ZUCCHINI in El País Vasco

At long last, we reach the end of the alphabet.  I swear, I never thought I’d get here when work on this project first began.  I was tempted to do Zebra (I saw it on a menu once but have never eaten it) but decided to do something really approachable, easily accessible and absolutely delicious.  ZUCCHINI!

Don’t call it a cop out, zucchini are fresh.  OK, maybe they’ve been cooked to death in the USA as the side vegetable of many, many generic restaurants.  But you know what, they’re always tasty and pretty hard to mess up.  Undercooked, overcooked, sautéed, grilled, fried, raw; I think they’re delicious and I always see the good in this summer squash.

That’s right the zuch is a summer squash, available mostly from summer to late fall but you can find it nearly year-round in warm areas.  Zucchini are crazy prolific and hearty, if you ever plant some you’ll be rewarded with BUNDLES of the fruit.  It really overproduces!  In addition, you’ll have heaps of beautiful, giant blossoms that range in color from yellow to orange and make a great addition to any dish you wish.  Most people immediately think about stuffing the flowers with cheese, battering them and deep frying them, but I also love them thrown into pasta, couscous or faro, or as an addition to frittatas, omelettes, pupusas and tacos…shoot, they’re good in everything.  I love the sensuous quality of cooking with flowers!

Look for small zucchini (or any summer squash).  They’ll have less water content and more flavor.  In addition to being tasty and easy to prepare, they are really good for you with potassium, magnesium, fiber, vitamins.  The Native Americans were really into their zucchini and grew them with two important companion plants, beans and maize.  Known as “The Three Sisters” the trio help one another grow and when eaten together create an incredibly health meal of pure protein.  Awesome!

ON TO THE SQUASH.  I rock out a great RAW pasta dish on this episode.  By taking a veggie peeler or mandoline to a zucchini you can create tagliatelle-sized strips that really are a great pasta substitute.  Healthy, raw, tasty fun.  I then got totally classic and fried zucchini in a beer batter.  Why not?  At the end of the alphabet is a pot of gold—golden beer and really hot frying oil.  My spears are phenomenal!

In a simple and fun way, the letter Z was a great shoot for me.  My neighbors Kim and Karl had an amazing amount of zucchini growing in their garden and I borrowed  a bunch of fruit for shoot.  When we wrapped for the day I ran over to their house and dropped off a ton of the fried spears and chatted about the show for a while.  It was totally in the spirit of giving and eating and growing and bonding and, well, ORGANIC A to Z.

I started ORGANIC A to Z out of curiosity.  I wanted to create a cooking show online and I wanted to blog about food and write recipes.  I had this itch, this burning desire to share my enthusiasm for food and home cooking with like-minded people.  But I wanted to take it a step further and dive deeper into the healthy world of organics.  Focusing the show on organics was a great way for me to learn more about and master this topic further.  As I jumped down the rabbit hole, I realized that going organic wasn’t always the best way to eat, in fact sometimes it made no sense at all; what’s wholesome about eating an organic apple flown half-way around the world?  I broadened my focus from being an organic advocate to a local, seasonal and organic eater.  But realize this is a personal choice, it’s what I am into.  As the show progressed I thought more and more about what I really wanted people to get out of this.  I’ve come full circle to the home kitchen.

I’m not here to preach [too much], I’m here to excite!  Get your ass in the kitchen and get cooking!  Whether you go seasonal, local, organic or not I just want you to cook!  There’s nothing, NOTHING, better in the world than home cooked meals.  This is the epitome of love, health and sustenance.  Family food is so amazingly important and precious and it must be preserved.  There’s really only one way to do that, cook and eat it!  So ask your parents and grandparents for their recipes, go hit the markets and get cooking.  At least one day a week, stand up to the fast-paced, prepackaged society we dwell in; cook a meal from scratch and eat it with people you love!

Hopefully I’ve given you some inspiration.  My recipes and show ideas are nothing fancy or overly complicated, anyone can do them and they’re all [as I say over and over on the show] totally delicious.  Be brave and bold, don’t worry about perfection and go ahead an make mistakes, it’s all good!  Have some organic adventures of your own in your home.  Just keep cooking!

Thank you so much for joining me on this alphabetical journey.  I wish you much love, much sustenance and many, many tasty eats!

Pizza

We are damn near the end of the alphabet and on the letter Y.  Again, now a lot of foodstuffs to choose from so I thought it’d be cool to feature YEAST on this episode.

I think Yeast is amazing stuff and we really take it for granted.  It’s in nearly all the bread we eat, a whole lot of the alcoholic drinks out there (beer and wine mostly) and truth be told it is all around us, all the time.  This is a cooking show and so I will not focus on the nasty, pathogenic strains of yeast that can cause infections and illness.  No, today it’s all about the healthy happy yeast floating all around us, resting on the skins of our fruits (especially grapes and apples) and veggies and ready to do good.  And then there’s the yeasts you can buy at the store for baking or the nutritional yeast (brewer’s yeast) for eating—great stuff and pure protein!

I got an appreciation for yeast early on when I was in high school and my brother and father started to do a lot of home brewing.  There were different strains of yeast involved in their alchemy and I still remember the unusual scent of the stuff in our kitchen.  A couple years back I was working as an apprentice winemaker at Peay Vineyards on the Sonoma Coast in California.  It was there that I learned the power of natural fermentation, which we relied on to ferment our grapes and turn that sweet, sweet juice into glorious wine.  There was enough precious yeast stuck to the skins of our grapes to begin fermentation totally naturally—a really remarkable feat!  After a couple days the crushed grapes would jump in temperature and start to foam as the yeast ate the sugar and burped out CO2 and alcohol.  Occasionally I’d have to kickstart the process with a small yeast (or yeast husk) addition to a tank of macerating grapes, I’d stink like yeast for the rest of the day.  The packages fascinated me though, different strains from France that were meant for different types of wine (Grenache, Syrah, etc.) and each one had a distinctive, unusual, fruity, musky scent.

It was also in Sonoma that I fell in love with an outstanding sourdough bakery named the Wildflour Bakery in Freestone.  These guys use a sourdough starter that is over 15 years old and creates the most amazingly delicious breads in the world.  I was blessed and honored to receive a piece of their starter which I have been lovingly tending for the past year and half, I named it Omar.

But you don’t need a bubbly sticky mess of starter or exotic imported Grenache yeast to get down in your kitchen.  Every grocery store sells packets of yeast and if you’ve never made anything with it, shame on you!  So let’s get crackin’!  Pizza it is on tap for the mighty yeast episode.  I have never, ever understood why anyone buys pizza kits, frozen pizzas or orders delivery.  It makes no sense to me.  You can make your own pizza in no time flat with your own fixings.  I always make extra dough and par-bake a bunch of crusts to store in Ziplocs in the freezer.  Voila!  I have killer, ready-to-eat pizzas any time.  With a salad, you can’t ask for a better lunch or quick dinner.  Oh yeah, did I mention that it literally costs pennies to make pizza dough?  Totally.

On the show I rock out a pear pizza. Originally I did a more traditional margarheita too, but we cut that out of the edit and left in the more funk-a-fied offerig.  I love to make alternative pies and this one is a great one!

When it comes to yeast, there are health benefits.  You know it.

Farm Fresh Eggs

How excellent!  X stumped us all.  Once again, a play on words was needed to tackle this egg-cellent letter.  EGGS it is!

Do I have to say anything about eggs?  Yes, I do.  You know I have a lot of issues when it comes to chickens and the same goes with eggs.  I’m on the hunt for a humane, happy and tasty product.  Conventional eggs have so many different labels on them, I can’t keep track and I’m never really sure if those birds are free range or humanely raised or what.

One day it occurred to me, THEY SELL EGGS AT THE FARMER’S MARKET…the only place I feel really comfortable buying chickens from.  Now that I’ve gone down that path, I’ll never go back.  The taste alone blew my palate and my mind!

I was shocked, totally, full on, flat out, caught with my pants down, surprised and amazed when I tasted my first farmer’s market egg.  It was like a whole new food.  Ever been to a really expensive brunch and had an egg that was super tasty, rich and creamy?  That’s what I’m talking about.  You can have that egg every day if you’d get them from the source.

When you get eggs from the Farmer’s Market you might be surprised.  They’re not all the same shape and they’re not all the same color.  My dozens are mixed; a few round and small eggs, a few long and big ones and the colors are all over the place– beautiful with blue, green, brown, speckled and light grey shells.  The camera didn’t pick up the hues in the colors very well, but my eggs on this episode were indeed multi-colored and the yolks were really rich, almost orange in color.  In case you were wondering, the color of the shells has no effect on the flavor, nor are there any changes in the nutrition.  Different breeds of hens lay different colored eggs.

The good outweighs the bad. For a long time people were freaking out about eggs, saying they had too much cholesterol and too much fat to be in a healthy diet.  But what about all that protein and the multitude of vitamins and beta-carotene?  Eggs are good for the eyes, the skin, the brain, the heart; they help you stay positive and happy.

And they’re fun to cook!  Almost every chef I know loves to throw down on some eggs, turning out the perfect omelette, poaching, frying, soufflé-ing…it’s a miracle food.  They are in so many sauces and custards, ice creams and baked goods; even all by themselves they are fantastic.  Traditionally, a restaurant will test out a new chef by asking them to prepare their favorite egg dish.  It’s amazing how one simple ingredient can be used in so many different ways to create so many tasty things.

For me, nothing tastes better than farm fresh eggs whipped up and cooked into a perfect French rolled omelette.  I don’t need anything to flavor the babies, just a little butter and sea salt.  Voila!  It was bigger, bolder flavors that really attracted me to eggs at first, especially since I never really liked eggs that much growing up.  But in 2000 I was in Rajasthan India and ate my first masala omelette.  It really grabbed my attention and thus, I turned it into the frittata for episode X.

Which came first, the chicken or the egg?  I can’t get into this debate.  But I know that nothing tastes better than humanely raised, organic, farm-fresh eggs.  So get down to your farmer’s market and get some of those fun and funky, multi-colored, delicious and excellent eggs!

V is for victorious vinegar!  There are so many different types out there and they’re all so delicious.  Different colors, different tastes, different levels of acidity, different bases for making them.  Let’s get started.

Vinegar is basically an acid.  Chefs talk a lot about adding acid to dishes to finish them off, while lemon juice is frequently the acid of choice, a variety of different vinegars also do the trick.  More than just a component in salad dressings, a little vinegar on a dish can really help heighten and enliven the flavors, bringing out the flavors within.  Give it a try!

People always say that old wine turns into vinegar.  This is not entirely true.  The wine would need to be fermented a again with something call a “mother”, a blob of friendly bacteria (like a sourdough starter).  The mother starts a secondary fermentation process which turns alcohol into acetic acid.  Since vinegar starts off as a juice (or wine or cider) or some sort, it’s a good idea to branch out into organics.  Since I only eat organic apples the same goes when it comes to my apple cider vinegar!

I love balsamic vinegar a whole lot, but in truth it is a bit of a trendy food item.  Joel Dean, from Dean & Deluca fame, is largely credited with starting this fad when he began imported balsamic vinegar from Modena Italy to sell in his New York shop.  Before long it took it and by the ‘90s was sold nationwide.  By the 2000’s it seemed every crappy café in the country was offering balsamic vinaigrette on its salads.  Back in Italy, it’s not widely used outside of Emilia-Romagna region in the north where it is so beloved folks apparently bring their own bottles to restaurants with them and dole it out by the eye-dropper!

No question about it, balsamic is great stuff.  Dark, rich, earthy, sweet.  Good balsamic is made from trebbiano grape must (leftovers from wine-making) and the great stuff is aged in oak barrels for years and years.  The über-expensive stuff that was aged for decades is thick and intense and tastes so good you would not believe it.  Worth the $$$.  Read the label on your vinegar…if it has caramel or coloring or thickeners added to it…throw it out!

But lets not forget about the other vinegars out there.  Classic RED WINE is great stuff and deserves another shot in your kitchen, sherry is one of my favorites with its intense, bright acidity.  Yummy and health apple cider vinegar is used as folk medicine for a million things and a splash will turn you apple pie into an award winner.  I also really enjoy Rice Vinegar (NOT seasoned…seasoned means it’s been sweetened which you can easily do yourself at home so get XXX rice vinegar…), strong umeboshi vinegar and coconut vinegar for when I’m doing the Asian thing.  Shoot, I can even see the value in white vinegar!

For well over a year I’ve been using a spray bottle of white vinegar to clean things up in my home.  The acid cuts through grease, a little goes a long way, I know EXACTLY what I’m spraying around my house, the scent dissipates quickly and it costs next to nothing.  It is an amazing household cleaner.  I even make floor soap out of it!

For this episode I show off how to turn cheap and crappy balsamic vinegar into something a little more exciting—a balsamic reduction.  There’s nothing to it really…in fact I didn’t even show it on video I just talk about it and eat it!

I also got bold and made the classic Filipino dish, Chicken Adobo.  I could have gotten fancy and used some rice vinegar or my beloved coconut vinegar (which I’ll do when you come over for dinner sometime) but instead chose to use the plain, boring, distilled, white vinegar.  I chose this one ‘coz ANYONE can find it ANYWHERE and it makes a surprisingly great adobo!  You have no excuse but to try it out.

I’m barely scratching the surface here.  There are hundreds of different vinegars out there and each one has its own thing going on.  Vinegars offer you a great opportunity to explore the fun and functional addition of acids in your food and your pantry.  Create your own home cleaners, make tasty and complex reductions, bust out the world’s greatest dressings and pump up the flavor in all of your dishes with help from the mighty V, vinegar!

U?

Stumped by the letter U I had a pull a shifty and thus came up with Upside Down Cake.  I think U may have be tougher than the letter “I”…  What food starts with the letter U?  Upside Down Cake is a great choice, it’s classic comfort food and right now everyone can use some of that!

I did not grow up eating upside down cakes.  In fact, I don’t think I ever ate one until I was an adult.  I’m surprised by this, I mean…who doesn’t like comfort foods?  Apparently my parents, that’s who!  Surprisingly, my mom spent part of her childhood in Hawaii and I’m sure they were the inventors of the pineapple upside down cake.  But maybe not, this a recipe with a mysterious, secretive past.  It was apparently invented in the USA in the early part of the 20^th century and did indeed call for pineapple…but no one is sure exactly where it came from.

Yeah, the pineapple.  This is naturally where our heads go when we think upside down cake.  I feel kinda guilty for dissing the pineapple the way I do on the show.  I love pineapple and even though it almost always has to travel a long way to make it to market IT IS DELICIOUS.  Pineapples are a low pesticide crop and so you really don’t have to stress out if you can’t find an organic one.

I chose apples instead.  We’re doing an American classic and what is more old school than apples?  What really brought me to this decision was another upside down dessert that I love—tarte tatin.  Tarte tatine is a French apple dessert…but it’s a pie (or a tart) not a cake.  I adore these, it’s one of my absolute favorite desserts to make.  I go beyond apples too and monkey with a bunch of different fruits like pears, mangos, persimmons…you name it.  So when I had to come up with something upside down for the letter “U” I thought tarte tatine and upside down cake and I combined the two and here we go…an apple upside downer!

One of the things I love about making tart tatine is that it’s done in my cast iron skillet.  My skillet is a beautiful work of art.  In many ways it is my pan of choice.  I’m a bit wary of chemical-based, non-stick coatings…but a well maintained cast iron skillet is naturally nonstick!  That’s what a “well seasoned” pan is all about—an accumulation of grease from years of cooking that is more or less embedded in the fibers of your pan.  The secret to seasoning pans is to never wash them!  If I really have to clean my skillet, I’ll rub salt into the pan with my finger and rinse it out, but never use soap and a scrubby!  You also don’t want to let cast iron pans (woks fall in this category) sit with water in them or they’ll rust…so always towel dry thoroughly.  You also want to give the pan a little oil to coat it while it’s in storage and waiting for the next use.  If you do these easy steps, you’ll be rewarded with a naturally nonstick skillet that’s virtually indestructible and a real great addition to any kitchen!

Many food historians say the upside down cake was originally a “skillet cake” and cooked on the stove top.  We’re gonna kick start our cake that way but finish her in the oven.  You can use any pan for this if you don’t have a cast-iron skillet.  No problem.

Though we may not know exactly who invented this American classic we do know that it’s always good fun to make.  And good eating.  And hard to screw up.  And totally delicious, organic fun!