July 31: Salad, corn fritters, and smoked salmon we brought back from the “Take Home Fish Company” in Neah Bay, WA.

August 15: Buffalo and blue cheese meatballs, roasted okra from the garden (yay!), and potato salad (this is one of my favorite potato salad recipes because, not only is it very tasty, it uses ingredients I can easily get locally: yogurt, chicken broth, and oregano). This meal is approximately 94.37% local. Well, not really, but close. Definitely close.

August 19: Finished off the salmon we brought back from our vacation, roasted okra, and butternut squash with butter, brown sugar, and pecans. Let me tell you about this squash: it patiently sat in the pantry since November. A great keeper! The outside looked a little rough (spotty), but the inside was just fine.

August 14: Beautiful brioche from Prairie Thunder Baking Company via Urban Agrarian.
Take a slice of that pretty loaf and top it some butter, thin apple wedges, and blue cheese. Broil it for a couple of minutes. I’m on a blue cheese kick right now.

Here’s how ya do it:

Fresh lard

Cube the lard and add about one cup of water. Slowly melt the fat over low heat for a couple hours.*

Once the lard is melted, strain and reserve the cracklings, if you want to use them for cornbread, etc. Pour the lard into a bowl with two cups of water. Chill the lard/water mixture in the refrigerator until solid. Magically, the lard solidifies on top of the water and lard debris. Lard debris: meditate on that.

Scoop off the solid lard and discard the water and debris. Slowly reheat the lard so that you can funnel it into storage jars. Store the lard for about three months in the refrigerator or one year in the freezer.

Lard is soft at room temperature. Kind of pretty, huh?

Homemade biscuits using lard.

Yum.

I used this recipe to make pizza dough with lard.

It turned out pretty okay, but needs some work. It was too crisp—like a saltine cracker.

Why render lard? Although there are vats of hydrogenated lard (read: trans fats) at the grocery store, freshly rendered lard has gone from being a kitchen staple to a fat for the margins—back-to-the-land types or whole-food gourmets. Little use for excess fat and the demand for lean meat, has resulted in selective breeding for lean animals. According to USDA statistics compiled in Fat by Jennifer McLagan, “in 1950 a pig yielded 33.2 pounds of fat, but in 1990 this figure had fallen to just 10.1 pounds.” Crazy! Now we use brining techniques to make pork more palatable. Like all fats, lard is a mixture of saturated, monounsaturated, and polyunsaturated fats. If you care about this sort of thing, the surprising part is that lard is mostly monounsaturated (approximately 45%). For me, the attraction to lard comes from the ability to render it myself. I can’t make olive oil or canola oil or vegetable oil. I probably can’t afford to make as much butter as I need. But I know where this pork fat comes from and I can easily render a batch twice a year. And it makes for better biscuits and pie crusts, to boot.

*I rendered two batches of lard: one on the stove, the other in the oven. I found the stove-top method to be superior because I had finer control of the heat and I could easily check on it. I like to check it a lot; I’m still paranoid from my first attempt at rendering lard.

If everything goes right, Ressler Farms will sell cornmeal through the Oklahoma Food Co-op. When I met Larry Ressler in February, he asked about unmet demand in the co-op. I immediately thought of cornmeal. Someone used to make it—I can’t remember who—but it’s not available anymore. Well, there’s hull-less popcorn. Would that work for milling? Somewhat moot since I don’t have a grain mill.

Blueberry Bonanza for Father’s Day and Mom’s Birthday.
The family doubted the fruity dish; we are a bunch of fervent chocolate lovers. But there was nary a blueberry left.

Blueberry Bonanza with Cornmeal Topping
Submitted by Judy Rogers in the Gardeners’ Community Cookbook
:: 3 to 4 c fresh blueberries
:: 1/2 c sugar
:: 1 T fresh lemon juice
:: 1/2 c cornmeal
:: 3/4 c all-purpose flour
:: 1 1/2 t baking powder
:: 1/2 t salt
:: 1/2 c plain yogurt or milk
:: 3 T butter, melted
:: 1 large egg, slightly beaten
:: ice cream, frozen yogurt, or creme fraiche

1. Preheat oven to 450˚.
2. Place the blueberries in a 9-inch square baking dish. Add 1/4 c sugar and the lemon juice and toss to mix.
3. Mix together the cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, and remaining 1/4 c of sugar in a large bowl. Add the yogurt, butter, and egg and stir briefly until blended.
4. In 1 T amounts, drop small mounds of the cornmeal mixture over the top of the blueberries. Bake until the topping is golden brown, 20 to 25 minutes. Remove and cool enough to handle, then serve warm or at room temperature, topped with the cream garnish of your choice, if using.

Tricia’s note: I think this topping would work on most fruit. I’ve made it three times now: with Oklahoma blueberries, peaches, and apples. When I made it for the apples, I substituted brown sugar for the white sugar.

Last Thursday I left with arugula, asparagus, spinach, chard, and parsnip soup. Here’s what I did with some of it:

I made arugula pesto. I used my mini food processor to chop the arugula to bits, then I mixed in chopped pine nuts, garlic, and olive oil. I was feeling exotic—pecans work well for a local nut substitution. I spread it on sliced baguette from Harvestyme Bread (my favorite of Pat’s breads) and topped it with shredded Pure Prairie Creamery goat cheese. Broil. A fantastic combination. Especially good with red wine. Really, though, what isn’t?

Friday supper and Sunday lunch: arugula pesto cheese bread, creamy parsnip soup, and salad.
For the past month I’ve been putting Spicy Lime Vinegar on my salads. Wow! I really enjoy salads now. I used to like eating them because I knew thew were good for me. Now I like eating them because they are actually good! Thank you, Holder’s Herbs!

Sunday I seared pork shoulder and then simmered it for about two hours with dry great northern beans, sage, olive oil, and garlic. They didn’t taste as good as Shauna’s beans, though. Shauna, are you holdin’ out on me?

Tuesday supper: leftover white beans and pork, roasted asparagus, and leftover arugula pesto cheese bread.
For the asparagus, I sought guidance from Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which I borrowed from the library. (Friday I had an epiphany that I could use the library to explore cookbooks!) Simple and delicious. In the roasting pan, I topped the raw asparugus with pats of butter and coarse salt. Then it roasted at 450˚ for about 15 minutes. Drizzle some lemon juice and eat.

Perhaps this war will make it simpler for us to go back to some of the old ways we knew before we came over to this land and made the Big Money. Perhaps, even, we will remember how to make good bread again.

It does not cost much. It is pleasant: one of those almost hypnotic businesses, like a dance from some ancient ceremony. It leaves you filled with peace, and the house filled with one of the world’s sweetest smells. But it takes a lot of time. If you can find that, the rest is easy. And if you cannot rightly find it, make it, for probably there is no Yoga exercise, no hour of meditation in a music-throbbing chapel, that will leave you emptier of bad thoughts than this homely ceremony of making bread.

-How to Cook a Wolf (1942) by M.F.K. Fisher

Thank you, Chelsey, for organizing a bread-baking class for the Oklahoma Food Co-op community. Pat at Harvestyme Bread gave us a primer on baking artisan loaves. We each got to take home still-warm whole-wheat bread and breakfast bread (with apples, dates, and raisins. yum!). And I finally learned how to knead! I’ve never quite understood. I still knead some practice (harhar!), but at least now I have a little confidence. I can see how, once I know what I’m doing, kneading might be an “almost hypnotic business,” as Fisher calls it.

Pat with his proofed breakfast bread dough.

We’re working the dough and shaping it into nice, rustic loaves.
Pat: “That’s what ‘artisan’ is—it’s handcrafted.”

If you are reluctant to knead, or just want to try something different, check out Shauna’s post on learning to make artisan bread in 5 minutes a day.

The corned beef recipe from Charcuterie was creating lots of chatter on the Oklahoma Food Cooperative listserv, so I thought to give it a try. The timing worked out perfectly—we got to enjoy it just in time for a circa-St. Patty’s supper.

Corned beef has nothing to do with corn…unless you’re using feedlot beef. “Corned” instead refers to the “corns” or grains of salt used to cure the meat. Since my first experience with corned beef, I was under the impression corn was somehow involved.  I was as a teenager working in a grocery store. We were trying to be snazzy like the big grocery chains and had people handing out samples on Saturdays. The butcher had his tray of corned beef: thinly sliced, pink, salty. It was mysterious and it was good.

Corned beef is incredibly easy: the brine and stove top do all the work. The most difficult part is acquiring the spices for this particular recipe. At the recommendation of a fellow co-op member, I used Butcher & Packer to order the allspice berries, mace, and pink salt. The brisket marinates in pickling brine in the refrigerator for 5 days. Then you rinse of the meat, cover it with fresh water, add more pickling spice, and simmer for 4 or so hours. The result is tender, shredded, flavor-packed succulence. It disappeared quickly, along with the potato and cabbage bake, Irish brown soda bread, Guinness and homebrew. Sláinte!

Here’s another blogger’s documentation of the corned beef process, along with the recipe. I’ll be making it again soon with a bison brisket I’m getting in this month’s co-op order. Why not? It’s such an easy, flavorful dish that two people can  eat on for several days.

Corned beef pickling spices: coriander seeds and peppercorns, cloves, mace and ginger, red pepper flakes, cinnamon, allspice berries, bay leaves, and mustard seeds.

It looks so bland, but it’s anything but.

I was very excited to attempt to make biscuits with rendered lard. I found a couple recipes online. I find it annoying that I had to use the internet to find a recipe for a centuries-old concept. And I am still disappointed that my new book, Fat (as in cooking fats), doesn’t have a biscuit recipe. None of my cookbooks have recipes that call for lard. Where can I find recipes that use real, minimally processed fats? Or can I just substitute lard when recipes call for shortening?

I was optimistic as I made that morning batch (indeed, there was more than one batch). The dough was a pleasure to work with, not heavy or sticky like the previous—albeit few—biscuit recipes I’ve tried.

But, the biscuits didn’t rise. And it wasn’t until clean-up that I realized I forgot to add the salt. And…I wasn’t exactly sure that I stuck to one recipe. (I had two very similar recipes on the counter.) Apparently, baking should not commence until I’ve had a cup of coffee.

Some good news came out of breakfast, though. We opened a jar of the ground cherry jam and it was truly a jam, not a runny “topping.” (It was still runny when I put the jars away back in October.) It was very tasty on the hockey-puck biscuit.

Sunday flew by; I dried a batch of grapefruit rinds in the oven. It made the kitchen smell of sugar cookies. I decided to attempt biscuits again for supper with a ground beef, gravy, and vegetable mixture ladled on top. I cranked up the oven to 400˚ and proceeded to follow one recipe. All of sudden, the sugar cookie smell was polluted by the smell of acrid, smoking grapefruit rind. I had forgotten to remove the rinds from the oven!

In all that commotion, I turned off the oven. And then I put the biscuits in the oven without remembering to turn the oven back on. I was happy to see the biscuits rising, but was puzzled when the biscuits were taking far longer than the 15 minutes the recipe called for. Luckily, Matt noticed that the oven was off. Once it heated back up, the biscuits finished baking but the bottoms were burned. Overall, though, their texture showed promise. I’m betting the third time will be a charm. I’ll be sure to report back.

They are in the same genus as the tomatillo—and like the tomatillo—the cherries keep very well in the husk.  The taste is difficult to describe. I’ll try, though: tart, yet mellow like a banana, with a mixture of a tomato and pineapple. The LaCrosse Tribune is the best source of recipes for ground cherries. And it turns out ground cherries are in the Slow Food USA Ark of Taste: “a catalog of over 200 delicious foods in danger of extinction.”

They produced all summer long and I used them up for several sweet treats.

Poached ground cherries

Amish ground cherry pie and ground cherry nut bread

Poached ground cherries on angel food cake

I came across one of these plants—cleavers— in my yard and thought I’d share a picture. Not sure if this will be enough for you to identify it. Consider looking up more photos. It’s bright green and the leaves are a little fuzzy. It’s not so good fresh—a little tough—but dried, it makes a tea high in vitamin C.

Another non-garden food source: sprouts! We grew some wheat berry sprouts for our salads. They taste a little nutty. Sprouts are a superfood—and according to Wikipedia—are the most nutrient-dense food. But the claim is missing its citation. For shame! Anyway, they’re good for you and fun. I use the Easy Sprout Sprouter. My first attempt was with hulless barley. That was unsuccessful. They started smelling horrid because I wasn’t shaking enough of the water out after each rinse. You must shake vigorously. I have heard of, but not done much research on, making breads with sprouted wheat berries. I guess the heat does not damage all of the nutrients in that fragile little sprout? I will have to look into this because I don’t think we will be able to eat this entire batch of sprouts.

When wheat berries were first offered in the co-op, I was confused. What is a wheat berry? I have learned that a wheat berry is another term for the grain that develops from the grass we know as wheat. It’s the kernels in the ear. The ear is that spiky thing at the top of the stalk shown in those quintessential Americana photographs. Wheat berries are milled into flour. The wheat berry is made of the bran, endosperm, and germ. In white flour, the berries are milled and the germ is sifted out because it contains the unsaturated fat that can go rancid. White flour can more easily survive our food supply system.

So, it’s the seed, it’s the kernel, it’s the grain, it’s the wheat berry. I was very familiar with wheat berries—I just didn’t know them by name.