Recipes.

I've been thinking about recipes this morning - well, about food, which led me to recipes.  I think about food a lot.  Especially when I am on a diet or, in this case, trying out my non-gluten trial.  You know how it goes -- there is to be NO bread, wheat, fillers, etc., in your diet for six weeks and ALL you want are any and all of the former.  I thought I would try to come up with some recipes that would perk me up while allowing me to stay the course of this non-gluten trial. 

I trotted over to my kitchen island where I have a thick stack of recipes that have caught my fancy on the Internet.  Alot of them are from reading all of your blogs, and a lot of them are from Alana Kellogg's site.  I am especially drawn to vegetarian fare in the summer with its glut of fresh vegetables (read: zucchini).  I also have a sizable cookbook collection.  And I have two recipe card boxes.  And I have a ring binder of mostly tried and true recipes.  And I have my Great Aunt Edie's ancient, falling-apart recipe book that is nearly a hundred years old.  Hmm.  Maybe, if I cooked my way through my recipe cards,  GAE's old binder, my binder, all my cookbooks, and all my printouts, then blogged about it, someone would make it into a movie!  Ah, but, by then, I'd be long gone.  Besides, who would they cast as me, now that Katherine Hepburn is long gone?

Back to subject.  When I opened my recipe card boxes and pulled out those dog-eared index cards and "From the Kitchen of" cards, it was so completely enjoyable!  I spent a good hour going through them, remembering people now long gone who had passed on their special dishes.  Remembering all the dinner parties and patio parties where I first tasted them.  It made me realize that the Age of Internet has really taken the sweetness out of savoring memories.  Got a dozen giant zucchinis in your fridge?  Google "zucchini recipes" and get a zillion hits in a nanosecond.  Or....leaf through the Vegetables section of your recipe box and find JaneAnn's Million Dollar Zucchini Cake.  I mean, really, which would you like to do?  I'm going through my print-outs to ferret out the recipes that I will actually try.  The rest will become scratch paper.  Then I am going to work my way through GAE's recipe binder - heaven help me, I'll probably have to go into a sterile environment and wear gloves, it's so fragile.  But there has to be SOMETHING in there I can eat!  Maybe Ruth's Divine Luncheon Salad?

A Walk in the Woods with Euell.

Risking a major jinx, I believe the Dreaded Winter is behind us.  I am not kidding myself that I have spring to look forward to -- we will just get deluge after deluge, then it will be hot and humid.  Apparently, that is now spring.  But things are starting to pop up.  GREEN things (gasp).  And this is the time I pull out my old faithful, new-to-me copy of Stalking the Wild Asparagus.  My original copy - purchased when I was a freshman in college (no, not the original edition, thank you, but darn close) - had been held together with tape, then packing tape, then duct tape.  It finally bit the dust when a cat knocked it off the bookshelf and the pages went their own individual ways.  I love this book.  For me, it makes every spring and summer a great adventure - trying to identify wild food. 

Thanks to Carolyn Renee at Krazo Acres, a blogger that I follow, I am now on the lookout for Henbit.  I also have my secret morel patch that I am hoping is still there next month.  And there are so many other wonderful groceries on Mother Nature's shelves that I haven't yet tried.

What is your favorite go-to book on foraging for wild foods?  What treasures have you come across?

To be PC, or not to be PC

I'm always surprised at how quickly a discussion on the subject of which breed of chicken is best to raise for meat can escalate into an argument.  There seem to be two camps - The Slow Grower Camp and the Cornish X Camp.  We'll condense them down to initials to save my poor carpal-tunnel-inflicted hands.  The SGC seem to feel that CX are Frankenbirds, a cruel mutant breed concocted in the labs of some cold, unfeeling megacorp.  While it's true that they are not the most appealing birds, they are not so horrible.  The chicks are as cute as any chicks.  They just grow at an amazingly rapid rate.  The SGC feel it is more natural, more humane, to raise only breeds that take their time, growing large and meaty at a much slower rate.  The CXC seem to feel that the SGC are a bunch of tree-hugging ninnies (kidding!!!!).  Why on earth would you continue to feed, water, house, and protect meat birds for weeks and weeks?  Where is the profit in that?  The CXC are proud of the fact that they can go from 0 to 5 pounds, cleaned and dressed in a little over 8 weeks, while the SGC are still filling up feeders for another 4+ weeks.  As for me, I tend to be wishy-washy on the subject.  I also tend to fall for whatever compelling story someone tells me in defense of any number of farming topics.  This year, I did not listen to my friend Marianne, who swears by the CX.  She sits squarely in the middle of the CXC.  Instead, I decided to raise Slow White and Slow Red meat chickens.  That was my first mistake.  There was no "breed" name attached to the chick descriptions.  These were ordered from a local feed store and they are about as generic as they can be.  As you can tell by the picture (this was taken today at approximately 8 weeks of age - pardon the chicken wire view) the Red cockerels are twice the size of the Whites, while the red pullets are lightweights, too.  Just look at the legs to get a sense of the size/wt. difference.  As a matter of fact, I am getting suspicious that they've foisted some White Leghorns on me.  At this rate, I will be raising the red pullets and white whatevers for another 6 months!  I've decided to hedge my bets and will also raise some CX this summer.

     As far as the flavor factor, every CX I've either raised or purchased from a local farmer has been excellent - large, tender and full of flavor.  Last year I raised some French Reds - another Slow Grower - and, while they took much longer to reach butchering weight, they were equally tender and large.  And their flavor was more 'chicken-y', if you know what I mean.  Given my overloaded schedule, small acreage and the price of grain, I think I will stick to the CX.  It's work enough to keep them fed, safe and happy for 8 weeks.