The Earthy Delights Recipe Blog
Celebrating wild harvested, traditional & artisanal foods
While you’ve probably heard of pawpaws, you may not be quite sure of what they are or where they come from. Let’s just put it this way: if you’ve never experienced the flavor of this amazing fruit, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. If you need more convincing, here are three reasons why pawpaws should be on your shopping list. 1. Pawpaws Taste GreatFirst, and most importantly, pawpaws are simply delicious. While often described as a …
We’ve been looking for a good pawpaw chutney recipe for a long, long time. As large, sweet and tasty as it is, the North American fruit with the scientific appellation Asimina triloba would seem to be the perfect candidate for the tangy and spicy Indian condiment. Sure enough, a quick internet search will turn up many likely recipe candidates, but a closer read will reveal most of them to actually be papaya chutneys (apparently, the word “pawpaw” is synonymous for …
If you’re a fan of pawpaws, you’ve probably eaten your share of the fresh fruit in season. But what about the rest of the year? Pawpaws are notoriously hard to store for more than two or three weeks in the fridge, and if unrefrigerated, the large, oval fruits ripen quickly and must be eaten within a few days. The answer?Pawpaw curd, another fantastic way to preserve the exotic flavor of pawpaws – practically indefinitely. Fruit curds are a mixture of …
“À l’anglaise” is just a fancy way of saying “English-style” in French. It really has little to do with actual English cooking but refers to the way that the French imagine English cooking to be – in other words, plain and boring. The term à l’anglaise is used without much consistency. In general, it means food that is prepared very simply and presented with no sauce more complex than melted butter. Sometimes it means boiled; other times, it means turned …
Nothing says “Country Breakfast” like fresh, hot buttermilk biscuits. There’s really nothing hard about making biscuits. With a little bit of practice, you can whip up a batch in 15 minutes or less (plus baking time, of course). The secret to making great, flaky biscuits lies in a few basic principles. Chill all of your ingredients before you start Cut in the fat with a pastry cutter Add just enough liquid to hold the dry ingredients together Use liquid with …
Many of our favorite wild foods seem to appear all at once in the early spring, which can make it hard to appreciate each one adequately. A practical way to enjoy the season’s abundance is to combine several of them together into a single dish. Another is to preserve the fresh flavors of the spring wild harvest so they can be enjoyed all year round. This dish does both. The flavor and texture of the morel is well known, and these unique, …
Ramps (or wild leeks as they’re also known), are a wild-growing member of the onion family that have become one of America’s most popular “rediscovered” folk foods. Of course, ramps have never really been forgotten or gone out of style in their heartland, a broad swath of eastern North America stretching from southern Appalachia, west to the Great Lakes region and north into southern Canada. Spring is the season for ramps, beginning in mid-March in their southern range and ending …
This mellow mustard tastes like pure, sweet summer sunshine. It’s got that keen mustardy kick that every good mustard should have, but the bite is tempered with sunny sweetness of apricots and complex, nutty notes of chanterelle mushrooms. The familiar fruity-floral flavor and aroma of chanterelle mushrooms is often compared to – and paired with – apricots. The chanterelle’s distinctive flavor intensifies when the orange-yellow mushrooms are dried, becoming deeper, darker, richer and toastier. Here’s the tricky bit: dried chanterelles …
From now on, whenever we cook artichokes, we’ll be finishing them on the grill. A quick trip to the grill transforms the prickly domesticated relative of the thistle into something altogether more subtle and flavorful, with a deep smokey intensity that soars above the simple steamed version. Grilled artichokes are easier to eat, too. Once the artichoke has been steamed, it’s a simple matter to quarter it and pull out the fuzzy inedible “choke” and inner leaves. After grilling, just …
It’s not surprising that most classic recipes are built on the solid foundation of good old-fashioned country cooking. Ramp and Jowl Bacon Gravy is insanely good over hot, homemade biscuits (check our recipe for Ramp Buttermilk Biscuits), but would be equally at home gracing a roasted veal chop in a fancy white-tablecloth restaurant. No wonder that down-home ingredients like ramps have found their way onto the menus of so many upscale dining establishments! A spoonful or two of this rich, …