food
Wordless Wednesday: June Fireworks: Shallots In Bloom
Categories: Edible Perennials, environment, food, frugality, Gardening, Health, Life, Wordless Wednesday
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Self-Sufficiency: Adapt To Your Climate
Woke up to this this morning:
I suspect I’ll be replacing all the tomato, bell pepper and eggplant seedlings that I planted last week in a fit of optimism. Yesterday afternoon I covered them with upside-down clay pots and spanish tiles and stuff, thinking we might get a frost, but today’s forecast says more snow and I don’t think my little clay pots are going to be enough to save them.
On the other hand, I have very good things to say about the hardiness of honeyberry, serviceberry, goji berry and sea-buckthorn bushes. We lost our apricot crop weeks ago to a hard freeze, but these tough little berry plants from places like Russia and Tibet don’t even seem to notice that they’re covered with snow and ice, even though they leafed out a month ago and are well out of the dormant stage. I think the real trick to growing your own food in any given area is to let go of sentimental attachments to varieties that just aren’t right for your climate and seek out plants that aren’t bothered by whatever your area throws at them. There are plenty of options to choose from, and most of them I’d never even heard of until I got serious about growing my own food and started doing the research. This summer I plan to create a new garden bed filled with slightly acidic soil, to accommodate edible perennials that can’t thrive in our sandy, alkaline soil. It’ll be mulched with pine needles and peat moss instead of straw and manure. Whatever the challenges are in your area, there are probably solutions if you’re adaptable and creative.
I just wish I didn’t love tomatoes and bell peppers so much. My life would be a lot simpler without those delicious, demanding little divas in it. I guess at some point today I’ll have to go peek under my clay pots and check for survivors; maybe the carnage won’t be total.
Can we be done with winter now?
Categories: Edible Perennials, environment, food, frugality, Gardening, Health, Life, Nutrition, Self-Sufficiency, Weather, Winter
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Buckwheat Pancakes
It’s official; I stopped eating wheat and all the weirdness cleared up. Wheat allergy: check.
Not the end of the world though, because it turns out you can make waffles and pizza dough out of all sorts of things that aren’t wheat. Yesterday I picked up some buckwheat groats at my favorite health food store (buckwheat isn’t related to actual wheat, and it’s gluten-free) and today I milled them into flour and made pancakes, since I needed a very basic project for my test run.
I was pleasantly surprised by how much quicker and easier it was to mill buckwheat into flour than to mill regular wheat berries. But later I did a Google search on the health benefits of buckwheat and realized that I had bought hulled buckwheat instead of unhulled. So basically I made the equivalent of white flour instead of whole-grain flour. Oops. Next time I’ll make sure I get the whole, unhulled groats.
But OH MY GOODNESS, those pancakes ROCKED. They were WAY tastier than regular wheat pancakes. From now on I will only ever use buckwheat flour to make pancakes and waffles, because it is magically delicious.
I used a recipe that I found online, and modified it slightly to suit my own tastes. I’m posting my version here in case anyone wants to try it.
BUCKWHEAT PANCAKES
1 cup buckwheat flour (if you mill your own you’ll want to use a bit more to allow for the fresh-milled “sifting” effect)
1 tsp aluminum-free baking powder
2 Tbsp honey
1/2 tsp unrefined sea salt
1 egg, beaten
1 cup milk
2 Tbsp melted coconut oil (The original recipe called for butter but I have begun substituting organic extra-virgin coconut oil in all my recipes. It’s healthier, more nutrient-rich and by some metabolic magic it actually makes you lose weight.)
Preheat lightly-greased cast iron griddle over medium-low heat. Griddle is ready when small drops of water sizzle and dance and then quickly disappear.
Mix dry ingredients together in one bowl or measuring cup, and egg, milk and oil in another. Then blend all ingredients together.
Pour 1/4 cup batter for each pancake onto hot griddle. Cook 1 to 1½ minutes, turning when edges look cooked and bubbles begin to break on the surface. Continue to cook 1 to 1½ minutes or until golden brown.
These are so good.
Upcoming projects: find a gluten-free pizza dough recipe that doesn’t involve 15 obscure ingredients, and select an acceptable gluten-free pasta. Quinoa incarnations are looking very promising on the pasta front.
It’s not an allergy. It’s an adventure!
You Can Have My Waffles When You Pry Them Out Of My Cold Dead Fingers
I think I may have developed some sort of wheat allergy, or possibly adult-onset celiac disease. I’m having all sorts of annoying symptoms that I’ve just realized only seem to show up when I eat wheat products. It is inconvenient, because I still have most of a rather expensive 50-lb sack of whole wheat berries sitting in my pantry, and also because I REALLY LOVE WHEAT PRODUCTS. I mean, how do you make waffles without wheat? How do you make PIZZA without wheat??
And frankly, a life without waffles or pizza does not bear dwelling upon.
So I am hoping that it’s something else. I shall stop eating wheat…any day now…and if the itchy rash, the headaches, and the, um, digestive difficulties go away, then I’ll officially know the culprit is wheat.
I’m sort of hoping that they don’t, though. Because then I can try giving up something else that I don’t love quite so much, and enjoy my beloved wheat products with unfettered abandon. Seriously, I would rather be allergic to BEEF or GARLIC or freaking ICE CREAM than wheat.
I mean, this is AMERICA. I’m pretty sure that waffles are one of the basic constitutional rights.
Categories: food, Health, Life
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An Invincible Summer 