Salted Spruce Tips and Pine Infused Garlic Salt

...ood processor, or wear gloves as you chop! The stingers will fade when the plant dries out.) • Seaweed salt. Add some sesame seeds for furikake-like flavor • My favorite salt so far has been piñon pine with garlic. I need me some more piñon! What do you do with it? Herbed salts are nice on vegetables and popcorn. They can add that extra oomph to soups and stews. They can be used as meat rubs. They can be kept at table and sprinkled on everything....

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Epic Rants and Raves

...ld, and all winter in the study.’ And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events. and not be painful to his friends and fellow-men. The lessons of science should be experimental also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in the elbow, outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous oxide, the f...

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Weeds into Fertilizer

...d. Which reminds me that I want to try making dandelion wine this spring…. So many of the plants that people consider weeds, like dandelion and nettle, are nutritious and medicinal plants. My favorite part is that they are easy to grow and don’t need good soil, need no fertilizer and don’t require watering. Perfect....

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Instant Soup Stock=Happy Flavor Bomb

...t the stock base. I love this stuff. I use it all the time. It’s one of my favorite cooking staples. I want you to love it, too. What do you do with it? Well, we all know that stock makes everything taste better, and I do make and freeze stock, but that is a bit of a chore, and I end up being stingy with my stock, considering a recipe and wondering whether it is “stock worthy.” When you have instant stock in the fridge, you don’t have to hold back...

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Cichorium intybus a.k.a. Italian Dandelion

...t weaned taste buds some time to get used to the first time we tasted this plant. Changing the cooking water a few times if you boil Italian dandelion is one way to deal with the bitterness, but we prefer to just throw it together with some fat in a frying pan, such as olive oil and/or pancetta. We also add some hot pepper flakes for a nice hot counter-punch. Italian dandelion makes a good companion to balsamic vinegar marinated pork or game (squi...

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