What's picking: Foraging 2010

I wrote a blog last fall about the fun and exercise of "foraging" around your home. Early summer foraging is probably my favorite. You can find all sorts of yummy things growing along the roadways, abandoned pastures, and even in front of your place of work!

I was blessed to grow up in the South with a Mother and Grandmothers who were familiar with the fun and benefits of "foraging".

If you are unfamiliar about what's edible and not in your surroundings, consult with a Foraging expert or blog, but always take caution with unfamiliar items, ESPECIALLY wild mushrooms!

Here in the Lowcountry, there are many wild varieties of berries and salad greens that are ready to be picked in late spring & early summer.

A few that I've enjoyed this past week are: (click on the links for nutrition information)

- Blackberries - Blueberries

- Loquats - Dandelion greens & flowers

The blackberries are just about to be in full swing. There are a few here an there now that are ripe, and they are very nice additions to fruit salad or just eating as you walk!

When you can't find many fruits or berries out in the public areas, look around your local farmer's market and ask the fruit vendors there where you can start.

On Thursday I went and picked my own strawberries cultivated on Barefoot Farms (St. Helena Island, SC), and the owner pointed me to a lady down the street who lets you pick your own blueberries!

Here is a recipe for a fruit salad that I like very much:

The Fruits of my Labor:

2-3 peeled, diced Kiwi fruit (grown in Ridgeland, South Carolina!--who would have known?)

5-6 large strawberries, washed and caps off (St. Helena Island, South Carolina)

handful of blueberries--washed first (St. Helena Island, South Carolina)

handful of blackberries--washed first (Hilton Head Island, South Carolina)

3 Loquat fruits--washed, quartered and seeded (Hilton Head Island, South Carolina)

- Toss together with 1 tablespoon of lemon or lime juice and a teaspoon of local honey if you want it a little sweeter!

- I enjoyed this mixture by itself with my breakfast, but makes a lovely topping for ice cream!

Loquats are an amazing find for me this last week. I discovered them growing in front of my clinic! They are also known as Japanese plums, and many yards on Hilton Head Island contain these "ornamental" sub-tropical plants. Rumour has it, Charleston was one of the first places in the U.S. these plums were brought to, due to it's climate and reputation for impressive ornamental gardens.

Loquats are very popular in China, Japan and India for eating raw or in preserves and chutney. My neighbor on Hilton Head has a very large, 12 year old Japanese plum tree that is LOADED with fruit this year. He was kind enough to share them with me now that they are ripe.

Loquats are the "perfect" dessert splurge for dieters, especially if you are cutting back on sugar. Not only are loquats loaded with NATURAL sugars, but are high in fiber, B-vitamins and Vitamin A. So the next time your trainer tells you to cut back on the sugar intake, put down the chocolate chip cookies and grab a few loquats! About 10 of these small snack-sized fruits contain ~100 calories.

Health Benefits of Loquats

Here is what this "exotic" fruit looks like:

Lowcountry Local Party Recipes

Thursday, April 22, 2010 was the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day. I would have written an Earth Day blog the week of, but I was very busy getting ready for my wedding that Saturday.

However, I did get to celebrate and promote Earth Day in a truly unique way. Most of our family members were in Beaufort that day, so we decided to have everyone over to our house for a garden party.

The hors d'oeuvres were made from 90% local ingredients. I define "local" as produced within 100 miles of Beaufort. The few items that we used from the regular grocery store (beer, olive oil, phyllo dough, butter) were at least products of the U.S.A., and even fewer things were imported (sea salt, black pepper). Even the rum in the punch was produced 15 miles north of here, with locally-grown sugarcane.

I had spent hours planning only to discover that the best way to do it was to go to the farmer's market and see what's available.

Please enjoy the recipes that I used for this fun party--you should try it out on your friends the next Earth Day! Those of you who do not live in the Lowcountry, please follow our example and spend some time at your local farmer's market--the creations you can make from just a few ingredients will blow your mind!

Sweetgrass Dairy Green Hill en Croute
- recipe courtesy of the Sweetgrass Dairy, Thomasville, Georgia
Green Hill is a surface ripened, double-cream cow’s milk cheese. If not readily available, any brie or camembert style cheese would be a welcome substitute.
Ingredients:
1 piece Sweet Grass Dairy Green Hill, COLD
10 Sheets Phyllo Dough
Butter, melted

Directions:
1. Preheat oven to 400°.
2. If you are lucky enough to live where you have access to fresh phyllo dough, then congratulations! For the rest of us, bring phyllo to room temperature, unroll, and cover with a barely damp towel to prevent drying out.
3. Take first sheet, and brush lightly with butter. Repeat 5-10 times being careful not to let raw phyllo dry out in between layers.
4. Place Green Hill in center of phyllo, and cut dough into a rough square that is larger than Green Hill by 3” on all sides.
5. Begin to pull dough to center of Green Hill and continue in a circular fashion keeping dough as tight as possible to the cheese. When all dough has been wrapped around cheese, turn over onto sheet pan or cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or foil.
6. Brush exterior with butter and place into oven for 8-10 minutes, or until the phyllo is just browned.
7. Remove from oven, let rest for 3-4 minutes.
8. We served it with fresh salad greens (from our backyard!), rice and flaxseed crackers, and honey (Beaufort, South Carolina)


Doug's yogurt dill dipping sauce for veggies:1/2 cup of Doug's homemade Greek-style yogurt (yeah that's another blog)
2 tablespoons of fresh minced dill (Bluffton, South Carolina)
1 garlic clove, minced (our backyard)
2-3 tablespoons of California extra-virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon of fresh lemon juice (my Aunt Susan's backyard...Amelia Island, Florida)
drizzle of wildflower honey (Beaufort, South Carolina)
Whip together until smoothsalt and black pepper to taste

Raw Veggie Tray:
Green baby Vidalia onions (Lyons, Georgia)
Sweet salad turnips (Bluffton, South Carolina)
White and orange baby carrots (Bluffton, South Carolina)
Broccolini (Bluffton, South Carolina)
Red bell peppers (John's Island, South Carolina)
Cucumber (St. George, South Carolina)


Honey Cayenne Grilled local South Carolina Shrimp
This is the LARGE SCALE party recipe, for about 30 people

Combine in a large bowl together:
10 pounds of deveined, shell and head off medium sized shrimp (Beaufort, South Carolina)
1/2 cup of local wildflower honey (Beaufort, South Carolina)
1/4 cup of California extra virgin olive oil
1 tablespoon of fresh ground black pepper
1 teaspoon of sea salt
1 teaspoon of Charleston Hot Cayenne pepper (grown in our garden in 2009, dried, crushed)
Sautee in a large pan or place on wet bamboo skewers and grill for 3-4 mintues or until shrimp are pink and shaped like a "C"

*An old trick for cooking shrimp---if they're pink & shaped like a "C" they're cooked, if they're pink & shaped like an "O" they are OVERcooked!*

Dessert:
Strawberries - Fresh picked in Hampton County, South Carolina with
Homemade whipped cream and
Jerri Roth's homemade Pound Cake (Hilton Head Island, South Carolina)
(Jerri is a friend of mine who has 20+ years experience as a baker and in catering)

Strawberries and Champagne

Spring is turning to summer, and that means WEDDING SEASON in the Lowcountry!

Weddings have been on my mind lately, especially since Doug and I "tied the knot" (literally!) on April 24th.

The week leading up to the wedding was full of parties, gardening and trying new recipes. The weather was beautiful that week, but it rained the morning of the wedding.

The rain stopped just in time for the ceremony and outdoor reception. It is only fitting that it rain on our wedding day; a lot of agricultural cultures see this as a symbol of good luck and fertility.

There was lots of good French champagne left over from the nuptual celebrations, and I had to figure out what to do with it once the bottles were opened and the bubbles were all but gone.

Mimosas, after all, do not have the same sparkle when made with day-old champagne.

With me being frugal and not wanting to pour good champagne down the drain, had to come up with a way to harness whatever goodness was left.

We also had a lot of fresh-picked Hampton County strawberries that my Mom had bought on her way from Georgia that were leftover from Thursday's party (I'll blog those recipes later).....

....what is better than to put strawberries and champagne together?

Most people eat the strawberries fresh, drink the champange and enjoy how the flavors of each compliment and open up each other. It is very refreshing and delicious.

What I did to minimize my waste and enjoy the best of both worlds is this:

Strawberry Champagne Adult Fruit-roll-ups

NOTE: I would NOT attempt this recipe with strawberries that are not LOCAL and IN SEASON, it will NOT taste good!

Place 1 pound of fresh picked strawberries, (washed and caps off of course)

and 1 cup of Champagne (fresh or day-old) into a blender

add 4 tablespoons of lemon juice or orange juice (helps preserve color)

- Blend until liquid.

- Pour onto the flat rack in your food dehydrator, or onto a parchment paper-lined half sheet pan.

- The dehydrator should be set to 100-150 degrees F for 8-10 hours.

- You can do this in your oven, however, most ovens will cut themselves off if left on for this long, and it's not very energy efficient. That being said, get your oven as low as it will go and dehydrate the strawberry puree for 8-10 hours.

- Once firm and dry to the touch, remove from rack and cut into snack sized pieces, or roll up onto a piece of cling-wrap.

DELICIOUS!

I am going to take full credit for this recipe since I cannot find anything like it on the internet. Surely someone has done it before.

Some other good recipes for strawberry season:

www.ncstrawberry.org

Foodie's peep-show?

April 3, 2010

I know that you guys have probably seen the Anthony Bourdain "No Reservations" show on the Travel Channel. He is fun to watch, even though he is lewd at times. In his 2008 season, he hosted a show called "Food Porn." For decades the media has been successful in selling sex. It was interesting how Tony began to make references to how food is a basic primal need and that the food tv channels often sexualize the chefs and their products to have the viewer begging for more. A perfect example is Nigella Lawson. WOW! She definitely has me begging for more. But it's not just the chef or cook that is turning us on. It's the FOOD itself! Let me explain further....


With that kind of intro, I'm sure you're wondering where this is going. I couldn't help but think about how I've been so intrigued by several of my own experiences in food lately and that it makes me yearn for more of the same satisfaction. My cousin Buddy sent me an email recently that definitely kept me "stringing along" with my mouth watering and tummy rumbling in envy.

I do realize that I have mentioned my cousin Buddy and his family a LOT in this blog, but he is a really unique person with an awesome job. He is also a wealth of information when it comes to sustainable gardening and cooking. He has to use such knowledge every single day!

Here is his email:

"I had dinner at SHH last Sun. with a journalist because the owners were in the Yukon, so I told Martha I would tell her what we had.
The journalist writes about organic food and spirits and has a 1,000 acre grain farm in Saskatchewan, growing hemp among other things. It is Certified Organic

Stinging nettle and grilled leek soup with miner's lettuce and pea shoots.
Tuna loin with gooseneck barnacles and scallop in a smoked salmon emulsion.
Sole with pickled blueberries, sunchoke, purple sprouting broc., and a crab potato perogie.
Sablefish with kale, squash, and Raclette cheese potato croquette.
Rhubarb angelica mousse on fennel sponge cake with sour cream ice cream.

I could not imagine it being better. "

Everything in the meal came from the gardens of the Sooke Harbour House, the Pacific Ocean surrounding it, or Vancouver Island. The kitchen gets its flour for pastries only from Canadian grains and mills.

How lucky is he to experience this table of local bounty?

Salad is no longer boring

April 1, 2010

Spring is in full bloom, and the salad greens are GOING CRAZY! My Mom planted an "Italian" and "French" salad mix of seeds in the fall, and they did pretty well, and then they died back in the snow we had in February. But now....they're BACK!

The most delicious mix was the "French," which included royal oak leaf, freckles lettuce, butterhead, flint, spinach, and heirloom Cos type lettuces. These are all "heirloom" varieties and can be found here at High Mowing Organic Seeds, of Vermont.

The oak leaf is most easily recognized in a "bag" salad of baby greens from the store, but it doesn't develop it's full flavor until the leaves are mature.

Even when mature and picked later, these varieties of lettuce are still tender and carry excellent flavor. I had heard that "baby green" varieties that are allowed to mature a little longer become bitter...I think this is a myth.

The radishes are doing well, and they provide a nice bite to my salad. We planted three varieties this year: traditional red, pink and mild white.

Here is a nice salad dressing I've come up with that contains many fresh, local ingredients:

- juice of 1 Hilton Head meyer lemon (frozen in December)

- 1 tablespoon of dijon mustard

- 1 tablespoon of local honey

- 2 tablespoons fresh chopped parsley

- blend in enough California extra virgin olive oil to make a 2:1 oil to acid ratio.

I like to whisk this all together in the bottom of my salad bowl. I then add the freshly picked (washed and dried) salad greens, thinly sliced fresh radishes, toss to coat and serve!

This dressing is great in a salad with dried cranberries, pecans and sliced local hard-boiled egg.

I wish that I could attend a workshop in May at the Sooke Harbour House garden, hosted by none other than my cousin, Buddy Cook.

He will be teaching guests about growing your own organic salad in small spaces or even window boxes.

Check it out here!

Spring!

It's springtime in the Lowcountry! The insects are out in full force, the warm tropical rains are drizzling down, washing the pollen to the Earth....and out of my sinuses!

The Bluffton Farmers Market is back, it just started this past Thursday, and so far, south Georgia and parts of South Carolina are already filled with spring goodies!

Many of these include honey, spring baby Vidalia onions, broccoli, mixed baby greens (spinach arugula, buttercrunch and the like), and even strawberries! In another 3-4 weeks the South Carolina strawberries will be ready.

Doug and I have been working hard to ready our little garden for spring. We've turned the compost and prepared our vegetable beds, and planted Clemson heirloom seeds in baby planters. It is so easy to have even a small vegetable plot, even on a small lot or in a window-box. I have not been composting at my home on Hilton Head, and I do produce a lot of organic waste since I like to cook from scratch. My roommate and I both recycle what we can, but I'd like to take this to the next level.

Our challenge is to figure out how to compost food materials in a small living space. We do not have a place to have or means to use a large compost bin, so I have researched smaller, indoor varieties. One thing that a lot of apartment dwellers use (especially in Japan), is the earthworm compost box. It is super easy, and relatively odor-free. There are many websites out there to help you get started, such as this one from Vancouver: Urban Agriculture and Worm Compost

I will soon be posting more information about composting and pictures of our garden as it grows! More recipes are to come as well, I picked up a very nice farmhouse blue cow's milk cheese from Swainsboro, Georgia at the farmers market and can't wait to talk about it!

Eco-Tourism and My Honeymoon

I had the most unique and wonderful honeymoon I could have imagined. There were two incredible components to the trip, so I will start with a little bit of history. Ever since my cousin Jessica got married at the Sooke Harbour House, I wanted to either be married there or spend my honeymoon there. I had no idea that years later, my dream would come true.

My cousin Buddy Cook, and his daughters Jessica and Sarah Cook are proud Canadians, and for 20 years, Buddy has been the head organic gardener at the Sooke Harbour House on Vancouver Island. This eccentric little B&B is well known for its restaurant, gardens and commitment to sustainability.

We began our honeymoon by visiting Doug's parents in Seattle, and then we drove up to Canada for the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics! This was so special to me in that I attended the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta and I thought that was a once in a lifetime opportunity. We attended Women's luge, Women's hockey, Men's curling and Women's downhill skiing events over the course of 3 days. It was a busy and tiring few days, but well worth the effort!

The night life in downtown Vancouver was vibrant and the local micro brews were delicious!

Our final day held the greatest treat of all...we got to see Lindsey Vonn win Gold for the USA!!!!

I am definitely now a lifetime lover of curling. It's basically shuffleboard on ice that allows cheating. The men tended to be a little more into shoving the opponent's stones out of the way with brute force, but the women would sit there and triangulate ways to out-maneuver the other team with precision.

We spent two days over on Vancouver Island, but did not get to see much. It was a very short trip, but I got what I wanted. I got to see my family and Doug and I had a very relaxing time in the Whale Room. I do wish that I could spend more time with the Cooks, they are lovely people and I have enjoyed getting to know them into my adulthood.

Aidan, Buddy, Deborah, Doug



British Columbia and Seattle offers a lot for the Eco-minded tourist. Everywhere we went there were public bins for composting and recycling, even out on the streets of Vancouver! Many restaurants and microbreweries we visited focused on locally sourced ingredients. Buddy often boasts that the only items on the menu at the Sooke Harbour House that are not local is the coffee, tea, sugar, chocolate and wheat flour (though Canadian-grown and milled). Seasonal, local food just tastes so much better! It is often not possible or practical to go 100% local, but every little change helps.


I think I have mentioned before that the goal of this blog is to educate my friends and family about the benefits of dining and shopping locally. Yes, local eating can be beneficial in the grand scheme of things (such as climate change, over-fishing, etc... but I'm not going there right now), the MAIN FOCUS is to SUPPORT your LOCAL ECONOMY, bringing food commerce back into your area (or keeping it there) and away from mass-produced products that are often stripped of character, culture and nutrition.


Food is less expensive and better for you when produced locally and minimally processed, which puts more cash in your pocket and more into the immediate community. It's not all about "saving the Earth," its about saving local, healthier ways of living.


You can do this even when you are on vacation. Pick a hotel or B&B that is environmentally aware and supports the community. Don't be wasteful...recycle when you can and don't eat at the mega TGIMcDougall's restaurants. It doesnt take that much research or effort, you can do it!

Back in Seattle after the Olympics, we went to the Theo chocolate factory!

Their tour was educational and the aroma was intoxicating. I wanted to morph into Lucy and step right onto the production line....except with Theo, they produce small artisinal batches of chocolate, so there is no "production line!"

Some awesome resources:

The only Organic, Fair-Trade Certified bean-to-bar chocolate maker in the United States: http://www.theochocolate.com/ Seattle, WA


Speaking of helping communities...what is Fair-Trade Certified?


This is not all just a bunch of hippie psychobabble....it's about doing the right thing for fellow human beings!