August 9th, 2011
Raw Corn and Quinoa Salad
Nothing makes me crave raw food like a junk food binge (see here and here). Plus, all the super fresh local produce that is available right now just begs to be eaten simply. So I’ve been eating mostly raw for the past week trying to use up the produce that is overflowing from my fridge and garden. So I bring you a raw corn and quinoa salad with Ontario corn and peppers and tomatoes from my garden. Make sure you buy organic corn. If the corn isn’t organic it is almost guaranteed to be GMO corn from Monsanto. I added some sprouted quinoa to the salad to make it filling enough for lunch. Feel free to use cooked quinoa instead. But quinoa is seriously the easiest thing to sprout,so if you’re curious about sprouting – give it a try!
This recipe is also my contribution to Wellness Weekend over at Diet, Dessert, Dogs.
Raw Corn Quinoa Salad
4 ears corn
1 bell pepper
halved cherry tomatoes (1/2 a pint or whatever you can pick off your tomato plant)
1 small jalapeno
½ cup quinoa, sprouted*
Dressing
juice from 1 lime
1/4 tsp ground cumin
2 tsp agave
2 tsp olive oil
With a large knife scrape the corn kernels off the cob into a large bowl. Dice the bell and jalapeno peppers and add them to the bowl along with the halved cherry tomatoes. Add in your sprouted or cooked quinoa. Whisk together the dressing ingredients and poor over salad. Add salt and pepper to taste. This tastes best after chilling the fridge for an hour or two.
* There are lots of ways to sprout quinoa. I soaked the quinoa for about 8 hours then drained it and let it sprout in a sprouter. But I’ve had luck sprouting it using the jar method. I found the sprouted quinoa was ready to use in 12-24 hours. Here is a good overview of how to sprout.
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July 20th, 2011
Garlic scapes are by far my most exciting local food discovery. A few years ago we went with some friends to a shared cottage for the summer solstice. One of the families that shared the cottage paid for their share by growing organic garlic and selling it at the farmer’s market. The weekend that we were there was when they needed to pick the scapes. The scapes are the part of the plant that will become the flower if you let them grow. But because you want the plant to focus on producing a nice bulb, you get much better garlic if you pick the scape to stop the plant from flowering. Before this I had never even heard of garlic scapes much less tried them. I went home with a huge grocery bag full of them to experiment.
It turn out that scapes are amazing! The taste of a mild roasted garlic with almost an asparagus like texture, what’s not to love! After trying out many different scape recipes, my favorite is pretty boring. I wasn’t even going to post it because it’s barely a recipe. But this is one of my favorite things to eat in the summer so I figured it was worth posting.
Scape season is almost over so make sure to pick some up at the farmer’s market this weekend! They will stay good in the fridge for quite awhile (1-3 weeks) as long as you put them in a plastic or cloth bag.
Simple Scapes
garlic scapes (as many as you like)
olive oil
salt and pepper
Chop the scapes into approximately 1 inch size pieces and give them a rinse. Get out a large piece of tin foil and place the scapes in the middle of the tin foil. Drizzle with a little bit of olive oil, a few tsp will due. Add salt and pepper and mix it all up with your hands. Wrap up the tin foil making sure it is well sealed. Place on a BBQ and cook for 15 minutes, flip, and cook for another 10-15 minutes. We often eat this as a side to red lentil sloppy joes.
Garlic scapes before going on the BBQ
Yummy cooked scapes
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July 13th, 2011
I’m not really a turnip fan. I usually only eat them in the depths of winter when they are pretty much the only local produce available. And even then I hide them in soups with a lot of other veggies. So I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I started getting them in my csa box. But there they are, every single week. I let them stock pile for a few weeks until I figured out what to do with them.
After some googling, I read online that they were actually very pleasant raw, so I chopped off a piece and sure enough they are very tasty! A lot less turnip tasting than their winter counterparts. So I decided to slice them thinly and make a salad out of them. I coated them in my raw cashew poppy seed dressing. This is one of my all time favorite salad dressings! It’s perfect on a spinach fruit salad or a coleslaw and it worked really well over the spring turnips.
Spring Turnip Salad with Poppy Seed Dressing (2 large servings)
6 spring turnips
1 small bunch radishes
2-3 green onions
Cashew Poppy Seed Dressing
¼ cup cashews, soaked for at least 30 minutes
3-4 tbs water
2 heaping tsp honey, agave, or sugar
1 tbs apple cider vinegar
¼ tsp dried mustard
salt to taste
1 tsp poppy seeds
Thinly slice the turnips and radishes. The turnips are quite soft so it’s easy to get them nice and thin. Chop the green onion. Blend all the dressing ingredients except the poppy seeds until smooth and creamy and then stir in the poppy seeds. Add the dressing to the veggies right before serving otherwise it will get watery.
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July 6th, 2011
I’ve been eating a lot of local food for a few years now but this is my first year trying out Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). I can be somewhat of a picky eater so the thought of just getting a mystery box of produce every week terrified me. But a few months ago a neighbour approached me about sharing a CSA bin with her. I figured this was a great way to ease into it.
Even though I’m quite familiar with local produce, the CSA does pose new challenges. For example, what the heck do you do with 3 huge bunches of radishes with greens? So I’m going to start doing some regular posts on things I make with my more challenging CSA items.
Back to radishes. Sure they’re yummy in a salad but that is only going to use up a few of them. I googled some recipes and decided to try cooking them and their greens. This was my first time cooking radishes and they were surprisingly delicious! Cooking really mellows the flavors. The greens were fairly bitter as far as dark leafy greens go. They might be too strong for those who are new to eating lots of greens, but I thought they were good.
I don’t even really have a recipe for this but it was inspired from this recipe. I just melted a small amount of vegan butter (Earth Balance) in a large sauce pan over medium heat and then added the thinly sliced radishes. When they were starting to get transparent I added the greens and sauteed until they were wilted. Then I seasoned with lots of salt and pepper. (Sorry for the terrible picture, I was too hungry to take a better one!)
Sauteed Radishes
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June 28th, 2011
I had planned to have a picnic with a good friend that I hadn’t seen in a while last week. Of course, it started raining shortly before we were supposed to meet so we ended up having lunch at her house. I made baked falafels for the main dish and
cookie dough balls for desert. I also made a sweet potato salad as a side dish, mostly because I had some sweet potatoes that had been sitting in the fridge for a while and needed to be used up. I almost ended up not even taking this dish along because I didn’t think it would be anything special. But wow, was I ever pleasantly surprised! This dish far surpassed my expectations. The combination of sweet potatoes, orange, cinnamon and toasted pecans is just magical. You can make this dish in advance and it travels well so it is a great recipe for summer picnics. And a lot healthier than regular potato salad. Now, if only I could get local sweet potatoes, it would be perfect!
Unfortunately I didn’t write down the recipe. Well, I think I did write it down but on a scrap piece of paper that probably ended up in the recycling bin! I had adapted it from this recipe. In the salad I just used steamed sweet potato, green onions and toasted pecans. For the dressing I used fresh squeezed orange juice, olive oil, white wine vinegar, maple syrup, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt.
I’ll get the exact measurements down the next time I make this!
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June 22nd, 2011
Is there a combo better than strawberry and rhubarb? I don’t think so. As I mentioned in my
Sloppy Joe post, I was an oddly picky eater as a child. I didn’t actually try the magical strawberry rhubarb combo until at my boyfriend’s house for Christmas Dinner a few years ago. I tried a piece of his mom’s strawberry rhubarb pie and fell in love. But truth be told, I’m more of a crisp gal. You still get all of the fruity goodness without having to bother with a pie crust. And they are usually a fair bit healthier, which means I get to eat them more often!
I harvested the rhubarb in my garden a few weeks ago and just tucked it in the back of the fridge waiting for the first of the local strawberries to ripen. Finally the strawberries were out in full force at the farmer’s market this weekend!
One of the downsides of a strawberry rhubarb crisp is that it usually requires a lot of sugar to counteract the tartness of the rhubarb. I decided to try making one sweetened mostly with stevia. This was a bit of a gamble because I couldn’t really tell if the sweetness level was OK until after it cooked. But this turned out perfectly for my tastes.
Strawberry Rhubarb Crisp
Filling
2 cups chopped rhubarb
3 cups sliced strawberries
¼ tsp (scant) liquid stevia extract
1 tbs tapioca starch
Topping
1 cup old fashioned rolled oats
½ cup flour (I used spelt, just about any type will work)
3 tbs agave or maple syrup
1 tbs coconut oil
pinch salt
Preheat oven to 400 F. Mix together the filling ingredients in a square glass baking dish. Mix the topping ingredients together in a bowl until combined and crumbly. Spread the topping evenly over the filling. Cover with tin foil and bake for 20 min. Remove tin foil and bake for another 15-20 minutes until the filling is bubbling and the topping is browned.
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