Norteño eating

 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 foun...

 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 ...