Kuba is a czech barley and mushroom casserole--a peasant dish that's traditionally served on Christmas Eve. In fact, when Julie and I went to the Unitarian Congregation in Prague on Christmas Eve, they served kuba and beer! The ingredients are barley, dried or fresh mushrooms, onion, garlic, marjoram, butter, salt, and pepper.
This summer we picked 14 lbs of crabapples (the nice, large variety) from a single tree. They all got turned into various jellies (some with watermelon added, some with grape added, some just plain crabapple). Because crabapples (and apples) are naturally high in pectin, we didn't have to add store-bought pectin. But it made adding the right amount of sugar more of a guessing game. Especially because the water-pectin-sugar ratio is constantly changing as water boils away. By the end I had it down, but several of the jars came out runny--more like syrup than jelly (and really sour too). One jar came out like a solid piece of candy!
I canned a bunch of tomato sauce this past summer. I love eating it on pasta, but you know, variety is nice. I think baked polenta is a good alternative. I like to jazz up my polenta with herbs like rosemary and frozen veggies like spinach, corn, and squash. Sounds fancy, huh? Restaurants seem to think so which is funny because polenta was originally peasant food. Oh well.
In fall we stocked up on potatoes and winter squashes from the farmer's market. We are still working our way through them all. We celebrated this particular pumpkin by turning it into gourmet pumpkin phyllo wraps complete with fancy pants local goat cheese, toasted pine nuts, and a balsamic reduction. The pumpkin puree filling included butter, honey, and sage. It should be noted that we got our pine nuts (piñons) from a roadside stand when we were in New Mexico. To remove the shells, we used Eric's favorite nut-cracking tool: vice grips. The vice grips are nice because you can adjust the final spacing of the jaws which helps keep the nutmeat intact.
I recently finished reading Slow Money: investing as if food, farms, and fertility mattered, which I added to my list after seeing the author, Woody Tasch, speak last October. The book is a collection of essays that describe his ideas for a new way of investing in local economies and food systems--an alternative to the irony that is often found in typical philanthropy: investing in destructive corporations in order to give money to organizations working to fix the problems caused by the destructive corporations. These ideas led to the creation of a new nonprofit organization: the Slow Money Alliance. Inspired by the Slow Food Movement, as well as Wendell Berry's work in sustainable agriculture and E.F. Schumacher's meta-economics, its mission is:"To steer significant new sources of capital to small food enterprises, appropriate-scale organic farming and local food systems; and to catalyze the emergence of the nurture capital industry— entrepreneurial finance supporting soil fertility, carrying capacity, sense of place, cultural and ecological diversity, and nonviolence."If this sounds like something you might support, I encourage you to read and sign the Slow Money Principles. There's a national campaign underway to get one million signatures.
" . . . I don't think one can attribute the orientation of the market to the greed of most individuals. More, it is a result of fear, uncertainty, and insecurity. In a world in which producer has been divorced from consumer, in which most of us produce virtually nothing or actually nothing that we consume, . . . we have little to fall back on for our immediate, day-to-day material security but purchasing power."
We are very lucky to have many small organic farms in Boulder. Some of these farms even have greenhouses. This means that during the warmer winter weeks we can ride our bikes out to the edge of town to buy local chard. But for those weeks that we are not so willing to make the journey for fresh greens, we grow red clover sprouts in our very own kitchen!
I know that garlic presses can be controversial but I happen to like using them most of the time. However, there's often a lot of flavor left in the peel after pressing. I sometimes save onion peels in the freezer to make vegetable broth, but since we go through a lot of garlic, I thought about making a "mostly garlic broth." After boiling the peels in water for a bit, I strained out the skins, added some salt, and had a delicious broth that warmed me up while I went on a recent hike.
In continuation of my obsession of using "spent" or used beer brewing ingredients, here is a crumble that uses the cranberry mush leftover from our recently bottled Christmas Dinner Cranberry Porter. I also threw in a chunk of frozen pumpkin puree and some crabapple syrup that was canned in the summer.