On the Board Today – June 3, 2014

This time of year there is an endless supply of fresh greens to eat. I’m not even sure what the first green is. I found it growing amid the garlic. Besides the mystery green, there are dill and onion scapes, kale and mustard blossoms, oregano and sage and lovage, and finally garlic scapes, the first of the season.


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Recently I read, in disbelief mind you, that some consider cooking and eating such a nuisance, that they have developed a powder you mix with water to make a liquid meal so you don’t have to fuss with getting food and cooking. According to their website, solvent.me, creator Robert Rhinehart and team developed Soylent after recognizing the disproportionate amount of time and money they spent creating nutritionally complete meals. Their catchphrase is what if you never had to worry about food again? Hmm, now wouldn’t that be a boring life.

I’ve never considered the amount of time I spend growing, gathering and preparing food a chore. Going out into the vegetable beds to see what is good to eat is pure pleasure. Watching apple blossoms turn into buds turn into small green fruit turn into ripe red apples is living.

Gathering food, preparing meals, and eating are so much fun, I can’t imagine subsiding on quick, liquid meals. To each their own I guess.

Raw Egg on Rice

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After working hard outdoors, few things are as satisfying as a raw egg on warm rice with a dab of pickled plum and wakame (Undaria pinnatifida). The yolks of the eggs at a man and his hoe® are so buttery, with a texture like very heavy cream. They have so much flavor, you don’t need any salt.

On the Board Today – May 24, 2014

It’s lunch time and on the board today are onion scapes, asparagus and garlic stalks, fresh kale, lettuce and mustard leaves. All refuse from an hour of weeding and thinning. The nice thing about cleaning out vegetable beds is that nothing gets thrown away. The weeds and stems you don’t want to eat, the bugs and bacteria in the compost pile are always ready to accept. The pretty stuff ends up on the lunch table in fresh salads and sautéed dishes.

How many restaurants can you go to where you get to taste greens that are just minutes out of the garden? People pay an arm and a leg for such exquisite fare. Here at a man and his hoe® it’s what’s for lunch every day.

Onion Scapes
chopped asparagus and Garlic
Fresh Kale
Lettuce and Mustard

The Trellis Restaurant in Kirkland, Washington, serves fruit and vegetables harvested daily at Executive Chef Brian Scheehser’s 10-acre farm in Woodinville. This is what they say on their website:

Experience Seattle’s most pure “farm-to- table” restaurant dining experience at Trellis. Executive Chef Brian Scheehser practices sustainable farming on his 10-acre farm in Woodinville. He grows and harvests fresh vegetables, fruits and herbs featured on the Trellis menu, including his signature “Two Hour Salad” with ingredients harvested within two hours of being served. Enjoy a down-to-earth wine country cuisine, lovingly planted and artfully prepared with our hands.

Eating greens picked within two hours isn’t bad. It’s not quite up to my standards, but it’s acceptable. The next time you are eating out, ask how long ago the greens were picked. Find out where they came from. It would be interesting to know.

On the Board Today – May 18, 2014
On the Board Today – May 10, 2014
On the Board Today – May 9, 2014

Why Is Mayonnaise White?

Mayonnaises

When I see mayonnaise in the store, I always wonder why it is so white. The typical recipe for mayonnaise starts with egg yolks, adds vinegar or lemon juice, salt, pepper, mustard (I prefer to use ground mustard seeds). After mixing these ingredients, you start adding vegetable oil drop by drop by drop until you have a thick emulsified dressing.

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And this is what my mayonnaise looks like. Starting with egg yolks this rich and bright, the mayonnaise I make at home always comes out quite yellow. So what are the food companies doing to make their mayonnaise so white?

A look at their ingredients reveals the answer. A check of commercial mayonnaise reveals that they are adding water to their mayonnaise. In some, water is even the first ingredient, which means there is more water than any other ingredient.

Mayonnaise recipes usually call for a ratio of one egg yolk per cup of oil. However, by using water, you can actually emulsify up to a dozen cups of oil with just one egg yolk. Commercial mayonnaise makers also often use the whole egg, not just the egg yolk. As a result, the ratio of egg yolk to oil is much less than in home made mayonnaise which is why their mayonnaise is so white.

What Makes Store Brand Mayo White ~ Stack Exchange

On the Board Today – May 18, 2014

On the board today – a simple lunch starting with freshly picked spring chrysanthemums (春菊-shyungiku) and kale, sautéed in home made butter made from raw cream.

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Followed by two eggs gathered within the past half hour, cracked into a bowl, laid on the sautéing greens, covered and allowed to gently firm to a soft egg.

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Flavored with a bit of sea salt from San Juan Island Sea Salt, and served on a bed of brown rice.

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Spring Garlic with Chicken – True Paleo Fare

This is a simple recipe with just a few ingredients.

  • One whole five-month old rooster which has been crowing for no more than a month and butchered within the last four days
  • One bunch of green garlic freshly plucked out of the garden – to grow a bunch of garlic, leave whole bulbs of garlic in the ground the summer before. Each garlic bulb will shoot up a bunch of slender garlic, perfect for dishes like this.
  • Some sprigs of freshly picked oregano
  • Sake or white wine

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Cut the rooster into drumsticks, thighs, and breasts. Save the wings and the rest of the carcass to make soup.

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The breasts should be a nice rose color, the bones a shiny alabaster. The skin and meat should have a bright, translucent sheen. The fat should be a pleasing, lemon color. The thighs will be bright red.

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Arrange the pieces of rooster in a heavy pot. Top with the garlic and oregano. Add some sake or white wine so there is a half inch to inch in the bottom of the pot. Cover the pot and put on a very low flame. Let it gently simmer for two hours.

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Out will come tender, juicy, tasty meat. Dish up as whole pieces or cut up and serve. Sprinkle with salt if you like.

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Rhubarb Sauce – Live a Little

Rhubarb Sauce is an indispensable condiment around here from April through summer. It’s tart flavor goes with most any dish, even something as simple as toast. For heartier fare like lentils, beans, or a roast, it is superb. Or mix it with some yoghurt to make a salad dressing And it is the easiest thing to make.

  • Step 1 – pick some rhubarb
  • Step 2 – chop it up
  • Step 3 – put the chopped rhubarb and some sugar and a bit of sake or white wine in a pot
  • Step 4 – cook it on a low to medium heat until the rhubarb has melted away – you may stir it once or twice
  • Step 5 – take it off the heat and pour into a glass container

That’s it. You can even start using it while it’s still warm.

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For variety you can add spices like allspice, cloves or cinnamon, or what ever comes to mind; play with the amount of sugar, or try making it without any sugar at all. If you want it velvety smooth, blend it with a hand mixer or in a blender. It will keep in the refrigerator for several weeks, but just make enough for a few days, and when you run out, head back out into the garden for more stalks. Making it in small batches will give you an excuse to run outdoors more often to pick fresh rhubarb.

Salad Recipe – Five to Ten Minutes

It’s fresh salad season here at a man and his hoe®, and I thought I’d share a simple salad recipe, one that I make nearly every day.

Step 1: Go into the vegetable garden and fill a salad spinner with leafy greens. There’s no need to pull out an entire plant. Pinch off the leaves you want and leave the plants to keep growing and producing more leaves. Today, I’m using Siberian kale and arugula leaves.

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Step 2: Find some herbs, like oregano in your rockery, and add them to the pile of fresh greens.

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Step 3: Add some chives to the pile of fresh greens.

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Step 4: As well as a few sprigs of mint.

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Step 5: Rinse and spin the greens. Chop up the herbs.

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Step 6: Pile the greens on a salad plate. Top with the chopped herbs. And finish by drizzling the salad with balsamic vinegar.

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There you have it. A fresh salad more delicious than any you’ll find in a restaurant, all for just five to ten minutes of your time. Food the way it was meant to be enjoyed.

Making Tofu

What does making tofu have to do with raising chickens? Nothing directly, except that chickens love homemade tofu as much as I do. They also go nuts over okara, a byproduct of making tofu. So do the dogs. Okara is the soybean solids left after squeezing out the soymilk. The soymilk is what is used for making tofu, but okara is an incredible food on its own. It makes fluffy, moist muffins, delicious pancakes and waffles, mixed with ground beef it makes mouthwatering croquettes, or is delicious on its own with a little ginger and soy sauce.

The basics of making tofu are crushing soybeans into a slurry, bringing the slurry to boil, squeezing out the soy milk, heating the soy milk, adding nigari to the soy milk to make it curdle, and then pressing the resulting curds into a block.

I recently learned that a farm on San Juan Island, San Juan Island Sea Salt, is making salt from sea water, and when I heard that, I knew that they also had to be making nigari because nigari is a byproduct of making sea salt. Basically, nigari is what is left when you take the salt out of seawater. It is also called bittern, and is mostly magnesium chloride. Nigari is very bitter. When you taste it, it is so bitter it feels like you are stabbing your tongue with needles. And yet, with their nigari, I detected a sweetness behind the extreme bitterness.

San Juan Island Sea Salt was very gracious to send me a sample of their nigari. When the sample arrived Saturday morning, I made a batch of tofu in the afternoon and was very pleased with the result. Their nigari is a wonderful product and it’s great to know I have a local source for nigari. The pictures below are ones I took of the process when I made tofu this afternoon. If you need more detailed information about making tofu, feel free to contact me.

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Things to watch out for:

  • If possible, use pure non-chlorinated water to soak the beans and make the slurry. Not an easy thing to do if you have public water. If you have a well with good water, count yourself lucky.
  • When bringing the crushed soy slurry to a boil, stir occasionally, and pay very close attention as it nears boiling as it expands greatly and will easily boil over.
  • Don’t boil the soy slurry mix long, a few minutes at most. If you boil it for a long time, it will not curdle as well – at least that has been my experience.