My first home made mustard!

I've been wanting to make my own mustard from scratch for awhile now and I finally tried it. I'm glad I waited because I've only learned about lacto-fermentation just recently. I decided to make the more rustic, grainy style mustard; so I used two kinds of mustard seed: white mustard and black.

I let them soak for 3 days in a jar with whey from kefir, a bit of water and some raw sliced onion. (1 cup mustard seeds, 1/4 cup whey, and enough water to cover the seeds) The longer you soak it the spicier it gets, so after 3 days, it has quite a bite! You can add all sorts of flavorings to the mustard, I picked the onion because it sounded intriguing; it gave the mustard a slight musty taste that gave it depth..... I like it!

 Once soaked for the appropriate time, throw it into a food processor. Add a little turmeric to get that yellow color, and also turmeric has anti-inflammatory properties. Maybe a bit of sea salt, and a bit of cider vinegar if you feel it needs more liquid.

 And Voila! Home made mustard! Yum!

more recipes at Hunger and Thirst's blog

Some of my stinging nettle recipes can be found this month at Hunger and Thirst 's blog. A dynamic duo of bloggers sets a challenge using a wild foraged ingredient each month and at the end of the month, the Wild Roundup is published with all the recipes everyone has sent in. There were @ 30 recipes this month! It's a great way to learn about wild edibles and their uses.



more yumminess

I was in the kitchen looking at a bag of tangerines from Costco; you know where you get like 20 of the beauties at once, and thinking "how are these going to get eaten?" Cause even eating 1 a day in my fruit salad for breakfast, they'll go bad before I can eat them all. My boyfriend love sweets, but there's no way he's going to peel a tangerine and eat it; it would be more accurate to say he loves SUGAR. An idea started forming in my head as I also had half a coconut worth of coconut meat......... "I wonder if coconut and tangerine together would taste like a creamsicle?" Now, I'm sure someone else has totally come up with this type of recipe before, but it was new to me, so I set out to try it. First I put the coconut into the blender with @ 2 cups of good water (I'm not very technical about measuring) Blended it up and strained it thru a nut milk bag (ok, it was really a wort bag for homebrewed beer, same diff)

I'll throw the strained coconut milk into the dehydrator to use as coconut flour or to roll up raw food treats

Love my Excaliber dehydrator. Next I peeled 5 of the tangerines and threw them whole into the blender cause I'm kind of lazy; blended them up and strained that in the nut milk/ wort bag into another container.

Then I poured the two liquids back into the blender to blend them together!

Yum, tastes just like a creamsicle, but not so sugary. Now I would be happy at this point but the previously mentioned boyfriend likes it sweet, so I chopped up some fresh stevia from my garden and threw it in. It'll steep in the juice for a few hours until we have dinner and I'll just pout it thru a strainer when I"m ready to serve! I prefer not to use the overly processed and bleached stevia powder from the store, but if that's all you can find I guess it'll have to do. Tell you what, the first person that subscribes to my blog and sends me their address will get a packet of stevia seeds in the mail. :)