Medicine Made From Flowers

Echinacea purpurea harvested from last summer's garden

This time of year, it's nice to have some herbal potions around to help fend off germs and stay healthy.  I was inspired in August to make a quick batch of Echinacea tincture from flowers and leaves for future use during cold season.

For years I stayed away from tincture-making because I thought I needed to have a tincture press, precisely measure everything, and probably possess some special knowledge that I did not have.  Fortunately in recent years knowing lots of herbalists in the "wise woman" folk tradition has given me confidence to try making simple concoctions like Echinacea tincture on my own.

Because this herb is tinctured in vodka rather than grain alcohol, it is going to be less potent.  Also, I only used leaf, stem, and flower, rather than root, which will make for a milder medicine.  The medicinal properties of Echinacea root are stronger than those of the above-ground parts of the plant.

My plan was to dig up some Echinacea roots after the plants died back in the fall and tincture those too and mix the two tinctures together for a whole-plant medicine, but I haven't gotten around to it, and I've just been using the milder leaf, flower, and stem tincture.

Here's the (very simple) process I used to tincture my Echinacea:

Harvest flowers, leaves, and stems in the summer when flowers are in full bloom

Rinse off bugs and debris

Fill a quart jar with chopped leaves and flowers

Pack everything tightly down into the jar

Cover the chopped up flowers, leaves, and stems with organic vodka

It was quick and easy to make a quart.  Six weeks later, I strained the contents of the jar through cheesecloth and bottled it up in empty tincture bottles.

Rosemary Gladstar has a great little video on tincturing Echinacea - she's using dried root, but the process is pretty much exactly what I did:

Here's how my tincture turned out:

I love thinking about Echinacea in full bloom in the summertime when I dose myself up with a shot of tincture.

Echinacea purpurea blooming in my garden last summer

Sifting through summer photos, I also came across this accidental little 3-second video, which I love because it includes an audio snapshot of the sounds of summer.  I love thinking of Echinacea tincture as the essence of summer, captured in a bottle, perfect for fending off winter ailments.

Up-Cycled Freezer Contents

Homemade ketchup from last year's frozen cherry tomatoes

It's a time of transition here on the farm, appropriately enough in this Equinox season. Two friends who have been living here for the past year are moving away, two new farm residents are arriving, the garden is winding down, we have only one more tailgate market day in the season, and everything is starting to feel cooler, slower, and quieter.

Our new neighbor-friends suggested going in on a bulk meat purchase from the WWC farm next door, which has motivated me to clean out our freezer. Since I went way overboard preserving vegetables last year when we had more produce than we could possibly sell or consume, the freezer was still full of jars of whole cherry tomatoes, wild blueberries, salsas, pestos and etc. It got to the point with the cherry tomato overload last summer that I was just rinsing them and stuffing them in half-gallon jars whole. And there quite a few of those jars still hanging out in the freezer by the end of tomato season this year (that being now).

This is what 10 quarts of frozen cherry tomatoes looks like:

Soooo, it was time for "out with the old." I made some super-delicious juice from all of the wild and tame blueberries piled up in the freezer, and am chipping away at the pesto, but what to do with gallons and gallons of thawed cherry tomatoes?

How could I use them without having to deal with all of the skins? I sure wasn't going to blanch and peel them all - that would have been a full-time job for a few days. Maybe something involving a trip through the food mill to get rid of all of the skins and seeds...something like ketchup!

Last year in the final throes of tomato overload, I made a big batch of green tomato ketchup, which we savored all through the winter. It made an especially delicious dressing for salad or fish when mixed with a little homemade mayonnaise.

All of those jars of cherry tomatoes got me thinking that the different flavors of all of the varieties -- smoky White Currant, sweet Sungold Select, tangy Black Cherry, and tomato-y Peacevine would make a delightfully complex and savory ketchup. Plus, I could throw in some last-year's frozen salsa to spice it up - all of the ingredients in the salsa (onions, peppers, parsley, garlic) are frequently included in catsup recipes, so all the better. More freezer space freed up, more flavorful ketchup.

The tomatoes and onions starting to cook

So here's the recipe:

Cherry Tomato Ketchup

• 10 quarts cherry tomatoes (fresh or frozen)
• 2-3 cups chopped onions, to taste
• Sweet and/or hot peppers, parsley, oregano (optional) to taste
• 1 Tbs black pepper
• 1 Tbs dry mustard powder
• 1 1/2 Tbs high-quality salt
• 1 quart apple cider vinegar
• 1 cup honey

1. Combine tomatoes and onions in a pot with everything except the honey.
2. Pour the vinegar over the vegetables and cook for 4 hours over low heat, stirring occasionally.
3. Put the mixture through a food mill.I use a secondhand Foley food mill which works like a champ.
4. Return to the pot and bring to a boil again, and allow to boil until ketchup has achieved desired thickness. Be forewarned: This takes a LOOONG time! It's good to start the ketchup in the morning and let it cook down on low heat all day long, stirring and keeping an eye on it through the day. A good project for a rainy day.
5. Add honey.
6. Pour into hot, sterilized jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.

Cooking down, down, down!

The final product - yum! It came out very smoky and spicy, almost verging on barbecue sauce, but still with the classic ketchup balance of sweet and vinegary.

Viola. Freezer space freed up, delicious condiment stockpiled for the winter.

And a little something for the nerds among us: "A confusion has long existed over how to spell and say the name of the condiment 'ketchup', with several different forms recorded..."

Experiments in Cheesemaking

Since Foxy has come into her milk and baby Felix has gone to his new home at Double G Ranch, we've had lots of goat milk to spare and I've been experimenting with simple cheeses.

The simplest goat cheese, which you can make without any special ingredients or equipment, is made by heating the milk to 180 degrees and adding something acidic (such as apple cider vinegar or lemon juice), allowing the curds and whey to separate, and then draining the whey (liquid) off of the curds (solids) in a fine mesh strainer or a colander lined with cheesecloth.

Then you can hang the cheesecloth up to drain for as long as you want - the longer it drains, the drier the cheese. This is the standard "farm cheese" that Christopher used to make with the milk from his goats fifteen years ago in Tennessee, and I learned the recipe from him. I love the tangy taste and crumbly, dense texture of this simple cheese.

The only disadvantage I find with this simple cheese is that it yields a relatively small amount of final product, with a large quantity of whey left over after the cheese is made. So for a gallon of milk, you might end up with something like a cup and a half of cheese. Plus, I love variety, and wanted to try some other fresh cheeses.

So I saved up to order from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company and on Thursday my "box of bacteria" arrived via UPS.

Mail ordering cheese cultures is a bridge strategy - eventually, I'd like to make my own mother cultures which I can keep on hand for cheesemaking, but I'm a novice and readymade, pre-packaged cheese cultures allow me to try out different methods and recipes and learn the ropes without a tremendous amount of trial and tribulation. "Direct set" cultures are particularly appealing as relative shortcuts to homemade cheese.

The first cheese I tried with storebought cultures was a plain chevre. There are tons of approaches to making chevre (here are a couple from Fias Co Farm) but this time I used Ricki Carroll's basic chevre recipe.

I started with a gallon of fresh goat milk and ended up with enough cheese that I reserved several cups to use as plain chevre and made a 12-ounce batch of experimental fruit and nut cheese with the dried fruit and nuts that I happened to have around the kitchen.

The plain, unadulterated chevre is super-delicious - very different from the "vinegar cheese" that we had been making. It has the smooth, creamy, buttery texture that is typical of chevre and a very mild, neutral taste. With a tiny sprinkling of salt or just alone, it is divine.

The little experimental flavored batch turned out to be kind of over the top, too good to be true. Here's how to make it:

Fig, Apricot, Walnut, and Almond Chevre

You will need:

• 1 gallon fresh goat milk
• Handful of walnuts and almonds, soaked
• Handful of dried figs and apricots
• 1 packet of direct set chevre culture (available here from New England Cheesemaking Supply)

1. Heat the milk to 86 degrees. Add the starter culture and stir.
2. Cover ant let sit at room temperature (not below 72 degrees) for 12 hours.
3. Line a colander with butter muslin (a fine-weave cheesecloth). Gently ladle the curds into the colander. Tie the corners of the muslin into a knot and hang the bat over the sink or a pot to drain for 6-12 hours until the cheese reaches your desired consistency.
4. Set aside as much cheese as you like at this point to use as plain chevre. Fill a 12-16 ounce container with the cheese that will become fruit and nut flavored.
5. Drain the soaked nuts and chop them in the food processor with the dried fruit. This will make a dry, crumbly paste of figs, apricots, and nuts.
6. Mix the fruit and nuts into the cheese and viola! Fancy, gourmet-style cheese that would cost you ten or twelve bucks at the farmers market or posh grocery store cheese department,

I didn't weigh or measure the cheese before I dove in, but Ricki Carroll says this recipe makes 1.5 pounds, and that seems about right. The total yield was much greater using cultures than making my farm/vinegar cheese with the same volume of milk, and the milk was barely heated at all, making this a raw milk cheese.

Making cheese from fresh milk is one of the most ancient food preservation methods. In the days before electricity and UPS, cheese was either aged in environments where the desired microbial life already existed (such as a certain cave that would produce a particularly flavorful cheese), even before people understood the microbiology behind the process, or "mother cultures" were kept alive to inoculate each new batch. Fresh, unpasteurized milk has a relatively short shelf life without refrigeration, not so with cheese.

Fresh (as opposed to aged) cheeses tend to be soft and mild, like chevre. Cheeses requiring aging are typically harder in both senses of the word. It turns out that fresh cheese is a pretty simple kitchen project - certainly easier and less involved (and less sweaty) than canning, for instance. My first forays into cheesemaking have been satisfying, easy, and delicious...so, dear reader, tune in later for further adventures in cheese. Maybe I will even get around to aging some cheese -- but for now we are eating the fresh cheese so fast that it's hard to imagine mustering that kind of patience.

Making Mayonnaise

The source of all mayonnaise

Our household consumes a huge quantity of mayonnaise. This is mostly because of Christopher, who believes that mayonnaise makes everything better, and often serves himself such a large portion of mayo that it appears more like a side dish than a condiment. Naturally, with plenty of fresh eggs from the chickens and a great local source of cheap organic extra virgin olive oil, I decided it was time we start making our own mayonnaise.

Years ago, I made some aioli to serve with fresh asparagus and it was a triumphant kitchen moment. I had a vague memory that it involved whipping for a long time, and pouring in the oil very, very slowly. My friend Kathryn makes mayonnaise sometimes, and I remembered her saying she used a blender. I did a little googling and found this excellent recipe for "Homemade Mayonnaise Without Tears" which recommended using a mixer with whisk attachments.

I don't have whisk attachments, but I figured that couldn't be that big of a deal, so I grabbed some eggs and got started.

A couple of hours and four appliances later...I had achieved mayonnaise. But it was not easy, let me tell you. I share this story in the hopes that it may spare some future mayonnaise maker from the frustrations of mayonnaise failure.

I started out with my grandmother's Sunbeam Mixmaster. It seemed like a reasonable choice given the "No Tears" recipe, plus it is glamourous and I always like getting it out for kitchen projects.

I do not recommend a mixer like this for mayonnaise-making. The beaters only hit the center of the bowl, leaving the edges unwhipped/unblended, and the whole Sunbeam operation was a colossal failure. I ended up with an oily, un-emulsified, very un-mayonnaise-looking mixture. It looked like raw egg yolks and oil blended together. Which is what it was.

Next I switched to the hand blender (aka immersion blender). This is a tool that I love and that a number of people in the googleverse recommend for mayonnaise making. I almost burned up the motor, and created a foamy yellow oily substance. I kept whipping, waiting waiting for that magic moment of emulsification, but it never happened.

At this point, fortunately I found several references saying that failed mayonnaise could be substituted for oil to make a new batch, so I saved the failed batch and moved on to appliance number three, the hand mixer. This seemed like it would solve the problem of not reaching the edges that I had encountered with the Sunbeam, and incorporate much more air than the hand blender/immersion blender.

Wrong. No magic mayonnaise moment.

Finally I switched to the trusty Osterizer.

Why did I not use the blender to start with?

I followed the directions in this recipe precisely (with one small exception, see #2 below) including beating the eggs for one full minute in the blender before beginning to add the oil (in my case oil/egg failure mixture) and adding it at an excruciatingly slow pace.

Finally. Mayonnaise success. The magic moment of emulsification.

Here are a few tips for my fellow novice mayonnaise makers to spare yourself time and struggle:

1. Use a blender. Don't bother experimenting with mixers of any sort. They don't work.
2. Use the whites of the eggs too. Most of the recipes I looked at called for separating the eggs and using only the yolks. In the end I used whole eggs, including whites. Correlation is not causation, so it's possible that using whites too had nothing to do with my success, but when I used the whole eggs, it worked. I think keeping the whites made the mayonnaise a more familiar and thereby more appetizing color, too.
3. Whip the eggs on high for at least one full minute before adding any oil.
4. Add the oil with excruciating, ponderous, agonizing slowness. Drips to very slow, thin drizzles only.

In closing, I would like to say: how did people EVER do this before electricity?!? At some point in between appliances, in my search for ways to salvage the failed mayonnaise, I found this lovely post about how French vendors just whip up little batches of mayonnaise by hand using only a whisk and a bowl, just right there on the spot on the street to accompany orders of french fries. It was totally demoralizing to read this as I struggled with my four appliances and runny yellow oil and egg substance.

The ridiculous number of appliances employed, dirty dishes produced, and electricity expended probably don't justify just over a pint of mayonnaise. I can report, however, that it was immensely satisfying to finally see that creamy, thick, delicious substance appear like magic out of nothing but eggs, salt, and oil.

All the dishes, appliances, electricity - that's tuition, as my dad would say. Now I know, and there will be no stopping me in the pursuit of mayonnaise.

Ridiculous number of dirty dishes produced in The Mayonnaise Lesson.

Home

I was up early this morning, weeding the raised beds in the hoophouse. The cold-hardy greens are growing faster now, and the lengthening days are providing lots of sunlight for them to soak up and turn into green and growing plant energy.

Being away for two weeks offered me a lot of clarity, and absence definitely made my heart grow fonder of my life. I love being back to cooking on a wood cookstove, back to soaking up the sunlight and warmth in our house on winter mornings thanks to passive solar design, back to my community and my family, back to walking across the muddy fields and even back to weeding. It's good to be home.

After 12 days of cooking three meals a day for 30-60 people, it's so luscious just to make a small meal for myself and Christopher, to pull weeds, to check on the tiny spinach and carrot plants in the cold frames. These small mundane activities feel so good after being away from them. I feel powerfully, intimately connected to the land here, and glad to be back in my own homeplace, touching growing things, watching a Cooper's hawk fly low over the pastures, hearing the first Red Wing Blackbird of the season.

Monster Mash*

Earlier this week, my dear friend Pooma brought me a basket of gorgeous hot peppers -- a beautiful mix of several varieties of habañeros and jalapeños.

Above: some of the aforementioned habañeros plus the last Italian sweet frying pepper from my garden.

Locally-grown peppers are a rare commodity at the end of the dripping-wet summer we had in these parts, and an especially precious treasure now after the first frosts have hit.

I have for some time had a hankering to make homemade hot sauce, and these peppers presented the perfect opportunity.

When I started searching for recipes for hot sauce, I was delighted to discover that traditional sauces involve fermentation, of which (regular readers know) I am enamored. Fermentation is an old-timey way to preserve food, a creative craft that has been practiced in cultures throughout the world for thousands of years. I love fermentation, and have tried fermenting just about every vegetable you can imagine, and lots of other things too. I've added hot peppers to various ferments over the years, sometimes with extremely intense, mouth-scorching results, but I've never tried fermenting them alone.

Peppers and salt: all you need for a killer mash

It turns out that the most flavorful hot sauces are made from an aged pepper mash, which is just salted peppers fermented for a period of time from a few weeks to three or more YEARS. Then the mash can be used in small quantities for flavoring, or combined with vinegar to make hot sauce. Fermenting hot peppers seems like a good way to spread hot peppery joy throughout the year as well as a step on the path to superlative hot sauce, so I decided to give it a whirl.

It was surprisingly hard to find a recipe online that takes the hot-sauce maker all the way through the process from fresh peppers to fermented mash to the final sauce product. I did find a couple of posts from experienced mash makers here and here and some interesting variations on the basic mash (for instance, here's someone who uses kefir starter culture to innoculate his pepper mash with good results).

Since I have a good understanding of brine-pickling in general, and since making pepper mash seems to be a fairly straightforward brining process. Brine pickling is an ancient, low-tech preservation technique that uses no electricity and very minimal equipment and ingredients. You can read more about brining in earlier posts here and here and also at Sandor Katz's most excellent website, wildfermentation.com. Grist also has a good summary article on brining, including pepper mash making.

Mash-making in progress

In any case, here is the recipe I culled from reading lots of summaries of the process. My mash is atypical because it is adds garlic to the ferment. We have lots of extra garlic from the garden right now, since we're planting our garlic for next year now and there are lots of leftover small cloves, and adding garlic is almost never a bad thing in my opinion.

Garlickey Hot Pepper Mash

Ingredients:

For the mash:

• 2 cups mixed hot peppers (I used green jalapeños; red, yellow, and chocolate habañeros; and one sweet red frying pepper)
• 1/2 cup peeled whole garlic cloves
• 1 Tbs fine- to medium- ground high-quality salt
• 1 Tbs coarse-ground high-quality salt

For the sauce (6 weeks to 6 months later)

• Raw apple cider vinegar to cut the mash to taste

Directions:

1. De-stem and de-seed the peppers. Be careful: this is serious business, because the seeds of hot peppers are really hot! You might want to wear gloves, and if you don't, scrub the heck out of your hands (I use dish soap, rubbing alcohol, and aloe vera to get the pepper sting out-I really should wear gloves) and do not touch your lips, nose, or any other sensitive parts after touching the insides of hot peppers.
2. Throw the peppers and garlic in a food processor or chop by hand. I chopped mine, because I was making a small batch. Some people ferment the peppers whole, but I decided to ferment them without the seeds because I am not one of those people who seeks out crazy over-the-top hotness in my hot sauce.
3. Mix in the regular-grind salt and stir or shake (easy to shake if you do it in a jar).
4. Gently pour in filtered, room temperature water to cover. Make sure that all of the peppers and garlic are completely submerged in the brine.
5. Cover with the coarse-grind salt.
6. Wait and watch!
7. Harvest the mash and make sauce by cutting with vinegar -- I haven't done this step yet, but will post when I do!

The mash in brine on day two.

*I must have heard the song Monster Mash hundreds of times throughout my childhood, always at this time of year, on record players of my elementary school classrooms, so I hope you'll forgive the gratuitious seasonal shoutout, dear reader.

Autumn Olive Mead

Dozens of small, shrubby autumn olive trees are speckled across our five acres of river bottom land. Autumn olive (Elaeagnus umbellata) is an invasive exotic. . .and an abundant, nutritious, wild fruit. Of all of the invasive species I've encountered, autumn olive is the hardest to hate.

Autumn olives are one of the first trees to leaf out here on our land, and one of the earliest plants to flower. Their silvery green leaves are beautiful, and their tiny yellow flowers are heavy with a sweet scent that makes me feel drunk with Spring. Honeybees and other pollinators love the flowers, which provide an early spring meal for many beneficial insects. Then, around the time that blackberries start to ripen, the trees bear fruit. Autumn olive trees in fruit are covered with tiny red berries, packed with fruit, bursting with fruit. The berries are pearly, almost opalescent in some light, and flecked in such a way that they almost seem to be dusted with glitter. Autumn olives are magical. A hard plant to hate.

Need more evidence? Autumn olive trees are nitrogen fixers. At Sugar Creek Farm, where we took a class last spring, farmer Joe Allawos has experimented with the benefits of the nitrogen fixing capacity of autumn olive trees by planting fruit and nut trees next to autumn olive trees, and at the same time planting the same variety of tree in a spot away from any autumn olive trees. The trees planted next to the autumn olives grew much faster and when we saw them were about 50% larger than the ones planted away from the autumn olives. Autumn olive trees planted or allowed to grow in a garden or orchard will accumulate nitrogen around their roots, which is then available as on-the-spot fertilizer for other nearby plants.

Finally, there is the nutritional value of the fruit: autumn olive berries contain vitamins A, C, E, essential fatty acids, flavanoids, and carotenoids. They are especially chock full of the antioxidant carotenoid lycopen, which is considered a powerful fighter of cancer and heart disease. Tomatoes, which are the most common source of lycopene, contain a fraction of the lycopene found in autumn olives. One study by the USDA's Agricultural Research Service showed that autumn olives can contain 17 times as much lycopene as a fresh tomato.

So there it is. Beautiful. Nitrogen fixing. Nutritious. And invasive.

We have cut dozens of autumn olive trees in clearing space for gardens, but we've left a smattering growing for the time being, and we harvest as much of the fruit as we can. The taste of the fruit is a tart burst of summer--I can stand at an autumn olive tree for a good long time picking and eating on a summer afternoon.

I can never eat an autumn olive without thinking of my friend Holly, who introduced me to autumn olives on a hike in the woods almost ten years ago now, when she was six years old. She knew far more about wild foods than I did, having spent a lot of time in the woods with her knowledgeable parents, and I am always thankful to her for helping me begin to appreciate the food that is available all around us for free!

All of this said, I feel compelled to offer at least a couple of links to information about the noxious, invasive nature of Elaeagnus umbellata, so here they are:

• Morris Arboretum invasive species fact sheet on Autumn Olive

• Nature Conservancy article on Autumn Olive (this article is written with a specific focus on autumn olive in one state, Indiana, but is more widely applicable, and is a good summary).

• Eastern Forest Environmental Threat Assessment Center Threat Summary on Autumn Olives

What To Do With Autumn Olive Fruit

As long as these beautiful and edible invasives pepper our landscape, we might as well enjoy their delicious fruit.

We knew we wanted to try a batch of autumn olive mead, which we did (more on that below), but I took to the internet in search of other interesting things to do with autumn olives, since we have so many and they are so yummy.

Here's a blog with all kinds of autumn olive recipes, including a delicious-looking jam that I intend to try later this month: Dreams and Bones.

I also discovered on one of my perennial favorite blogs, Fast Grow the Weeds, a post with a recipe for an autumn olive chutney that looks divine. There will definitely be some chutney happening in my kitchen later this week -- thanks El!

In the meantime, here is the recipe for the mead we made last evening, which smells outlandishly delicious already and is a gorgeous deep, purple red color as it begins its fermentation.

Autumn Olive Mead

Ingredients:

• 1.5 gallons autumn olives
• 1 gallon of honey
• Water as needed

Equipment:

• 6 gallon carboy (glass jug for fermenting)
• Airlock (see photo)

Instructions:

1. Wash and mash the autumn olives. Use your hands and create a nice, mushy, juicy slurry!
2. Heat a large pot of water and dissolve the honey in it.
3. Add water to the fruit slurry to make it easier to pour. Combine the honey water and fruit slurry in the carboy and add water to fill the carboy up to its shoulders.
4. Cap with an airlock and wait!
5. The mixture should start to bubble and continue for several weeks. If the mead is not bubbling, or develops mold, you can add storebought yeast for winemaking (champagne yeast is good). If you're lucky, the wild yeast that is present on the skin of the fruit will suffice.
6. After the bubbling stops, siphon off the liquid into another carboy and compost the fruit dregs. Allow to ferment again until there is no more bubbling; transfer to bottles and enjoy right away as "young" mead or age for a mellower flavor.

Below: mashing the fruit to create a slurry. . .

. . . and the mead ready for fermentation!

Winter Reading: From Scuppernongs to Switchel

When it gets cold outside, there's nothing I like more than curling up somewhere with a hot beverage, a cat, and a book. I come from a long line of bookworms, librarians, word-lovers, readers, writers, and other nerd-types. Book-loving is in my blood.

If the book contains recipes, food history, and stories about food, all the better as far as I am concerned. One of my all-time favorites is 100 Vegetables and Where They Came From, by a hero of mine, seed saver and historian William Woys Weaver.

So I can't tell you how excited I was to be introduced last night to this book: Smokehouse Ham, Spoon Bread, & Scuppernong Wine by Joseph E. Dabney. We were having dinner with our good friends Bud and MF. After a highly satisfying meal of stuffed butternut squash, cream of broccoli soup made from broccoli from their garden, and a creamy custard for dessert, we retired to the living room to talk about James Bond movies (!), Noam Chomsky, and traditional mountain "stack cakes." This last topic lead to MF whipping out the aforementioned book.

We found several very fine stack cake recipes within, but that was just the beginning. This book is a treasure trove of Southern Appalachian food lore, food histories, food traditions, and recipes. It's one part oral history, one part cookbook, and one part hymn to the people and traditions of the Southern Appalachians. It is meticulously researched and written with the reverence and relish of a person who has cultivated a long-lasting and deep love of food and food traditions.

I quickly became completely absorbed -- a whole chapter on sweet potatoes, another on persimmons, and a veritable profusion of information about old-time food-preserving techniques. Very old Cherokee recipes, wild foods traditions, and chapters on moonshine, wine, and beer. Recipes calling for everything from "several squirrels" to "Tennessee truffles," otherwise known as ramps. A section on "The Art of Growing" in the southern mountains. And lots of amazing old photographs of places all around where I grew up and where I live now. This is so far up my alley it's out the other side.

In the 12 or so hours since MF kindly lent me her copy (seeing the pain it would cause me if she didn't), I have spent most of my waking hours falling in love with this book. I stayed up late reading Christopher snippets about the history of wild grapes in North Carolina, and opened it up first thing this morning to read about possum hunting.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough. As I try out recipes, I will post some of them, and I'll write more about Dabney's exhaustive survey of mountain food culture as I read and re-read it, I am sure.

On a related note (food traditions, books I love, recommended reading for cold days and nights), I was re-united last night with my copy of Wild Fermentation by Sandor Katz. I had apparently lent it out to MF long ago and forgotten. Christopher has had to hear me lament its absence many times in recent months, only to discover that it was safe and sound in West Asheville all along. I was very excited when MF whipped out my copy last night.

This is one of my all-time favorite books. It is only 187 pages from cover to cover, but it is highly concentrated. Like a thick mole or miso paste, it provides more flavor, substance, and hours of enjoyment than you might imagine. Wild Fermentation is chock full of recipes, food histories, stories from the modern food underground, philosophy, politics, and food lore from many traditions.

Wild Fermentation is the book that I used as a guide when I first began making krauts and brine pickles, ginger brews, kombucha, and other fermented foods. It is the single indispensable resource for people embarking on fermentation adventures, in my opinion, and an invaluable cache of fabulous food facts and folk traditions.

So there are two recommendations for winter reading. Though I am a big fan of libraries, these are books that I think it is worth owning. My copy of Wild Fermentation is well-worn already -- it has the creases and stains to prove that it's a book I pull off the shelf and use in the kitchen all the time. I am going to purchase Smokehouse post haste, and have a feeling it will assume a similarly revered and beloved status in my kitchen.

Happy winter, happy eating, and happy reading!

~~~~

A note on the title of this post: Scuppernongs and Muscadines are wild grapes that grew rampantly in North Carolina before and at the time of European settlement. According to Joseph Dabney, they were still to be found in abundance growing wild in these parts as recently as the 1940s, and were used for wine-making, desserts, and an amazing-sounding ferment made from wild grapes and molasses, apparently based on a Cherokee tradition. Switchel is a delicious home-made soft drink with molasses and ginger, a fine recipe for which can be found in Wild Fermentation.

Making Mole - Tasty Tonic Food for Winter Well-Being

This year we grew heirloom Pasilla Bajio peppers (pictured at left), a mild, sweet-hot, long, wrinkley, dark green pepper that turns deep chocolate brown as it ripens. Its one of the many types of peppers traditionally used in Mexican mole.

Mole (pronounced "moe-lay") means "sauce" in Spanish - read more about mole here.

Last night, I decided to try my hand at a mole paste, which I will describe after the following disclaimer:

*Disclaimer!* There are an almost infinite variety of highly personalized mole recipes, incorporating regional traditions and generations of mole-making expertise handed down from mothers to daughters, guarded as family secrets, perfected and adapted, with each mole sauce embodying the unique culinary magic and heritage of the person (usually a woman) stirring the pot. This is NOT one of those moles. I humbly acknowledge that it is a non-traditional, bastardized, white-Southern-hippie-anarchist-vegetarian-novice first time gringa mole. Traditional moles can require a whole day in the kitchen, sweating and toasting and grinding and stirring. Mine takes a little more than an hour. Although I think it tastes pretty darn good, it is not in the same universe with traditional moles.

Peppers toasting in the skillet

So. This mole only uses one kind of pepper rather than 3, 4, or 5 varieties. If you use more varieties, you can achieve complex subtle pepper flavor combinations. I also used only pumpkin seeds rather than the blends of almonds, sesame seeds, and other seeds and nuts that may be included in other moles. I wanted to use as many local ingredients as possible, and pumpkin seeds are nutritious, affordable, and locally plentiful. I used honey instead of sugar, and left out the chopped bread/cookies/crackers and/or tortillas that some moles include.


Spices awaiting grinding








Without further ado, here is the recipe:

Gringa Mole Paste

Makes about 1 quart

20 Pasilla Bajio peppers
20 cloves of garlic
3 oz. raisins*
2 generous tsp. salt
1/2 tsp. pepper
1 tsp. oregano
1 Tbs. cumin
1/2 tsp. ground cloves or 7 or 8 whole cloves
2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4- 1/2 tsp cayenne powder depending on how hot you like it
1/2 tsp chili powder
1/3 cup honey
1 cup pumpkin seeds
3 oz. unsweetened baking chocolate

• Wash the peppers under cold water. Remove the seeds and stems.
• Heat up a cast iron skillet and toast the peppers in batches. Use a tiny bit of oil in the skillet -- I used virgin coconut oil. Cook the peppers just until they soften and brown a bit. This is going to make your house smell really good.
  
• Meanwhile, roast the garlic. I usually do this in the toaster oven. Leave the garlic unpeeled to roast - you can peel it after roasting.
  
• When all of the peppers are cooked, put them in a large bowl and cover with boiling water. Add the raisins and cover with a cloth or dishtowel. Let sit for 1/2 hour or until everything is soft and the raisins are "plumped up."
• While you are soaking the peppers and raisins, toast the pumpkin seeds lightly, until they're golden brown.
• Drain the peppers and raisins and retain the soaking water.
  
• Grind all of the spices together with a mortar and pestle.
• Melt the chocolate. Peel the garlic.
  
• Blenderize or process in a food processor the pumpkin seeds, honey, garlic, and spices, adding a little soaking water to make the blades turn if necessary. Add the peppers, raisins, and melted chocolate, and continue adding soaking water until you achieve the desired consistency.

The final result should be a thick paste that you can dilute with water, stock, or tomato sauce (or any combination of these), adding sauteed or roasted onions and garlic to make delectable sauces for whatever you are cooking up.

Throw a dollop in your refried beans, use it to spice up burritos or enchiladas, mix with stock and tomato paste as a spicy/sweet marinade for baked beans, or use in the traditional way, as a sauce in which to slow-cook meats.

Mole paste can be refrigerated and used over a few weeks, or frozen and used through the winter as a way to bring your summery chili peppers from the garden to the table through the cold months.

Finished mole paste in a jar

More to Mole than Fabulous Flavor?

As I was making the mole, I was thinking about what a great tonic food it is -- a medicinal combination of foods perfect for fall and winter well-being. The ingredients are a perfect nutritional blend to help keep the immune system strong through the changing seasons and to keep us feeling good physically and emotionally as winter arrives.

Local honey and garlic are well-known immune boosters.
Peppers contain capsaicinoids, which trigger the release of endorphins which can help fight seasonal depression. Capsaicinoids also increase metabolism, which seems perfect for the arrival of winter, when we have less opportunity for physical activity. Raisins are high in phenols--powerful antioxidants that are also found in chocolate. Pumpkin seeds contain phytochemicals with anti-inflammatory properties, and are packed with protein and nutrition. Dark chocolate is full of the aforemmentioned antioxidants, and triggers the release in the brain of oxytocin, a hormone and neurotransmitter that is linked to feelings of well-being.

Oxytocin is a facinating biological phenomenon -- it's released during breast feeding and is linked to mother-child bonding. It is also released by hugging, social bonding, sexual arousal and orgasm, and by sharing food in low light. The release of oxytosin is triggered more by certain foods than others. At the top of the list of foods that cause the body to release oxytosin: chocolate and peppers.

Could mole be the perfect fall and winter tonic food to supercharge your immune system, keep you healthy, boost your metabolism and lift your spirits?

Maybe so. But beyond the punch it packs for winter wellness, it is worth eating for taste alone. My nontraditional gringa batch turned out rich, complex, and fabulously delicious. I used some last night to make a hearty stew of black beans, onions, greens, and sweet peppers, which we served with mashed sweet potatoes, guacamole, raw cheddar cheese, sour cream, and tortillas. Mmmmm.

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*A note on raisins: I used all organic ingredients for my version, but if you're not going to go 100% organic, you might consider making sure that at least your raisins of the organic persuasion, since non-organic raisins, affectionately known in my family as "pesticide pellets" contain high levels of toxic chemicals.

More on brine pickling

Jars of recently brined pickles: mixed vegetables on the left and summer squash on the right.

Earlier this summer, I blogged about one of my favorite old-fashioned, probiotic ways to preserve vegetables -- pickling them in salt water. (See the original post, Coming Home to Abundance for brine-pickling instructions, references, and background).

Brine pickling has been such an ongoing, everyday part of life at our house over the past few months of heavy harvest that I wanted to write a little bit more about it, with specific comments on various vegetables for brining.

This summer, I've brine-pickled cucumbers, squash, okra, onions, garlic, radishes, beets, carrots, and cauliflower, all with good results. Fresh dill, basil, and parsley all pickle well, too, and add great flavor to brine pickles. I have a crock going now of baby squash, the last of the summer carrots, and okra with dill flowers. I'm sure I've brined other things in summers past, but I don't remember them all!

I do remember that I tried fingerling eggplants once with disastrous results (mushy and moldy), so I don't recommend brining eggplant. Other things I DON'T recommend brining include: ripe tomatoes, peppers, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and lettuce. I've known friends to brine watermelon rinds (very delicious) and green tomatoes successfully, too.

I've found that squash and cucumbers do great pickled whole and then de-brined (soaked in cold water), sliced, and stored in a 4-to-1 water/vinegar solution. They'll last almost indefinitely in the fridge that way.

You can store the pickles in the original brining liquid, which is cloudy and full of beneficial bacteria, but it's generally a bit salty for my taste. I like to pour it off and save it to use for other things, including just pouring a shot of it into sauerkraut or pickles when packing into jars for storage.

Okra is really tasty brined whole and either sliced and packed or just packed as whole pods (they look cool that way). This is an outstanding way to keep up with the okra overload when your okra plants are producing faster than you can possibly come up with clever ways to disguise okra for fresh consumption.

Small carrots are great brined whole, and are a surprisingly yummy snack - salty, crunchy, and crisp.

Onions do better quartered than whole, unless they're pretty small. Pearl-sized pickled onions are GREAT.

An easy way to get started with brine pickling is to fill a crock or big jar with all the brine-able veggies that you have lying around needing to be used. Make sure they're washed and prepped as described in my earlier post and then pour a strong brine solution over them (1/2 cup salt to 1 quart water). Press down (I use a plate weighted with a full jar on top), make sure they're submerged, cover, and wait. In warm weather, the pickles will be salty, sour, and pickled in as little as 10 days. It really is like magic!