If you’re looking for something fun to do in a beautiful setting on Memorial Day weekend, you should consider joining me for a hands-on DIY cooking class at River Myst Haven. It’s a gorgeous place that’s nestled among the hills west of Healdsburg on Westside Road.

From scratch, we’ll create building blocks of the DIY kitchen and then use them in a seasonal menu that we’ll all enjoy together.

Participants will learn how to make mustard, which we’ll use to create a glaze for pork canapés and also the vinaigrette for a seasonal salad. We’ll enjoy homemade Meyer lemon parsley aioli on a sustainable seafood stew. We’ll learn how to make yogurt and talk about all the different ways to use it, as we create a yogurt cake with seasonal fruit. Finally, we’ll have a cultured butter making demo and tasting. $100. Sign up here.

MENU:

Mustard Glazed Pork Canapés

Seasonal Vegetable Salad of

Artichokes, Asparagus, Snap Peas and Fava Beans

with Homemade Mustard Vinaigrette, Fresh Herbs,

and Ricotta—(subject to change based on availability)

Sustainable Seafood Stew with Meyer Lemon Parsley Aioli

Yogurt and Seasonal Stone Fruit Cake with Streusel Topping

Butter Making Demo and Tasting

My life and my kitchen have both been overtaken by fermenting cabbage lately. (Is there a support group for that?) Partially, it’s the season. I always want to make hearty, fattier foods when the weather turns cold and sauerkraut and curtido are the perfect accompaniments. Plus cabbage turns sweeter as the weather gets chillier, making it a tastier proposition all around.

The other reason for the abundance of fermenting cabbage is that I’ve been doing a lot of demos to promote DIY Delicious and ferments are interesting to people and lend themselves well to demoing. Fermenting is something a lot of people want to try but have maybe felt intimidated. Ferments are also quick to make in a prescribed amount of time on a stage (most of the time is passive time spent waiting for them to ferment). I always bring a finished batch with accompaniments for tasting.

What type of accompaniments? Well, you can eat curtido, sauerkraut, or other fermented vegetables with beans, in grain bowl salads, atop soup, with sausages, mashed potatoes, on sandwiches, in tacos and quesadillas and even on pizza with the right flavor profile combination.

Lately I’ve been serving curtido with simply cooked Rancho Gordo beans (gotta give the other book some love) and local queso fresco. The demo days have been cold and rainy so that dish has been working out quite nicely.

I had some leftovers the other day and created the taco you see pictured above. To make it, I sandwiched some grated cheese between two tortillas and crisped them in a cast-iron pan to make a taco dorado.  I added beans, leftover steak, avocadoes, salsa, cilantro and a big dollop of curtido. I took another batch to a friend’s birthday party where it was enjoyed with tamales by all the guests.

The only problem: My whole laundry basket smelled like fermenting cabbage because of the tea towels I’d used to cover the Mason jars. Thank goodness a double wash took care of the problem, and prevented me from having to replace all my clothing!

Wild Salvadoran Curtido from DIY Delicious

Time Required: 15 minutes active; 3 to 5 days passive

Curtido is a lightly fermented cabbage salad commonly served with pupusas. Think of it as sort of a Latin American sauerkraut.

Makes 1 quart

1 medium head green cabbage (about 1 1/2 pounds), quartered, cored, and sliced as thinly as possible

1/2 a small onion, sliced thinly

2 to 3 carrots, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

2 jalapenos, cut in quarters lengthwise, seeded and sliced thinly

1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed

Put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a large bowl. Add the salt and, with clean hands, toss and squeeze the vegetables until they start to soften and release their liquid (about 5 minutes). Add the jalapenos and oregano and toss to distribute. Pack the mixture tightly into a one-quart, wide-mouthed glass Mason jar, pushing down on the vegetables with a wooden spoon or your fingertips with as much force as you can until the level of liquid rises above the vegetables. Put a smaller jar inside the glass jar to keep the vegetables submerged. Cover with a clean tea towel and secure with a rubber band. The curtido needs to breathe.

You can see the small juice glass inside the jar if you look carefully. Note how all the vegetables are submerged in liquid. Now all you need is a tea towel and a rubber band to cover.

Leave out at room temperature for about 3 to 5 days. Check once daily to be sure the vegetables stay submerged, pushing down on them if needed. If you see a frothy residue on the surface, simply skim it off. Taste daily starting on the 2nd day. The curtido is ready when it tastes good to you. When it’s to your liking, fasten the lid and transfer it to the refrigerator. It will last months in the refrigerator. It doesn’t really go bad but will soften over time.

Though it took place last month (how is that possible?) I wanted to take a moment to blog about the home-brewed soda class my pal Nishanga taught at 18 Reasons.  Nishanga showed class participants how to use ginger bug and whey to naturally ferment sodas. She discussed other starters and I brought along some homemade root beer I’d made using the method in DIY Delicious that calls for brewing yeast.

Nishanga telling them what’s what.

Grating ginger and turmeric for the ginger bug

Slightly fermented ginger bug

Class participants putting together their very own sodas

After the demo, participants put together their own starter batches to ferment at home. Nishanga shared tastes of her lovely home-brews featuring amazing flavors out of her garden in Berkeley. We tried Lemon-Rosemary and Hibiscus Schizandra Soda. For snacking, we used the yogurt we’d drained the whey from to make a quick dip and served it with my homemade crackers from DIY Delicious.

PS: Nishanga recently signed a contract for her own cookbook with New Harbinger Press.

It’s sure to be a great and completely unique book because nobody I know has so much gastronomic talent combined with a professional grounding in Chinese Medicine and nutrition. Congratulations Nishanga!

Straining the sarsparilla for root beer

Root beer fermenting

This is one of those salads I could eat every day for months. All local from the farmers' market. Annabelle's puntarelle and escarole, Blossom Bluff persimmons, Art Davis' pecans (spiced with a little brown sugar, cayenne and other spices), and Somebody's pomegranates but I don't remember whose. It's bitter and sweet and crunchy and spicy and refreshing and it's just a great salad. I usually make a lighter vinaigrette with shallots (no garlic) and lemon juice or Champagne vinegar.

In other news:

Nishanga and I will be teaching a FREE soup class this Friday at The Cog.

Ways with Soup
 
Join CoG members and cooking teachers Vanessa Barrington and Nishanga Bliss in an exploration of the many ways of making economical, nourishing, delicious soups.  Veggie stocks and bone broths, the wonders of miso, cream soups and bean soups, soups and fermentation, recipes, and much much more!  Bring a mug and spoon for tasting.  FREE! If you're not a member come and learn from Susan Fleming how The Cog can save you money.
 7pm at The Cog 67th and Hollis in Emeryville.

 Curtido

Time Required: 15 minutes active; 3 to 5 days passive

The technique for making curtido is exactly like sauerkraut. Curtido is a great foil for rich, heavy, meaty, or fatty foods, which is why it’s so good on pupusas. I like it on tacos and beans too.

Makes 1 quart

1 medium head green cabbage, sliced as thinly as possible
1/2 a small onion, peeled and sliced thinly
2-3 carrots, peeled and grated on the large holes of a box grater
1-2 tablespoons kosher salt
2 jalapenos, cut in quarters lengthwise, seeded and sliced thinly
1/2 teaspoon dried Mexican oregano, crushed

Put the cabbage, onion, and carrots in a large bowl. Add the salt and, with clean hands, toss and squeeze the vegetables until they start to soften and release their liquid (about 5 minutes). Add the jalapenos and oregano and toss to distribute. Pack the mixture tightly into a one-quart, wide-mouthed glass Mason jar, pushing down on the vegetables with a wooden spoon or your fingertips with as much force as you can until the level of liquid rises above the vegetables. Put a smaller jar inside the glass jar to keep the vegetables submerged. Cover with a clean tea towel and secure with a rubber band.

Leave out at room temperature for about 3 to 5 days. Check once daily to be sure the vegetables stay submerged, pushing down on them if needed. Taste daily starting on the 2nd day. The curtido is ready when it tastes good to you. When it’s to your liking, fasten the lid and transfer it to the refrigerator. It will last months in the refrigerator. It doesn’t really go bad but will soften over time.

Nishanga's Blog

Me and fill-in MC, Michelle Fuerst, having a good time in the Scratch Kitchen.

Photo Credits: Susan Fleming

We make a great tag-team because we’re both passionate about food and strive to eat and teach others to eat as sustainably and healthily as possible. And Nishanga knows about all the stuff I don’t know about, like sea vegetables, so I love her for that. Plus she’s cool.

Her workshop really opened my eyes. I’ve always enjoyed sea vegetables when I’ve encountered then but I knew next to nothing about them. She talked about how sea vegetables can absorb and flush environmental toxins from our bodies and that they are a super sustainable way to get some of the important nutrients we get from the fish in our dwindling oceans (PS: I’m reading Bottomfeeder great read and—yikes!) But we have to be careful where our sea vegetables are coming from…because they do absorb toxins and heavy metals and we don’t want to eat that stuff. There’s a local brand called Mendocino Seaweed Company that harvests from the clean waters off the Mendocino Coast.

She demonstrated and talked about the different types of seaweeds from strand seaweeds like arame, hijiki, and sea palm, to the strip seaweeds like kombu and wakame to the sheet seaweeds like dulse and wild nori. I went from knowing that kombu was good for cooking beans and that I really liked nori to knowing much more—like the different applications for each seaweed and that dulse is seriously tasty. I even walked away with some good recipes.

We’ll be doing another round of workshops starting in May. We’re thinking of fermented drinks, another kraut/kimchi workshop, homemade body products, main dish salads, and some other ideas. These are free workshops so they are a great way to gain knowledge without shelling out $50-75 for a cooking class. You don’t have to be a member of The Cog, but we’d love it if you join. Then you can run your own workshop on whatever you do well. This is just the beginning of what a community based food system looks like. Check it out! And check out Nishanga’s blog. You’ll learn a ton.

Hitting the New Year Running:

Saturday, January 10th–book signing and food samples from Heirloom Beans at Omnivore Books
3-4 PM Free!

Wednesday, January 14–Winter Soups and Stews class at Sur La Table in San Francisco 6pm. $75

Saturday, January 24–Fermentation Workshop at The Cooperative Grocery in Berkeley. Time of day to be determined. Email or leave a comment, if you're interested. The Cog is also looking for new members. Now is the time to join! Workshop Free! Bring your own veggies and jars. I'll bring salt and recipes.

Menu:
Seared Steelhead with French Lentil Salad
Farro Risotto with Cranberry Beans and Mushrooms
Beet and Quinoa Salad with Scarlet Runner Beans and Avocados
Flageolet Bean and Halibut Stew with Herb Pesto
Stuffed Gypsy Peppers with Wheat Berries and Rattlesnake Beans

Sorry E for not using your pictures. I just don't like putting pictures of myself up here.
the beans plus a corner of the halibut stew

Beet Quinoa salad. Good salad. Bad lighting. Bad picture.

First I took a class at Sur La Table on Chutney, Kimchi, and Sambal. It was totally mind and palate blowing. Three masters of their genres, Niloufer Inchaporia King, author of the award winning My Bombay Kitchen, Huynjoo Albrecht, proprietor of CookingKorean.com, and Daniel Sudar, chef at Red Lantern Restaurant in Redwood City (if anyone local is up for a field trip, let me know. The restaurant is steps away from the Cal Train station) demonstrated some amazing staples of Indian, Korean, and Indonesian cuisines. The tastes jumped around my tongue and left my head spinning with ambition to recreate the flavors I sampled. I left truly inspired to push the boundaries of the familiar even further in my kitchen.

Then I headed over the Ferry Building to attend a panel discussion on Meals, Meaning, and Memory in Asian Diasporas. It was scholarly in the way that panel discussions by scholars often are (by that I mean the talk required concentration) and hours later, I found myself continuing to run over in my mind some of the ideas that were brought up: why food-based cultural habits are the last to change when immigrants assimilate, the ways in which immigrant’s eating habits vary depending on who they are eating with, feelings of being “other” around food, and the roles of caste, gender, in ascetism in Gandhi’s vegetarianism.

What did I cook when I got home? I pulled out Andrea’s book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen,
which I love and cook from often. I made two dishes I hadn't made before: a simple soup of shrimp and cabbage (to which I added rice) and rice noodles with Chinese chives, tofu, and dried shrimp (instead of the fresh shrimp and pork called for). It’s fun that I’m getting comfortable enough with the Vietnamese techniques and flavor profiles to vary the ingredients and still end up with very good dishes that are almost always better than anything I can find in a Vietnamese restaurant.

Next up: Kimchi!

I'm so glad I treated myself to this wonderful day. I wish I'd gone to the all-day symposium on Sunday too.

Got my author copies yesterday! The book will be on the shelves soon. You can preorder it now on Amazon cheap. Or you can "support your local bookstore".

I'll be teaching a bean class at Sur La Table on Maiden Lane in San Francisco September 13. We'll be hitting the Ferry Plaza Farmers' Market to meet Steve, talk beans and buy ingredients, then we'll head back to the kitchen and prepare a variety of bean dishes.

Steve and I will both be at Jimtown Store on September 14th from 2 to 5 signing books.

I'm teaching in Cleveland October 20, 21, and 22 and then at Kitchen on Fire on the 25th.

Whew! here we go.