Log Cabin Cooking

Be popular, gift homemade Garlic Salt blends

By Barbara on December 12, 2014 in Recipes

When my husband, Wayne, was 15 and had been playing guitar for, oh, about 6 months, he decided to share his freshly acquired skills in the form of a class held in his parent’s living room. He plastered nearby UCLA with signs saying “Be popular, play the guitar” and somehow managed to attract a large gathering of folks of all ages with visions of becoming 1960s hootenanny rock stars. Who knows if the students made good on their intentions, but I do happen to know that Wayne sure made a great life out of playing and teaching guitar (plus banjo, fiddle, mandolin).

young wayne guitar player 500x361 Be popular, gift homemade Garlic Salt blends

1960s guitar-playin’ Wayne Erbsen

So if you have a hankering to be a culinary hootenanny rock star among your family and friends this holiday season, I recommend making a couple of these garlic salt blends and packaging them in nifty little jars to give as gifts. They’re so easy and fun to make. I invited a few girlfriends over for a fall garlic salt-making crafty party last month, and everyone brought fresh herbs from their gardens to add to the salt blends. It looks like a lot is going on in these photos, but really … you just chop up a few ingredients, dry on a cookie sheet and you end up with simple fragrant salts that will change your life.

stitched picture garlic salt1 500x349 Be popular, gift homemade Garlic Salt blends

Mary Lou carefully chops kaffir lime leaves, (not her fingers!)

Today, we’ll make 4 salts. Use them in place of salt to liven your food, here are some suggestions:

Ginger/lemon garlic salt … Sprinkle on kale, tofu, anything carrot, salad dressings, adds a fresh zippy flavor

Smoky garlic salt … Pork or chicken, beans oh so wonderful with beans, cream of potato soup, everything.

Celery and herb garlic salt … I use this in any soup or dish that includes celery. LOVES eggs. Deviled, fried, scrambled.

Tuscan style garlic salt … Soups, baked potatoes, roasted veg of all sorts, fresh peas, sauteed carrots, corn on the cobb, etc.

Feel free to get creative with your own blends, but you’ll need to keep the salt to garlic ratio the same. First, let’s talk salt and garlic.

I’m not a salt expert by any stretch, but I recommend you use a crunchy salt to make these blends. I suppose you could use Kosher salt, but I usually use Maldon salts (both regular and smoked) which are readily available in Whole Foods type markets and online (about $5 a box). Salt is big business and you can find all kinds online, but I don’t think I’d use a super fancy variety because the texture and taste will be lost when combined with all these other flavors. A clean crunch is what you want. If you splurge, let it be for the smoked salts. I’ve been meaning to try this one from LA. Okay, now for garlic. I grow the red Russian type of hardneck garlic because I love its medium spicy flavor and big cloves. It starts to sprout come January, so December is perfect timing to use it before it fades. The better your garlic the better your salt, so see if you can find something interesting, if possible. If not any fresh garlic will do.

RATIO of GARLIC to SALT: One medium clove to one tablespoon of big flaked, crunchy salt. If using Kosher salt, you can use one large clove to one tablespoon of salt … or two small. You get the idea …

To make each salt, you start by chopping the salt and the garlic together until they’re medium dice. Then you add the other ingredients and you just chop until everything is way fine. Don’t be in a hurry, enjoy the fragrances!

First up is ginger garlic salt. Fresh ginger, garlic, lemon zest, chili pepper and I had lemon grass growing in my garden, so it also joined the party. (Those are kaffir lime leaves, oh so optional.) The photo shows one large garlic clove, but I added two great big, fat ones.

Chop chop chop, until it looks like this.

Then sprinkle on a parchment lined cookie sheet and allow it to dry at room temp. for a couple days. This one takes a while to dry out. You can turn your oven on to 170º and once it warms up, turn it off and put your garlic mixture in until it’s dry.

Now, the smoky salt. Oh mercy me it is so good! Garlic, smoked salt, smoked paprika, and dried chipotle peppers. If you don’t have dried smoked chipotle peppers, some sort of hot pepper will do. Chop the salt with the garlic and then add the other ingredients. I recently found some smoked black pepper and tried that with success. Use just a little and crack it first. Penzy’s has a nice smoked paprika. You can also find a so-so version at Trader Joe’s.

Celery and herb salt blend is next in line. Garlic, salt, chives, fresh celery leaves, parsley, red pepper. I love this blend.

It looks like this when dried.

And last, my favorite salt I use on everything … is the Tuscan herb salt. Splendid table did a version of this one with a great little video. You’ll need rosemary, sage, red pepper, a little lemon zest if you like, garlic and salt.

And it looks like this when it’s finished.

And then, of course, you need some little bitty salt spoons. Notice the tiny orange spoon on the left. I made it from a carrot. Yep, a carrot salt-spoon. I took a carving class this week where I made the very extremely primitive spreader knife because what I want to carve is little salt spoons. I poked myself with the point of the uber-sharp carving knife more than once, so I thought I’d practice with this tiny gouge knife on a carrot before making a mess of the real thing + moi. I kinda am having fun with veggie spoon culinary fantasies.

And then, finally, you can put your herb salts in tiny glass jars … make a sweet crafty label and tie on a tiny spoon and there you have it. You will be so popular that come February, your gift recipients will be bugging you to make them more salts!

herbed garlic salt and jars 500x295 Be popular, gift homemade Garlic Salt blends

Larger 3.5 oz. jars are from Kitchen & Company, Bormoli. Tiny 2 oz. jars are made in Portugal, from World Market, also 3 oz. Weck jars are fun.

herb salt on potato soup 500x333 Be popular, gift homemade Garlic Salt blends

Potato soup with celery herb garlic salt

Herb Garlic Salt Blends

2014-12-12 22:53:13

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Ingredients

GINGER GARLIC SALT: 4 medium cloves garlic, 4 Tbls. coarse salt, 2 or 3 strips lemon zest, about 2 Tbls. ginger chunks, fresh or dried chili to taste, few grindings coarse black pepper
SMOKY GARLIC SALT: 4 medium cloves garlic, 4 Tbls. coarse salt, 1 Tbs. smoked paprika, 1/2 dried chipotle pepper if you have one or hot chili pepper to taste
CELERY HERB GARLIC SALT: 4 medium cloves garlic, 4 Tbls. coarse salt, handful of fresh chives, parsley and celery leaves, hot red pepper to taste
TUSCAN HERB GARLIC SALT: 4 medium cloves garlic, 4 Tbls. coarse salt, 1 strip lemon zest,
up to 1/2 cup total of fresh sage, rosemary, and parsley (not basil, it turns dark)

Instructions

Chop garlic and salt roughly. Add remaining ingredients and chop until well combined and finely diced. Sprinkle onto a parchment paper lined cookie sheet and air dry a day or two until crumbly and completely dry. If it's being poky, then heat your oven up to no more than 200º, turn it off and let the garlic salt sit in there with the oven door closed. Don't bake the mixture!
When super dry, place in a festive glass jar, lid on.

By Log Cabin Cooking/Barbara Swell

Log Cabin Cooking http://logcabincooking.com/

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Thanksgiving Pie Class for the pie lady/feller in all of us

By Barbara on November 4, 2014 in Recipes

Yikes!!! Are you having a Thanksgiving pie-making emergency? Well don’t fret, darlin, you’ve come to the right place. Join my daughter Annie and I for an evening of pie-making fun next Wednesday, Nov. 12 from 5:30-8:30. Together we’ll whip up Mrs. Tennis E. Painter’s Appalachian Candy Roaster pumpkin pie (with chocolate ganache if you please), Super boozy bourbon pecan pie, and a wonderful 1930s toasted oat and coconut mock pecan pie.

And pie crust? Yes we are all about the crust! Choose to make either Barbara’s locally milled wheat pastry flour crust or Annie’s fabulous gluten-free flour version. Classes fill up super quick, if you’re interested, let us know pronto. Particulars are here.

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Roasted Peach Butter goes for a walk in the woods

By Barbara on September 2, 2014 in Recipes

It’s a fine day for a walk in the woods with Mrs. Roasted Peach Butter and her five little “offspring.” Sweet late summer peaches are abundant here in the south, from giant to little and everything in between. They’re ripening on counters, and not-ripening in the fridge and I thought I’d just gather a smattering of varieties and turn them into a fragrant low-added-sugar peach butter spread. Starting with 3 pounds of peaches, I added 1/2 cup sugar (about 100 grams) and juice of a couple lemons. The peaches were so sweet on their own, the modest amount of additional sugar just took over. Bleg. So I took out the stick blender, gave the hot mess a beating and then poured it into a big glass pan to bake in the oven. For an hour at 250º.

Which turned into about three hours because I was playing with okra pickles … recipe testing for the picnic book at hand.

Okra freaks me out, but okra pickles are so good and slimless enough once they sit for a couple weeks. The super tall Weck asparagus jars make for some gorgeous smoky-okry and garlic dill okra pickles.

Anyway, the “forgotten” roasted peach butter was so so SO much improved, that I’m going to forget it from now on. The color is deep and seductive and the flavor is frankly, stunning. It’s too good to eat with anything other than a little espresso spoon. There was just enough for 7 three-ounce Weck jam jars. So I promptly ate one and a half and water-bath processed the other five.

Good thing Mama peach is guarding her babies!

Roasted Peach Butter

2014-09-02 16:04:06

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Ingredients

3 lbs. peaches
1/2 cup (about 100 grams) white sugar
Juice of 2 lemons

Instructions

Peel peaches by giving them a 30 second bath in boiling water. The skins will slip right off. Remove & compost the pit and chop the flesh. Place in a saucepan with 1/2 cup sugar and the juice of 2 lemons* Simmer the fruit on low heat for about 30 minutes, or until the fruit starts to fall apart. Give the hot pulp a toss with a stick blender, food processor or blender. Oh do be careful with splattering! Some like their fruit butters super smooth, but I prefer mine with some texture. You decide for yourself. Pour the fruit batter into a glass baking pan and bake at 250º for three hours or until it cooks down to a deep golden hue. It's ready whenever you think it is. Water-bath can according to recommendations of folks like those at the National Center for Home Preservation. http://nchfp.uga.edu/publications/publications_usda.html Or, just get out a little sugar spoon and go to town.

Notes

If using organic lemons for the juice, be sure to zest them first. Citrus zest keeps perfectly in a small glass jar in your freezer for later use.

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Fresh Farmhouse Cheesemaking Class

By Barbara on July 7, 2014 in Recipes

“Cow” vending machine

If you Asheville folks have a hankering to learn to make artisan farmhouse cheeses from local cow (or goat) milk, do we have a fun evening in store for you! My daughter Annie Erbsen De Bacco will be teaching a class on Wed., July 16th, and she knows a thing or two about the subject. After all, she has spent the last 5 years living with her husband, Gianluca, next door to the roadside “cow vending machine” (photo above) in the alpine village of Aosta, Italy.

coliseum aosta s 500x375 Fresh Farmhouse Cheesemaking Class

Roman coliseum, Aosta, Italy

The Latteria sits on the side of a narrow road on the edge of a cow pasture. Drive or walk up, insert a Euro into the machine, and out comes a quart of fresh, raw cow’s milk.

Not only can you get fresh milk from cows that are mooing a mere few feet away, you can also choose from fresh fontina, yogurt, or butter from the cow-automat just to the left of the milk dispenser. Made, of course, in the cheese kitchen within a stone’s throw of the barn. And that’s not all … see that cow at the top of the page? Well that’s sweet Cobra-the-cow who is pretty much, the most famous cow in the valley d’Aoste for being the cow battle champion several years in a row. Cobra lives in the cow vending machine barn and you get to drink her milk for mere pennies. Annie learned to make all sorts of fresh and aged cheeses from Roberta … who lives at the top of an alp with her family … and makes the most amazing cheeses from her cows and goats ever … And here Annie learns from a cheesmaker from Branzi, only a 30 minute blood-curdling mountain road drive from another well-known cheese town of Taleggio.

You will not get to eat the fabulous, creamy, famous Branzi cheese of this cheesemaker.

Or any of these other versions of cheeses you might have heard of ….

Unless you travel to the upper Val Brembana in the Bergamo region of northern Italy where Branzi and its neighboring cheeses are born. There is precious little of them and they are consumed where they grow.

Which brings us to what grows in the mountain region around Asheville, and that is plenty of good milk, both cow and goat. And, in fact, Western North Carolina has abundant small batch artisan cheesemakers and its very own cheese trail now.

Annie will source local, low-temperature pasteurized cow’s milk (and maybe goat as well) for her class, and participants will learn to make fresh mozzarella, ricotta, and fromage blanc cheeses. She’ll also discuss how to work with raw milk in case you have access. To register, go to the classes page and we’ll see you next week!

PS: Do not procrastinate signing up; the last class Annie taught filled up in 2 hours!

fontina cheese aosta market1 500x340 Fresh Farmhouse Cheesemaking Class

Fontina cheeses from Valle d’Aoste, Italy

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Homemade Maraschino sour cherries, elderflower cordial + the high price of pussyfooting

By Barbara on June 12, 2014 in Recipes

Ugg. Somewhere due east of remorse is regret. And I have it bad. But at least I didn’t dawdle away the chance to make three fetching early summer flavorings in the aftermath. And I hope you don’t dally either, if you have any of these in mind to make. Before I tell you what they are, here’s my regret confession ….

This was at a yard sale last weekend and I did not bring it home.

A 1953 Chambers gas stove in perfect working order to be had for a song. All I had to do was find some way to move the billion pound beauty in an hour, on a Saturday afternoon. Rather than gather my wits, I talked myself out of it because to take on this stove would have been like buying my first car: A 10 year old 1966 VW bug which came with a copy of this book, which I came to know all too well:

But now I’m sorry because I’ve been looking for a vintage stove like this for years and years. It’s a trivial regret, to be sure. But to be a pussyfooter, which is a real word, by the way, is to be cautious in a “don’t dance in the rain, you’ll catch a cold” sort of a way. No thank you to that. Lesson learned, let’s make Maraschino sour cherries.

You’ll need a bit of Luxardo Maraschino liqueur, a slightly bitter, sweetened cherry liqueur. Mind you, Luxardo = luxury = pricey. But at least it’s a huge bottle for $35. Brandied cherries are wonderful as well. Anyway, pit fresh sour cherries such as Montmorency or whatever kind you can find at your local farm market and place them in a pretty jar. Warm up about a third of the amount of liqueur as you have cherries … don’t boil, just warm. Pour over the cherries and refrigerate. If using brandy, dissolve sugar to taste to the warm brandy and add to the cherries.

Now on to #2: Garlic scapes.

The little twisty seed stalks of hard-neck garlic are ready and available in your garden or at farm stands right NOW, depending on where you live. You have some time if you live in the North. You can read about garlic scape pesto here, but all you need to do is buy about 5 or 10 bunches of them (usually around $1.50 a bunch), if you don’t grow your own, and just store them in the fridge in an open bag. They’ll be good until August. They will change your life.

On to the most urgent of the three non-regrettable summer pantry items: Elderflower cordial.

We planted two varieties of “bought” elderflowers which have just about finished blooming. York and Nova. And the native wild bushes are in flower TODAY here in Asheville.

Elderflowers smell like happy. So sweet and seductive. The fragrance of the blossoms and of all they infuse is subtle, yet memorable and so fresh. Like that summer rain we’re going to dance in.

Pick the flower clusters just as they all open before the petals start to fall off. Thanks, Annie, for going for the high ones! Do you know that old saying …. “Reach for the high apples first, you can get the lower ones anytime!”

Pluck the flowers off with a fork straight away, the blossoms will not wait. All parts of the plant but the flowers and berries are toxic. So do as you’re told, dear.

You can make a syrup out of the flowers, which will keep in the fridge a couple weeks, or you can freeze in ice cube trays. Store the cubes in jars. Into fizzy water, prosecco, or rhubarb mojitos they go, with a few fresh berries and mint. Here’s a prosecco, elderflower cordial/strawberry ice cube, and maraschino cherry fizz. Maybe, just maybe … almost as good as a 1953 Chambers gas stove.

Or not. Cheers!

Elderflower Cordial

2014-06-12 16:22:16

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Ingredients

15 heads of elderflowers, about 2 cups of blossoms
2 cups water
1/2 cup sugar for light syrup. Up to 2 cups sugar for heavier syrup.
One organic lemon, sliced (or 1/2 a lemon and 1/2 an orange)
1/2 tsp. citric acid (optional)

Instructions

First make absolutely positive that you have identified correctly your elderflower bush. Pluck off the blossoms of 15 freshly picked flower heads with a fork. You should have about 2 cups. Pick out any green stems while you prepare your sugar syrup. Boil water and sugar until sugar dissolves. Then add lemon and orange slices and citric acid if you're using it. (See note below.) Allow the syrup to cool a little. It should be warm but not super hot. Add the flowers and place all in very clean jar. Sit at room temperature for 24 hours and strain off flowers through cheesecloth. Store in a sterilized pint jar in the refrigerator for two weeks, or freeze to plop into summer beverages.

Notes

Most elderflower cordial recipes call for the use of citric acid. This will keep the cordial from going funky for about 4 weeks or so, but I'm not a fan of the taste of it. So I just freeze mine, sometimes with a strawberry in the middle. You can also make an alcoholic version by stuffing a jar with blossoms, filling with vodka, and then placing lemon slices over all. Strain after a few days or up to a week. Sweeten to taste with sugar syrup (two parts sugar dissolved in one part boiling water, then cooled).

By Log Cabin Cooking

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Food that looks like itself … spring veg offal fun

By Barbara on May 29, 2014 in Greens, Recipes

Are you playing with your vegetables again? I hope so. Otherwise, you’ll have to explain yourself to these radishes in need of a hair-do.

Fresh-plucked spring veggies are just so darn fun, all you have to do is get out of the way and let them party on your plate.

I just read a recipe that instructs: Split a vanilla bean in half, scrape out the seeds and discard the bean. WHAT???????? Are you crazy, at about $5 a bean, there are a gazillion things you can do with a eviscerated vanilla bean pod, the least of which is stick it in your sugar bowl until you can figure out how to use it. Anyway, I got to thinking about how people forget that the stems and leaves of garden-fresh beets, turnips, and radishes are edible and delicious. (Not strawberry leaves or stems. Don’t eat them!) Carrot stems are edible but an acquired taste. Leaving a little bit of stem on your wee veggies makes them look like themselves too; so much more festive at the table.

I’m in the pickle phase of my book, and out of all my recent trials, the turnip stems in homemade muscat wine vinegar is my favorite. The pickled turnip stem idea was not mine, it was Hugh Acheson’s. The recipes in his new book are quite wonderful, even though you have to cut the dern book apart to be able to use it. I didn’t photograph the stem pickles, because who knew they’d turn out to be the Cinderella pickle! Below are red onion and cardamom, asparagus spear, and baby turnip/orange pickles.

See that fern to the right of the asparagus pickles? Well, that’s a strikingly beautiful Ghost fern which you can purchase anyplace that ferns are sold. This one is a piece of the original mamma of all Ghost ferns which spontaneously appeared in the garden of my very own mamma (and dad). Which is a sweet story for another time, but let me just say that I was just in Richmond VA, visiting my dad and the garden he and my mom created, which is actually more like a park. He tends it on his own now, and it is magnificent. As is my dad. Everywhere you look flanking the maze of antique brick pathways are native woodland plants loving collected, traded, and shared over a lifetime.

Which brings me back to spring offal salads that look like themselves … and this project waiting to be tackled in this forlorn forgotten corner of our yard: The abandoned concrete and stone picnic table from the 1940’s when our stucco barn of an 1880 house was resurrected. See that slab of concrete on the ground to the right? That’s one of the benches.

By the end of the summer, it will be sitting on stone pillars waiting for alfresco diners like you and me. The old red goat house that’s now a facade will have to wait its turn.

PS: “Offal” is technically something that is wasted, but these days, it’s typically used to refer to animal innards like kidneys and livers, that are again a welcome guest at many a omnivorous table.

Baby root veggie offal salad with buttermilk herb dressing

2014-05-29 21:49:51

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Ingredients

Fresh-picked baby salad greens
Baby turnips, carrots, beets, radishes
Strawberries if you have them
Pistachios or other nuts for crunch

Instructions

Tear the salad leaves and place in center of plate
Cut baby veggies in half, leaving a little of pointy root end and a bit of stem. Save turnip, beet, and radish greens for another meal. Place the veggies around the edge of the salad. Top salad with buttermilk/fresh herb dressing, and sprinkle with pistachios.

Buttermilk/herb dressing

Into your blender or food processor, place one cup good buttermilk, 2 Tbs. sour cream or greek yogurt, a smushed clove of garlic, a handful of fresh herbs (parsley, basil, tarragon, chives, green onion tops), half an avocado if you have one, a squirt of lemon juice and salt and pepper to taste. Blend until it looks the way you like. Can use as a dressing or a dip.

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Portable fun

By Barbara on May 20, 2014 in Quirky Food Musings

My mind wants me to write this book, but my body does not want to sit in a chair at a desk inside my attic office and get down to business. So I figured out the perfect solution.

The 1946 Remington Noiseless Portable Typewriter. I’ve been looking for a manual typewriter with a not-tiny font in good working order for years now. So when my daughter, Rita and I came upon this one in an Atlanta antique store recently, I grabbed it. The ribbon was dried up, but did you know they still make manual typerwriter ribbons? In the USA no less. Anyway, here’s one of my new off-site offices.

I call this the stump picnic table office. And it’s perfect for writing a vintage cookbook about this sort of thing:

A portable cooking cookbook deserves to be written on a portable vintage typewriter. Only problem is that it’s been a while since I’ve typed on a manual typewriter. I’m rusty, and my pinkies are a bit flaccid, so I need to build up strength for typing “p” and “q” and such. The typewriter came with a case and the KEY for heaven’s sake. And the instruction booklet is with it as well. I need to share with you important information about how to craft a dinner invitation and how to respond. Thank you Mr. & Mrs. Remington, 1946. The reply is hilarious. I can’t stop laughing.

Ok Now here’s a sample of my typing which I hope will improve come book-time.

Love, and I would NEVER turn down a dinner invitation from you!!!!!

Barbara

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Dandelion Blossom Cordial Spritz

By Barbara on April 15, 2014 in Recipes

There’s a dandelion emergency pending, ya’ll. Our cheery yellow polka-dot pals are about to get the perkiness froze straight out of them tonight here in the mountains. So I suggest you run outside and pick as many as you can, just in case, because you don’t want to miss a chance to make this spritz.

I have a recipe in my Garden Supper Tonight book for Dandelion Honey, which I learned from our Bohemian friends, Martin and Denisa. They live in a little village just north of Prague with their two kids in a fairy-tale cottage that sits on the edge of a forest that is enchanted with wild edible mushrooms. Martin plays, teaches, writes books about American Appalachian old-time music … in the Czech Republic. Listen to him play the banjo here to get you in a dandelion mood. In the photo below, he’s on the right playing his banjo and Denisa is playing the guitar. I could talk forever about this wonderful and talented family, but we need to get our dandelions tended to.

Here’s Martin’s voice describing the Dandelion Honey recipe that he and Denisa make every spring:

“This is a traditional recipe passed down from the old-world Europeans. We use it as a substitute for honey in any recipe that I’m trying to make wild.” What Martin means is that this delicate floral-flavored syrup tastes of the outdoors … an unmowed yard teeming with dandelions and wild violets, morel mushrooms laying in ambush in the woods, and cherry blossom petals swirling in the breeze, which by the way is a bone-chilling breeze at the moment.

To make the Dandelion syrup, you pick as many flower-heads as you can 100-200 is a good amount at a time. There are about 150 in this bowl.

Pinch the flowers out of the green lower leaves, and measure out the petals only. Don’t worry if you get some green leaves in with the petals. “They” say these will make your syrup bitter, but a little bitter is the taste of spring and it goes perfectly with a Prosecco spritz. The recipe particulars are below, but basically you infuse water with the petals overnight, strain in the morning, add sugar and reduce liquid by half. You can simmer it super slowly like Martin suggests, in order to keep the color pale; or you can do as impatient Barbara does and boil the heck out of it for 30 minutes and it’s light amber. Slow cook it if you want it to be the color of honey. A spritz doesn’t care as long as it’s not scorched.

The syrup will keep refrigerated for at least a couple of weeks. To keep for longer, make into ice cubes, which you can remove from freezer and plunk into your summer drinks. To make an alcoholic dandelion honey cordial, add a cup of vodka to every cup of cooled syrup. This will keep indefinitely in the refrigerator.

To make your spritz, pop open a bottle of chilled Prosecco, Cava, dry white wine, or fizzy water. Add a tablespoon or so of dandelion cordial to each glass, top with Prosecco, lemon wedge, a dandelion or mint spring and keep your fingers crossed that our fruit trees don’t get frostbit!

Dandelion blossom honey spritz

2014-04-15 14:13:41

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Ingredients

2 cups dandelion petals from about 150 dandelion flowers
2 cup boiling water
1/2 cup sugar
1 small organic lemon (or orange), optional

Instructions

Boil the water, stir in the dandelion petals, then turn off heat. Add the juice of the lemon and throw in the shell. Pour cooled mixture into a quart jar and refrigerate overnight. Next day, strain out the dandelion parts and to each cup of liquid, add a half-cup of sugar. Simmer until reduced by half. At this point it will start to bubble like crazy, stop at this point, or you will scorch your syrup. Pour syrup into a dish-washed or sterilized jar. Keep in the fridge up to two weeks or freeze into separate ice cubes.
To make a Prosecco spritz, add a tablespoon of dandelion blossom honey to each glass of prosecco or other white wine or seltzer. Garnish with lemon, bug-free dandelions, and a mint sprig.

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Creasy greens! And a wild violet and creasy spring salad.

By Barbara on April 4, 2014 in Greens, log cabin, Recipes

If you look down, Spring has arrived in our mountains.

If you look up, Spring looks like it’s a million years away.

But when the creasy greens start popping up in fields and roadside stands here in Western NC (usually mid March), eating officially gets pretty darned exciting.

In case you don’t know these slightly bitter, pungent, heavenly greens, you might want to order some seeds from here and plant them post haste. What we call creasy greens are actually upland cress …. watercress’s landlubber cousin. Only more of everything including vitamins and chew. I only have one patch in my garden, so I picked up a bagful at a farm stand en route to our cabin this week.

We ate them pan-seared with eggs and sausage for breakfast. Then, we had enough energy to do some spring cleaning inside and out.

It’s easy to clean when there’s no stuff. And it’s too dark to see into the nether-regions. No electricity = no vacuuming, just a broom and a mop.

And then once back home in Asheville, the creasy’s screamed SALAD!!!

Usually I’m not much of a salad dressing fan, but there’s nothing like a fresh-tasting creasy green and teensy green herb buttermilk salad dressing to top a spring green salad.

Right in front of the salad dressing and buttermilk are several baby elderberry plants which need a home. Who wants them? The variety is either a York or a Nova (not sure which plant they sprung from) and they will bless you with fragrant elderflowers for your summer cordials and cakes and deep blue-black berries that will strengthen your innards. You’ll have a crop next summer. They need lots of room and nothing else. Except you.

Creasy green buttermilk salad dressing with violets

2014-04-04 17:18:27

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Ingredients

1 cup buttermilk
A couple tablespoons sour cream, mayo, or greek yogurt
One clove garlic, smashed
A handful of fresh herbs such as parsley, chives, basil .. whatever is on hand
A stuffed cupful of either creasy greens or watercress
Violets from your yard or mine
Squirt of lemon juice if it needs it
Salt and pepper

Instructions

Add all to blender and whirl. Adjust the salt and pepper to your liking. Drizzle over a fresh spring salad of crunchy bibb lettuce with red cabbage, chopped creasy greens and carrots. Don't junk up this salad!

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I baked you a pi for your birthday, Albert Einstein!

By Barbara on March 14, 2014 in Recipes

It’s 3.14. Pi Day. And Einstein’s birthday. And we’ll be celebrating around here shortly. This is a re-post from 2013, because this year’s pie is still in the mixing bowl, and-anyway, I already used up all my vast physics knowledge last year. Ya’ll have a great pi day!

OK, I have a basic physics lesson for you that explains quite simply what pi and Einstein and winter squash pie have in common. Since I have successfully avoided most things physics and pretty much all things math during my lifetime, I have consulted with my three scientist offspring about today’s topic. Rita, who studies nursing at Emory U in Atlanta, says to ask Wes. Annie, who is a medical physicist, says to ask Wes. And that pi has to do with Einstein’s Field Equation of Relativity which looks like this:

$e782a708f8a82b60f25eea21a9862ad0 I baked you a pi for your birthday, Albert Einstein!$

Wes is a billion floors down in the atomic, molecular, optical physics lab at Kansas State U. where he shoots electrons with a laser and then makes up stuff about why they land where they land. Evidently he’s busy, so I will just fill in the blanks for you about what Einstein had in mind with his equation, that I’ll call “Rik” for short.

When Einstein was about 2, he let go of his ball and became obsessed with why it went down instead of up. Or maybe that was Richard Feynman. Anyway, when Einstein was about 9, he was struck out at a little league game because he was preoccupied with calculating the trajectory of the ball as it traveled toward him through the curve of spacetime. He used pi to calculate the curve. Of course. Well, he got benched after that and he had time to think about electromagnetic fields and linear momentum and stuff like that, and some of these things had something to do with pi. And then, as he was spacing out on the bench, his stomach started growling which reminded him about how a particle of pie would be so nice about now. So as he was walking home to get that piece of pie, he whipped up the geodesic equation which expains how if you drop an electron, it will not go straight down, it will go in the straightest possible line on the curve of spacetime and it will end up in Wes’ lab and he will zap it with a laser as soon as he finishes eating his pumpkin pie.

I think that about covers it, don’t you? Except for calculating the circumference of a 9-inch pie plate. You do that while I tell you about Mrs. Painter’s winter squash/pumpkin pie.

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I baked you a pi for your birthday, Albert Einstein!

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