Random Cooking Tips

I post daily on One Dish’s Facebook page about dishes and little tips from my teaching and cooking activities. Here are some recent ones.

RANDOM COOKING TIPS 

Teens mix a simple salad dressing into cabbage & apple slaw. (photo Nicky Patnaude)

1) At my class at Boys & Girls Club (early Nov), we made a quick salad dressing of mayo + bottled Italian vinaigrette. I decided that my usual straight vinaigrette might be too different for these teens, and besides, those two condiments were in the Boys & Girls Club refrigerator. It was fine and, at least it wasn’t sweet like typical coleslaw dressing. One could scaffold  down the fat / dairy by reducing the ratio of mayo gradually so they don’t notice so much. One could blend vinaigrette with buttermilk which has less fat than mayo (and no egg). I usually skip dairy altogether and blend vinaigrette with silken tofu for a lovely creamy VEGAN dressing or dip. People don’t even notice it has no dairy. See recipe page and scroll to the bottom for Vegan Dill /Cilantro Dressing.

Chicken Mafe Stew with sweet potatoes and spinach (photo Nicky Patnaude).

2) Two great ways to make stews thick & creamy is to add nut butter and/or a little mashed potato or squash. This is especially nice with vegan gluten-free stews, in place of dairy and flour, since the nut butters add a rich creaminess. That’s what the teens and I did with the Chicken Mafë Stew and Lentil Mafë Stew. Mafë is a simple West African sauce of tomato sauce mixed with peanut butter. We added boiled cubed sweet potatoes and frozen chopped greens (spinach or collards) to both versions.

Lentil Sweet Potato Mafe Soup (my photo).

The next day, I added water to the Lentil stew and enjoyed it as comforting hearty soup along with a big bowl of slaw, for a filling, low-carb meal. This soup will inevitably appear on Delivered Dish of the Week menus quite soon.

If you’re sensitive to peanuts, you could use almond, cashew or soy nut butter. I was given samples of soy nut butter at the Food Allergy Resource Fair last Sat, which I’m eager to try.

3) When you make a long-simmered soup, throw in frozen corn cobs to enhance and sweeten the broth. Works great for both meat and vegetarian soups. My grandma used to make a very simple consomme of pork & corn cobs (all Chinese savory soups are consommes). All she did was simmer a cheap lean cut of pork shoulder with 2 frozen corn cobs. I don’t even remember any onions in it. Hours later, we enjoyed a clear low-fat broth with wonderful flavor. Per Chinese custom, we took out the pork and corn and served that separately from the broth. White rice and a green vegetable or two rounded out this meal. We dipped small pieces of tender pork in soy sauce and ate with rice. She liked to eat the niblets off the cob, but I disdained because I found the niblets had no flavor. All the corn essence and most of the pork flavor was in the broth.

This simple soup is perfect for a crockpot. If making a vegetarian soup, use veggie broth/bouillon and add onions, carrots etc. Ten minutes before you’re ready to eat, remove the cobs and throw in frozen corn niblets and frozen or fresh spinach.

I particularly like to use sweet corn broth as stock for thick White Bean Soup with Dill.

Size Matters

Gas ranges and stack ovens in main cooking work area, GIA Kitchen (my photo).

Main cooking work area (my photo). Ranges are on the right side.

Big prep area with sinks, facing ‘cooking area’. This is one of 3 separate prep rooms. (my photo)

JUST CHECK OUT those XXL gas ranges at my new digs, GIA Kitchen, the “incubator” kitchen in St Paul.  Talk about sexy, spacious, stainless steel heaven!  Doesn’t this make you home cooks drool?  All that counter space makes me swoon.

And, this is only one of THREE prep rooms, one of which is designated gluten-free. Yes, more counters and sinks. Can you stand it?  I’m even not including photos of the various walk-in freezers and coolers.

This is what I’ve been dreaming about. Now I’ll be able to handle more delivery & catering clients! And, hopefully, I can start offering cooking classes here next year!

Fellow tenants at GIA Kitchen at GIA Food Fair Nov 2: the artisanal toffee man and Kathy of Brody’s 569 Gluten-free muffins (my photo).

Mark your calendars! GIA Kitchen is holding another HOLIDAY FOOD FAIR on SUN DEC 2, 2pm – 5pm.  It’s a great opportunity to sample tasty treats from local food entrepreneurs as well as see this facility for yourself. We’ll be offering Special Holiday Sales, too. One whole room will feature Gluten-Free products!  

Please see Nov 5 post “Incubating Good Food” for more photos of me and other fellow food entrepreneurs at GIA’s first Food Fair on Nov 2, 2012.

I’ve posted a few more photos of the kitchen on my Facebook page — go to www.facebook.com/pages/One-Dish-at-A-Time  — “Like” and Share!  I post news, pics and cooking tips daily.

Food Fairs and Holiday Dishes

I’m flogging 3 upcoming events. Please drop by the Food Fairs and say Hi.

 #####  SUN NOV 4, 2pm – 5pm  #####
FOOD FAIR at GIA Kitchens, 955 Mackubin Ave, St. Paul (a warehouse near Dale & Front Ave). Taste the newest food trends in the Twin Cities and discover local products. Free samples!  See this new spacious commercial kitchen where I’m a brand new tenant!   This event will be repeated on Sun Dec 2nd, 2pm – 5pm.

Besides me, you can meet creators offering: Gluten Free Pizza Crusts & Rolls  by Zen Gluten Free; Gluten Free Muffins & Breads by Brody 579; Gluten Free Baking Mixes & Waffle Cones by Thrive; Gluten Free Granola by Barnstormer; Gluten Free Cheese Rolls by Sweet Fusion Bakery; Gluten Free Cookies and Scones by Dana’s Gluten Free; Gluten Free bars and bread made with ancient grains by Thuro Bread; Stroopwaffles by Proper People; Spicy Feta Cheeses by Philia Foods; Locally sourced, Organic Ice Cream by Sweet Science Ice Cream; Cake Pops by Raspberry Bird.     Call (651)379-4809 for questions about event.

#### WED NOV 7th, 6.30-9pm ####
My next cooking class, “Healthful Holiday Entrees & Sides” at Robbinsdale Middle School,  6.30-9pm. Fee $45. Register at http://www.robbinsdaleareacommunityed.com/insight/registry/classinfo.asp?courseID=9954&catID=1119

Firecracker Slaw: the prettiest slaw you’ve EVER seen!

Here’s the description:

Offer stunning vegetarian & vegan dishes on your holiday table that satisfy both taste buds and also dietary preferences from diabetic and low-fat to dairy-free or gluten-free. These are great complements to traditional fixings, too.  You’ll make a Roasted Squash & Pepper Pie, Gorgeous Beet Slaw and Green Parsnip Soup. Please bring a knife and cutting board if you have one. Tracy will sharpen your knife during the class.

I’d appreciate it if you could forward this to friends & neighbors who may be interested! 

 

 #####  SAT NOV 10 9am – 12pm  #####

FREE Food Allergy Resource Fair at the Hopkins Eisenhower Community Center, 1001 Highway 7, Hopkins. The Resource Fair will feature allergy‐friendly food and product companies offering food samples, coupons and detailed information on product safety and benefits.  Kids’ craft table, silent auction, “Ask the Allergist” booth, too. Hosted by nonprofit organization Food Allergy Support Group of Minnesota FASGMN www.foodallergysupportmn.org  FFI 763‐220‐0289 .

Soup’s On!

When it’s damp & cold like today all I want is a big bowl of hot soup. The great thing about soup is you can throw all the ingredients in a crockpot overnight or while you’re at work. Here are 3 of my faves, all vegan, low-fat and high-fiber. 

Kale & Yam Soup, above, and Parsnip-Celery Soup, below (my photo).

The Parsnip Celery Soup will be featured in my upcoming community education classes, “Healthful Holiday Dishes”, being offered at both Inver Grove Heights Community Center and Robbinsdale Middle School, Sat Nov 3 11.30am and Wed Nov 7 6.30pm, respectively. Register now! (I’ll post links and lesson plan later today.)

PARSNIP & CELERY SOUP. Vegan, Gluten-free, Paleo-friendly. Made this last spring for St Patrick’s Day and it’s a winner. Incredibly comforting and kid-friendly. I didn’t find a recipe that was perfect (ie dairy-free) after looking online for 5 minutes, so I combined two similar recipes for Parsnip Soup w/ Leeks & Parsley and Celery & Parsnip Soup with Green Onion & Dill Matzo Balls. I wanted to combine celery & parsnip b/c one has starch and the other has fiber, and parsnips have more complex carbs than potatoes. They’re also naturally very sweet.  I also wanted to stretch parsnips which shrink when cooked.

These recipes follow a basic formula for making pureed soup: saute, boil, puree. That’s why I know I can combine them. To customize, I’m skipping the leeks and matzo balls — so it’s a gluten-free soup — and retaining the parsley coulis. I substitute olive oil for butter and skip the cream. You don’t miss the cream at all.

KALE & YAM SOUP. Vegan, Gluten-free, Paleo-friendly. A thick green pureed soup with, count ‘em, 2 Super Foods in a bowl. A nice hot immune-system booster (vs cold smoothies). Flavored with sage & caramelized onions, this is from the “Love Soup” cookbook. I certainly Love that book. The author recommends Japanese yams which are particularly sweet & fragrant, but regular are fine, too. The extreme green-ness may put off some picky people but some clients adore this. It makes you feel healthy and fills you up.

Posole soup with plenty of crunchy garnishes is a hearty Meal in a Bowl (photo from a website).

MEXICAN POSOLE WITH HOMINY & BEANS. Vegan, Gluten-free, fairly Paleo-friendly. Posole is a terrific pepper-based soup/stew with hominy, to which I’m adding beans for protein. Medium spicy. Absolutely life-giving on a wet day. Unlike the 2 pureed soups above, it’s full of texture and bright spices. It’s traditionally made with pork (so good!) but this vegan version is great IMO. Ground guajillo pepper is the main flavoring agent. You can find this in cellophane pkgs along with other spices, herbs & whole dried peppers in a Hispanic grocery/deli, or the Hispanic aisle of a big inner-city regular grocery or Asian grocery. Little Hispanic grocery stores are found in a lot of Mpls & St Paul neighborhoods and are fun to explore. For example, you’ll find cheap RIPE avocadoes that you can actually eat right away!

About pureeing soup: you’ll need a blender or a food processor. I love my immersion blender cuz it’s one less thing to wash, and having to keep depressing the button strengthens my grip. Ha ha.

Teaching Teens & Tweens

As I prepare for my pro-bono teaching gig at East Side (St Paul) Boys & Girls Club tomorrow, I feel like I’ll be stepping into an episode of reality TV.

The Challenge (insert dramatic chords): show a group of tweens & teens how to make healthful food in 50 min from start to finish, with no knives. Cram a little nutrition info in there too. And I’m one of the lucky guest chefs in that the Boys & Girls Club has an actual kitchen and is giving us free rein.

Tracy and tweens at St Paul’s then-newly opened North End Teen Center in 2011.

This is all being organized by Free Arts Minnesota, an arts non-profit for which I used to volunteer, and whose mission is “Art Heals”. Free Arts coordinates teams of adult mentors to lead weekly arts & crafts sessions w/ disadvantaged children at 40-some facilities in the metro. In a push to emphasize health, it has created a new Healthy Minds and Bodies program and pulled in guest chefs to each lead a series of 3 cooking sessions with these teams. So, instead of painting or collaging, we’re going to make food. The audience and parameters, however, are very dissimilar to the adult cooking classes I’m teaching thru community education in the next 2 weeks (schedule in previous post; more details coming next post).

Fortunately, I’ve taught several classes to tweens & teens before, including St Paul’s North End Teen Center (see 2011 post) and at Plymouth Middle School, but in those cases, we could use knives. Fresh vegetables, even potatoes, require knives.

There are, of course, lots of fairly easy sweet treats that we could make, that are highly appealing to kids and don’t need knives. S’mores, designer popcorn balls, etc. Yet more sweet treats is not our goal. And, there are lots of quick & interesting “healthful” recipes, the kind that I teach to adults all the time. But, these are kids in an urban after-school program. They’re probably not going to run home and make quinoa salad. 

These are not adults who have access to cars & money to shop for ingredients or who have gadgets like blenders, and, neither are they necessarily motivated to take time & effort to make real food. We don’t know what their home situations are. In fact, some may not have regular access to food at home, let alone regular meals  — this is the definition of Food Insecurity.

Source: linda5900 from Photobucket.com.

A recent news report this summer stated that 9.5% of households in Minnesota experience Food Insecurity. That’s 1 in 10 households and 1 in 8 children (source Second Harvest Heartland).  Approx 375,000 MN children depend on the National School Lunch and Breakfast program for free/reduce-priced daily meals (as provided for in the Federal Nutrition Bill). In the summer when there’s no school, 80% of these kids go hungry. The MN Dept of Education’s “Summer Food Service Program” admirably tries to address this gap.  During my back-to-school-year studying Dietetic Technology, I spent a month with co-sponsor Second Harvest Heartland, knocking on doors, leaving flyers and talking up folks in North & South Mpls neighborhoods where 4 pilot programs were being launched. These 4 offered free lunches to both adults and kids — traditional programs offered lunch only to the kids and made the adult chaperones wait outside. Guess which one worked better for the whole family?   Either way, hopefully both the traditional and the new projects continue to grow and serve more hungry folks.

I want to teach these kids — any kids, anybody really — to cook real food they can make easily at home, by themselves or with family, that they like and can be proud of, that use cheap & easily purchased ingredients, and, that happen to be healthful.  

Readers of this blog know that these are the 4 key factors in my entire approach to cooking, ie my mission. Anybody can make nice food with gourmet ingredients and lots of time. And that’s great — when you do, celebrate it, and invite me over!

But, the people who would most benefit from learning healthful ways of eating do not surf Epicurious.com or read “Martha Stewart Living”. They do not peruse blogs about gluten-free and vegan foods. And, it’s not just the lowest-income bracket. The ‘middle’ could also learn a few new things. 8.3% Americans (26 million) are affected by diabetes. Diagnosed cases shot from 1.5 million in 1958 to 18.8 million in 2010; another 7 million are as yet undiagnosed. More stats. 

OK, so I have my work cut out for me.  Back to my 3 cooking sessions at the Boys & Girls Club. 

Given the time constraints and these goals, my game plan is to use mostly plain ie unadulterated packaged foods and teach them to combine and customize. These are mainstream foods that most tweens & teens are familiar with and hopefully already like to eat. I’m channeling Sarah Lee and Readers Digest, I guess. I’ll save the quinoa for next week’s adult classes.

For teens & kids in general, the key is not too many steps = quick pay-off. I’ll divide the kids & mentors into teams and assign them different dishes or tasks.

Session #1:  Custom-flavored cream cheeses like pineapple & cilantro, salsa, cranberry, and herb. We’ll use ziplocs and pipe it into celery & hollowed out cukes a la “ants on a log”, and, make roll-up wraps and possibly quesadillas either in the microwave or on stove-top. Tweens into cuteness can make pinwheels.

Session #2:  Easy Eggs and Tunafish Salad. High-protein snacks and meals that a 10-yr old can make. Hopefully, some of the older teens have knife privileges so I can show them how to dice celery, apples & onion.

Session #3: Graduation Dinner of 2 quick stews and rice. 1) Chicken w/ Mixed Veg and 2) Beans & Greens. The only ingredient to chop is onion & garlic; we’ll use frozen veggies and canned beans and broths.

My goal: happy proud kids.

As mentioned above, a year or so ago, I taught a couple cooking classes at St Paul’s North End Teen Center to tweens & teens. (See posts from mid-2011).We had 2 hours and knives, however, which enabled us to make from scratch such dishes as bean & veg salad, hummus, pico de gallo, chili, and nut-balls. The group was great and very willing; some older teens were excellent choppers. Actually, I didn’t have enough tasks for all the kids to be occupied the whole time. So that requires more strategizing in future.

Aunty Oxidant Coming Near You

Tracy at MPS’ Farm 2 School community BBQ 9-21-12

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Aunty Oxidant is going to be all over the metro in the next 3 weeks, doing demos and teaching various classes. 

SAMPLING & DEMOS IN OCTOBER:

• Sat Oct 13th, MN Food Assoc. Harvest Party, Marine-in-St-Croix (near Stillwater)
• Sat Nov 3rd, GIA Kitchens Food Fair, St Paul.
• Sat Nov 10th, Resource Fair, Food Allergy Support Group MN (FASGMN), Hopkins
  [Alas, demos at Farmers Markets are over, since the satellite markets will be closing soon. Boo hoo! ]

UPCOMING COOKING CLASSES — REGISTER NOW!

• Oct-Nov: basics with teens of St Paul East Side Boys & Girls Club, thru Free Arts MN program.
• Oct 29th, Meatless Monday Garden Supper, at Harvest Moon Co-op, Long Lake.
• Nov 3rd, Healthful Holiday Sides, at Inver Grove Hts Community & Fitness Center.
• Nov 7th, Healthful Holiday Sides, Robbinsdale Community Ed at Robbinsdale Middle School.

I’ll be posting more details about these events and classes shortly.

Meanwhile, I just had to share these great photos I received today of me, handing out samples at last month’s Farm 2 School Community BBQ hosted by Mpls Public Schools’ Dept of Culinary & Nutrition Services. (See Sep blog posts.) Since Aunty Oxidant has no sidekick*, I rarely get photos of myself despite doing these events all the time.

Pic #1: prepping samples of Blanched Carrot & Kale Salad in Orange Ginger Vinaigrette. The other tray on left side displayed cups of Roast Ratatouille — on the table is the big tub I had brought.

Blanched Carrot & Kale Salad in Orange Ginger Vinaigrette. Vegan, gluten-free, soy-free.

Pic #2: lovely close up of the beautiful, super-food Carrot Kale Salad. A perfect autumn side dish that keeps a week and can be extended w/ beans or quinoa, etc. See Recipe page.

[Thanks to MN Dept of Health and Family Support for the photos!]

 

 

 

 

*I did rope a friend into a sidekick gig once, and had her wear a giant 7 ft corn costume at the farmers’ market. It proved hard for her to hand out samples without knocking people on the head. Note to self: make smaller costumes.

 

Down the Rabbit Hole

It is so easy to slip down the Rabbit Hole into the dizzying Wonderland of Starch.

That goofy Alice with her yo-yo weight issues. First, it’s the quick-fix “Drink Me Potion” aka liquid diet food substitutes. She drops pounds immediately but doesn’t have strength or energy to even turn the doorknob. Now Alice is hungry and feeling deprived and, in a typical rebound, scarfs a box of “Eat Me Cakes” (not likely the whole-wheat applesauce kind). She bloats and balloons to giant size and again, can’t get out of the house. She gets head-aches.

This woman needs to get herself to a meeting of Cake-eaters Anonymous.

Moreover, what does the schizo Mad Hatter serve at tea? Pastries & cake. “Off with their heads!”, orders Wonderland’s Queen of Hearts, another unstable personality. What did infamously unsympathetic queen Marie Antoinette say about her starving French masses? “Let them eat cake.”

Crabby, confused, hyper-sensitive, prone to over-emotional fits and angry flare-ups. Obviously, these poor people are in the throes of processed flour & sugar addictions!

[Oh, I hear you, sister. And the dang holidays are approaching!]

So, what to do? Learn to love chewy, satisfying, low-glycemic whole grains. Go beyond brown rice. I’m talking about wheat berries, oat berries, barley; and on the gluten-free side, quinoa, millet and buckwheat groats aka “Kasha”, and different red and red-brown combo rice.

Autumn is the perfect season for cassoulets & stews with different kinds of whole-grain pilafs. And now the heretical: Refrain from serving bread on the side. I know, it’s so nice to mop up sauce with crusty bread, I get it. I’m not saying never eat it.

Case in point: I have a client who wants to better control her carb intake. Cake is not her “eat me” temptation, it’s pasta and bread. In a recent coaching session, we discussed “scaffolding down” from these processed carbs, and substituting whole grain pilafs and salads. She’s never cooked grains, so, in our next cooking lesson, we’re going to make 3-4 kinds for her to try. I’m bringing my pressure cooker.

Once she learns the basic method of boil & simmer — it’s the same for all of them — she can start using these instead of white rice and pasta. These pack more nutrients per serving and make you feel more full. Plus, then you’ll have cooked whole grains on hand for other wholesome dishes.

Wheat-berries with Lentils & Collard Greens. Grains took only 15 min in pressure cooker (my photo).

 For instance, Google “wheat berries” and up pops up several nice salads and soups right away. Go to www.vegetariantimes.com’s huge database for more inspiration.

If you love bread, try to save it for sandwiches, where it has a noble and practical purpose.

And then, we’ll treat ourselves to cake.

Super-food Stews

Black-eyed Peas, Carrot & Collards in Smoked Paprika Sauce, over brown rice (here pictured w/ Sriracha hot sauce on top). A super-food one-pot meal.

Black-eyed Peas, Carrot & Collards in Smoked Paprika Sauce. Served this very simple hearty stew on Fri night for 70 folks; and it’s on the lesson plan for 2 “Super Food” cooking classes this week.

Taking advantage of seasonal veg, it’s a very “clean” yet intensely flavored, toothsome one-pot meal that is vegan, gluten-free, low-fat and low-glycemic, high-fiber and nutrient-dense. Plus, your day’s Vit A and more.

Here’s the Recipe. This is technically a ‘cassoulet’, ie a braised dish with broth. Serve over brown rice or other whole grain, with hot sauce on side.

Making this for a family quantity, say 2-3 quarts, it’d take less than an hour esp with canned Black-eyed Peas. I used farm-fresh veggies from the market, of course, but, flash-frozen will do too, and would shave off another 15 min of prep time.

Btw, Black-eyed Peas have 6g protein per half-cup, in top 4 of legumes (winners are kidney beans & soybeans). Don’t have black-eyed peas? Fine — use any canned beans or lentils. (Search this blog for more posts about BEP, my favorite neglected step-child bean.)

Of course, this is a perfect autumn vegetarian entree. It would also be terrific with a small amount of chicken, pork, kielbasa, or turkey brats, and yes, left-over bacon. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, or squash as well but, refrain from making this into a carb-fest (ie increasing glycemic load). Keep a high veg to carb ratio.

More nutritional info:

 

• 1 cp cooked sliced carrots contains 54 cal, 4.7 g fiber, 1.2 g protein, 5.4 g sugars, 537% RDI vit A, 9.4% RDI Vit C, 4.7%  calcium, 5.5% folate, 2.9%  iron, 26% Vit K.

 Estimated glycemic load = 2 (of 100/day target).
• 1 cp cooked collards has 49 cal, 5.3 g fiber (10% RDA), 2 g protein, 308% RDI vit A, 58%  Vit C, 27% calcium, 44%  folate, 12% iron and 1045% Vit K. Estimated glycemic load = 4 (of 100/day target).
• 1 cp canned black-eyed peas has 160 kcal, 6 g protein, 34 g carb, 8 g fiber, and notably, 6.7% RDI iron and 15% folate. Estimated glycemic load = 20 (of 100/day target).

  [RDI = Recommended Daily Intake]

 Some of my coaching clients are trying low-carb regimens. Ok, then skip the grains, not the beans.Beans are the best kind of complex carbs AND provide serious protein, so do NOT omit. You’ll just get hungry sooner if you do.

Scroll the Recipe page for more Super-food recipes!

 

Carrots and Kale and Collards, Oh My

Blanched Carrot & Kale Salad in Orange Ginger Vinaigrette.

These last few weeks I’ve been featuring a lovely seasonal dish, Carrot Kale Salad in Orange Ginger Vinaigrette, which I first made with cooking camp students (see late Aug posts). I handed it out at the Farm 2 School Community BBQ last week, at the little Farmers’ Market which pops up in the parking lot of the Inver Grove Hts Community Center, and at a Health & Wellness fair.

I will also be teaching this and 3 other kale dishes in Super Food classes @ Robbinsdale and Inver Grove Hts community education next week. More on that in next post.

This salad rocks! Everybody loves it. The full recipe for salad and the vinaigrette is now on the Recipe page. It’s all about Complementarity. As any art students will tell you, the color orange’s opposite is the color green. Similarly, the natural sweetness of carrots balances the earthy ‘green’ taste of kale, and, orange juice enlivens them both. And you know that brightly colored food are the most healthful; antioxidants are what make them colorful in the first place.

This vinaigrette is fairly tangy at first, perhaps a bit sour for some kids unused to vinegar — but it mellows after a day. It also depends on the sweetness of orange juice concentrate you use and whether you use white wine vinegar or cider vinegar. It’s excellent on mixed green salads and grain salads. Combine this carrot kale salad with Quinoa, for instance.

“Dinosaur” lacinato kale (back) and regular curly kale (front).

Quite a few people told me they liked kale in this salad more than they expected. Perhaps because blanching fresh kale takes off the bitter edge while producing a chewy texture. Blanching leafy greens like kale or collards is a great way to keep their deep green color & nutrients. It’s also really fast. As you & yours come to like blanched kale, use more kale and fewer carrots in this salad.

Blanching is also the first step in freezing these hardy leafy greens. Anytime you plan a dish with kale/collards, blanch 2 batches and freeze one in a ziploc for later. Right now, they’re a dollar/bunch at the farmers’ market, where they’ll be available thru Dec.

About stalks: you can chop up the upper stalks with the leaves or strip them off, depending on the dish. For a stew or soup, leave them on, since they’ll get soft during simmering. For a salad, a saute or a quick braised dish, strip them off. (If you wish, chop stalks finely and save for that stew/soup.) 

Chopped kale ready to be blanched.

TECHNIQUE TIP: Strip leaves off kale or collards easily with a ‘corn-shucking’ motion. Grab a stalk in one hand, leaves pointing down. Fold the 2 sides of leaves together with your other hand, with rib facing the opposite way. Pull down sharply like you are shucking corn, and then only the rib remains. Roll 4-5 of the rib-less leaves together like a cigar, then chop into shreds.

Now what?

1. Add raw shreds to cabbage or mixed green salad.

2. Add raw shreds to ramen noodle or Posole soup.

3. Blanch, drain, squeeze out water & freeze.
4. Blanch for salads. Drizzle w/ sesame dressing (ala co-op deli) or peanut dressing.

6. Saute w/ garlic, olive oil, lemon juice; or, add sesame oil, soy sauce & chilli pepper flakes.

7. Add to quiche, casseroles, ratatouille. Throw into pasta sauce, cassoulets, curry, soup. Nice in chili & any bean dish. (Use ‘search” to find past posts on Beans & Greens.)

Kale shreds, blanched. My favorite long-handled sieve.

Back to the Carrots & Kale salad. Like 90% of my salads, it keeps for a week+. When you’re tired of it as a salad, simmer with a little water or broth — or coconut milk —  6-8 min til tender and serve hot.

UTENSIL TIP: go to Asian grocery and buy a sieve with long handle for scooping out blanched or boiled veggies, noodles, potatoes, etc. This handy utensil saves time, since it’s bigger than a slotted spoon. Not pouring out the hot water means you can re-use it for multiple veggie-blanching batches and soup, too.

The sieve comes in different bowl sizes and handle lengths and range from $3 – 7. Don’t bother getting a small one.

Field Trip to Strauss Farm

Unistar campers on a tour of hoop-house led by Anton Strauss. They’re looking at eggplants; tomato vines are behind and peppers on the sides.

My cooking lesson week at Camp Unistar were wholly based on which seasonal veggies were being supplied by the camp’s local source, a Mennonite farmer, Ivan Strauss. He had a good selection; it was interesting to note differences between what grows well in northern MN and in south-central Twin Cities. All week long, we were utterly spoiled by the quality of his super-fresh beauties. Seriously terrific veggies, including the best tomatoes some of us had ever tasted.

We were fortunate to be able to visit the source. Mary Ellen, the camp’s Food Service Director, organized a field trip to the Strauss farm west of Bemidji. Mary Ellen has been cultivating a relationship with Ivan for several years and now orders most of the camp’s vegetables from him.

Bountiful vines, clipped to vertical & horizontal wires with pulleys so you can let down each vine to harvest, then pull it back up. No ladders!

This family is old-order Mennonite, so they’re off the electrical grid and don’t drive motor vehicles. All farm operations are done by horse, gasoline, solar and lots of human power supplied by Ivan, his wife and the older of their 5 sons and 4 daughters, who range from age 21 to 3. A few of the boys were our tour guides around the fields and hoop-houses. They were harvesting tomatoes in the hoop-houses, wearing the Mennonites’ signature hats and woolen britches.

Everything is harvested by hand. We learned it takes 3 draft horses to pull the potato harvester, with a person or two behind to pick up the potatoes. Mary Ellen raved about their Yukon Golds.

Besides their rapidly expanding vegetable business, the Strauss family also raises hogs, Siberian Husky pups and makes hand-made wooden patio furniture.

Following this field trip, I was hoping to squeeze in a discussion about supporting local food economies and sustainable farming methods, but it didn’t happen. Next time!