Gardening Time Again

The gardening and hardiness chart of America has changed because of warming climates. Many of the more northern Lower 48 United States can plant earlier this garden seas during Spring , Summer, and part of the Fall of 2012.

Some of these suggestions for the garden are fun and different for a new year of fruits, vegetables, and flowers.

• How To Make Pickled Green Tomatoes To Use All Your Garden Produce

• Findings of the Great Lakes Heirloom Tomato Project – Best and Tastiest Tomatoes

• Casseroles of Another Color – The Best Colorful Tomato Tuna Supper

• Polish Traditions: Spring and Easter Recipes

• The Wonderful World of Oz – Fight Free Radicals With Foods of a Different Color

• My Favorite Unknown Recipes: Delicate Pear Pie and America’s Pear Fair

• How to Make Lemon Pickle 

• Fuzzy Peaches and Smooth Tomatoes – Multitasking To A-Peel

• Unique Eggs – Green Bean, Mushroom and Tuna Frittata

• Vitamins in Jelly for a Healthy Diet – Give Up the Goo!

Christmas Recipes From the First Nations

These traditional recipes from Native Americans and American Farmers in the New Nation of the 18th and 19th centuries are good-tasting and use local products and ingredients.

• First Nations Christmas Recipes for Thanks

• Savory Christmas Carrot Soup

• 

  Native American Foods – Not Just For Thanksgiving

• Everything Pumpkin But the Pie!

• Recipes From the Everglades

GRATITUDE JOURNAL

Harvest Season, Thanksgiving, and Breast Cancer Awareness Month all make me think about Gratitude Journals.

Listing a good person, place, or thing to appreciate more or begin to honor in some way is a great start to a new perspective for the Holiday Season – and November Elections! – Anyone else tired of all the Negative Ads about candidates? If all of them are true, there is no one for whom to vote in 2010.

Find out about Gratitude and Thanksgiving Journals and enjoy three delicious and different Harvest Season Soups at the link:

Healthy Harvest Time Soups for

Your Gratitude Journal

at this LINK

Chicken Pie’s Got Legs!

Chicken Leg Pie or Chicken Thigh Pie

is an old recipe that is making a new appearance in restaurants around the nation and chefs are adding their own flavorful touches.  Home cooks are discovering the recipe in the back of their Grandmas’ recipe boxes while looking for something new and making a grand time of it.

Chicken Leg Pie

sounds like a joke to “city folk”, but it is a legitimate dish. It was most probably developed as a different way to use the abundant chicken on US farms, especially in the Great Depression. After fast food became a way of life, the recipe was put away until the 1970s, when it resurfaced. In the 1980s, it seemed to disappear again, but is visible again in the 2010s as a novelty dish.

How to Peel a Tomato or Peach?

Chefs and Home Cooks!

How do you go about peeling a fuzzy peach or a smooth tomato?  Some folks are aggravated or repulsed by the “fur” on peach skins and  irritated by tomato skins that have some off loose in their soup.  So, how to remove these fruit peels easily and quickly without a mess and cut fingers  is a situation in the kitchen.

Fuzzy Peaches and Smooth Tomatoes –

Multitasking Tools for A-Peel

A number of methods can be used for peeling tomatoes and peaches. these include a plunge into a boiling water bath in an open pot or kettle, which makes tomato skins crack. This happens in just a few seconds and the tomato can be removes, plunged a few seconds into ice water to remain uncooked and its skin peeled off fast – it fairly well JUMPS off the tomato! Peach skins need to be scored first, lightly with a paring knife and the system then works the same way for the peach. Remember to plunge it into the ice water bath before zipping off the peel so that the fruit does not cook. The change in temperature also helps to pull the skin away from the fruit and the fruit to shrink away from the skin. 

Chefs and cooks also apply peelers and knives to peaches and tomatoes with good results, depending on their skills and preferences.

See the link above for a range of attractive and even cute peelers and some beautiful knives in a range of prices.

Chef’s Techniques

How many ways can you prepare onions

before adding them to soups, stocks, or sauces?

Onions  -  To Sweat, Saute or Caramelize?

 Perhaps you prefer them diced and tossed into the rest of the cooking ingredients and that can be very tasty.  Cutting up a Spanish or Vidalia onion and garnishing  the surface of a bowl of white bean soup is also delicious.

Some dishes call for bringing out the deeper or sweeter flavors of onion before adding them to a sauce or soup – perhaps your favorite homemade BBQ sauce – or even sandwiches and pizzas. Visiting the article linked above will provide instructions for sweating, caramelizing, and sauteing onions in text format and via some entertaining videos featuring awesome chefs of all sizes. 

Many Types of Vinegar

Magic Ingredients: Vinegars

Chefs and cooks produce new dishes every day with the addition of any of a new variety of vinegars. These include a wide range of fruits and herbs.

The article at the link above discusses vinegars made by early Native Americans and other Indigenous Peoples from their local resources, all the separate vinegar variety groups, of vinegars, and ideas for how to use them and where to purchase.

The Hero of Herbs

CILANTRO!

…Is an increasingly popular herb that has jumped from Mexican, Spanish, Asian, and Middle Eastern Cuisine to Everyday American.  Put is on salads, add it to your favorite dishes, and ber imaginative with this healthy herb.

Although a few people are allergic top cilantro - as some people will  be allergic to any herb – CILANTRO is also as source of medicine. It fights cancer, fatigue, insomnia, high cholesterol, and a host of other conditions.   

It’;s hard to describe the taste of cilantro, because many people taste something different in it - but it is delicious to those who love it.  In fact, it’s my hero!

Vinegar – Magic and Good Taste

Salty, Sweet, Sour and Bitter.. .and the new Savory.

We have four basic tastes and perhaps a 5th if we add the edemame advertising campaign’s savory. Sour is Number One with me!  Give me a dill pickle over a donut any day.  Add a tall rib of celery and that’s lunch.

Vinegar is categorized as sour has is my favorite taste since childhood.  Pickles, pickled peppers, and pickled vegetables are fantastic food products that are easy to make at home. If you cannot find cucumbers, but zucchini are available, you can pickle them. Many people cannot tell them apart. 

VINEGAR – A MAGIC INGREDIENT

A number of different types of vinegar can be used to make pickles, deglaze pans, marinate meats for enhanced flavor and tenderness, vinaigrettes, sauces, and even desserts. White vinegar and newspaper make a good combination for cleaning windows! Click the link and find about dozens of fruity vinegars, herbal varieties, and those made with honey, beer, and even maple sap!

6/1 Travel Breakfast

Summer is a convenient time to travel and in doing so, take an opportunity to change eating habits as well.  A new setting helps set the stage for new eating habits. One such summer did much for me in this way, especially in the discovery of new breakfast trends coming from old traditions. 

Korean Breakfast In Seattle – Grains 

The Korean breakfast I enjoyed on summer in Seattle was unforgettable and the link above describes the elements that went into one of my favorite mornings.  The discovery afforded me with easy to make foods that changed my mornings. Enjoy!