Yummy Mango’s and FoodBuzz fun!

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More yummy mango’s for breakfast. I really can’t get enough these! I’ve introduced them to my family for a couple years now and have really been enjoying these smaller ones from Mexico. They’ve recently showed up in my grocer’s aisle and I’ve been buying them up! Juicy and sweet :)


What’s your favorite way to eat a mango? Any other tropical fruits I should know about?

Recently, I have been having so much fun finding amazing cultural food blogs on foodbuzz.com. I recently became a featured publisher and through that have met many people throughout the WORLD, creating and sharing their recipes. I’m a type of person that loves to find authentic recipes that have been passed down from generation to generation. It becomes much more than just a recipe and food, but history, family, and tradition! I wanted to share a few of these blogs that I know you’ll enjoy.

Dil Se… – Traditional Recipes from India. This gal is so cute and shares her family recipes.

My Columbian Recipes – Authentic Colombian recipes with beautiful photos.

I love flavour, me! – Traditional Portuguese Recipes. Ruth has such great recipes that she shares from her family.

Everythings Herbed – Traditional Philipino food

Arabic Bites – Authetic Arabic Cuisine

Hummingbird Appetite – Traditional Korean Recipes

I’m still finding new blogs everyday. If you have a blog from your home country or family or you know of one, please comment and leave me your address. I would like to start a cultural foods blog list!

For next week, I’m planning on sharing a recipe on Spanish flan and enchiladas and homemade beans and rice passed down from my Mexican grandmother. It’s cooking right now and smells so GOOD!!! As alway’s, Happy Cooking!

Apricot and Mango Crumble on Foodista

In the Garden, 6-15-09

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Our rainy weather has been overwhelming to my Spring garden. My plot in the community garden soaks up way too much water. Next year I will build raised beds in it. It’s to difficult to sit and have to watch my lovely plants soak up way to much water, yellow, and then fail to produce the harvest that I was hoping for. The plants are stuck in a sort of sleep and aren’t growing like they should be. A week and a half ago, I planted 6 more tomato plants in leu of spinach that failed to grow. Now the tomato plants have turned purple and are waiting for warmer weather. I’m sure they will be very late to harvest, if at all.

On the upside my summer plots at my parent’s home are doing wonderful. My tomato plants and peppers are growing beautifully. I’ve never seen such beautiful foliage on my tomato plants. The Heirloom varieties have leaves unlike any found at your local nursery or garden center. I’ve also been excited to watch my beans grow. They took about a week and a half to germinate, but once they sprouted, they took off! I’m growing purple and yellow varieties. Next week I’ll plant two more rows in order to have a sucession of plantings. My zuchinni, yellow squash and eggplants are also doing very well. I also planted radishes and they seem to be doing much better than the radishes I planted in my community plot two weeks before.

I’ve been following a blog called Skippy’s Vegetable Garden. (She has a great planting calendar for you to use!) I alway’s get inspired by visiting this site. A down to earth woman that loves to garden. I’m definitely going to take her lead and start utilizing more raised beds. Especially in my community plot! I’ve learned from Skippy’s that I should start a garden journal in order to learn from past mistakes and to remember successes. I plant to do this next year. To create a planting calendar and start tracking what I’m doing in the dirt :) I also realized that I could use a couple more raised beds. Next year I’d like to build a couple more on the south side of my house and utilize them for lettuces, garlic and onions.

Below is my garden update in pictures.

Summer Plots at Mami’s and Papi’s

I’m excited to document this bed as it grows. Yellow squash, zuchinni, beans, eggplants and radishes. All heirloom and spanish varieties.

Spanish Variety Eggplant

Heirloom Beans

Zuchinni

Yellow Squash – Early Golden Summer Crookneck

My girls! I still find it hard to believe I started these from tiny seeds!

Amish Paste

Brandywine

Italian Heirloom – Notice the enlarged leaves, absolutely beautiful!

Peppers

Spanish Padron Peppers and Nasturtiums

Franklin Community Garden Plots

My strawberry plot has been prolific!

My spring plot. As you can tell all the rain has made my plants start to yellow :(

Fava Beans

Broccoli – I think I need to harvest this as I noticed some yellow in the head.
Can anyone share if I should wait for the head to get larger?

Peas – They have started to flower, but now all this rain is turning them yellow :(


Chamomile

Onions – They also do NOT like all of this water!

Hopefully, if the rain will let up, these plants will still have a chance to produce. Next year, it’s definitely raised beds! I also have some containers in my backyard filled with beets and carrots that are doing well! I didn’t have a chance or space to plant melons and cucumbers. As soon as I pull up my peas, I’ll throw in a couple cucumber plants and pole variety beans. I’ll have another update within a couple of weeks.

Monday’s with Mami – Puchero y Caldo

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With fresh chickens in the deep freeze, I wanted to make a batch of chicken stock. In Spain my family makes an amazing meal in a pot called Puchero. Soup bones of beef with marrow, ham and chicken are added to enrich the soup and create a stock. After the meal is eaten, the stock is reserved and saved for other meals. Here in the states, my mother came up with our own form of puchero simply using chicken since beef bones and jamon serrano are not readily available. Though delicious in it’s own right, it will never compare to what my Abuela Rora makes in Sevilla. (Lord willing, when we visit next summer, I’ll be able to feature Monday’s with Abuela Rora!)

Puchero y Caldo

Ingredients

  • 1 whole farm fresh chicken
  • feet from the chicken (optional)
  • 1 cup garbanzo beans
  • 1 gallon water
  • splash of vinegar
  • 1 onion cut into 4 sections
  • 3 carrots cut into thirds
  • 3 celery sticks cut into thirds
  • 3-4 potato’s cut up into small pieces
  1. Soak Garbanzo beans overnight
  2. Cut up the chicken, reserving the back bone
  3. In a large stainless steel pot, add the cut up chicken, including the back bone and feet if you have them.
  4. Add 1 gallon of water and begin to simmer your pot on high heat
  5. Add a splash of vinegar, garbanzo’s, onion, carrots and celery sticks.

  6. Bring your pot to a boil. Once boiling, skim off the scum that floats to the top of the pot.
  7. Turn your heat to low and simmer for 8 hours up to 24 hours. The longer you simmer, the more flavor your stock will have.
  8. 20 minutes before serving, add the potato’s to the stock.
    This recipe is for both the puchero and stock. If you are only wanting to make the puchero, you’ll only need half the amount of water and would only need to be slow cooked anywhere from 4-8 hours. If you are only wanting to make chicken stock, omit the garbanzo beans and potato’s

That’s really it! Once the puchero with stock is done, serve right away. I alway’s drizzle my puchero with olive oil and a splash of apple cider vinegar. So comforting!

Once the meal is eaten, drain the stock through a colander and reserve in pint size (2 cups) mason jars leaving an inch from the top and freeze. Now you have homemade chicken stock to use for future meals. SIMPLE!

Our day on Coyote Run Farm – Estilo Andaluz!

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* Please be aware some of the pictures below are graphic.

This Past Sunday Gabe and I did the unexpected and traveled to Lacona, IA to help Coyote Run Farm on a chore. The chore? Well… May sound gruesome, but we went to help butcher 100 laying hens that were past their prime. Meaning, they are no longer laying eggs or slowing way down. Why on Earth would we ever want to do that for? Well, FREE chicken meat! That was the deal. Come and help and in exchange we were offered a farm fresh meal and free range chickens that we helped slaughter. I really couldn’t say no to the deal since farm fresh chickens are usually around $12 a hen. I was really surprised when Gabe agreed to go and really didn’t seem like the idea bothered him at all. I was kind of hoping he would have laughed at the suggestion but when he agreed I bit the bullet and signed us up.

I’m really glad we went. It was work but at the same time, Gabe and I now know how to process our own chickens. In the future we would like to raise our own broilers and process them ourselves. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be, but they also weren’t my chickens. I had no attachment to them. It was really cool talking to Patrick, one of the owners of Coyote Run. I asked him if it was difficult to butcher his own chickens. He told me that yes, it was, but it’s part of what you have to do if you’re going to eat meat. It was harder for him to take some of his turkeys a few years back to a locker where the person culling and butchering his babies showed no compassion for the birds. They were stressed, often thrown about in pools of blood. Doing it on the farm, he said, he knows that he’s creating the best stress free environment for the birds before culling them quickly.

I was so glad to be able to visit the farm. It was absolutely beautiful. 100 acres where they grow enough produce to sell at the downtown farmers market every Saturday morning. They also have mules, cows and of course chickens. Each animal has acres upon acres to pasture on. The chickens themselves have 5 acres of pasture and they’re opening more for them. They are also growing alfalfa and making their own hay. We were only able to tour a small piece of the farm, but from what we saw, I would definitely make sure to stop by Coyote Run on Saturday mornings and buy some farm fresh, free range eggs and beef!

After a long day of pulling feathers and processing, we were treated to an amazing farm fresh meal prepared by Steve Logsdon, owner of Basil Prosperi’s Lucca in the East Village of Des Moines. Coyote Run grows tomato’s and other veggies specially for this restaurant. So make sure to stop by as they support family farms and local food. The meal was amazing and to top it off we were treated to homemade ice cream made from Lois Reichert’s (Reicherdt’s Dairy Air) goat milk. Lois herself was helping process chickens! It was a fun time. We met some great people and left with 8 chickens for the deep freeze.

I think the coolest part for me was speaking to my aunts and grandmother Rora in Spain about this. When I told them they were so excited. All they could say was, “Anda!! Estilo Andaluz!”

These are my pictures that I would I like to share :) Please be aware that some of them are graphic. I totally understand that this is definitely not for everyone, Praise the Lord for lockers!

Step 1: The Cull

Step 2: Defeather
Once the chicken was culled, it was dunked in a huge pot of boiling water. The chicken was dunked in and out for about a minute and a half which made the feathers pretty much slide off.

Step 3: Gutting the chicken
You can see Lois Reichert getting rid of all the insides.

Step 4: Final Wash
Once the chicken was feathered and gutted it was cleaned out with water and then sent to a cooler to sit in ice.

That was it. It took us about 4 hours to get through 100 chickens. After they were all processed, Patrick from Coyote Run Farm gave us a mini tour.

Chickens! The chickens are tended to so well at Coyote Run. With five acres to pasture and more on the way, these chickens are living the good life. Not only is this good for them but also for anyone eating these nourished filled eggs. If you’ve never had an egg from Coyote Run, I would suggest you give them a try. The yolks are a deep orange, firm and round. The whites are clear and thick. A sure sign of an egg filled with nutrients. These pictures will explain why these eggs are so rich!

This chicken was explained to us as having some sort of developmental problem. However, Patrick from Coyote Run, explained to us that although there are sure problems, she is a sweet girl! Most places would have culled a chicken like this, Patrick on the other hand, has decided to keep her since she’s such a sweetie :)

Farmers Market Produce. Coyote Run’s veggies are amazingly beautiful!!

Our farm fresh meal. A perfect way to end the day.

June 9, Happy Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day!

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Although I’m not a big sweets person, I couldn’t think of a better time to use up my freshly picked strawberries and locally grown rhubarb than National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day. I didn’t bake a pie, (As I’m still a clutz at baking!) so I made a much simpler cobbler. It was simply YUMM!

Happy Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day!

Strawberry Rhubarb Cobbler

Ingredients

For the filling

  • 1lb rhubarb
  • 1/4 cup raw honey
  • 1 tbsp. spelt flour
  • 1 1/2 cups strawberries

For the dough

  • 1 cup spelt flour
  • 1 1/2 tbsp. raw honey
  • 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder
  • pinch of salt
  • 4 tbsp. chilled butter cut in pieces
  • 1/2 c. plain or homemade yogurt
  1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
  2. Butter 9 x 13 inch baking dish.
  3. Dice rhubarb. Toss with honey and flour, put in baking dish and place in oven for 7 minutes while preparing cobbler dough.
  4. For cobbler dough mix flour, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter. Stir in honey and yogurt just until moistened (Don’t overmix).
  5. Remove rhubarb from oven and mix in strawberries.
  6. Place cobbler dough on top of rhubarb and strawberries.
  7. Bake at 400 degrees for 20-25 minutes. Serve warm.

Monday’s with Mami – Caldo Gallego

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I was so excited to find a huge bunch of turnip greens for $1 at the Downtown Farmers Market. SCORE!! I knew right away that I wanted to use them to make a Caldo Gallego before the summer heat really sets in. Turnip Greens are the greens that grow above the root of the turnip. Many people compost them and eat the root. However, the turnip greens are supercharged with nutrients. Vitamins A, K, C, folate, calcium, iron and many more!

This recipe is the traditional soup of Galicia. The Turnip Greens are slightly bitter, similar to Brocolli Rabe or Mustard Greens. When cooked down and wilted it lends itself to the smooth and creamy texture of the white beans and potatoes yet empowered by the boldness of the chorizo sausage. It’s delicious and another one of my favorite peasant dishes. Like most Spanish potajes and soups, it’s even better the next day.

Caldo Gallego

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound thickly sliced pancetta or slab bacon, cut into 1/4-inch dice
  • 1 cup dried white beans, soaked overnight in water to cover
  • 1 large onion, cut into 1/2-inch dice
  • 2 potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch dice
  • 2 turnips, peeled and cut into 1/2 inch dice
  • 1/2 pound Spanish chorizo, casings removed and sliced thinly
  • 1 lb turnip greens (or other dark leafy green), stemmed and coarsely chopped
  1. Cook the pancetta in a large heavy pot over medium heat until most of the fat is rendered, 8-10 minutes.
  2. Drain the beans, add them to the pot, along with enough water to cover them by 2 inches, and bring to a boil. Skim off the foam, then lower the heat and simmer gently, partially covered, for 45 minutes, or until the beans are beginning to soften.
  3. Add the onions, potatoes, and turnips and cook for 20 minutes, or until the vegetables are softened.
  4. Add the chorizo and greens and cook for 10 minutes, or until the greens are tender.