New Nettle Soup

An annual ritual for many here on Hornby is picking the precious herb Urtica dioica, otherwise known as stinging nettle. This is an ornery herb to love, but love it I do. Besides, most of my favourite people are also a little prickly.

Picking them ( the nettles, not the people) doesn't differ greatly from picking blackberries. You come out with injuries but it's a small price to pay. I harvested these nettles from a large open field up the mountain from where I live. A whole field full of free vegetables! Yippee!

add fresh leaves to boiling water for spring tonic tea 

New Nettle Soup

2L chicken stock (or veg stock)
1c wild rice (or small diced potatoes)
1/2 c dried pine mushrooms
(shitake mushrooms would also be great)
1/3c pine nuts
2 cloves garlic
1/8c butter
1lb fresh nettles
1 red chili
3 sage leaves
1 whole apple

it's a swampy but yummy spring soup

Soak dried mushrooms in enough water to cover them. When the mushrooms are soft, chop, return to the water, add partially steamed wild rice, simmer until rice and mushrooms are soft. In a shallow pan, toast pine nuts, put to the side. Add butter to warm pan, add garlic, nettles, toss just a tad. Then combine all ingredients in a pot, cover with stock, simmer after adding sage, apple, and chili for a good 30 minutes - then serve. This soup does well if you can just leave it in a cool spot overnight for the flavours to meld. Another nice thickener is a little cream, or a little pureed basmati rice, or even a bit of pureed cooked barley.    

This one's not pretty at all...

Beef Broth Congee - so goooood...

... but it's the easiest soul food I know how to make! And it's yum yum yummy in yer tum tum tummy. One half liter of the best beef broth available, 1/2 cup basmatti rice, 1 red chili, 1 piece of ginger. Bring to boil until rice is disintegrated, Remove chili, ginger, and blend until smooth with hand blender. (If you want to coat every wall in your kitchen with beef congee, blend it in the blender....)  It's not pretty - but on a rainy day it can't be beat.

The Prettiest Food Ever

Sometimes the art of haute cuisine bugs me. I let all of the world's food issues block the enjoyment of a painterly dish. We can't change all the world's problems. We do what we can. We try to live consciously. .... so why not just enjoy the beauty .... This has to be the prettiest food I've ever seen - even in Japan - and the Japanese are the emperors of beautiful food....

Orange Peel Heaven

jar of powdered peel & some freshly grated tangerine peel 

This year, instead of expanding my horizons, I'd like to find better and more interesting ways to use the ingredients I already know and love. One of the things I'm going to do is save my orange peels. 

If I'm paying a whopping premium to get the organic, non-waxed, non-sprayed, individually coddled, hand-picked and lovingly packed oranges - I'm going to be eating ALL of that orange! This means actively using the peel. Apart from making candied peel, there is also a new (to me) use for this wonder of nature: dried and powdered peel.

I save my orange peels and tuck them under the wood stove to dry out in a large flat platter. Once they're crunchy I put them in the coffee grinder (a really well-cleaned one) and grind them to a fine powder. The powdered peel is said to store almost forever and have a whack of powerful properties. Seems a little orange peel in your tea pot (green, black, or roiboos tea) is not only flavourful but can also lower your cholesterol. It can also be used to stimulate a waning appetite, say after that sledgehammer flu that went around here over Christmas. Other more obvious uses would be to put a little powdered orange peel in with baking, with sugar for dessert topping, or used in a rub for poultry.

Also, the colour orange has always created an atmosphere of positively charged, forward moving energy for me. I love eating oranges, I love looking at oranges, and I love how both the colour and the fruit make me feel. There's going to be a whole lot 'o orange in my year to come.

Seville orange season is coming up. So in addition to the marmalade, consider putting a little peel aside for grinding into magic orange dust!

Traditional Tortiere and Christmas Cake

Tis the time of year for reposting the Christmas staples. This is a time honoured recipe I have enjoyed every year of my life, except perhaps my toddler years. Tortiere is traditionally eaten on Christmas eve, after midnight mass ... right before bed. No wonder no one sleeps... And who wants to!

Christmas cake, on the other hand, may be eaten at any time of the season, day or night. I make mine in February when I'm organized and September if I'm less organized. A few months is really all it needs to soak in the Brandy and turn into spongy yumminess. Merry Christmas!

Extra Deluxe Rice Crispy Squares

It's November. Dark when you get up; dark when you have supper. In fact, it's dark most of the time in between too. So having an extra special treat once in a while is really the only reasonable survival suggestion accessible to everyone throughout this season-with-no-light.

I was introduced to Rice Crispy squares in my adulthood. This year is the first time I've ever made them. Too bad they're the easiest sweet possible to make on the stove.

Yeah - 1/4c butter, 1tsp vanilla, one bag of marshmallows, 6c Rice Crispys. Melt the butter, toss in the marshmallows, stir until melted, add vanilla, add the Crispys, stir until fully mixed with the marshmallows, turn out into shallow baking dish and let solidify. That's it. But my version makes this horribly seductive snack almost acceptable to eat.

Same basic recipe but add only 2c of Rice Crispys and replace the rest with chopped almonds, dried apricots, cranberries, currants, chopped walnuts and toasted sunflower seeds. Serving suggestions: cut yourself one giant square, eat with a hot cup of coffee (with whole cream and sugar too, if you like), sitting in your favourite chair, reading a new book - kindle or paper, you choose. Let the Season of Indulgences begin.

Pear Sorbet

Pears from Susan's tree  

There is more fruit on one fruiting tree than any one household could reasonable eat before it all goes bad. Pears are a particularly sensitive fruit this way because they seem to ripen all at once within an hour of each other. One minute they are too hard to pick, next they are on their way to going bad. So if you have a pear tree  loaded with fruit - you are on high alert and called to action at a moment's notice!

This basket full came to us from a woman on island who has multiple fruit trees and many other fall ripening vegetables. It's a season of plenty all right. Plenty of planning, canning, drying, chopping and giving away the bounty.

What to do with so many pears that will not live to see the end of the week? Cut 'em up, chuck 'em in the freezer! And then what? I like pears, but I don't love them. What would we actually do with bags full of them?

This is a recipe from Jamie Oliver's cook book Jamie's Italy (p. 276).

3/4 c sugar
1c water
2 1/2lb soft pears (peeled, chopped)
juice and zest of 1 lemon
1/4c grappa (or to taste) (We used Chartreuse because we didn't have grappa)

Pale gold yumminess - right out of the freezer 

Dissolve the sugar in the water, bring to boil. Then reduce heat, simmer for 3 minutes. Add pears to this, simmer for 5 minutes then remove from heat. Add lemon juice. Cool this mix a little and then puree in a food processor or blender (like we did). Sieve the mix (to remove bits of peel or core) into the serving dish you want use. Stir in lemon zest and alcohol to taste. Careful not to add too much alcohol or the sorbet won't freeze. Whisk the sorbet every half hour until it stiffens up to an icy consistency. A sorbet consistency in fact. Serve with a biscuit, garnish with a sprig of mint - or a pear leaf if you have them.

I have not traditionally been a fan of pears, but I have to say - this is the best sorbet I have ever eaten. Ever. The flavour is completely unexpected; a combination of clear pear flavour but then the blending with citrus and a little alcholol edge take it up to a level that puts it safely in my top shelf of favourite recipes.