Wild Rice Harvest Pilaf

It’s funny how tastes change — when I was a kid, I used to hate wild rice (I thought of it as “funny rice,” and I don’t mean funny in a good way), but now it’s one of my favorites. Granted, what we see called “wild” rice is actually a cultivated variety grown in California; in contrast, the real “wild” stuff actually grows wild along the shoreline of the Great Lakes, most notably in Minnesota. Still, though, cultivated wild rice has a grassy, nutty flavor that makes it stand out. If you’re dining with folks who may be newcomers to the wild rice scene, you might want to blend wild and brown rice half-and-half as I’ve done here. That’ll tame the flavor a bit as well as create a visually appealing speckled look.

Since wild rice has a slightly longer cooking time and absorption rate than standard rice varieties (black, purple, brown, red), it’s best to cook each in its own pot. That way you can be 100% sure that you’ll wind up with the ideal texture for each. One nice quirk about wild rice is that it’s considerably less sticky than other rices, making it the perfect candidate for pilafs and other rice dishes that you want to be fluffy and light-textured. (Long-grained rice varieties are naturally less sticky; short-grained are so much stickier in comparison that they’re often called “sticky” rice.) Mixing wild rice with any other variety will amp up the fluffy-and-light factor.

Wild Rice Harvest Pilaf
Serves 4 for a main course or up to 8 as a side.

1 cup raw wild rice
1/2 cup raw brown rice
4 cups chicken or vegetable broth, divided
3 green onions, minced
2 carrots, chopped or sliced into thin rounds
1/4 cup dried cranberries
2 tsp. dried sage (or 1 T. if you’re a huge sage fan)
1 tsp. sea salt
1/2 cup sliced almonds

Place the wild rice in one medium pot and add 3 cups of broth. Bring to a boil uncovered, stir well, and then reduce heat to lowest setting and cover. Simmer for 40-45 minutes or until grains are starting to pop — they’ll split and reveal their white innards — and have reached a texture you like. I tend to like my rice a little on the chewy side.

While the wild rice is cooking, place the brown rice and 1 cup broth in another medium pot. Bring to a boil uncovered, stir well, and then reduce heat to lowest setting. Stir in green onions, carrots, cranberries, sage, and salt and cover. Simmer for 30-35 minutes or until the grains have reached a texture you like. Ditto for me on the chewiness.

While the rices are simmering, toast the almonds: spread them out in a large dry skillet over medium heat. Dry-toast the nuts, shaking the pan occasionally to prevent any scorched spots, for 4-5 minutes or until almonds are fragrant and have turned golden-brown. Slide them onto a cool plate and let sit until the rices are done.

When the rices have reached their desired tenderness — the wild rice will need to be drained, but the brown will be perfect as is — scoop both rices into a large bowl. Add toasted almonds and toss gently. Season with freshly cracked pepper and additional salt if desired.

This makes a nice winter side dish to take along to holiday parties. It holds well at room temp for several hours and can be kept for up to a week in the fridge.

Enjoy!

Cranberry Ice Cream with Cranberry, Apple & Orange Chutney

I don’t have many fancy gadgets in the kitchen — sous-vide cooking and flavored foams just seem like too much work to me — but I consider my ice cream maker to be an indispensable culinary aid. Ditto for my blender. If you have those two kitchen helpers, making ice cream becomes ridiculously easy. Not only can you upgrade your ice cream by using high-quality ingredients (dairy from grass-fed cows, natural sweeteners, etc.), you can let your imagination run wild and you can make whatever flavor you want. Avocado and coconut? Done. Creamed corn with cinnamon? Sure. The scoop is yours.

Seeing as Thanksgiving is just around the corner and ’tis the season for every market to showcase cranberries in all their crimson glory, I thought I’d give cranberry ice cream a shot. And because I had the delicious joy of sampling ice cream made with blackberries and buttermilk when I was in Germany earlier this year, I decided that I’d use a similar approach for this batch. (Tip for travelers: if you are in Konstanz, visit the Aran coffeehouse + ice cream shop!! The Touch of Singapore restaurant is another must-taste destination in Konstanz.)

You can serve the ice cream all on its own or you can serve it with the chutney as I’ve done here. Or serve the chutney all on its own — I originally came up with the chutney because I wanted to serve a tastier and healthier version of the time-honored but sugar-drenched cranberry & orange dish that’s typically offered at the Thanksgiving table. Rather than white sugar, this chutney features apples, ginger, and a touch of honey.

Cranberry Ice Cream with Cranberry, Apple & Orange Chutney

For the ice cream:
1 1/2 cups buttermilk, preferably from grass-fed cows
4 egg yolks that you don’t mind eating raw (I always stick with eggs from pastured hens)
1 cup fresh or frozen cranberries
1/2 cup maple syrup
1 tsp. almond OR vanilla extract

For the chutney:
12 oz. fresh or frozen cranberries
1 large apple, chopped
1 seedless orange, peeled and split into segments
1 tsp. ginger
1 to 2 T. honey or to taste
Apple cider (optional)

To make the ice cream, place all ingredients in a blender and blend until smooth. Pour into an ice cream maker and follow manufacturer instructions.

To make the chutney, place all ingredients in a medium pot and simmer over medium-low heat for 20 minutes or until thickened, stirring and smashing the chutney occasionally to help the orange segments release their juice and the apples and cranberries release their pectin. (Pectin thickens as it cooks.) Add another drizzle of honey or a splash of cider if you’d like your chutney to be sweeter. Serve with the ice cream, on its own, or even on a cheese plate or with a helping of turkey or chicken.

Enjoy!

Teff & Cranberry Porridge

How can you tell if someone is a professional recipe developer? If they have a freezer full of cranberries from May to September. That’s because we have to work four to five months ahead to be seasonal when magazines hit the newsstands, which means we’re always in season out of season. Hence cranberries on hand during summer rather than fall/winter. (Another good way to tell if someone is a professional recipe developer is to mention the Great Pumpkin Shortage of 2010 and see how panicky she gets at the mere thought of trying to chase down non-existent canned pumpkin in May when trying to create Thanksgiving recipes…only to discover that the previous year’s crops had taken a tumble and virtually no stores had canned pumpkin in stock. We had to start calling our friends to see if anybody had leftover canned pumpkin stashed away in the pantry. Such are the trials and tribulations of the recipe creation world.)

But I digress: this post is really about easy breakfasts, not cranberries. I just used cranberries in my porridge because I have lots of them on hand. You can use whatever fruit you like. The real point today is to share a super-quick porridge recipe. Everyone is familiar with the idea of cooking oats for breakfast, but have you ever tried teff? The whole grains are so tiny — the world’s smallest, in fact — that they cook in 5 minutes. Just add your milk of choice (dairy, grain, nut, coconut, etc.) in a ratio of 2:1, simmer, and serve. Can’t get easier than that, especially now that teff is getting easier and easier to find. Whole Foods stocks it nationwide, many local grocers stock it (the Berkley Westborn started stocking it after I told the owner what a wonderful whole and gluten-free grain it is), and most health/whole food stores stock it. It’s crunchy, nutty, and can be purchased as a whole grain or a pre-ground flour, or you can grind the whole grain into a nice flour using your spice/coffee grinder (or a small food processor).

Teff & Cranberry Porridge
Makes enough for an individual serving; feel free to increase portions as you see fit.

1/2 cup whole milk (dairy, coconut, nut, grain, etc.)
1/4 cup teff
Handful cranberries or any other fruit
Maple syrup or date sugar (or any natural sweetener you like) for serving
Cinnamon (optional)

Bring milk to a simmer, then add teff and continue to simmer for 5 minutes, reducing heat to medium-low if the milk starts to bubble and go from a calm simmer to an angry boil. Milk froths up quite a bit when it boils, so keep a close eye on the stove and be ready to lift the pan from the burner and turn down the heat if necessary. You can either add the berries/fruit when you add the teff or you can stir them in at the end.

Stir in a dash of maple syrup and cinnamon before serving if you wish.

Enjoy!

Cherry, Blueberry & Cranberry Pie

It might be cheating to recommend one of your own recipes by saying, “Hey, my mom liked it!”, but when you’ve baked hundreds of things over the years (possibly thousands) and your mom tells you that your berry pie is the best thing you’ve ever baked, you tend to want to shout it from the rooftops.  So here I am on my virtual shingles:  this pie turned out really well!  (It’s also sugar-free and egg-free.)

Cherry, Blueberry & Cranberry Pie

Using a pastry blender (or scissor-cut with two knives), blend the following until you have coarse crumbs:

2 cups whole-wheat flour
1 tsp. sea salt
1/3 cup chilled organic butter (preferably from grass-fed cows)
1/3 cup chilled cold- or expeller-pressed coconut oil
Sprinkle in 4 T. of cold water and blend with your fingertips until the mixture forms a solid ball. (You may have to add another tablespoon or two of water.) The dough will still be crumbly and will fall apart easily, but you should be able to form it into a ball and let it rest without having it crumble into bits.  Making sure the butter and oil is chilled at the beginning will make the dough less sticky and easier to handle.

Combine in a bowl and let sit for 15 minutes:

20 oz. frozen fruit that has thawed, or roughly 2 1/2 cups (I used about 50% cherries, 25% blueberries, and 25% cranberries)
3 T. tapioca flour (you could also use potato flour or cornstarch)
1/2 cup agave nectar
1/8 tsp. sea salt

Preheat oven to 425 degrees F. Separate dough into halves and push one half into the bottom of a greased 9″ glass pie pan. (You could roll it out, too, but I found it easier to simply push the dough into place.) Pour in filling. Crumble remaining half of pie dough over the top. (Again, you could roll it out and then place it over the top, but if you do that, be sure to prick it thoroughly!)

Bake at 425 degrees F for 10 minutes, then reduce heat to 325 degrees and bake for another 45 minutes. Crust will be a golden brown when done.

When serving, you may wish to dust each slice with cinnamon and drizzle on one or two teaspoons of maple syrup. Greek yogurt and slices of fresh fruit would also make a nice topping.

Enjoy!

Cranberry Pineapple Relish

Whenever I indulge in grocery shopping (for a foodie like me, doing so really is an indulgence and not a chore), I like to talk to random strangers:  fellow shoppers, butchers, cheese mongers, the store employees who are arranging the fresh produce, the ones who are doing cooking demos and taste offerings.  You never know when you’ll get a great tip…and besides, social shopping is so much more fun than doing it solo.

This cranberry-pineapple relish is an idea I got from the Colavita lady–while we were chatting about exotic fruits, she mentioned that she serves cranberry-pineapple relish instead of the traditional cranberry-orange one at Thanksgiving time.  “What a great idea,” I thought, and resolved to give it a try.

I put some frozen cranberries and fresh pineapple in my little food processor, gave it a few zips, and voilá !  I had a refreshing, exotic alternative to a traditional favorite.  (If you like your fruit relish sweet, you may wish to add 1 tsp. of cane sugar per total cup of fresh fruit.)

This relish would also make a great substitute for butter-and-sugar-laden frosting, or you could serve it as a stand-alone dessert as I’ve done here.  You could also spoon it on top of toasted bread in place of jam.  (Perhaps with a bit of Greek yogurt for creaminess.)  And the presence of pineapples means the relish would pair particularly well with pork–just think of Hawaiian pizza!  Poultry, too, would fare well with this combination of tropical and North American fruits.

Ahh…yet another way to use pineapple.  You can never have too many!  My thanks to the Colavita lady for sharing her tip with me.

Cranberry Pumpkin Bread

With its mixture of ground flaxseed and almonds, this moist, tart-but-sweet pumpkin bread makes a nutritious and filling breakfast.  It can also become a tasty dessert if it’s topped with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and a drizzle of honey.

If you’d like to give a gift loaf to a friend, mix 2 tablespoons of powdered sugar with a dash of vanilla extract and little bit of milk or water (just enough to make a thick liquid) to make a quick decorative icing.  Let the icing drip off of a spoon and go back and forth over the loaf to make a zig-zag pattern.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Grease and flour a 9×5 loaf pan; set aside.

In a medium bowl, whisk together and then set aside:

1 cup whole-wheat flour
1/2 cup almond flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. salt
1 1/2 tsp. cinnamon
1 tsp. ginger
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves OR 1/2 tsp. allspice

Combine in a small bowl and then set aside:

1/3 cup almond milk
1/2 tsp. vanilla

In a large bowl, whisk together:

1/4 cup applesauce
1 cup sucanat

Whisk in one at a time:

2 eggs

Whisk in:

1 cup canned pumpkin (if you can find organic pumpkin, it’s worth the splurge; Trader Joe’s sells excellent organic canned pumpkin during the holiday season)

Add flour mixture and milk in three parts, alternating between the two.  Stir in:

1 cup cranberries (fresh or frozen)

If you’d like your loaf to be a bit sweeter, add:

3-4 chopped dates OR 1/3 cup raisins

Pour batter into greased pan and bake for 70 minutes. Check doneness with toothpick; if necessary, bake an additional 5 minutes and then check again.

Enjoy!

Cranberries are a familiar sight on the Thanksgiving table, whether served as a sauce or a relish.  They also pair well with chicken and pork.  Chutneys made with nuts–like the one below–are particularly tasty with a sharp, full-flavored cheese like Cheddar or Gouda.  Whether you use pears or apples in this recipe is up to you!

Cranberry-Pecan Chutney

Cranberry-Pecan Chutney

Serves four as a side side; recipe is easily doubled or tripled.

Place in a medium pot over medium heat:

1 cup whole cranberries (can be fresh or frozen)
2 large Bosc pears OR 2 large firm-fleshed apples (such as Gala or Fuji)
scant 1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup cider vinegar
1″ piece of ginger root, bark trimmed off and ginger cut into four pieces (you may want to poke a toothpick through each piece so it’s easier to remove before serving)
1 cinnamon stick
1 clove

Bring pot to a boil, stirring occasionally.  As soon as the mixture reaches a boil, turn heat down to low and simmer mixture for 15 minutes.

Remove from heat and stir in:  1/2 cup chopped pecans.  Remove ginger pieces right before serving. (Note:  this keeps well in the refrigerator, so feel free to increase the recipe.)

Optional:  Stir in 2 chopped dates OR 1/4 cup raisins OR 1/4 cup dried cranberries when you add the nuts.

Enjoy!