Black walnuts

I think we have all seen and smelled black walnuts.  Here is one on my porch with the flesh still on:

In the Fall, they cover the ground under trees, slowly rotting and giving off that characteristic piney aroma.  I really like the aroma.  Inevitably there is a squirrel or ten in the neighborhood collecting them.  I've always more or less ignored them, but this year I decided to try to harvest some.  I mean, they are lying all over the ground.  Just pick them up and you've got free food.  Walnuts are tasty, right?

First thing to know, black walnuts have a very strong, distinctive taste.  It's not for everyone.  They taste rather like they smell, a bit like Pine-sol.  It's an acquired taste.  I hear that they taste good on things and when baked and I've gotten a bit of a taste for them, but it's been a slow process.  If you like retsina, the Greek wine with pine tar added, you might love black walnuts.

Second, they are a pain to get out of the shells.  They are too hard to use a nut cracker, so you need a hammer and a hard surface.  The nut doesn't come out easily, either.  You have to more or less obliterate the nut and harvest the nut piece that fall out.  The nut is kind of interwined in the shell.

Third, they take some time and effort to "process".  How do you do this?

1) You need to remove the outer fruit.  The fruit is actually pretty hard, so you need to cut it off with a pocket knife.  I just cut a circle and pulled the two halves apart.  See the two halves and the shell below:

You need to wear gloves when doing this, like the nitrile ones in the background.  Black walnut juice will stain everything, including your skin.  My glove broke and I had a zombie thumb for a week.

2) Wash the shells of remaining fruit.  I did this in my sink with a scouring pad.  It smells and the waste water is black.

3) Cure the nuts.  They say that you need to put the nuts in a porous bag, like an onion bag, and dry them for a month or two.  I plopped them in my food dessicator for 2 days.  It seems to have worked fine.

I probably won't harvest them again, but we'll see.  I find other foraged foods much more rewarding and delicious.

Pepperpot

I picked up a can of callaloo a couple of months back, but couldn't figure out what to do with it.  Finally, I just looked that the recipe on the can and decided to make something like that, with a lot of variations, as you will soon see.

So what is "callaloo"?  Well, it is basically Jamaican spinach.  I am pretty sure it is native to Jamaica, like allspice.  If you can't find any callaloo, just use frozen spinach.  My can contains a pound supposedly, so I think that is one package of spinach.

Ok, so what is "pepperpot"?  It's a Jamaican stew, broadly with meat, callaloo, scotch bonnet peppers, and a relatively thin broth.  As the name suggests, it can be quite hot.

The recipe is fairly broad, depending on the ingredients you have around the house.  I replaced okra with some German white asparagus I wanted to use up.  I used 1 quart of veggie broth and 1 quart of fish broth (via bonito bag).  If you are using beef, you might go light on the beef broth to avoid overwhelming the dish.  I replaced all the meat with salt fish.  I added Pickapeppa sauce as my salt and umami source, but you could use soy sauce or worchestershire sauce.  I found the broth tasty, but it needed more depth and sweetness and I achieved this with vinegar.  I started with my hot sauce vinegar, but realized that the dish was getting way too hot, so switched to regular white vinegar..

Salt fish is something that I have started to use more often.  It is a great way to preserve fish when freezing it.  Frozen fish tends to be mushy, but salt fish thaws out rather firm, so a much more pleasing texture.  You have to soak off all the salt, but that is no big deal.  Salt fish costs about the same as regular frozen fish.  Go for it.  I added the fish halfway through to cooking to avoid softening it too much.

Keep tasting the pepperpot as you cook and fish out the scotch bonnet (or habanero) when the desired heat is achieved.  If you are sensitive to heat, leave the pepper out and adjust the heat with hot sauce in the end.

If you use shrimp, add it in the last 15 minutes to avoid overcooking it.

Pepperpot

1 lb mild green (callaloo, spinach, etc)
1 lb meat, with bones for more flavor
6 okras, asparagus, carrots, or whatever
2 quarts broth or water
1 onion, chopped
1/3 tsp ground pepper
1-2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 scotch bonnet or habanero pepper, stem removed
1/4 cup coconut milk or whole milk
1 tsp thyme
1 Tbsp soy sauce, Pickapeppa sauce, or Worchestershire sauce
1/4 cup milk
1/4 cup vinegar

1) Dump everything in a big pot except the vinegar
2) Bring to a boil and simmer 1h uncovered.  Check the heat level and remove the pepper when you wsih.
3) Add vinegar to taste.
4) Eat with corn bread, fried plantains, or whatever.

Fried plantains

Whenever we go out or order from a Caribbean or African restaurant, my wife always orders the plantains when they are available.  Who wouldn't?  They are sweet, slightly crispy, and delicious.  They are so popular that our local African restaurant frequently sells out.  How complicated can they possibly be to cook at home?  Well, not really complicated, but you need to know a couple of tips.

The main key is that the plantains need to be really ripe.  Plantains are basically firmer bananas.  Where a banana would basically liquify, the plantain keeps it's shape.  For some reason plantains seem to be sold really unripe, even more so than bananas and are somewhat more difficult to judge in terms of ripeness.  While bananas go from dark green and hard to bright yellow and soft, plantains turn from green to slightly yellow or to black and slightly softer.  The first time I tried to cook plantains, they weren't ripe enough and I ended up with basically banana flavored fried potatoes.  OK, but not exactly mouth watering.

I would recommend finding the ripest looking plantains, buy them, and put them in a brown paper back on the counter top for a week or so.  Toss in an apple for good measure.  Both the bag and the apple give off ethylene gas which helps to ripen the bananas.  My plantains didn't really change much in color, but after a week I opened one a little and tasted it.  It was quite sweet, like a firm ripe banana, so ready to go.  Plantains appear to have a much longer shelf life than bananas, so you have a lot of time.  Bananas seem to go from unripe to rotten in a couple of days, but not plantains.

I sliced the plantains up fairly thin and fried them in a combination of butter and canola oil.  I am sure any oil should work fine, just as long as you can get it pretty hot.  I found that my range heated to 8 out of 9 was a good temperature for frying.  Yours might vary.  It was a temperature where the plantains brown nicely over a couple of minutes without blackening.  Flip them over, cook them another couple of minutes, then remove.  Drain on paper towels.  They will soften a bit, but still easily keep their shape.

Remember to get the oil to the proper temperature before you add the plantains so that you don't stew them or have them soak up a ton of oil.  Hot oil doesn't get absorbed nearly as much as cool oil.  I usually start with the point where the oil has begun to smoke slightly.  Adding your plantains will cool the oil immediately and then you can tweak the temperature up or down to get proper frying.

Forgive the rotation of the picture, but here are the finished plantains.  Better than any I have ever had in a restaurant.  Even better cold than warm.

Easy Rice and Beans

This one goes out to my mother, who always complains that recipes take too long to prepare and require too much chopping.  This recipe requires minimal chopping and shouldn't take more than 20 minutes or so to prepare.  There is one "unusual" ingredient, Recaito, but this should be available in any decent grocery store in your area in the Hispanic section.  It is a Puerto Rican cooking base and is super easy to use and stores in the fridge fine.  It is basically onion-cilantro paste, so healthy, though it might have a touch of MSG.  MSG, despite it's bad rep, has never been definitively linked to any actual adverse reactions.

Interestingly, on the left in the picture on the label is cilantro, and the right is culantro, also know as Mexican cilantro, though I have never actually seen in in a Mexican grocery.  It is "super" cilantro.

Rice and beans is so easy to cook and is plenty healthy.  It is a good way to use up whatever you got in the fridge.  Green seasoning that I published earlier would also work great in place of Recaito.  I used instant brown rice to speed things up.  It tastes fine.

Easy Beans and Rice

2 cans beans (any kind), drained and rinsed
1/4 cup Recaito
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1 small can chopped green chilis, undrained
1/2 Tbsp salt
3 cups cooked rice
1-2 Tbsp olive oil

1) Heat oil over medium heat in a pan
2) Fry the onion and garlic a few minutes, until softened
3) Add Recaito and fry for a few minutes, until aromatic
4) Add beans, chilis, rice, and salt and heat through.
5) Serve with hot sauce on the side.

Persimmon pudding

The promised persimmon pudding recipe.  I have no idea where I got it from, so I can't credit the inventor.  It is flipping good, as my wife would say, so not worth changing anything, except to lower the oven temperature and bake the pudding thinner.

Wild harvested American persimmons could be the tastiest in the world, but if you can't find any, you might be able to use Hachiya persimmons.  Fuyu are more apple-like, so might not pulp very well.

For the best taste, heat the pudding up before eating and top with loads of whipped cream.  The sugary fluffiness of the whipped cream blends perfectly with the flavor of the pudding.  Cold pudding out of the fridge is OK, but warm, it is out of this world.

For a fantastic dessert, this is not that terribly unhealthy.  It has a lot of fruit and only 1/2 cup of sugar.  And yes, as stick of butter, but one is better than two.

The recipe calls for 1 cup of nuts (pecans or walnuts).  I don't think I've ever added them.

Persimmon Pudding

2 cups persimmon pulp
4 eggs
1 stick butter, allowed to soften at room temperature about 30 minutes
3/4 cup milk
1 tsp vanilla (I used Penzey's Mexican, which is intense)

1 1/2 cup all purpose flour
1/2 cup sugar
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
2 tsp cinnamon (I used cassia)
1/2 tsp nutmeg (freshly graded is best)
1 tsp ground ginger
1 tsp allspice

1) Heat over to 350 oF.
2) Mix together the persimmon pulp, the eggs, butter, milk, and vanilla,  The butter will remain a little chunky, but this is fine.
3) In a separate bowl, mix flour, sugar, baking soda, baking powder, salt, and spices.
4) Add dry ingredients to wet in thirds.  Mix just enough to wet everything and it is relatively homogeneous.
5) Add nuts if you want
6) Bake in a greased glass dish, about 1.5 inches deep.  This comes to two pans for me.
7) Bake about 30 minutes, until a knife in the middle comes back clean and the pudding is solid.
8) Allow to cool a few minutes and taste.  It should be out of this world.