There’s nothing like a sweet, cold Thai iced tea to cool off the heat from Thai curries. Making your own Thai iced tea is economical and easy! The tea used in Thai iced tea is a red-leafed variety that only grows in Thailand; its pretty orange color is really brought out by the addition of condensed milk. The Thai people call it cha-yen and drink it hot in the mornings and cold in the afternoons.
Pine nuts are the edible seeds produced by pinecones. Most pine nuts are too small to make it worth the time and trouble to harvest; only a few species of pine nuts are large enough to make it worthwhile. First, they have to be extracted from the scales of the pine cones, and then the hard outer shells have to be removed. Unless you really want to forage for your own, it’s probably best to just buy them already shelled at the store!
One of the most common and easily-acquired Asian mushrooms is the shiitake mushroom. Shiitakes grow on trees in the wild, but are easily cultivated on wood chips or logs, they are available as mushroom growing kits.
The other day while trying out my new pie bird, I was in the mood for a savory pie. I had some stew meat in the fridge, some red wine, some vegetables, and a bag of frozen artichoke hearts. An idea formulated!
Pie birds (also known as pie funnels, pie chimneys, and pie whistles) are hollow ceramic devices used to keep pies from bubbling over in the oven by providing ventilation from the hot filling through the crust. They originated in Europe and historians often argue over whether they came about in the 1500’s or during Victorian times.
I recently realized that I’ve done a lot of posts on edible wild food, and with Spring coming up, I decided it would be fun to create a roundup as a definite guide for you all, so you can go out and forage for some tasty things to eat! I think everyone should experience the simple pleasure of hiking in a park or field and picking enough greens for a salad, or berries for pies and jams. Some of my favorite childhood memories are foraging for wild foods with my parents, my brother, and our dog in the North Carolina mountains.
These days, whenever I go hiking in Golden Gate Park or the Presidio of San Francisco, I’m always coming up on fields of these circular green leaves with tiny flowers in the middle. Called miner’s lettuce, they are an edible salad green that can be eaten raw in salads, like nasturtiums, or boiled/sauteed like spinach.
Perhaps you’ve seen these thick, stumpy mushrooms with small, flat caps at Asian markets. They’re part of the oyster mushroom species and are sometimes called king oysters since they’re the largest of the oyster mushroom species.
I recently acquired a lot of meyer lemons from my neighbor’s tree. I can only drink so much lemonade, eat so many lemon pies, and make so much marmalade! So I decided to make preserved lemons, and it was ridiculously easy. Now I have several jars of preserved lemons that I can use in Middle Eastern recipes.
One of the first things I noticed about this mushroom is that instead of gills under the caps, they have “teeth.” Can you see them in the photograph above? These are the spore-bearing structures.
I’ve been eating a lot of cardoon this winter. The other night, wanting to try something new, I pondered the statement, “you can roast any vegetable!” I wondered if this was true of cardoons, so I did a little kitchen experimentation.
A friend gifted me a jar of Branston pickle when she returned from a recent trip to England, and I knew that I had to have a Ploughman’s lunch.
Even though it’s winter, I am still canning seasonal fruits and vegetables. Home canning is not limited to only summer! I saw some beautiful red cabbage at the market, and suddenly visualized rows of jars filled with gleaming purple vegetables in my larder. I put together this very easy recipe which I’ll share in this post.
Dear Readers, I’m sorry for the following sentences I am about to write. Even though it is still snowing in most parts of the country, it appears to be springtime in San Francisco. The almond, plum and cherry trees are blooming, hyacinths and daffodils are coming up, and the hills are lush & green. The first asparagus shoots and green garlic, two harbingers of Spring, have arrived at the farmer’s markets.
This mushroom has been a little elusive on my wild mushroom forays. Its dark color and thin, ruffled edges make it a bit difficult to spot on the forest floor. But finding some black trumpet mushrooms is a treat, because they are very delicious. If you aren’t a mushroom forager, you can find these at your local gourmet fungi distributor, or online.
I came across this pretty speckled salad green at the farmer’s market the other day. It’s a castelfranco radicchio, a heirloom vegetable from Italy.
Shimeji mushrooms are a group of mushroom varieties characterized by long stems and tight concave caps. There are over 20 species of shimeji mushrooms, including enoki and pioppino. This post is about the buna-shimeji, which is also called the beech mushroom and the brown clamshell mushroom.
Who doesn’t love a big pot of chili, especially on a cold evening? I had some friends over on Saturday night and we all enjoyed sitting around, eating chili, and watching a movie together. Chili is one of those things where everyone has their own recipe. There are just too many ways to make it! Have no fear, I’ll cover a few variations in this post.
Look at this pretty striped vegetable! Artificially colored? Genetically modified? From an alien planet? No, it’s a chiogga beet, also known as the candy cane beet and the bullseye beet, and it’s a heirloom beet from Italy.
The matsutake mushroom season is winding down, although I am still finding some matsutakes foraged in Oregon at the local co-op. I’m pretty sure they won’t be around anymore in the next two weeks. I love this mushroom, it is one of my favorites. I put together a quick and easy rice dish that highlights the flavor of these fragrant mushrooms.