest 2008

Just got wind of a great blog, which I've seen before..
www.homegrownevolution.com

They are participating in Picklefest 2008 -- a giant pickling party. The couple who write this blog, Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, are teaching everyone how to lacto-ferment food, which involves brine instead of a hot water bath (how saurkraut is made). This apeals to me because it would involve a whole lot less energy being spent (my utility bill went up when I did a ton of canning). Can't resist the challenge of making my own kimchi.