Healthy Recipes

51. A Vegetable Harvest: Celebrating the Harvest with Autumn One-Pot Meals

Autumn has always been my favorite time of year. The fiery
glory of the leaves during my college years in Maine....

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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52. Which Diapers Are Better for the Planet?

As a father and pediatrician, I’ve changed many diapers—enough to teach
me that diapers are a daily reminder that as humans...

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Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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53. Why Exercise is Important after Baby

Post-natal exercise offers a whole range of
benefits for new moms. However, it’s important to remember that you should
always consult with...

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Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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54. Urban fruit gleaning

Here's a neat idea and yet another neat video from "Cooking Up A Story": urban fruit gleaning. And it features the work of a neat volunteer-led initiative in Portland, Oregon called "The Portland Fruit Tree Project." Check it out and start bringing together a gleaning corp in your area...the fresh fruits, jams, jellies and ciders are waiting for you.

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Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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55. The last of summer's bounty

By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, October 20, 2007 in The Washington Post



This time of year I'm like the women in Jean-François Millet's painting "The Gleaners," bent over the mown fields in their kerchiefs and long skirts, gathering scraps of leftover grain. It's completely irrational. My garden is still bursting with fresh crops for fall: spinach, kale, leeks and a dozen or so others. Winter squash is just starting to cure in the shed, and I haven't even dug the root crops yet. But somehow the oncoming winter brings out the frugal peasant in me, and I'm gripped with the urge to salvage what is left of summer's bounty.

The last of the unpicked snap beans have seeds swelling in their pods. Better not waste them. I spend an hour shelling them and another gathering the last of the old corn ears, stripping them of their kernels and adding them to the beans for succotash. There's some over-the-hill fennel, too woody for salads but a perfectly good candidate for long, slow braising.

A row of broccoli plants and another of zucchini are ready to be yanked out and composted. But shouldn't I leave them a week longer to see if they'll pump out a few more stir-fries' worth of food? I stroll through the garden, assessing what is left. I want one more dish of fried squash blossoms, one more platter of tomato salad before frost threatens. "Look, it's fall," I tell myself. "Get over it."

Then I spot the bolted lettuce. Some of the leafy towers are nearly three feet tall. Where I've harvested heads, the stems have regrown with multiple spires, like Notre Dame. Ready to rip them out, I remember something I read about once on a favorite Web site called L'Atelier Vert ( http://www.frenchgardening.com). Although the leaves of bolted lettuce are so bitter only the starving would eat them, the stems are said to be quite tasty. Curious, I cut some, strip them of their leaves and bring them indoors. Not even bothering to peel them, I cut them all into half-inch pieces on the diagonal. I would expect them to be tough, but they are succulent and easy to slice.

I saute them on low heat for 20 minutes or so in French walnut oil. They begin to exude the milky sap that gives lettuce its botanical name ( Latuca), then they slowly caramelize until they are crisp. I heap them onto a plate with coarse sea salt and freshly ground pepper. They are delectable, more sweet than bitter, but with a little bite. If I leave the roots in the ground, maybe they will sprout a few more meals like this one before the season finally comes to an end.

Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Image: "Les Glaneuses" by Jean-François Millet, 1857.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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56. In a Lebanese kitchen garden

We're delighted to feature a video this month entitled "Cooking With Love: Alice’s Kitchen" produced by the good folks at "Cooking Up a Story". It features Linda Dalal Sawaya who talks about how her love of gardening, cooking, and her own Lebanese heritage got passed down over the generations from mother to daughter. Linda shares a biteful of this oral history in this short video and a heaping portion in a book she wrote called "Alice's Kitchen: Traditional Lebanese Recipes".

Related recipes:
Summer Squash Stuffed with Rice
My Father’s Tomato Salad
Easy Garden Fresh Tabouleh
Lebanese Okra and Tomato Stew

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Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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57. Easy garden fresh tabouleh recipe

Tabbouleh is a Lebanese dish, considered by many as the "national salad". Its main ingredients are bulgur, finely chopped parsley, mint, tomato, scallion (spring onion), and other herbs with lemon juice and various seasonings, generally including black pepper and sometimes cinnamon and allspice. In Syria and in Lebanon, where the dish originated, it is often eaten by scooping it up in Romaine lettuce leaves. In the Middle East, it is truly a salad with the green ingredients dominating. The dish's global popularity has led to new interpretations and regional modifications such as the use of couscous (which originates from Northern Africa) in place of bulgur.

Ingredients
2 bunches of fresh parsley (1 1/2 cup chopped, with stems discarded)
2 tablespoons of fresh mint, chopped
I small onion, finely chopped
6 medium tomatoes, finely diced
1 tablespoon salt
1/2 teaspoon black pepper
1/2 cup bulgur
juice of three lemons
6 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil

Procedure:
Rinse bulgur in water and add to a large mixing bowl. Combine all chopped ingredients, salt, pepper, lemon juice, olive oil, and stir. Cover with a clean dish towel and let sit for 1-2 hours or until bulghur is tender.

Photo credit: Ulterior Epicure

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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58. Lebanese okra and tomato stew

A whole range of simple Lebanese vegetarian dishes, referred to as bi zeit in Arabic, are cooked in and primarily flavored by olive oil. This vegetarian dish combines the flavors of okra and tomato with garlic and cilantro. If you have fresh tomatoes from your garden, by all means, use them in place of the canned.

Ingredients
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 1/2 pounds fresh or thawed frozen okra, patted dry
2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
1 medium onion, thinly sliced
5 large garlic cloves, minced
1/2 cup coarsely chopped cilantro leaves
One 28-ounce can peeled Italian tomatoes, chopped, juices reserved
Salt and freshly ground pepper

Procedure
1. In a large skillet, heat the vegetable oil until shimmering. Add the okra and cook over moderate heat, stirring, until bright green and crisp-tender, about 4 minutes. Transfer the okra to a plate with a slotted spoon; discard the oil.
2. Add the olive oil to the skillet and heat until shimmering. Add the onion and cook over moderate heat until softened and golden, about 8 minutes. Add the garlic and cilantro and cook until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add the tomatoes and their juices and bring to a simmer, then cook until slightly thickened, about 3 minutes.
3. Return the okra to the skillet and season with salt and pepper. Cover and simmer over low heat until the okra is tender and the sauce is thickened, about 20 minutes. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Serves 6


Recipe source: Food and Wine magazine
Photo credit: Arobotar

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 23, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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59. Getting better (food) mileage

An interesting and hopeful thing has happened in the past year without many people realizing it: "food miles" entered the public lexicon, and not as some hair-brained concept coming from hairy-headed hippies, but as a serious way of thinking about the social and environmental impacts of what we eat.

"Food-miles are a great metaphor for looking at the localness of food, the contrast between local and global food, a way people can get an idea of where their food is coming from," said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University.

Pirog should know. He's Mr. Food Miles. Pirog carried out the research that found that foods travel on average "1500 miles from field to fork". In fact, it's even farther if you consider that his study was focussing on the average distance produce travels from the point of production to midwestern markets. For the East Coast, the distance is closer to 2500 miles.

Pirog is careful to point out that food miles are just one indicator of food's environmental impact and other things need to be plugged into the calculation, for example, how the food was produced before it hit the road. Still, food mileage is a concept that people can get their head around. With gas at $3/gallon, we know that getting good mileage is important and that some cars are better than others. Tuning into our food mileage is not just about ruling out the bad options - the infamous 3000 mile Caesar salad - but discovering the many good options out there, including some just down the street from us. Heck, we might even make a new neighbor.

If a metaphor can do that, it's a very powerful one indeed.

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 31, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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60. October 2007 Newsletter

To read the full newsletter online, please see: www.kitchengardeners.org/newsletteroctober07.html


 
Dear Kitchen Gardener,

How do like them love apples?  Aren't they beauties!  Well,
not beautiful in the conventional, airbrushed, Gourmet magazine
kind of way.  The beauty, for me, is being able to enjoy my own
reddish tomatoes in late October in Maine after the first light
frost. 
 
True, they may not make the
cut for tonight's starting salad team, but they'll do just fine simmered
in a sauce or

slow-roasted to bring out their latent sweetness.  They may
well be our last sauce tomatoes of the year. 
 
It's been quite a run for us
this year, tomato-wise.  I can't even guess how many cranks I've given
on my food mill (my new favorite kitchen gadget) over the past 6 weeks. 
All of this brings me in a round-about kind of way to the theme of this
month's newsletter: one person' trash is another person's pleasure
or, if you prefer, one person's waste is another person's taste. 
Yes, I realize those may not be expressions you're accustomed to
hearing, but they're ones deserving some consideration. 
 
Tomatoes like mine would end
up in the waste bin if they dared infiltrating the ranks of the
picture-perfect, red, round globes that grace the shelves at the local
supermaket.  They would be deemed an eye-sore and most likely a
health risk in our bacterophobic culture. For me, though, I see them and
think "pasta al pomodoro" and "Superbowl Chili".  With nearly 20
bags of them in our chest freezer, we'll be thinking lots of different
things right through the winter, all of them tasty.
 
In this month's round-up of
articles and videos, we take a closer look at trash, treasure, waste,
and taste. 

Barbara Damrosch's latest article encourages us to go gleaning in
our own gardens.  You might be surprised at what you'll find. 
3000 miles away, in Portland, Oregon, a group of people from a nonprofit effort called
The Portland Fruit Tree Project is
thinking similar thoughts.  A short video follows them as they go
on an

urban fruit gleaning mission, something my family and I have been
doing this month with our neighbor's apple trees.  Our neighbor
sees apples with blemishes, we see apple sauces, crumbles, and pies. 
In a

world still very much in the grips of hunger and malnutrition, work
like this should be taking place in every community where neglected
fruit trees and underharvested crops can be found. 
 
You know this already, but I
think that we, the organic kitchen gardeners of the world, have an
important role to play in changing people's perceptions about food. 
We know better than anyone else that there's really no such thing as
trash when it comes to the garden.  What doesn't make the grade for
the table is always a welcome addition to the

compost pile where it awaits magical transformation into next year's
pleasure.   
 
Warmly,
 

 
PS: 2008 has just been named
the International Year
of the Potato by the United Nations.  If you have a clever idea
how KGI might celebrate potatoes next year,

don't be shy in sharing it. 
 
PPS: And don't be shy in
general.  I'd love to hear from you on what we're doing right or
what we might do differently. You're also invited to comment on our
articles and share some of your own knowledge or lack thereof, as the
case may be.  That's what the comment form is for at the bottom of
each page! 

Category : From the Garden

Date Added: Oct 31, 2007 Rating: 0.00 Votes: 0



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