Passionfruit

Remember my blue passion flower, the South American beauty queen that went to the evolution store and asked for every single option available for a flower. "Yeh, I’ll take one of those too," the Blue passion flower said "but make it flashy and garish please, I've got people to impress."

On the inside of its bright jack-o-lantern orange fruit (this is not the same as the common dark purple passionfruit that you see in the market) is dark red cells much like the pomegranate, but easier to chew seeds. Add to the benefit that it acts as a sedative, it might just cure some cancers (has carotenoids and polyphenols). Passionfruit are used as a treatment for easily excited children, bronchial asthma, insomnia, nervous gastrointestinal disorders and menopausal problems.

The juice and the leaves of passion fruit contain alkaloids, including Harman, which has blood pressure lowering, sedative and antispasmodic action. You can make a mean blood-red Caipirinha by mottling the red fruit grains with brown sugar, ice, Cachaça and limes. Or make a passionflower elixir with water kefir grains. Or ferment into a passionflower wine. If you pick enough, you could make a pie. The flavor is musky, tarte and sweet, much like a guava and very floral as you would expect from its flowery first show. Add sugar and cream and make a heart ache red passionfruit fool. Whisk with honey and lemon juice and oil for a zippy salad dressing. Passionfruit puree, coulis or just peeled and raw, poured over ice cream for dessert it would be heavenly and just the thing to relax you into a peaceful nights rest.

Beet the heat: one local summer week four

Beet the HEAT

The last of the beets were in our CSA basket, four to go with my four I already had. When I roasted my chicken (at 10pm to avoid the heat), I roasted all the beets, save one for beet kvass, with a couple of heads of garlic in olive oil. Some of the roasted beets, I froze for later use. With the rest, I made a few great chilled beet recipes to "beet the heat" this local summer.

Ginger Glazed Beets
2-3 oven roasted, peeled and slivered beets
1/4 cup marmalade or jelly (i used some mint jalapeno jelly)
Pat of butter
Teaspoon of grated or chopped ginger
1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
Melt jelly with butter in a saucepan; Add ginger and beets. Cook, stirring constantly, over medium heat until glazed with the sauce. Add vinegar to deglaze the pan. Serve warm or chilled. I also topped with some local roquerfort cheese and hazelnuts.

Beetroot and Kim Chee Chilled Vivid Soup (I don’t think I could ever recreate it, it was a great way to use up things around the house)
Sautéed already roasted beets with butter and onions, added chicken broth (2 tablespoons of homemade concentrate) and beet kvass juice. Cooked for a few minutes. Add purple kim chee cabbage with had cumin and mustard seeds. Used the immersion blended to make a thick soup. Chilled in the fridge. Made a white sauce with peeled and seeded cucumbers, garlic and onions in a blender with sour cream and some yogurt.

Cold as a Cucumber Beet Kvass (in the above photo)
Made above white sauce, added a dash of beet kvass, mixed to make this bright fushia color, added gone-to-flower cilantro and basil. My husband hates cumcumber and ate both of these cold soups with gusto. They store well in the fridge for a few days.

Cold Borscht (an ad-lib recipe, use what you have)
Onions
Potatoes
Beef
A bit of oil to sauté the above ingredients
Beets and their juice from roasting
Broth
Beet Kvass, fermented beets… use vinegar if you don’t have it, but the beet kvass adds a special zing. Recipe below.

Cook until all the vegetables are tender, chill and serve with sour cream and a dash of beet kvass or vinegar.

Beet Kvass

*large raw organic beetroot, peeled and chopped up coarsely.
*1/4 cup whey made fresh from raw milk during cheese making or strain off of yogurt (I have A LOT of whey right now)
*1 teaspoon of sea salt
*filtered water

Place beetroot, whey and salt in a glass container (I used a cleaned out Nutella jar) Add filtered water to fill the container. Stir well and cover securely. Keep at room temperature for at least 2 days before transferring to refrigerator (mine is still on my countertop)

Drink a glass morning and night for health benefits. Beet kvass is great for a digestive aid, blood tonic, promotes regularity, alkalizes the blood, and a good treatment for kidney stones and other ailments. You can use it in place of vinegar for some vivid salad dressings. I used the beet chunks afterward the ferment to make my borscht soup with a splash of this beet elixir.

One Local Summer Full of Zucchini

Flipping though my archives: hmmmm....How to cook a swollen ovary. Because that is what it is.

It’s not very nice of me to bitch and moan about the zucchini plethora we have whilst others are starving and being flooded, just staying above water. Mother Nature sure is pissed (literally) at us! Nor is it a truc nouveau; nothing new to complain about too much of a good thing. Anyone that lives near a farm or gets a CSA basket full of zucchini or those who have at least one zucchini plant will tell you that they are rabbits of the vegetable world. Don’t feed them after midnight, the must be reproducing in your vegetable bin. Barbara Kingsolver talks about the over zealous zucchini in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but she was not the first to discover this summer phenomena of excess. Unlike their squash cousins who have been filling up mudrooms and root cellars since the time of the colonists, “zuccha” were brought over to the states by Italian Immigrants in the 1920’s.

If you have never made and want to make Zucchini bread. Do, it's delightful. You can also use shredded beets and carrots and bananas. Elise has a good butter-based Zucchini bread recipe, because butter tastes better! Also 101 cookbooks has a few recipes that you can add chocolate chunks, or mulberries (my idea) too. Follow their recipes, instead of me discussing zucchini bread all day long which is one of my first ways of getting ‘rid’ of them, because its been well covered. By the way, Zucchini bread/ muffins/ cupcakes are excellent for freezing, as is just zucchini grated straight into freezer bags for winter days with no greens in sight.

Because soon you’ll be tired of hearing every person with a food blog and food journalist talking about zucchini and how they are flooding the farmer’s market, people using them for rubber stamps, dried for kindling, or as a compost filler. So let me start first, before the tsunami of summer squash descend upon us with some interesting ways to prepare them.

Grilled on the BBQ. With us trying (insert laughter here because MIL showed up with a construction crew to work for 3 weeks and reverse all the money we had saved to date) to save electricity we grill quite a bit of everything including potatoes and beets besides pork chops and steaks. I let them marinate in olive oil, thyme, rosemary, salt, pepper and apple cider vinegar while I prepare the fire. They take longer to braise than most meats, about 20 minutes for zucchinis cut into long fourths.

Zucchini Flan. Floating perfectly in a congealed sea of eggs and Parmesan. It would make an Italian grandmother happy and a French one too, which is who I learned this recipe from. Perfect chilled and made one or two days in advance.

• 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, plus extra
• 3 small zucchini cut into chunks
• 1/4 cup corn starch
• 1 cup cream fraiche (heavy cream)
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 1/4 teaspoon freshly grated nutmeg
• 1 cup finely chopped red onion
• 1/4 cup extra-virgin olive oil
• 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 cup freshly grated Grana Padano Parm
• 6 basil leaves
• 4 eggs, beaten

Preheat the oven to 375°. Butter the inside of a loaf pan. Melt the butter over low heat in a small saucepan. Add the corn starch and cook for about 30 seconds, stirring continuously. Pour in the milk, whisking constantly. Season with the salt and nutmeg. Simmer until the mixture is thick, about 2 minutes. Cool to room temperature.

Place zucchini in a large cotton kitchen tea towel, twist it up tightly, and wring out as much of the moisture as possible; this is essential to achieving the proper consistency in the flan, as too much water will make the flan soggy.

Meanwhile in a sauté pan, sauté the onion in the olive oil until it is soft, about 10 minutes over medium heat. Add the zucchini, parsley, salt, and pepper. Cook, stirring often, for 10 minutes; transfer to a bowl and cool to room temperature. In a large bowl, combine the sautéed zucchini mixture, the cream sauce, Grana, basil, and eggs.

Pour into loaf pan bake in a bain maire (with water up to its sides) for 45 minutes. Remove from the oven; let them rest for 10 minutes, then unmold them upside-down on a serving plate.

Zummus from a flickr friend, with expertise in gardens and nature, that I lean on heavily for advice and great recipes like Zummus! Grated zucchini, garlic, tahini (or other un-sweetened nut butter, she says that cashew would be good), salt, pepper, lemon or lime juice. Blend until thick and creamy and you've got zummus! I added cumin, piri-piri and random Indian spices for some kick.

Indienne Courgettes: Zucchini are not from India, so this is a French twist on Indian food. Add other vegetables if you have them

Hidden Vegetable in Pizza Sauce, also not my idea but published a hundred times already in every children’s sneaky secrets cookbooks out there. Steam zucs and then mash in a blender and add to your tomato sauce. They will never know its in there. Carrots and beets can also be used the same way.

Zucchini Flax Seed Brownies. Speaking of health-ish. I made these brownies often for our little family.

Riana’s Ratatouille. Our tomatoes are not in season, yet. But soon we will have buckets of them plus the larger zucchini and lovely purple eggplants that you can expect me to write about all the ways of cooking them: eggplant marshmallows, eggplants with powdered sugar, etc)

Use the Pits to your advantage

For the true French way of making clafoutis, you leave the pits in. This makes the dish stay firm and not waterladen like with the cherries pitted (if you do that you'll have to add cornstarch to the batter). it also gives the dessert (or breakfast food for me) a hint of almond. Makes you eat slowly and carefully too.

3/4 cup flour
1/4 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
1/4 cup sugar or honey or natural sweetener of your choice
3/4 cup milk
1/2 teaspoon pure vanilla extract (promise to give you the recipe soon, to make your own vanilla extract)

For the Clafoutis Batter: In your food processor or blender place all the batter ingredients. Process for about 45 - 60 seconds, scraping down the sides of the bowl as needed. Once the batter is completely smooth, let it rest while you prepare the fruit.


1 pound fresh sweet cherries--- leave the pits in
1 tablespoon unsalted butter

Butter your dish and then layer cherries in a dish like the photo and then pour the batter over the top. Bake for 55 minutes in a hot oven. Serve warm or cold the next day for breakfast

Pits saved for Cherry Pit Ice Cream and Cancer Cures and homemade Cherry Pit-Hot/Cold Packs

Cherry pits are poisonous everyone says, but you would have to eat a ton of them to die. Just as if you ate a ton of salt you would die too. Or a ton of sugar, which actually is far worse than cherry pits. (Sugar has be shown to be 20 times more toxic than B17 the contents of the apricot, appel and cherry seed.) Or a ton of cherries would kill you, my god. I am getting sick of them already we harvested about 40 pounds, must of which I froze, canned and dyhydrated.

The pits happen to be cancer cure (like the apricot and our friends, the loquats) and are a cancer preventative, just one or two a day. They contain B17 which is illegal in the states and some doctors have been jailed just trying to prescribe it. The pharmaceutical industry has a lot of financial incentive to ensure that vitamin B17 remains illegal and unacceptable by the medical establishment, because they are unable to patent a naturally occurring substance and thereby risk losing a $200 billion a year industry.

Vitamin B17 (also called Amygdalin or Laetrile) is one of the most controversial substances in cancer research. It is a nitriloside, which occurs naturally in fruit seeds, some berries, flax, millet, and some beans, leaves, grasses and nuts.

Touted as a cure for cancer several decades ago by Dr. Ernst T. Krebs, it has since been discredited by orthodox medicine as “quackery.” Respected researcher Dr. Kanematsu Sugiura was fired after refusing to publish false test results on Laetrile – he stood firm in his belief in it. One of the most famous proponents of B17 is G. Edward Griffin, whose book, video and articles attempt to explain what the fuss is all about.

These and other researchers contend that cancer is little more than a deficiency disease, much like scurvy or pellagra. In cultures that eat foods high in nitrilosides such as the Hunza or the Eskimo, cancer is unheard of. But today, our modern diets have all but eliminated this vital nutrient. The medical establishment, on the other hand, has worked hard to undermine confidence in this substance. Their “official” reason? Because it contains a molecule of cyanide. Hydrogen Cyanide found in the pits has been proven to be chemically inert and non-toxic when taken as food or refined pharmaceutical such as laetrile.

Mr. Griffin’s video and many other articles and websites explain how the molecule is uniquely absorbed and used by the body: the only enzyme that can break it down exists only in a tumor cell, so in a sense it becomes a kind of “cancer smart-bomb,” and is neutralized in the body’s other healthy cells.

La Vida Loquat

"Let food be our medicine and medicine be our food" said Hippocrates 2,000 years ago.

The literal butt of bards' jokes for centuries: (Shakespeare makes reference to their sphincter-like exteriors) the loquat, an apricot cousin of the Medlar fruit though more puckering than its relative. Loquats originated in SE China and have been mentioned in their literature for thousands of years. You can now find them all over the world.

Loquat pie, if made from fruit that is not fully ripe, is said to taste like cherry pie and it does. I made it with my rustic leaf lard crust for fathers day. Instead of sugar, I stirred in watermelon jam. Loquats tastes like a cross between an apricot, peach and a sour cherry. You can make chutney and jam and jelly with the first batch of pectin rich loquats or freeze them with some lemon juice for future use instead of cherries or apples for tartes and pie fillings.

Loquats are sweet and sour when fully ripe (must ripen on the tree) and eaten raw or simply stewed with a little sweetener added. Or keep cooking to make an excellent jam when the fruit is a little unripe as it will have enough pectin to make it jell. I cooked our first batch into a sedative syrup with chamomile and ginger. Then canned three quarts with rooibos syrup.

Medicinal Uses: The fruit is said to act as a sedative and is eaten to halt vomiting and thirst. The flowers are regarded as having expectorant properties. An infusion of the leaves, or the dried, powdered leaves, may be taken to relieve diarrhea and depression and to counteract intoxication from consumption of alcoholic beverages. Great for thirst quenching on a hot summers day as well. Also leaf poultices are applied on swellings. Analgesic; Antibacterial; Antiemetic; Antitussive; Antiviral; Astringent; Expectorant; Sedative.

The leaves are analgesic, antibacterial, antiemetic, antitussive, antiviral, astringent and expectorant A decoction of the leaves or young shoots is used as an intestinal astringent and as a mouthwash in cases of thrush and also in the treatment of bronchitis, coughs, feverish colds etc The leaves are harvested as required and can be used fresh or dried. (remove the hair from the leaves in order to prevent irritation of the throat)

And the fragrant flowers are an expectorant.

Loquat juice is used in Chinese medicine for soothing the throat like a cough drop. Combined with other ingredients and known as pipa gao it acts as a demulcent and an expectorant, as well as to soothe the digestive and respiratory systems.

Take three times a day when you feel a cold coming on and chances are you will cut it off or lessen your time of suffering. It also contains liquorice roots, chamomile, apricots (same family as loquats) orange peel, pepper mint, lemon grass, almond and sugar to become a thick syrup.

Used in Japan and China for centuries as a cancer cure, the seeds are eaten in a variety of ways with special doctors orders. Recently in the news, herbalists in Cyprus in the Mediterranean used Loquat leaf tea with some success for various types of cancer. Drinking Loquat leaf tea regularly and eating 2 seeds per day (warning: seeds are dangerous just like apricot and peach seeds, they contain small amounts of cyanogenetic glycocides which release cyanide when digested!) has been successfully used for blood vessel and bone marrow, liver and pancreatic cancer. It is essential to eat the seeds as it is some 1300 times higher in amygdalin B17 Laetrile than the leaves. Amygdalin is otherwise known as the anti-cancer vitamin, B17 or laetrile.

Mulberry Sorbet

Mulberry Sorbet

made with maple syrup and mulberry kefir d'acqua and homemade lilac rose petal honey
(how to make the honey previous post)

Mul-anykind of Berry Sorbet
makes about 1 quart

1 pound (about 4 cups) mulberries, strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, or raspberries, or a combination
3/4 cup juice of some sort, i used fermented kefir water (not milk based!) but you can use blueberry juice, apple juice, lemonade
1/4 cup maple syrup
1/2 cup honey (note: you may use sugar instead for both sweeteners if you wish)
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
pinch of salt
1 tablespoon vodka

Blend the mulberries with the juice in a pan over medium heat, and add maple syrup and honey. Cook for five minutes. Remove from heat. Stir in the lemon juice, salt, and vodka. Freeze according to your ice cream maker’s instructions. Or put in a container in the freezer and stir every couple of hours. Or let it freezer and then crush in a blender. Let the sorbet sit in the freezer for a few hours before serving.

One Local Summer: week two

Sultry hot air sends us out of doors for our localavore summer meals. Branches saved from the November annual pruning of the mulberry trees are what fuels our fires as we linger under the now lush fan like green leaves carefully dodging the occasional squid ink berry that was missed for tonight’s dessert . If we are doing a big feast for friends we throw on one of those gleaned grape vine logs. Many of the wine growers around here are encouraged to pull up their 30+ year vines and plant olive trees in place of them to alleviate the local wine glut.

Back in March during our Meet Your Meat Month, 30 days where we only ate meat that we could physically see with our own eyes, we found an excellent organic pig farm near my husband’s work (in the middle of the grapevines, of course). A tiny two window case shop connected to the cutting room is where this all women run (four women to be exact) oinker operation supplies us with the fruits of their seven sows. Actually, we started eating less meat after Meet your Meat so now we don’t pig out on 10oz of meat at eat meal. We take it slowly and savor what this animal has sacrificed for our nutrition.

From this batch of pork ribs, grilled with homemade bbq sauce, I was able to make three meals. We eat a lot of courses at our house, typical to a French household. Apetizer, main plate, followed by salad, then cheese, fruit and maybe dessert if you have room. Our appetizer lately that has been a steamed artichoke for each of us with a side of fresh made aioli mayonnaise. Including the baby, she devours artichokes.

The ‘chokes are superabundant against all odds right now and winding down thankfully as there is such thing as too much of a good thing. I have heard that the plants winter over well. More like winter, spring, summer and fall for our five little starter plants from two years ago that we promptly forgot about when grandma passed away. They are taller than humans with 25 heads!

The older lady who must be the matriarch of the “cochon gourmet” wipes her knotted hands on her previously white butchers apron and admires my gusto for all things porcine. She offers me three pig feet for my Menudo and insists that I take the ankle bones as well. She knows that I like to use the whole hog as I bought just that from her at Christmas time. It was here that I finally figured out what to call leaf lard in French “saindoux.” After three or four visits of her giving me regular lard which is not the same thing. I explained it’s the fat that surrounds the kidneys, it comes off in paper like layers. I stood on my tip toes to see through the plate glass window to the dissection room with four or five splayed hogs on the table-sized chopping block. You cook it very slowly and use it to make pies and finally a light bulb went off in her head that shined crystal bright through her eyes and she raised up her gnarled index finger with an ah ha! She told me to come back in two days. She renders it for me and charges 1.75 a kilo which is a steal.

With this meal, we grilled the end of our pointed cabbage and zucchinis from our CSA basket. A bit of local fresh olive oil, fresh cracked sea salt and black pepper was all that is needed. The ribs were smothered in a hot barbecue sauce that I made a few months ago with tomatoes (our last frozen ones from grandma’s deep freeze 2006 they said in her scrawl, onions, garlic, salt, vinegar, sugar and hot peppers cooked forever and a day until it was rich and dark maroon. We ate our gardens last batch of artichokes first. And it was followed by a wonderful mulberry/cherry pie (grandma's tree as well) made with a leaf lard crust. (pictured below is the previous one with foraged strawberries and mulberries from those same trees)

Chinese pork stirfry with carrots and onions, greens from our deck garden, some sour cherries from a neighbors tree and fried fava beans made our second meal. And the final is Ham hock soup with green and coral lentils and leeks from the “left over freezer bag”—a catch all place for odds and ends of vegetables that are too good for the compost yet missing that something to make them into dinner. Fried half a sweet onion in duck fat, added a pork knuckle (the part between the foot and the ankle) and the pork bones from the ribs with some meat still on them, and lentils that had been soaked in whey (to use up all that whey and it makes beans more nutritious). Later, I added some chicken broth that I had defrosted, cumin seeds and random spices from my stash. With a baguette it will make a nice down home meal.