Beet Humus

I modified this from the blog Simply Recipes. Even if I were a beet hater, I would make this dip just to look at it. My husband says it is a deep maroon color, I say it’s a dead ringer for Pantone 249.

Ingredients
1 pound beets (about 6 medium sized beets), trimmed, scrubbed clean, cooked (roasted, steamed or boiled), peeled, and cubed
1/3 cup tahini sesame seed paste
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice
1-2 clove garlic, chopped
Zest from one lemon
1/4 teaspoon sea salt
1/4 teaspoon ground pepper

Method

  • Place all ingredients in a food processor (or blender) and pulse until smooth.
  • Chill for an hour to let flavors meld.
  • Serve with pita chips, vegetables or use as a sandwich spread. Store for up to a week in a refrigerator.

This post is a part of The Nourishing Gourmet’s Pennywise Platter.

Beware, picky eaters…

The world is divided into two camps-those who love beets and those who hate them. I’m firmly in the first camp, though I wasn’t always. It took my friend Jan and her perfectly roasted beets to change my mind. I think the problem was that I had never had beets prepared properly. In fact, I believe, correctly or not, that proper preparation is the key for anyone to like any food. And I often feel the need to prove it.

When people tell me that they don’t like a particular food I’m usually a little incredulous. I try to be tolerant, but often feel it is my duty to prove picky eaters wrong. Case in point, my friend Sydney despises eggs. She will steer clear of anything with the slightness whiff of egg. She doesn’t eat her father’s pancakes because they are too eggy. Once when she was visiting, I made a delicious custard-based (a.k.a egg-based) ginger ice cream and served it for dessert. I waited for her to taste it and I asked how she liked it. When she said, “Yum, delicious!” and took another bite. I jumped up and yelled, “Ha! Got you. There are six egg yolks in that ice cream!”

I never said I was the most congenial hostess, but don’t worry, if you are allergic to shellfish, I won’t sneak in any shrimp. If you are a vegetarian, I’ll use vegetable stock rather than my normal chicken stock. But if you tell me that you hate mushrooms, I just might chop them into teeny, tiny pieces and serve them to you hidden in a meatloaf. Fair warning, you picky eaters, you.

Thankfully, my husband is an excellent eater. The only thing I will occasionally find pushed to the side of his plate is raw green peppers. I guess I’m not hiding them well enough.

We both are beet lovers and fall is a great time to get them. This past weekend I went to the Hudson Farmers market. Red Oak Farm had beautiful red and golden beets. I picked up a bunch of each, roasted them, sliced them and served them with a roasted chicken. The two beet colors were quite pretty together. My husband and I ate them all. I meant saved some so that I could try a new recipe, but didn’t set any aside.

Earlier this week, with a deadline looming and a preference for local produce, I got on the phone and called some farms. I called Fog and Thistle to see if their road-side stand was open and if they had beets. It wasn’t open but a nice person offered to go out, in the rain no less, and pull some beets for me. Got to love that!

Red Oak and Fog and Thistle have become my favorite farms. Of course anyone who helps me out of a beet crisis gets points in my book, but I like both farms for two reasons. One, they are organic and two, they are reasonably priced, satisfying both my frugal nature and my quest for healthy food. They give me hope that you can eat pesticide free produce on a budget!


Roasted Beets
If you have particularly large beets, or just want to speed up the cooking time, half or quarter them before roasting.

Beet juice can stain your skin, so wear kitchen gloves if you don’t want pink fingertips. I also like to peel them in the sink to contain any beet juice splatter.

Ingredients
2 pounds medium beets
1/2 cup water
1 tablespoon olive oil
salt and pepper to taste

Method

  • Heat the oven to 400 degrees.
  • Rinse the beets and trim off any leafy tops, cut any large beets into smaller pieces.
  • Place beets in a deep-sided pan, add water and cover with foil.
  • Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until beets can be pierced with a fork and the skin comes off easily.
  • Peel and slice the beets. Drizzle with olive oil, and season with salt and freshly ground black pepper.

Serve warm.

Serves 4-6

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays at The Food Renegade!

Book Review: Nourishing Traditions

Nourishing Traditions:
The Cookbook that Challenges Politically Correct Nutrition and the Diet Dictocrats
By Sally Fallon
NewTrends Publishing 1999

My friend Jan gave me this cookbook. I love it. It doubles as a reference book. It’s loaded with well-referenced material seemingly debunking many of the current trends in nutrition. This book is for the person who is ready to change their diet and is willing to put the time into doing so.

Nourishing Traditions arose from the writings of Dr. Weston A. Price. He was a dentist in the 1930s and conducted extensive, in-depth studies of people, all over the world, eating traditional foods. Price had the good fortune to be able to study groups of people who lived solely on traditional diets and compare them to people who had adopted a modern diet. He was able to examine multiple generations and siblings, some of which were born and raised on modern diets, and compare them to family members who were raised on traditional diets.

A dentist, Price focused on each group’s susceptibility to tooth decay and dental-arch deformities. Price found that in the groups who adopted a modern diet that included white flour and refined sugar, dental caries and dental malformations increased dramatically and their overall health decreased.

Nourishing Traditions uses Price’s findings as a starting point and adds to it copious amounts of modern research to develop the recipes.

This book asks you to dispense with the notion that saturated fat and cholesterol are bad for you. This is a hard one for everyone who, for the last 20-plus years has been taught the opposite. I think her facts are compelling and since saturated fat makes most things taste better, I’m all for it.

Nourishing Traditions also does a hard sell on foods that have a high “ick” factor. There is a whole chapter on organ meats. I haven’t been able to stomach anything except for the liver pate, but she has convinced me that organ meats are good for me.

Enzyme-rich, lacto-fermented foods are of particular interest to me. Making a pickle without a drop of vinegar seems like magic to me!

Pear Walnut Cream Cheese Wontons

My husband made pork dumplings the other night and we had leftover wonton wrappers. He had the great idea of making a pear dessert with them.

Wonton wrappers can usually be found in the refrigerated section of grocery stores. If you are more of a D.I.Y. person, click here for a recipe on making your own.

Ingredients
2 ounces cream cheese, softened
1 tablespoon maple syrup
1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
dash of salt
1 medium-sized pears, roughly chopped (peeled or not is your choice)
1/4 cup walnuts, finely chopped
10-15 wonton wrappers
1/4 cup coconut oil (or vegetable oil for frying)

Method

  • Add cream cheese, maple syrup, cinnamon and a dash of salt to a medium-sized bowl and mix until smooth.
  • Mix in pears and walnuts.
  • Place 1 heaping tablespoon of filling in the center of wrapper.
  • Using fingertip dipped in water, gently wet around the inside edge of wrapper.
  • Fold wrapper in half. Gently push the filling down to keep edge of wrapper free of filling. Press to seal.
  • Repeat with remaining wrappers and filling.
  • Heat 1/4 cup of oil in a large sauté pan on medium-high heat, keep the oil under its smoking point.
  • Once the oil is hot, gently set dumplings in the pan.
  • Fry for 3 or 4 minutes on both side, or until the bottoms are a nice golden brown. Shift dumplings occasionally to prevent from sticking. (These are sometime called pot-stickers because of their predilection for sticking.)

Serve warm.
Makes 10-15 wontons

Pear Risotto with Mushrooms and Blue Cheese

It is hard to go wrong with pears and blue cheese. In fact, when making this dish, keep some sliced pears and blue cheese handy. You’ll want a snack between all the stirring.

Vialone Nano, Carnaroli or Arborio rice are traditionally used in risotto. They have a high starch content, which gives the dish a beautiful creamy consistency. You may substitute other types of rice but you won’t get the same degree of creaminess. Since we only have white rice in the house when my husband smuggles it in, I use short-grain brown rice. It’s not quite as creamy, but the blue cheese makes up for it. I could easily double the amount of blue cheese, but then that wouldn’t leave me enough for snacking.

Ingredients
5 to 6 cups chicken or vegetable stock (homemade preferably)
2 tablespoons butter
1/2 medium onion, diced
2 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups of mushrooms sliced (any fresh type will do)
2 cups rice (short grained, like Arborio)
4-5 medium-sized pears, chopped (peeling or not is your choice)
5 ounces blue cheese, crumbled
Fresh parsley, chopped for garnish
Salt/pepper to taste

Method

  • Using a large frying pan, sauté onions and mushrooms in butter for about 5 minutes over medium-high heat.
  • Add 2 cup of rice to the frying pan; toast the rice over medium-high heat for a few minutes.
  • Keep a pot/bowl of warm chicken/vegetable stock close by. Add a ladleful of stock to the pan with rice. Stir to keep the rice from sticking. Reduce heat to medium. Once the stock has been absorbed, add another ladleful. Keep repeating with the remainder of stock. The rice should be tender but not mushy. If the rice is not tender, you can continue to add small amounts of water until the dish has a nice creamy consistency.
  • Add pears and blue cheese and stir well until cheese is melted.
  • Salt and pepper to taste.

Serve risotto warm. Add a salad for a meal, or serve a smaller portion as a side dish.
Serves 4 as main course.

Part of Fight Back Friday.

Pears

As a kid, I mainly ate two kinds of pears. The first kind were canned. For any special occasion at my grandparents, we would start in the den with shrimp cocktail. Then we would move to the dining room where at each place setting was a glass plate with tomato aspic for the adults and pear salad for the kids. For the pear salad, my grandmother would set a pear-half on a leaf of iceberg lettuce. She would add a dollop of mayonnaise in the center of the pear and top it with a sprinkle of cheddar cheese. Did I just hear all of you mayonnaise haters groan?

The other kind of pear was the kind that grew on the first tree outside of our backdoor. This was a large tree, easily higher than the window of my sister’s second floor bedroom. These pears were hard, gritty and rather bitter. I would occasionally pick one and eat it, but was never impressed with them. I was always under the impression that they just were not good eating pears.

Turns out, maybe I just wasn’t harvesting them right. The pears’ gritty texture is due to something called stone cells. The best way to minimize stone cells is to pick unripe pears and allow them to ripen off the tree. Done correctly, the texture is smooth and the pear is juicy.

Asian pears, totally different in both taste and texture to European pears (the typical ones grown around here), are one exception and should be allowed to ripen on the tree.

Nutritionally speaking, pears are a good source of fiber, have a bit of potassium and vitamin C – good things to have in a healthy snack.

At the farmers market last week, I picked up three types of pears, Bosc, Bartlett, and Comice. Barlette pears are light green and will turn more yellow when ripened. Bosc pears have a classic pear shape and a cinnamon-brown colored russeting. Comice pears, small in size, are the cutest, most perfect pears. I’d buy them just to look at them. Fortunately, they are not only adorable, they are also juicy and delicious. They are my favorite pear.

Store pears at room temperature until they start to soften. When ripe, they should give gently when pressed. Once ripened, store them in the fridge.

I do think about driving by my old house, picking some pears and letting them ripen properly. I wonder if they might boot Comice pears out of my favorite pear spot. I’d like to think that they would.

Book Review: The Omnivore’s Dilemma

If I had to name one thing that most influences my cooking, it would be reading. I’m an avid reader and in the last few years I’ve been eating up many a food-related book. Not only do I find them entertaining, many have completely changed the way that I eat.

I’ve always considered myself a healthy eater. Over the years, my idea of what I considered to be healthy has changed and books have been an important part of that change. I’ll be posting reviews of books that have influenced my eating. Here’s the first one.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
By Michael Pollan
Penguin 2006

The Omnivore’s Dilemma was a “gateway drug” for me. I blame it for igniting my real-food quest, which was a slipper slope to a full-blown obsession. It’s a must read for anyone who eats. After I read it, I bought multiple copies and gave them as gifts. I thought it was enlightening and important to share.

Pollan traces the origins of four meals. The first meal is from McDonalds. This takes us through a commercial feedlot and ends up in a cornfield. Apparently, just about every bit of processed food can trace at least some of its ingredients back to corn.

The next two meals are organic. One leads us to large-scale commercial organic farming operation and the other to an innovative, self-sustaining farm, where we meet Joel Salatin of Pollyface Farms, quite the character.

The fourth meal is one that Pollan hunted, gathered, and grew himself. He takes us hunting for wild boar in California and shows us the secretive world of morels and chanterelles foragers.

This book challenged that way that I looked at food. It brought to light some of the more unseemly practices of industrial food and made me keenly aware of how political food is.

Redesign: in the works!

I’m working on a new look for the blog. It may be awhile before I land on anything I want to stick with, so don’t be surprised if things keep evolving. Suggestions and comments are welcomed!