GardenFork – Eclectic DIY

Category: Cooking TV

Easy Hard Cider Recipe – GF Video

Hard Cider made easy with this hard cider recipe in our DIY video. All you need are a few items from a homebrew supply store, we like to use Midwest Homebrew, click here to visit their site. Watch our how to make hard cider video and then let us know your questions and suggestions below.

The key to making hard cider

When making all fermented beverages everything must be clean and sanitized. You can use a mild bleach solution or one of the commercial sanitizer products. I prefer B-Brite, but you can use any of them. Bleach can cause problems with your clothes if you splash the sanitizing solution on them. Keep a quart of sanitizer solution nearby as you make hard cider. Rinse your bottle or carboy in the solution and rinse, along with anything else that will come into contact with the cider.

Hard Cider in 5 gallon and 1/2 gallon batches

If you are going to use fresh cider from a mill or some that you made yourself – watch us make our own cider in this video here – you will need to kill off the wild yeasts and organisms in the cider before adding your cultivated yeast you bought from the homebrew store. We use campden tablets. Crush one tablet per gallon, toss in, mix well and let sit for 24 hours before pitching the cider yeast.

Read the instructions on the yeast package. Liquid yeasts with a burst pack need to be activated a few hours ahead of time. It can be tricky to burst the little pack that is inside the yeast package. The yeast package does not have to be bulging to pitch the yeast. Be sure to sanitize the scissors you open the pack with and the yeast package itself when pitching the yeast.

When fermenting small quanities of hard cider, use a jug that is twice the volume of the cider you are brewing for the initial fermentation that lasts a few days. This keeps the large foaming of the yeast from clogging the airlock. After the first few days of activity, siphon or rack the cider into an container sized for the amount of cider you are brewing. So for a half gallon of cider, you would start it in a one gallon jug, and then transfer it to a 1/2 gallon jug. Do your best to keep the sediment from the initial fermentation from moving to the second jug. The sediment can impart off-flavors, and its easier to pour from bottle with less stuff in the bottom of the bottles.

We will post a how to bottle cider and beer video soon. In the meantime, let us know your thoughts below:

November 13, 2013
How to Can – Canning Tomatoes, Fruit, Vegetables : GF Video
How to can video! Learn how to can food: apples, peaches, can tomatoes, vegetables. Canning food is easy using the waterbath method. Use a big pot you already have as a canning pot and buy a funnel and a grabber tool and you are good to go.

Home Canning How To

This waterbath method is for high-acid food like fruits, tomatoes, pickles. You should use pressure cooker canning for low acid foods like meat and fish. You can buy a canning pot to boil the jars, but we use a big metal stockpot, the same one we use for brewing beer and cooking pasta. When using a stockpot for canning, place a towel in the bottom of the stockpot to keep the jars from touching the metal bottom of the pot. A GF viewer suggested tying together some jar bands with twist ties to form a base for the jars to rest on in the pot.

Some things to keep in mind when canning food:
- Be sure to wash the jars, lids, and bands with hot soapy water
- Do not allow any food to get on the rim of the jar or on the rubber area of the sealing ring. Wipe off any mistakes
- Allow the jars to cool for 12 hours and test the lids for seal. Some jars lids may still make the pop sound when they are taken out of the waterbath.
- Buy a canning funnel and tongs, they are worth it. Less spilled food and no burned hands!
Canning Funnel keeps the rim of the jar clean and sits nicely on top of the jar. Canning Tongs save your hands!

We based our information on one of the experts at Ball Jar Company, they have a great PDF on canning.

Watch our other canning videos here!

What are your canning tips? Let us know below:
September 23, 2013
Simple Rhubarb Cake Recipe : GF Video

Make this simple rhubarb cake and and learn how to cook rhubarb in this easy cake video. This rhubarb recipe is based our Peach Dump Cake Dessert Recipe video, link here. What’s great about this recipe is that it doesn’t take long to bake and you’re ready to go out in the yard instead of being in the kitchen.

This rhubarb recipe can be adapted to use most any fresh or canned fruit. Like its cousin, the Peach Dump Cake recipe, it uses a quick cake recipe and adds in fruit. We found that simmering the rhubarb in some sugar before adding it to the cake batter works really well. Our oven usually takes longer than most to bake cakes, so this recipe should take about 30 minutes in your oven.

If you want to make this recipe and its winter, you can buy frozen rhubarb in larger supermarkets now. Neat. I imagine frozen would not need to be cooked as much beforehand, as the freezing breaks it down some.

We have a bunch of how to grow and cook rhubarb videos on our site, here is the link. Our first rhubarb video we did when our Yellow Labrador Henry was just a pup, and she was eating my notes while we were shooting the show. Watch our first rhubarb recipe video here.

Let us know your thoughts and suggestions and ideas in the comments below, are there new ways to use rhubarb in recipes? Have you ever eaten it raw? I have, it has quite a taste!

Simple Rhubarb Cake Recipe
Ingredients
•   1 cup All purpose Flour
•   1 1/2 Teaspoon Fresh Baking Powder
•   1/2 Teaspoon Salt
•   1 stick Butter
•   1 cup milk
•   1 1/3 cups sugar – use less if you want
•   2 cups rhubarb
Cooking Directions
1. Preheat the oven to 375F
2. Cut the Rhubarb into 1/2\’ pieces, toss into a small pan with 1/3 cup sugar over low heat, simmer for 5 minutes or until the rhubarb is slightly soft. You may want to drain off some of the water from this to keep the cake batter from being too wet.
3. Mix all the dry ingredients together
4. Add the milk and slightly cooked rhubarb. The batter may look pretty wet
5. Pour the batter into a greased 8 x 8 cake pan. I like to use a glass pan for this. It browns the cake nicely.
6. Bake for 30 minutes and test for doneness. The top of the cake should be nicely browned, but not too toasted.
7. This rhubarb recipe goes well with ice cream.

June 14, 2013
Foraging For Wild Garlic : GF Video

Foraging for edible plants in the spring includes looking for edible wild greens like wild garlic, also called spring garlic. This edible wild food is one of the first plants to start growing after the long winter, and is ready for your dinner plate. Wild Garlic looks like a young scallion plant or chives, and is edible. The taste has a slight garlic aroma, but its definitely in the onion taste family. You can find this edible plant growing in lawns and forest edges. Many consider it a weed, however we think it a great addition to salads or meals.

Be Safe In Your Foraging!

Double check with a good plant identification book! At the end of the post are some books we suggest. Always be sure with your plant identification before adding this to your soup.

According to Wikipedia, when cattle eat wild garlic, it can give a garlic-like taste to the milk and beef, interesting. It is native to Europe and considered an invasive here in North America.

I see this edible plant growing in yards a lot. I’m sure the homeowners don’t realize they have food growing in their yard! To harvest the wild garlic, its best to use one of those 3 pronged garden fork hand tools. You have to dig down a bit to get out the bulbs, or you can snip off the green stems and they will grow back. As the plant matures, unfortunately the stems get woody and aren’t good eating. If you pull this plant out of a park or someone’s yard, make sure it hasn’t been sprayed with an herbicide. Not a good thing to be eating that stuff.

Let us know what you know about this plant or any questions below:

June 7, 2013
Daylilies – Foraging for Edible Plants : GF Video

Foraging for wild plants starts in your backyard with foraging for daylilies. These edible plants in the yard are an edible wild food. Today we talk about foraging the young shoots of the common Daylily, which are edible and great in salads. Daylilies are a non-native, and can be an edible invasive plant, especially the common orange daylily, which grows throughout the eastern U.S.

Harvest the young shoots of the daylily for one of the first foraged meals of the spring season. The plants leaves will grow back, just be sure not to whack too many of them if you want them to grow again. If you find the invasive plants in a natural area, like a forest or meadow, its ok to harvest with abandon, in my book. Daylilies belong in your yard, not natural areas. Here is some information on the invasive kinds of daylilies from the National Park Service.

You can eat other parts of the daylily, but for this foraging video, we will focus on the young leaves. We’ll talk about harvesting other daylily parts in upcoming videos.

On a tangent, there has been talk of terminology, and that we should not be forarging, but instead wildcrafting. Wildcrafting is fun word, it brings up all sorts of imagery in your head when you say it.

Also there are issues of what and how much of something one should harvest when foraging. On foraging for daylilies, I believe its OK to harvest what you want, as long as its in your yard or you have permission to be where you are, as these are non-native plants in the U.S.

Watch All Our Foraging Videos Here

Buy Foraging Books on Amazon Here

Buy Foraging Books on IndieBound

April 18, 2013
Maple Sap Collection Tips, Backyard Maple Syrup Project GF Video

Halfway through collecting maple sap to make maple syrup, I made this video on tips on tapping maple trees and how to collect sap to make maple syrup. Shot on the iPhone, it looks pretty good.

I use tree saver plastic taps and plastic lines to collect sap, i’m finding that buckets at each tree work pretty well. I have one large barrel that collects from two trees, and its kind of a pain to get the sap out. The benefit is if the sugar maple sap runs really well, the bucket can handle the sap. One time my smaller 5 gal buckets overflowed.

There has been some discussion on how much sugar gets trapped in the ice that we remove from the sap buckets. My neighbors, old time maple syrup experts, remove the ice from their maple sap buckets. But then I was asked how much sugar is lost with the ice, and I don’t know. The questioner brought up Popsicles, and the fact that they are made with sugar that seems to freeze with the ice.

It helps when hauling buckets of sap to have them only half full, its easier on your back and you splash a lot less. I store our sap in a big new trash can on the shady side of the house that has been surrounded with snow to keep the sap cool.

Check out all of our how to make maple syrup videos here

Here is a great PDF from the Univ of Maine on how to tap trees and boil sap

Let us know your questions or comments below:

March 22, 2013
DIY tapping maple trees for maple syrup – GF Video

Tapping sugar maple trees to make maple syrup is a big tradition in my part of Connecticut, so I wanted to show you how to tap maple trees to get maple sap to make maple syrup. We use plastic taps and tubing that are connected to buckets at the base of each tree. The advantage of using individual buckets is that some of the water in the sap will freeze in the collection bucket. The whole goal of boiling sap in an evaporator is to remove the water from the maple sap, so removing some of the water as ice is a super simple way to reduce your boiling time.

Tubing Connector for tapping sugar maples

We buy our taps and tubing from Leader Evaporator. The smallest length the tubing comes in is 500′, but don’t fret, its quite inexpensive, about $60 for that much tubing. To buy a lesser amount of tubing locally would cost just as much. We use Tree Saver taps. Buy a bunch of their tubing connectors too, you will need them to tie several taps into one bucket.

In a future sugar maple tree tap video, we’ll connect several trees into one large collection barrel.

Check your buckets every morning, scoop out the ice with a sieve, and then store the sap in a large barrel that is in a cold place packed with snow. The sap has to stay cold or it will spoil. You can tell if you sap has gone bad if it has a milky color to it.

We have a bunch of maple syrup making videos, including how to boil down your sap into maple syrup, click here to watch our maple syrup videos

Here is a great PDF from the Univ of Maine on how to tap trees and boil sap

Have any questions or comments? Please post them below:

March 12, 2013
Dog Treat Recipe Sweet Potato Dog Biscuits GF Video

Homemade Dog Treat Recipe! These dog treats are easy to make, and our dogs love these dog biscuits. I’m wondering if there’s a difference between dog treats and dog biscuits, maybe dog treats is a more general term and dog biscuits refer to baked dog treats like these sweet potato dog treats we made for the Labradors.

While working on this recipe, I found the amount of milk you add varies depending on how large and how moist the sweet potato is. You want the dough to be kinda dry, like pie crust dough, not wet. I’ve reduced the amount of milk in the dog treat recipe here, after mixing in the dry ingredients, you can add more milk or water if the dough is too dry to work with a rolling pin.

You also might consider adding in brewer’s yeast or powdered garlic to these dog treats, if you’ve found those ingredients help your dog’s health, or flax seed perhaps? What do you think?

I add flax seed oil to our Labrador’s breakfast to supplement their omega 3,6,9 intake. Keep flax seed oil in the fridge, btw. If you want to buy flax seed oil, its usually kept in the fridge case of the health food store.

If you don’t have a dog biscuit cookie cutter, you can use a glass or tuna can to cut out round dog treats, but its fun for kids to make dog bone style treats.

Here are some dog treat cookbooks you might want to check out, and let us know your dog treat recipes below:

Sweet Potato Dog Treat Recipe : GardenFork.TV
Ingredients
•   1 Medium sweet potato
•   2 cups whole wheat flour
•   1 cup whole oats
•   2 eggs
•   3/4 cup milk
Cooking Directions
1. preheat oven to 350F
2. poke 4-5 fork holes into sweet potato, microwave for about 8 minutes, or use the \”bake potato\” setting on your microwave. let the potato cool before handling it!
3. mix the two eggs together in a small bowl, set aside
4. remove the sweet potato from the skin and mash with a fork
5. add the dry ingredients together with the mashed sweet potato
6. add in then eggs and milk. you want a thick dough that isn\’t sticky, you may have to adjust the amount of milk.
7. flour a board and roll out the dough, you don\’t want a sticky dough
8. roll out to 1/2\” or 1/4\”
9. cut out dog treats with cookie cutters or a glass or a tuna can or just use a knife to cut out whatever shape you like.
10. grease a sheet pan with cooking spray, butter etc. put the dog treats on the pan
11. pick up the leftover rolled out dough and form it into a ball again, and roll it out into a sheet, and cut more dog biscuits
12. bake for 30 minutes or until slightly browned on top.

February 24, 2013
Best Rice Pudding Recipe : GF Video

How To Make Rice Pudding Recipe Video. I love rice pudding, here I show you how to make rice pudding in the oven. There is also a stove top rice pudding recipe, which we will show you soon. Rice pudding is a comfort food, it reminds me of diners and maple syrup. Plus rice pudding is super easy to make, even I can make it .
Many people make a bouron sauce for rice pudding, but I prefer honey or maple syrup. I’m not big on the bourbon sauce, I find it too sweet and boozey.

Plus this is another use what you got recipe, in that you can put in nutmeg or cinnamon or a combo of both. At the local diner, they sprinkle the cinnamon over the dish of rice pudding just before baking it rather than mixing it into the batter.

Other additions that I’ve seen are chopped apple, lemon or orange zest, dates, currants, and other dried fruit. Try some stuff in your cupboard and let us know what works for you in the comments below.

In testing for doneness, its eye of the beholder, some people like pudding firm, and others like it more loose pudding like. I think a lot of it depends on what you ate as a kid. I remember a lot of Jello pudding as a kid, so i tend toward the firm side of puddings.

Best Rice Pudding Recipe
Ingredients
•   2 cups cooked rice, long, short, or brown
•   1 1/2 cups milk
•   4 eggs
•   1/3 cup sugar
•   1 tsp vanilla
•   1 tsp salt
•   1 tsp cinnamon or nutmeg
•   1/2 cup walnuts or raisins ( optional)
Cooking Directions
1. Preheat Oven to 325F
2. Mix together everything but the rice.
3. After the eggs are well mixed, add in the rice.
4. Pour the batter into a greased 8×8 or 9×9 dish
5. Bake for 25-30 minutes
6. Pudding is done when its the consistency that you like pudding, some like it firm, some like it jiggly.
7. I prefer to serve warm with honey or maple syrup.

February 5, 2013
How To Cook Mushrooms : GF Video

Learn how to cook mushrooms in our latest foraging – mushroom identification video. We made a oyster mushroom identification video, and people asked us to show how to cook mushrooms, so here is our mushroom cooking video!

The oyster mushrooms we use here were cultivated mushrooms, and you can grow your own mushrooms, here’s post about growing mushrooms here, but we bought these at the food coop. In the growing season you can go mushroom hunting, but be sure to learn from an experience mushroom foraging person, and bring your mushroom identification books with you. Below are a few of the mushroom books we like and use.

To clean mushrooms, I just brush them off with a towel, you can also wash them, but its not always necessary, I feel, but you should do what you want, because you’re going to do that anyway…

Butter, Salt, & Pepper are the key ingredients in this simple sauted mushroom recipe, and the cast iron pan is great for cooking mushrooms, holds heat nicely and its evenly distributed too.

You can store mushrooms in your fridge or a cool basement, I keep them in a paper bag that’s not closed tight. Plastic bags will cause the mushrooms to go bad quickly, I think. Also when you are foraging for mushrooms, bring along a few paper bags, its the best way to store them while you hike around, IMHO.

Below is my favorite book I use for mushroom identification, let me know any other suggestions you have in the comments below:

Click To Buy From An Independent Bookstore

January 25, 2013
Cooking Pizza In A Fireplace – GF Video

Cooking pizza in a fireplace is not rocket science! No need to build a pizza ove, let me show you how to cook pizza in the fireplace. This is totally a “Use What You Got” GardenFork moment. I wanted to make pizza in our portable backyard pizza oven, but it was freezing outside, and staring at the fireplace, the light bulb went off in my head. I already had a built-in pizza oven in our living room.

Cooking Pizza In A Fireplace, How To Start

For this pizza oven method, you’ll need a cast iron dutch oven combo cooker, You can buy a combo cooker dutch oven here
And a cooking or camping grate. you can buy the camping grate here

We make our pizza dough – watch our pizza dough recipe video here – the day before and let it do a slow rise in the fridge overnight.

Be very careful when working with the fire! Fire burns – don’t wear loose clothing, wear gloves and use fireplace tongs or other metal tools.

After the fire in the fireplace pizza oven dies down bit, put the camping grate over the fire and preheat both parts of the dutch oven. You may need to adjust the height of the camping grate over the fire, I used bricks under the legs of the camping grate. Have all your ingredients prepared ahead of time, as well as the dough rolled out.

Hardwoods make the best firewood, my wood shed is primarily stacked with oak and maple. The maple takes longer to catch, so I use a mix of what I have.

Have you used your fireplace as a pizza oven? Let us know in the comments section below.

Here are the links again to the combo cooker dutch oven and the camping grate:

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January 11, 2013
Heirloom Simple Squash Soup Recipe – GF Video

Here’s a simple squash soup recipe that uses heirloom winter squash- Blue Hubbard – instead of the usual Butternut Squash. You can use any type of winter squash in this soup, but we wanted to trumpet the use of more heirloom vegetables in our recipes here.

We grow heirloom and hybrid squash in our neighbor’s field, using the weed stop fabric. We made a how to video about using the weed free plastic gardening mulch, which you can watch here.

Winter Squash are easy to grow. The biggest problem we have with growing squash is the Squash Vine Borer, and we have 2 videos on dealing with them

An organic method to prevent the Squash Vine Borer Video

How to deal with a Squash Vine Borer infestation Video

You can cook winter squash several ways, steaming, frying, baking… I prefer to roast squash. You need to be careful when cutting winter squash, it’s quite dense, and you need a sharp knife. Take care to steady the squash and yourself when cutting it up, if you slip, its a bad thing with a knife.

Baking or roasting squash helps sweeten the flavor of the squash, i think. I split the squash in two, put both halves face up in a pan, and stick in the oven; don’t cover with foil.

Heirloom Simple Squash Soup Recipe
Ingredients
•   1 Heirloom Squash, such as Hubbard
•   1 medium onion, chopped
•   1 small handful sage or thyme or a mix
•   2 cups lowfat milk
Cooking Directions
1. Split the squash in half, scoop out the seeds, place face up in roasting pan and roast for 1 hour at 350 or until squash flesh is soft. you can check this when a knife easily inserts into the flesh.
2. When squash is roasted, put 2 glugs of oil in a dutch oven or deep pot, toss in oinion and cook till just golden and kinda clear
3. Add cooked squash flesh to the pot along with chopped herbs
4. Mash the squash with a potato masher and add some of the milk.
5. You can use a hand blender or masher to cream the squash, adding more milk to get the consistency you want. A blender will work also, but its more messy.
6. Salt and pepper to taste and ladle into individual bowls.
7. You can add in home made croutons, which makes the soup more of a filling meal.

December 13, 2012
Deep Fry Turkey How To GF Video
Learn how to deep fry turkey in this GardenFork.TV cooking video. We received a bunch of requests to make a video about how to make deep fried turkey, so just in time for Thanksgiving, here is the our simple method for deep frying turkey. We bought our Turkey Deep Fryer Kit on Amazon here
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There are a bunch of precautions when using a deep fryer, remember, the oil is real HOT and can burn you.
- Wear long sleeves and heavy gloves
- Turn off the burner when lowering or raising the turkey
- Defrost the turkey fully
- Keep a fire extinguisher nearby
- Slowly lower the turkey into the hot oil, takes 1-2 minutes to fully immerse the turkey
- Make sure the oil temperature thermometer is not accidentally stuck in the turkey itself. You want to use the large round dial thermometer that comes with your deep fryer kit to measure the oil temperature.
- Do not let the oil go above 350F, bad things can happen, like spontaneous combustion, not a good thing.
- Follow all safety rules that come with the turkey deep fryer kit
  .
The secret to great deep fried turkey is temperature, you want cook the breast to 145F, then turn off the burner, lift out the turkey, drain and let it rest for 20 minutes. It will continue to cook a bit. I’ve found that if you cook the turkey past the 145F mark, it tastes dry and crumbly.
[box bg=”#FFCC33″ color=”#000000″]Be extremely careful when using a deep fryer! Hot oil will burn your skin. Follow all directions and precautions that come with you deep fryer.[/box]

We could go into the science of protein strands tightening up when they are heated too much, but we’ll leave that to America’s Test Kitchen. Just remember to check the temperature after about 25 minutes in the thick part of the breast.

Here is where we bought out deep fried turkey kit:
November 2, 2012
What would you like to see? GF Video

I get ideas all the time for new GardenFork videos, but I’d like to hear from you guys what you’d like to see. I have a list of show ideas in my Evernote file, but some of the best ones come from you guys. Like the video we did on garden hose repair!

I’d appreciate you taking the time to post below your suggestions and thoughts, i’d appreciate it. Thanks, eric.

October 22, 2012
Foraging for Edible Plants: Purslane GF Video

Learn how to forage for edible wild greens and identify edible plants in this Foraging for Purslane video. Edible plants like Purslane are sometimes considered weeds, but you can eat them, watch and learn here in this GardenFork foraging video.

Purslane grows all over the place, ( it grows well in compacted and dry soils ) so all you urban homesteaders rejoice, here’s a free salad green that grows like a weed. Purslane is considered a succulent, it kinda looks like the leaves of a jade plant, that whole family of plants. We have purslane volunteering in our garden, so if I run across it, I usually just let it grow and harvest it before it takes over whatever plants are next to it.

From the Purslane Wikipedia entry, I learned a lot about purslane. Purslane is eaten all over the world, just not here in the states. The leaves and stem are edible, not sure about the taproot. It is eaten raw and cooked, and it has a ‘mucilangious quality’ it is also cooked into soups and stews and can thicken dishes.

Greeks fry the leaves with sage, in Turkey it is cooked like spinach, and again, here, we pull it out as a weed.

What I found cool is that it has high levels of Omega 3 fatty acids, which few plants have. One usually has to eat fish to get high omega 3 levels. This edible wild green also has antioxidant properties.

Do you eat purslane? what is your favorite wild edible green?

September 13, 2012
Roast Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe GF TV Video
Easy Cherry Tomato Recipe served over pasta, rice, or quinoa. Here’s a recipe for all those ripe cherry tomatoes in your garden. Roast the tomatoes with some garlic and the like, and its amazing.

My friend Bill gave me this cherry tomato recipe; he’s been making it a few times a week. Its a great midweek dinner, or weekday dinner recipe, super simple.

I make this with all yellow tomatoes, but you can ‘ use what you got ‘ cause that’s the GardenFork way, after all. The yellow cherry tomatoes have lower acid content, and are sweeter, I think, than red cherry tomatoes, but that’s just my opinion.

If you have a recipe for cherry tomatoes, please share it with us below, be great to hear from you.
Roast Cherry Tomato Pasta Recipe

Recipe Type: Pasta

Cuisine: Italian

Author: Eric Rochow

Prep time: 15 mins

Cook time: 30 mins

Total time: 45 mins

Serves: 4

Cherry Tomato Pasta recipe to deal with all the tomatoes you have in the garden.
Ingredients

2 pints cherry tomatoes

1/4 cup olive oil

4 large cloves, coarsley chopped garlic

1 cup oil cured black olives – optional

1 cup cubed feta cheese

1 lb pasta, preferably whole wheat
Instructions

pints cherry tomatoes

/4 cup olive oil

large cloves, coarsley chopped garlic

cup oil cured black olives – optional

cup cubed feta cheese

lb pasta, preferably whole wheat

Cooking Directions

Preheat the oven to 375F

Wash and dry the cherry tomatoes. arrange the tomatoes in one layer in a 9 x 13 pan.

Coat with the olive oil and distribute chopped garlic over tomatoes.

Roast in oven for about 30 minutes, or until the cherry tomatoes start to burst and brown slightly.

If using black olives or feta cheese, add these after tomatoes are roasted.

Cook pasta while tomatoes are roasting. Drain cooked pasta and divide between 4 bowls.

Pour roast tomato mixture over the pasta.
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September 1, 2012
Surfcasting with Lures How-to GF TV Video
Surfcasting, saltwater fishing from shore, is easy to do, and a great way to learn how to catch fish. In this how-to video we use lures at the beach to fish for striped bass and bluefish. Ocean fishing like this is not complicated, and i’m all about simple is good.

We went surfcasting at Fort Tilden Park, on the border of Queens & Brooklyn in New York City; its pretty wild to be in the city, yet on the ocean, weird dichotomy there between the urban business and the calm of the ocean surf.

A couple of things I learned about ocean fishing on this trip:
- Bring along water friendly shoes like those sandles with big holes in them, or don’t wear shoes at all if its warm enough
- Apply sunblock, the bigger the SPF number the better. Even if its cloudy, you should protect your skin.
- Make sure you have the proper permits and are allowed to be fishing where you are fishing. I’m big on following the rules, that’s why they are there.
- Pay attention to bag limits and eating limits. Around NYC, the fish have accumulated some chemicals in their flesh that you don’t want to eat large amounts of.
- Buy used surfcasting gear on craigslist, our suggestion is 10- 12′ lightweight rod and spinning reel. I used braided line for the first time in this video and it worked well.
A big thank you to my friend Brian and his dad Jack.

We’ll do more fishing videos in the near future, i’m all about eating food that is locally harvested. What are your surfcasting tips? Let us know below:
June 20, 2012
Foraging: Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto Recipe : GF Video
Foraging was on our minds this weekend, seeing some edible wild plants in our yard, after listening to this NPR story on eating and cooking wild foods like edible Garlic Mustard and Nettles.

Yes, you can eat nettles, despite the fact that the stems of the nettle plant have tiny barbs that sting if you grab Nettles without gloves. The secret is blanching before eating the nettles.

Garlic Mustard is an edible wild green, its leaves have hint of Garlic taste, though the mustard leaf taste is more prominent. Garlic Mustard is a non-native invasive plant that crowds out woodland native flowers like trilliums, bloodroot, etc. When harvesting Garlic Mustard, be sure to remove the entire root base, so it doesn’t grow back.

Our Wild Edible Plant Pesto Recipe made with Stinging Nettles and Garlic Mustard is inspired by an NPR interview of Leah Lizarondo whose food blog is Brazen Kitchen. A big thank you to Larkin Page-Jacobs of NPR and Leah.

Please tell us about your foraging recipes and tips below the recipe, thanks.

Foraging Videos & Edible Plant Identification:

Here are other plant identification foraging videos we have done:

Dandelion, How to find, forage, and cook Dandelion Video

Lambsquarter, Foraging and Cooking Lambsquarter Video

Click for photos of Garlic Mustard and Stinging Nettles for plant identification.
Garlic Mustard & Nettle Pesto Recipe

Recipe Type: pesto

Author: Eric Rochow

Prep time: 10 mins

Cook time: 1 min

Total time: 11 mins

Serves: 2 cups

A simple pesto recipe made from foraged edible plants, Garlic Mustard, Stinging Nettles and Dandelion
Ingredients

1 cup Blanched Nettles

3 cups Garlic Mustard Leaves

1 cup Parmesan or Romano cheese, grated

1 cup Extra Virgin Olive Oil

1 cup Dandelion Leaves ( optional )

1/2 lemon

1 tablespoon lemon zest

1 cup toasted walnuts

2 medium cloves garlic
Instructions

Wash all greens in a salad spinner – wear gloves when handling stinging nettles.

Take 2 large handfuls of nettles – wear gloves! and blanch in boiling water for 5 minutes, drain in a colander.

Grate 1 cup of cheese using the large holes on a box grater, don\\\\\\\’t buy the pre-grated cheese, it tastes awful.

Toast the walnuts in a fry pan on the stove, keep an eye on them, the burn easily.

Place the greens, walnuts, cheese, garlic in a food processor, pour olive oil over the ingredients in the food processor.

Add lemon zest and the juice from half a lemon.

Turn on the food processor and watch the fun, you want the greens to become a roughly chopped paste, but not turn to mush.

Serve this over pasta ( whole wheat pasta goes well with these flavors ) or in white bean soup, or on bread, its great.
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May 4, 2012