i hope you eat good food, grow beautiful things, and have more love than you know what to do with.
When I first discovered how to make butter from scratch, I was horrified. How have I lived so long without making my own butter? I felt like an entire world opened up to me that I had previously not known before. Dinner guests are always …
We decided to make crab cakes with the four lady crabs we caught. These crabs are meaty and perfect for crab cakes. I followed a recipe for it but I think I will omit most of the the things next time and just use a little cornstarch as binder. I prefer a nonflavored crab cake to a flavored “Maryland” style one.
Sophie was super excited to be a part of the entire process and was very helpful with the entire recipe.
Freshly scrubbed crabs. Showing the Lady Crab’s hallmark purple “leopard” spots.
Ingredients (Makes 4 Crab Cakes):
1. Scrub crabs with brush (careful to avoid the claws). Bring pot of water to a boil, and put crabs in for 10 minutes. Remove and put in ice water to cool.
2. Remove the meat from the crabs, including the legs (remove leg segments and roll with chopsticks or rolling pins to push the meat out.)
3. You can either roll into balls or bake. If baking, Preheat oven to 450 degrees Fahrenheit. Mix the mayo, mustard, duck egg, bread crumbs, herbs, and seasonings together and toss extracted crab meat into mix.
4. Grease a muffin pan and spoon mixture in until full (crab cakes will expand slightly). Bake for 20 minutes or until outside is crispy and golden.
This week has been fun, learning about when and how to catch Snapper fish at the local fishing pier. We’ve been catching at least a few per day until today, when the super rough waters only came up with one. This one’s a decent size, …
Let me preface this by saying that throughout my childhood and the majority of my adult life, I have never been able to kill anything on purpose (except mosquitoes) and the idea has always been greatly taboo not only in my upbringing (my parents are …
I know it might seem strange for those who have always viewed dandelion as a weed, but it’s an extremely nutritious green (with 500% DV vitamin K and 100% DV vitamin A per 1 cup chopped serving–as such those on blood thinners like Coumadin should abstain) but I hope you give it a try. It could very well save your life if you’re starving one day! Not to mention actually buying it at Whole Foods is expensive.
You can sit it in water for half an hour with salt in order to decrease the bitterness even more, but I like it because the bitterness. It’s also a diuretic if you’re bloating with a bit of water weight. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it’s canonically used to clear heat and toxins from the blood (due to the bitter and cooling nature.)
Ingredients for the Pesto (makes 1.5 cups):
Ingredients for Sliced Tomato and Bread with Dandelion Pesto
1. Place all the ingredients for the pesto in a blender/food processor and blend until smooth.
2. Toast bread and arrange on plate with tomato. Spoon pesto over the plate and garnish with red pepper flakes. Serve warm.
Ah, dandelions (Taraxacum officionale), the bane of America’s sterile and homogenous grass lawns. It’s a pity people dislike it so much because it really is a wonderful plant, and in many parts of the world like Italy, it’s a common vegetable green. High in fiber …
A lot of sources will tell you that Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis) is only reliably perennial from zone 9 upwards, zone 8 pushing it, and zone 7 should be wintered indoors. This is where a location’s microclimate as well as choosing cold hardy varieties come into …
Italian parsley is grown as an annual/biennial culinary, which means that it usually dies in its second year after it sets seed. That doesn’t make it suitable for my particular application of a perennial food forest so sometimes I decline to grow it, even though a lot of recipes call for it. In comes Mitsuba Parsley, sometimes called wild Japanese parsley, which is a hardy perennial (down to zone 4) that comes back year after year with a similar taste (mitsuba and Italian parsley are cousins) and similar application in cooking. It’s low growing (1 – 3 feet) and suitable for a groundcover, especially since it loves shade and moisture. I have it in my perennial herb box in mostly shade where it happily grows (except for when my ducks were eating it.)
It tolerates a wide range of soils but does need it to be able to hold moisture. Any hotter than zone 9, and the plant gets stunted and will likely die. It’s found in the woodlands of Japan, hence its name. Right now my plant is small, but I’m hoping it will gain some size in the coming years, and I can propagate it by root division (it will also set seed as well.) Unlike Italian parsley, mitsuba stems are tender and also edible! It really is a useful cut and come again herb.
I am a fiend for sprouts, and I especially love alfalfa, which I often sprout at home during the fall and winter times. One of my absolute favorite ways of eating it is replacing lettuce in sandwiches with the delicious, slightly peppery bite of alfalfa. This can …
