Food Archives - Page 19 of 20

Black Walnuts: A Forager’s Treat

Foraging for food is part of the joy of living in the country with natural resources. Our food supply does not end when the gardens are put to rest. The abundant black walnut trees at Five Feline Farm provide nuts with a distinctive flavor and are one of our favorites.

Harvesting the nuts is a process starting with the easy part: collection. Simply pick up nuts that have fallen to the ground. It doesn’t matter if the outer hull is green or black at this stage, just pick them up and fill a bucket. Collect way more than you think you need. By the time you have hulled, cracked and picked out the nutmeats, a five gallon bucket will yield about a quart of nuts.

The next step is to let the nuts dry until the hulls are completely black and withered. A great place to do this is in the greenhouse. The easiest way to remove the hulls is spread them in the driveway and run over them repeatedly with a vehicle of some kind. This year the riding mower was pressed into service but a pickup truck or car works nicely too.

Step three is sort the nuts from the hulls. Wear gloves for this step. Walnut hulls can be used as a dye and make everything a nice warm brown color. Although this is a wonderful natural dye for fabric and wool, it is not great for skin unless you like an uneven brown tone on your hands. It will not wash off, so plan for a week or more with your hands in this condition. Again, wear gloves.

After picking up the hulled nuts, let them dry again in the greenhouse for several days. The nuts can keep for a significant period of time at this stage. Mesh bags that ten pounds of oranges come in are a nice ventilated bag to store the nuts while drying. After drying, some people wash them off in a bucket of water to remove the additional pieces of hull or dust that remains. You can also just shake the bag to rattle off some of the remaining dried bits of hull. This makes the cracking process a little cleaner.

Now the most difficult part. Cracking the nuts. Black walnuts are one of the most difficult to crack because of the hard shells. Really hard. It is worth the investment to buy a good lever action nutcracker made especially for black walnuts. This will create enough leverage to actually crack the nut without crushing all of the nut meats. Just such a nutcracker is available from www.lehmans.com for about $40.

Lastly pick out the nuts. Black walnuts do not come out in good halves like pecans or English walnuts but you can get some sizable chunks. The flavor is worth every crumb. The best tool for picking out the small pieces is a dental pick which is readily available at most pharmacies.

The flavor of black walnuts is woodsy and earthy, rich with distinctive flavor. Black walnut ice cream is a delicious treat or try adding some to your favorite fudge recipe.

What other recipes would you recommend for black walnuts?

Persimmon Pulp

Now that the frost has sweetened the persimmons and seeds have been cut for winter forecasting, it is time to make pulp.

Pulping is a problem. Wild persimmons are small and full of seeds. I have tried several methods none of which are satisfactory. The Juice Mate clogs, a colander smears the pulp around inside and not through the holes. I usually resort to using my hands. This is a messy proposition at best.

A neighbor reports using a food mill finding this a reasonably efficient way to extract pulp from the skin and seeds. I am going to try this method for the ones stored in the refrigerator. I would be willing to collect more and develop more recipes if the pulp was easier to obtain.

Persimmon and black walnut would be a great, timely pairing for fall foods at Five Feline Farm.

What methods do you use to extract persimmon pulp? Do you have a favorite persimmon recipe?

Please share in the comments section.

Making Herb Butter

Five Feline Farm produces not only vegetables and fruit but an array of herbs to complement any dish. Unfortunately, the growing season is coming to a close in Central Illinois, so it is time to pick some herbs to be held over for winter use.

Herbs can be dried and stored in glass jars or chopped and frozen in ice cube trays. Both of these methods provide a warmth of flavor to winter meals enhanced by knowing there are no fertilizers or pesticides. The down side to dried herbs is a bit of a change in the flavor. Fresh flavor is diminished and although superior to herbs bought in plastic shaker, it is still a dried herb.

Herbs frozen in ice cube trays offer an advantage of holding onto some of the fresh flavor, but the cubes tend to frost over and stick together in time. Plus the added bit of water can be undesirable.

Both of these methods have a place, but recently I started making herb butters to preserve and utilize fresh herbs. Wrapped in waxed paper and sealed in freezer bags these have kept for several weeks. Since butter freezes well, it seems that herb butters should also freeze well.

To start, wash and air dry the herbs. Select a handful of herbs to snip into tiny pieces. Judge both the size of the pieces and the amount of herb by what you would want to find in your finished dish.

Mix the herb thoroughly in one stick of softened butter.

Spread the butter into a rough log about 2 inches from the edge of the waxed paper.

Fold the waxed paper over the log and lightly squeeze into a log.

Roll up the log in the paper and twist the ends.

Label and store in a freezer bag.

To use, unwrap and slice off the amount desired.

The freezer now contains butters with chives, basil, oregano, thyme, curry and rosemary. The options for using these butters is only limited by the cook’s imagination. A slice of chive butter on a baked potato or a bit of basil butter melting over sautéed chicken breast will warm the winter months with a reminder of summer.

What would you put herb butter on? Drop us a comment with your ideas.

Beneficial Weeds

A new look at weeds
A weed is a weed is a weed. Except when it is a useful tool around the Farm. We look at weeds differently now that we are living in the country and striving to be more sustainable.

Weeds as food
Certain weeds with attractive flowers are visited by bees collecting nectar. They also collect the pollen. Some people will tell you the honey made from classic allergen weeds such as ragweed and goldenrod helps reduce allergy symptoms. We have sold some honey to individuals using it specifically for this purpose. (Disclaimer: we are not purporting that our honey is an allergy treatment.) There was a time that we would have tried to eradicate all ragweed and goldenrod, Queen Anne’s lace and others to allow for more purposeful plants. Now we encourage these to be part of the landscape.

The same is true for some of the invasive shrubs. We do work to keep these under control but the wild olive, wild cherry and false honeysuckle are also beneficial to the bees.

Plants as decoys
We have learned through experience and observation that Japanese beetles prefer some weeds, e.g. pigweed to the vegetable plants. We reduce the weed level in the garden but do not eliminate entirely. This balance helps both the garden and the gardener. Chemicals are not needed to control Japanese beetles when they have a weed to eat.