I thought I might just pop in a photography post this week – a few shots of our little vegetable garden, which I reckon is coming along nicely. Course, that all seems a little too nice, polite and pretty.. so lets through in some fire too (grilled gluten free pizza). Jolly good show.
Happy summer everyone!
There has to be something said for a recipe that combines the two big culinary focuses in my life – seafood and charcuterie (curing, preserving). Salt cod takes care of that.
Salt cod is one of those ingredients that I hardly ever use. In fact, come to think of it I have never done anything with it in my home kitchen. It is always on the menu in some form at a favorite local restaurant of mine, where it is impossible for me to have dinner there and not order something salty and fishy.
I got thinking the other day, and wondered how hard it would be to make. Turns out it is bloody easy. Easier than breathing. Well, almost. You know a dish is going to be easy when the name of it is also the full ingredient list.
Yes folks – to make salt cod you need… drum roll, no guessing now…:
salt.
cod.
BINGO! Well now, that can’t be too hard. Heck, I reckon even Sandra Lee makes stuff with more ingredients than that.
Click to see more photos, and read how to make this classic cured fish recipe
Blame this post on some Twitter friends that assured me it would be interesting.
When you cure meat you have to learn a thing or two about ingredients that don’t come up much in regular cooking. I don’t know about you, but I never cooked much with dry milk powder, dextrose, or peculiar sections of beef intestines. I can say without a doubt that I never dealt with nitrites/nitrates before making moldy meat in my garage.
So I thought it might be kinda fun, in a food history geeky kind of way, to look at why nitrites/nitrates are used in meat curing, the effects and benefits they have, their health implications, and natural sources of nitrites. We will talk a bit about botulism poisoning too, just for giggles.
I have a somewhat recent love affair on buckwheat. It seems like savory crepes (galettes) are all the rage here in Seattle, and almost all of them have a proportion of buckwheat in them. This is traditional to the area of France where they were apparently first developed – Brittany. Buckwheat has this lovely rich brown color, and a very distinctive nutty flavor all to its own. Even though the name might be misleading, it isn’t a wheat and is gluten free (watch out however for cross contamination in fields and processing if you are highly sensitive to gluten).
Click to read more, see photos and get this Buckwheat pancake recipe
