What’s cooking?

We have a constant supply of two types of fermented vegetables in our house. One is sauerkraut, the other garlic. Here’s the latest batch ready for its 6-week fermentation.
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All three of us eat this every day. Garlic is *such* a medicine.
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Practically, all it takes is creating a jar like this every 6 weeks: Buying 8/9 heads, peeling, chopping the big cloves in half, adding a brine (5g of salt per cup of water) and keeping the garlic under the liquid (hence the cabbage leaf you can see). That’s it.
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It takes an hour. Our sauerkraut-making also happens once every 6 weeks. That takes about an hour too. Two hours every six weeks for ample daily fermented veg is a good deal in my book.
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There’s an article on garlic in my linktr.ee and a ‘recipe’ for sauerkraut on the resources page of my website (also linked in linktr.ee).

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These beautiful green tendrils are agretti, a green vegetable that I had never seen before I came to Italy. It’s everywhere at the moment, cooks quickly and simply and tastes a little like asparagus.
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Do you have this where you are?
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Served here with burgers using Flavio’s beef mince @valledelsasso and Italian millet.
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Next I’d like to give it a go as a ‘pasta’. The lady at the grocer’s told me lemon, olive oil and garlic were the way to go and who’d argue with that?!

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I love it when I create a dish here in my little Italian kitchen, for my two boys, that comes directly from an IG friend’s creativity and sharing.
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This is the delicious Pongal, something I would never have known about it if not for @kobofermentary. It’s an ancient Indian dish, traditionally made at harvest festival. I fermented rice that I previously ‘broke’ in the coffee grinder and then toasted it in coconut oil before cooking it long and slow with some tumeric.
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To top it, I bloomed cinnamon, cardamom and anise in coconut oil, then added dried coconut.
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Not very traditional – I left out the dahl and swapped out ghee (both sue to my son’s sensitivites) but very, very delicious.
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And, excitingly, in zero-waste mode, I even have a use for the water I soaked/fermented the rice in; I’m going to wash my hair in it!! Check out my story today for the details 🙂

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Every time I make Sowans, the Scottish oat ferment, I have both a drink and an oat ‘porridge’ ready to use. There’s quite some competition for how it’s used!
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Sometimes, we cook up the porridge and eat it for breakfast with crunchy decorations! Other times, I reserve it for this: Spelt and Fermented Oat Porridge bread.
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The crust is crackly, nutty spelt and the crumb is soft from the addition of the porridge. It also helps the bread last longer.
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There’s a slice shot in my stories. Wish I could feed you some!

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Doing chocolate research is satisfying 🙂 I’m learning about *so* much more than ‘just’ chocolate. Here’s my tuppence-worth (does anyone non-British say that?) about vanilla.

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My second batch of home-cured bacon is delicious. This time, the cure had salt, sugar, bay, peppercorns and juniper berries. When I took the lid off the spice grinder and sniffed, it nearly blew my head off!
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I like my bacon crispy, but it’s *really* hard to cut bacon thinly by hand, so chunky and cast iron-panned has to do me. Chef also gets the first dibs on the liquid fat left in the pan! I love to pour it over my bread 😉
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Pigs raised over the hill by Flavio at @lavalledelsasso. Thank you!
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How do you like your bacon?

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This may not look like a traditionally Scottish food, but it is. Here’s my morning oat porridge, which has been made from fermenting the ‘crumbs’ that are left behind when you roll oats.
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I don’t ferment half-heartedly; there were cosy in my DIY proofing box for a week and have a wonderfully sour, complex flavour.
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I compliment it with ground linseed, crunchy nuts, olive oil and miso. It’s yummy!
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Progress videos and more photos in my story today. There’s a highlight called Sowans, if you want to see more.

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Sourdough discard soup with celeriac, carrot and sausage, topped with lard-fried breadcrumbs for a soup-complimenting crunch.
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This is a version of the recipe you can find linked in my profile that is gluten and lectin-free, being made from a millet starter that I keep.
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I can’t believe I went so long without putting discard in my soup. Next, I want to try and find some smoked sausage, so I can work on a more traditional rendering of this dish, which I based on the Polish soup called Zurek.
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You should try making it while it’s still winter(ish). It’s so very good.

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Ancestral cacao-diving continues in our apartment. And look at these! I think, aesthetically, they are very beautiful, but the light brown marks are a commercial-chocolatier’s nightmare: bloom. It’s where the cacao butter hasn’t cooled down ‘just right’.
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Traditionally, chocolate was only ever used in drinks and this bloom didn’t matter.
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But when I eat these, instead of melting them into a drink, I can taste the effect. There’s more grain; it’s a bit drier.
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I’m not sure exactly why it happened this time, and not the other dozen times I’ve gone through the process. But, just like teaching myself sourdough or kombucha, I carry on and I learn.
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And, while I experiment, we’ve made it to the ‘mythology’ section of the 700-page ‘The Secret Life of Chocolate’. Who isn’t interested in why and how people believe what they believe? It’s fascinating! My son and hubby are very happy making it one of our family evening-reads. Perhaps that makes us weird, but I wouldn’t have it any other way!

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We render lard from local back fat in a slow cooker. It’s simple – dice the fat and put it on low. Every couple of hours, pour the liquid off. By the end of the day the ‘scratchings’ left over are small and you have containers full of lard everywhere.
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I then work some magic with the left-over bits. I transfer them to a medium-hot cast iron pan and cook for 30 minutes more, stirring occasionally. This not only creates wonderfully crispy bits of delicious fat that we can sprinkle on our food, but also seasons my cast iron pan nicely!
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Zero-waste, a shiny pan and smiling faces at the table.

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