Friday Favourites

June 29, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Find

In these "Friday Favourites" posts I link up to some of the best things I've seen on the internet recently. My favourite real life moment recently was picking Saskatoon berries with my family - spanning four generations!

Grow

Curing and Storing Garlic - harvest time is coming up pretty soon!
Harvesting and storing edible flowers.
Creating a living privacy screen in the garden.

Find

Some amazing tips for how to go hiking with your toddlers.
Recipe using foraged elderflower to make strawberry elderflower cordial.
Foraging linden flowers and serviceberries.

Eat

A lot of great ideas for using the veggies you are growing, or receiving in a CSA share.
Fried blueberry hand pies.
Homemade watermelon juice.

Make

This idea for giving new life to thrifted wooden trays.
Free printable wall art - oversized book page quotes from women authors.
Free cotton dishcloth pattern.

Misc

Really great advice about food writing, and why you should absolutely write a food blog!
"Can Together" challenge from Marisa McClellan of Food in Jars.
I just want to say how much I LOVE these shoes. What they do for my feet and fashion is one thing, but what they do for the environment and how they impact the lives of the people who make them is incredible. Check them out for sure.

Some of these links are affiliate links for which I will receive a small commission from any sale made. Any product linked here is something I have tried and would absolutely recommend from my own experience with the company.

Wild Spinach Dip

June 07, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Find, Eat

I have always been in love with spinach dip. It was one of my mom's go-to party or potluck recipes, and often served in a huge sourdough bread bowl. Delicious. I was a little bit disappointed when I went to look for a recipe to make my own and they all called for prepackaged ingredients. Frozen spinach. Packet of onion soup. It didn't change how tasty the dip was, but I figured there had to be a way to make it with fresh ingredients, and that it might be even better that way.

I sort of forgot about my spinach dip ambitions for a while, and just kept eating the prepackaged version from the store. In that time I learned about atriplex hortensis, (also known as wild orach, or mountain spinach), and how it has naturalized in the wilderness nearby. Much to my surprise there were massive patches of it growing in my own backyard (see the next photo for just part of one of the patches)! We ate some of the leaves last year in soup, but didn't do much else with them. This year I remembered my dream of figuring out a fresher spinach dip, and I wondered if the wild orach might work.

Wild orach is in a group of plants often generally known as simply "goosefoot" due to the shape of its leaves. This doesn't give you much to go on in terms of plant identification, because there are may other "goosefoots" out there, and some of them - such as Lamb's Quarters - are in a completely different plant family. Don't use this blog post as your main source for plant identification - find a good field guide (here are a couple: Food Plants of the Interior First Peoples, Edible and Medicinal Plants of Canada) and use some other online foraging resources to supplement the very limited information I am giving you here.

I was reading around for various recipes, and I came across one that suggested you could use fresh spinach in your dip, but to steam it first because that will give you the right texture. I thought this sounded great, so I went out and gathered a bunch of wild orach to steam and try in my dip. I wanted a bit of crunch, but had no water chestnuts, so I finely chopped some Jerusalem artichoke to add in there since it has a similar texture. I think next time I would add slightly more, but because I didn't know if we would like it I started small.

Wild Spinach Dip

Ingredients

100 g Wild Orach (can substitute normal spinach, but use a lot more because the orach breaks down less during the steaming process
2 - 4 Jerusalem artichoke tubers
1/2 cup sour cream
1/2 cup mayonnaise
1 tsp onion powder
1 tsp soup base paste or builion (if using soup paste omit salt)
2 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp salt

Takes 30 min, serves 4.

Instructions

Steam the orach using your preferred method for a few minutes until just softened. Remove from steamer promptly and place on a plate in the freezer to chill, but not for so long that it starts to freeze.
While the orach steams, blend sour cream, mayonnaise, onion powder, soup paste/bullion, garlic, paprika, and salt in a high powered blender or food processor until there are no large garlic chunks. Taste and adjust spices as you like them. Transfer to a bowl.
Finely chop the Jerusalem artichoke tubers, and stir them in with the blended mixture.
Remove the spinach from the freezer before it starts to freeze, and roughly chop it into smaller pieces. Stir the orach into the rest of the mixture until all the leaves have been coated in the dip and there are no large chunks of leaves.
Serve with a really delicious loaf of bread and enjoy

Scale this recipe up or down to suit your needs. I just made a small amount here to try it out, and because there are only a couple people in our house eating it. If you have the patience or are good at planning ahead this dip is even better after spending a night in the fridge. The flavours mellow and blend that way, but it is delicious eaten immediately as well!

To support my blogging endeavours, this post contains affiliate links from which I receive a small commission if you make a purchase. Every product linked here is one I have used personally and would recommend based on my experience.

May Harvest Totals

June 05, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Grow, Find

Asterisk Denotes Foraged Item

Chamomile: 9 g
*Dandelion Greens: 394 g
*Dandelion Petals: 120 g
Douglas Fir Cones: 120 g
Green Garlic: 12 g
Lemon Balm: 7 g
Lettuce (Volunteer): 6 g
*Lilac Flowers: 482 g
Mint (Mojito): 8 g
Mixed Greens: 145 g
Pansies: 3 g
Pea Shoots: 10 g
Rhubarb: 151 g
Sage: 1 g
Strawberries: 11 g
Tarragon: 2 g
Thyme: 1 g
*Wild Lettuce: 180 g

Total: 1.662 kg

This month was an interesting one for me, because usually the bulk of what I harvest in May is wild Asparagus, and this time for some reason I never made it out to my spot to gather any. Initially the smaller harvest total was a bit discouraging, because ideally I'd like my self sufficiency to increase over time. However, when I looked at last year's harvest total and subtracted what was asparagus, I found that this year I'd quadrupled my non-asparagus harvest! The other thing that amazed me was that last year my "May" totals were actually April and May combined. This year we were able to gather enough earlier that I tallied everything up for March and April's harvest so this year is already bringing in a more plentiful and diverse harvest.

One of the most interesting new things added to my spring harvest totals are these Douglas fir cones (pictured below). I picked these while they were still green, and they have the most beautiful aroma. I'd seen a few people posting on Instagram that they were using them for flavouring, so I decided to blend them up into a flavoured sugar. They have the most beautiful aroma and a bright citrus/crabapple taste with forest notes that is really hard to describe. I'm imagining making Christmas cookies this winter from sugar flavoured with a Christmas tree! I also think these would make an incredible sorbet flavour too so I'm hoping to get out before they mature too much and gather some more to experiment with.

What are you harvesting these days? Leave me a note in the comments and I'd love to hear how this spring of gardening and/or foraging is going for you!

Dandelion Leaf Kimchi

May 27, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Eat, Find

In high school I had several good friends from Korean families, and I always looked forward to being invited over for meals in their homes because that usually meant I was going to be served kimchi. Later on I found out where the Korean grocery store was so I could make sure I always had some in my fridge. A couple years ago I realized that there were several recipes online for making small batches so I've now been making my own. I've been collecting a lot of dandelions this spring, and in thinking of ways to use them I realized that they might make a pretty good kimchi, and I was right!

I don't want to call this post a recipe per se, as I don't feel versed enough in Korean food to write one, and I relied heavily on various other online sources which I will be linking here. From how I understand it kimchi is fairly flexible, so feel free to adjust things to your preferences.

Your first step is to salt the dandelion greens. This is to start releasing the water content in the leaves. Sprinkle them liberally in salt and massage them a bit to start the process. If you've made sauerkraut before this will be familiar to you. Let them sit for about an hour and a half, and while this is happening prep the rest of the ingredients.

Chop up the veggies you are going to be adding to the dandelion greens (I used carrots, radish microgreens, leeks, and green garlic). For anything bulky make sure you julienne it finely to help the overall texture. Several of the recipes for the kimchi paste include making a porridge of rice flour to help everything stick together. I wanted to keep the steps as simple as possible, and knowing that you can make hot soup in a Vitamix blender I threw all the ingredients for the paste in there and blended it smooth. It seems to have worked really well and saved a lot of time!

If the dandelion greens are too salty you can rinse them off. When you like them toss in the chopped veggies, and massage the kimchi paste to cover everything. After that pack it in a jar so that the veggies are completely submerged. Leave it on the counter for three days, and then put it in the fridge. You can eat it right away, or you can wait for it to get more sour.

Here are some resources that are more complete recipes if you are looking for ideas on salt ratios and flavours for the kimchi paste:

Food in Jars

Maangchi

Edible Landscaper

Dandelion Egg Noodles

May 18, 2018 by Kelsey Fast in Find, Eat

I feel I have to preface this recipe by stating that I am by no means a pasta expert. There are no Italians in my family, so I'm basically just making it up as I google along. This method has been working pretty well for me so far, so I thought I'd share it. A few things that have helped my amateur self have been my Kitchen Aid stand mixer, Vitamix blender, and marble rolling pin (this last one is because I don't have a pasta machine - although I do have my eye on this - and the heaviness of the marble pin helps get the dough thin enough)

I've written about making dandelion greens into pesto to use in a pasta sauce before, but this time I added the puree right into the dough for the noodles. This uses way more leaves than you'd eat in the average salad, so it's a great way of packing more vegetable content into a meal that is pretty carb-focused.

Dandelion Egg Noodles

Ingredients

4 cups dandelion greens
2 large eggs
3-4 cups flour

Takes 20 min, serves 4-6.

Instructions

Using a high powered blender or food processor blend dandelion greens into a fine puree. Add a small amount of water if needed to get things moving.
Put three cups of flour in the bowl of a stand mixer (or on a flat tabletop if you want to knead them the traditional way). Make a well in the middle, and add eggs and dandelion puree. Knead until smooth and homogenous. Add more flour if the dough is still too sticky to roll out.
Sprinkle flour over a large countertop and roll out to a thinness where you could see your fingers through the dough (this will be thinner than the ones in my photo). Use more flour if necessary to keep it from sticking, but you don't want to add too much and make them too dry.
Using a very light dusting of flour to keep things from sticking, fold the dough over top itself a few times, and cut with a sharp knife into noodles.
Boil for a few minutes in very salty water, and finish in whatever sauce you prefer.