Mad skills…

Homemade broth is not only nourishing to the body, but also the soul.

If you spend any amount of time w my friend Heather, you’ll hear her refer to someone and their mad skills, usually referring to their cooking skills. If you have “mad skills’, you can cook just about anything and make it taste good.

We aren’t born with these skills. I’m fortunate enough to have mentors, such as my great-aunt, that love food as much as I do.

Using vegetable scraps in broth are a great way to reduce food waste and save money, but not all scraps are created equal.

She had a huge bookcase full of cookbooks and we’d read them on lazy Summer days, commenting on what looked good. She was my cooking mentor before OPB and Julia Child. I’ve always loved food and cooking and learning about it, using it in my daily life, and sharing it come easily to me. Do what you love, and the rest will fall into place, right? What if you don’t have a mentor, or someone to share your love of cooking? Well…that’s where we come in. The Master Food Preserver volunteers and staff in Clackamas County wanted to try something new and created skill sheets for folks and the farmers that feed them.

Green Sauces can be made from greens as well as herbs.

I’ve mentioned our stellar volunteer group. They’ve been patient during the pandemic, asking for ways to participate with the Family and Community Health program when we can’t provide in-person classes. Early this Spring we met via Zoom to discuss ways to support farmers selling their produce. I alluded to it in this post.

In case you thought pesto was the only green sauce.

We didn’t want to step on our well-respected peers toes, so we decided to focus on skills. Skill sheets are open-ended so you can apply them to many different foods. It opens up a world of options and decreases food waste. This idea originated with Zenger Farm’s CSA for Prescription Health program.

Fall and Winter root vegetables bring richness, flavor, and sweetness to your cooking. Try celery root this year!

Creating something simple and easy to use is harder than it sounds. These sheets represent months of brainstorming, researching, testing, editing, countless emails, and printing.

Big shout out to all of the Clackamas County volunteers that contributed, (I won’t list them here for privacy reasons), as well as Kelly, my friend and

Simple and tasty cooking ideas to help get you started. 

neighbor Kristina (lady, you have mad editing skills!) and Bryan and the Zenger peeps…y’all are rock stars. Thank you!!

 

 

 

Please, please, please, share. These aren’t meant to be a “best-kept secret”. A downloadable pdf is available on our webpage under Culinary Skill Sheets as well as our social media pages. If you find them useful, or not, please share your (constructive) feedback in the comments.

 

I can personally verify that trimmed basil stems kept in a glass of water will eventually sprout. 

 

As always my friends, keep up the good work. You’re doing a great job. I have to remind myself that 100% today may look different from yesterday’s (or tomorrow’s) 100%. Be kind to yourself. It’s been a little rough lately, but as Samwise Gamgee said to Frodo, “There’s some good in this world, Mr Frodo, and it’s worth fighting for.”

Do yourself a favor, if you have access to green (unripe) coriander seeds, keep them.  They freeze well and are great in a next veggie saute, green sauce, or curry. Mine are pickling in a fermented hot sauce. 🙂

Stay curious and be excellent to each other.

Buffy Rhoades| mom. forager. gardener. volunteer turned program assistant. a real busy beaver

instagram icon download 24x24 - curved Healthy Together Newsletter  Website

 

It’s okay to be a little corny…

Nasturtiums “from my garden” was listed as a salad ingredient and were peppery and delicious.
Photo from Buffy Rhoades. (Yes, these are from my garden.)

A couple weeks ago my husband and I celebrated our anniversary with a fancy-schmancy dinner at a local restaurant. They featured seafood and seasonal produce, and to my delight, corn was one of the highlights of the menu. (Corn pudding or majarete, is delightful! Who’d have known?!) 

Photo courtesy of Julian Scholl on Unsplash

Now listen, I’m dating myself here, but I have childhood memories of a large wooden crate of freshly harvested corn on the side of the road with a hand-painted sign advertising “CORN 4 ears for $1”. My family would bring some home for dindin, but also to preserve for the rest of the year, because in-season produce is not only best quality, it’s also more affordable.

Lucky for us, Oregon State University Extension has a number of food preservation publications for individual foods, such as Preserving Corn. If you don’t care to pressure can your corn, but would really like to freeze it, they share everything you need to know about how to get the best results. (I did not know that you need to blanch corn before freezing it until I began training as a volunteer for OSU Extension. This explains my previously disappointing results!)

Photo courtesy of Mohd Hafiz Yahya on Unsplash

The season is winding down, but it’s not too late. I’ll be dreaming of my beloved great-aunt Barbara’s corn chowder while cleaning, blanching, and freezing ears of corn this weekend. Also, don’t forget OSU Extension’s Food Hero site for more recipes, facts, and kid activities. 

It’s been a long while since my last post. Be assured, more topics are on the horizon, but in the meantime, if you haven’t already subscribed to our YouTube channel, followed us on Instagram and Facebook, or visited our webpage, please do so. We share all kinds of things relating to the Family and Community Health program. Mostly about life and getting good at it. (I love that quote!)

Sunflowers from the garden have been a source of joy this season. 
Photo by Buffy Rhoades

As always my friends, keep up the good work. Get your pressure canner gauge tested at an Extension office, stay curious and be excellent to each other.

Buffy Rhoades| mom. forager. gardener. volunteer turned program assistant. a real busy beaver

instagram icon download 24x24 - curved Healthy Together Newsletter  Website