Norteño eating

  A tip of the hat to Forager Chef Alan Bergo. This is Bergo's forager pub cheese recipe, adapted to lacto-fermented mushroom juice. Check out his website at www.foragerchef.com, and consider buying his book, The Forager Chef's Book of Flora: Recipes and Techniques for Edible Plants from Garden, Field And Forest. It's a keeper. As an artisan baker, I am also, always, a sucker for a good schmear. This most definitely qualifies.  Pub cheese and friends 4 oz. cream cheese, softened. 8 oz grated sharp cheddar or other cheese of your liking. 2 small or one large minced garlic clove 1/2 cup sour cream a splash of hot sauce 2 tablespoons lactofermented suillus or bolete juice OK, so put the cream cheese and cheddar in your food processor and wizz it up. You will need to scrape down the sides a time or two. Add the sour cream, garlic, hot sauce and mushroom juice. Process until it is a smooth and homogeneous spread. The juice contributes a flavor that is only background in shroomin

  Frozen chickenfats We are fortunate to have, where I live, a great profusion of suillus mushrooms, locally called "slippery jacks," during the mushroom season. Russians, who I think have a greater appreciation of mushrooms, call these fungi "chickenfats," possibly because of their color. My fondness for them is, locally anyway, a minority opinion. Most foragers walk right past the chickenfats because they have a high water content and, when just thrown in a pan and sauteed, have a sort of slimy consistency that many find offputting. Their loss, and a gain for those of us who know what to do with our chickenfats! So one option is to go with the texture. Saute and serve them up with an escargot butter and the texture will be right at home. Another is to harvest and dry them. I have found that when reconstituted, the chickenfats have lost any textural issues and have, on top of that, a fuller funkier flavor than their more respectable bolete cousins. The third way, i

 I reactivated this blog to share a renewed vision and enthusiasm for the potentials of a local cuisine, inspired by several groundbreaking chefs including Rene Redzepi, Alan Bergo (The Forager Chef) and Pascal Bauder. What is a local cuisine? There is no cut and dried answer to that question. One sense of the phrase is, the foods and preparation methods traditionally employed by the multi-generational inhabitants of a locale or bioregion, and that interpretation deserves respect. Another definition of local cuisine might be, the exploration and development of a vocabulary of flavor based on locally found ingredients. Obviously, between the two, there is overlap, and I am interested in exploring all interpretations, but I do see a great adventure in the latter. I am particularly interested in what I think of as foundational ingredients. I might define foundational ingredients as those which provide a basic flavor palette for  a local cuisine. So chiles, red and green, are foundational

 The one-seed juniper, juniperus monospermum, grows in abundance around my community here in northern New Mexico. You may have had commercial dried juniper berries, used in brines and similar, and you may know they provide the dominant, resinous flavor in gin. But the ripe berries of the one-seed juniper, fresh, are sweet, juicy, as well as having that familiar gin flavor and aroma. Yes, sweet! The favored food of the bluebird in this habitat. The little fellows gorge on juniper berries and then perch on fencelines and poop out the seeds, which is why you see so many young junipers growing along fencelines here. "Yeah, thanks for the botany lesson but why should I care?" Because they're yummy and abundant and we can DO things with them. I have a mason jar of juniper berry syrup in the works and I'll let you dear readers know how that turns out when it is finished, but this type of syrup takes a month or two. But for now, the juniper salt. Imagine a juniper-infused sa

Just jarred up a batch of forager chef Alan Bergo's lactofermented radish and onion shmaltz.  Yeah, it's weird, and yeah, it's unexpectedly yummy and addicting. I expect the texture to improve once it chills in the fridge. Roughly a pound and a half of radishes and onions are shredded or finely sliced, combined with two percent salt by weight, and vacuum sealed. They are left out at room temperature for a week or so until the bag swells up with gas and the veg is lactofermented.  The radish-onion mix is then squeezed to remove excess juice, and put in a blender. Liquid schmaltz (rendered chicken fat) is drizzled in and wizzed up with the veg mixture until the mixture becomes a homogenous spreadable paste.  Next time, I will use a food processor for the blending, as I had to release the blades on the blender multiple times before this was done. I realized only after re-reading Bergo's recipe that I had omitted raw garlic (1 tablespoon full) from the ferment. So maybe

Sweet white clover (melilotus albus) grows all over this area (Las Vegas, NM.) It is widely regarded as a weed, but the truth is, this is one wonderful plant. A nitrogen fixer, bee candy, and really an amazing culinary herb as well. Sweet white clover is high in coumarin, the same chemical that gives that sort of perfumy note to cinnamon. Here's a recipe that is easy and which showcases the wonderful flavor of this common roadside herb. INGREDIENTS foliage and blossoms from three or four branches of sweet white clover 1/2 cup sugar 1 stick (1/2 cup) unsalted butter 1 cup all purpose flour 1/4 cup cornstarch In a food processor, combine the sweet white clover and sugar, and process until the leaves and blossoms are incorporated and the sugar is flecked with green. Cream the butter and sugar together. Add the flour and cornstarch and work with your hands until the mixture becomes a cohesive, smooth dough. Shape into a log, wrap in plastic and stick in the fridge for several hou