Your Practical Guide To Self Reliant Living
We all have it. That favorite comfort food that eases the stress out of us after a particularly harrowing day. You’re thinking of yours right now… My favorite comfort food, fried brussels sprouts with sriracha aioli, comes from the appetizer menu of our local pub. I’ve been trying to recreate it at home for months, but clearly, I just needed the right stressful inspiration.
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I’m a serious apple pie fiend. I’ve tried it every way you can imagine, even the unconventional. Give me your old school lard crusts, and I love it. Make it savory by adding in sage and brie and it’ll be my dinner all week. When I came across a scrumptious summer recipe for blackcurrant shortbread squares, I decided to give it a fall dessert twist with using fresh apples. Thus, apple pie shortbread squares were born!
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My first home in Vermont had a huge patch of bee balm growing right outside my bedroom window. I’d wake up to a flurry of hummingbirds in the summer, arguing over the nectar inches from my window glass.
There was never a need to put up a hummingbird feeder, the bee balm took care of it for me and provided for endless hours of entertainment in the summer.
But bee balm doesn’t just feed the birds and the bees. It’s a potent medicinal and a tasty edible too.
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Rhubarb is just beautiful, and it’s a shame to hide it inside of a pie. This rhubarb upside-down cake shows off all it’s beauty right on top, and allows for your own creativity arranging the pieces. Leave them long like Smitten Kitchen’s version, try a cubic design like real simple food, or get really fancy with an elaborate diamond pattern like this one from The Kitchen McCabe.
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A bachelor friend of mine wanted to help cook dinner, so I put him in charge of biscuits. He’d never baked in his life, and pasta is one of his most complicated meals. While I stirred and prepped other things, I walked him through the process. He’s pouring things into the bowl at my direction, and it became clear that he’d never actually encountered flour before.
At one point, he looks into the bowl and stares in amazement. “It’s just powders….you put these powders in the bowl and it makes biscuits…that’s amazing!” I thought about it, and that’s almost true. These were traditional scratch-made biscuits, with butter and milk, but it got me thinking.
You could make tasty real food biscuits with a just add water mix, except for the butter. That’s the tricky part…now made easy with powdered butter.
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My family is working on a long-term food storage plan, and we’re hoping to include everything we need to make our favorite recipes. Butter keeps well in the freezer, but if power is out, it’s nice to have a backup plan to keep your family eating comfortably. I bought a can of butter powder and I’ve been learning to how to adapt my recipes to use butter powder instead of perishable butter.
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Capers are a staple of our home cooking, and we eat them enough that I decided to learn how to grow them myself. I was disappointed to learn that they need a long growing season and lots of heat to thrive, so no luck in Vermont.
Traditional capers are the pickled flower buds of a heat-loving Mediterranean shrub, but there are a number of other pickled flower buds that taste remarkably similar.
Dandelions produce a small, caper sized flower bud early in spring before the stem shoots skyward and opens into a flower. If picked small enough, dandelion buds can be made into convincing dandelion capers. That’s a homemade caper that just about anyone can grow!
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If dandelion wine captures the essence of summer for adults, then dandelion ice cream sums it up for kids. This flower infused treat is sweetened with honey. All you need is one cup of dandelion petals, which should be available on any respectable pesticide-free lawn.
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Pesto is one of those things that you can make with just about anything green. Wild weed pestos can be made with just about any green that has enough flavor to give a pesto character. Ramp pesto uses flavorful ramp greens to make a spicy, garlicky pesto to get you moving in the spring.
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Dandelion greens have made their way into the supermarket, but what about the roots? Dandelion roots are both nutritious and edible. They can be foraged in the early spring before the plants send up flower stalks to minimize bitterness.
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