We view this treat like a salad, and eat it before or after many meals. It is loaded with digestive enzymes and probiotics!

Start with a bowl of raw, plain kefir or yogurt, then top* as you desire with any or all of the following:

• pureed raw fruit or chopped raw fruit
• soaked and dehydrated rolled oats
• soaked and dehydrated chopped nuts and seeds – start with raw nuts
• sprouted and dehydrated (hulled) buckwheat groats
• raisins, date pieces, pieces of dried fig, or other dried fruit (unsulphured)
• drizzle of raw honey
• sprinkle of cinnamon and/or nutmeg
• sprinkle of unsweetened coconut

Yumm! Serve and enjoy!

*All toppings should be raw (not heated above 115 or 118 degrees F), especially the dairy, nuts, seeds, dried fruit, and honey – if you want the digestive enzymes intact. The cultured dairy, germinated (soaked) nuts, germinated (soaked) seeds, sprouted buckwheat, honey, and dates are all excellent sources of digestive enzymes. The cultured dairy is an excellent source of probiotics, with the kefir having around 10 times more active cultures than yogurt.

What else would you add? Also check out these 7 Yummy Ways to Eat Kefir!

Remember! The Gallery of Christmas Cookies is right around the corner – this coming Monday, the 14th of December! Get your cookie recipes ready!

We’re on a quest to find the perfect homemade creamy salad dressing. We’ve enjoyed almost every trial version. I’m not sure I’m done with the recipe, but this will show you where I am so far. And, you know what, I’d love to have your suggestions on how to improve this and make it more tasty!

The base of this recipe is either: chevre, yogurt cheese, kefir cheese, or sour cream (or “sour cream” made from chevre). Those all have different consistencies – the key is to add raw milk to whichever one you’re using to get it to the consistency you prefer. The recipe below reflects a thinner consistency, which is what we like because: 1) it lasts longer and 2) it is easier to pour.

The yogurt cheese or kefir cheese will make the dressing more tart, so you might want to decrease the apple cider vinegar and/or add a bit of raw honey. The chevre and sour cream make our favorite dressings, though we like the yogurt or kefir based dressings very much, too.

What I like about this recipe is that it is very versatile. And it goes with saying (though I’m going to say it) that herbs and spices differ greatly in quality and flavor. I am always very happy with the dried herbs and spices I get from Azure Standard; the brand is usually Oregon’s Wild Harvest. These herbs/spices far surpass the grocery store herbs. Other options for you would include a health food store with good turnover or Mountain Rose Herbs.

Lindsey recommended adding chives to a creamy, ranch-style dressing. I have yet to get some chives. They are on my list for my next Azure order. I placed an order yesterday but forgot to add the chives and now it is too late.

On to the recipe…

• 1 cup chevre, yogurt cheese or kefir cheese PLUS 1 cup raw milk –OR– 1-1/2 to 2 cups sour cream
• additional raw milk, for consistency (I use 1/4 to 1/2 cup)
• 1/4 cup raw apple cider vinegar
• 2 teaspoons herbed seasoning salt, herbamare, or 1 teaspoon sea salt (plus more to taste)
• 1 tablespoon organic dried dill
• 1 tablespoon organic dried parsley
• a pinch of black pepper
• additional ingredients – garlic, more herbs, etc.

Whisk all ingredients together – in food processor, blender, or with a whisk by hand. Store in an air-tight jar in the refrigerator. Makes 2 to 3 cups, depending.

Please share your favorite salad dressing recipes in the comments. I’d also love to hear your suggestions for how you’d make this dressing better.

This post is part of Pennywise Platter Thursday at The Nourishing Gourmet, Fight Back Friday! at FoodRenegade, and A Gathering of Homemade Dressings at Kitchen Stewardship. Making your own salad dressing is not only better for you (have you read any labels lately?) but you’ll save money.

Cold grain salads really hit the spot during the summer. We live on them all summer long!

On Saturday evening, I took cold cooked millet and mixed it together with shredded roast beef, goat feta cheese, diced onions, olives, garlic, herbs, salt, pepper, extra virgin olive oil and balsamic vinegar. The dinner was great and cooling on a day that reached 100 degrees.

In this post, I’ll share a general formula for creating your own cold grain salads, based on the foods your family enjoys and what your pantry contains.

The Grain

In a cold grain salad, the grains should be soaked, cooked, then chilled ahead of time. It is good to do your cooking in the morning when it is still cool – or better yet, if you have a roaster oven, you can set it up outside to cook your grains, which won’t heat up your house at all. These are some of the (already soaked and cooked, then chilled) grains we’ve used in cold main dish salads:

• Brown basmati rice
• Wild rice
• Quinoa
• Millet

Refer to the Grain Cooking Chart (or the Gluten-Free Grain Cooking Chart) for grain/water ratios, along with directions and options for overnight soaking, which is very important to aid in digestion.

The Meat

You’ll also want to have some type of meat, already cooked and chilled. The meat can be plain, as it will get seasoned in the salad. Or, if you cook it already marinated, it will add flavor to the salad. Either way, it is delicious! These are great meats to include in a cold grain salad:

• Pastured chicken chunks
• Grass-fed shredded roast beef
• Grass-fed ground beef (when cooking, keep it chunky, but small chunks)
• Wild-caught salmon chunks
• Pastured pork bacon bits
• Chunks of pastured pork ham
• Chunks of pastured pork or lamb sausage

The Add-Ins

There are so many add-ins. This won’t be exhaustive:

• Diced veggies, such as onions, peppers, zucchini, squash, cucumbers
• Veggies, such as peas or snap peas
• Sliced olives
• Chunks of raw cheese – feta, cheddar, etc.
• Cold, cooked beans – pintos, black beans, garbanzos/chickpeas

The Dressing

The dressing is really up to you. Our favorite is a viniagrette made from extra-virgin olive oil, balsamic vinegar (sulfite-free), salt, pepper, garlic, and herbs. Also good would be a honey-mustard, a natural ranch-type dressing (I’m working on a super good one right now), or a yogurt/kefir based herb dressing.

You mix up all the ingredients. Taste, taste, taste (of course to adjust seasonings). It is best to let it chill for an hour or so, to let the flavors mingle together. Another tasting might be necessary to make seasoning adjustments.

Try one! Let me know what you mix together and how your family likes it! Feel free to share what else you do for cooling eating during the summer.

It is hard to know whether I should share this dressing or not… because not everybody was crazy about it. As usual, I did like it very much, while everyone else thought it was so-so. See what you can do with it! It came from this recipe, only I used kefir instead of yogurt and green leaf stevia instead of honey. Perhaps I should do it again with honey. I can tell I’m really convincing you to give this a try with all my ho hum comments. But I think it has potential – and I really liked it. (Thank you to SueEllen for suggesting it to me!)

Making the recipe one time gives you about 1/2 cup of dressing – enough for one meal in our house, where a salad serves five of us with pretty large servings.

• 1/2 cup kefir – or plain yogurt in original recipe
• 1/8 teaspoon green leaf stevia (from Mountain Rose Herbs) – or 1 tablespoon raw honey, or to taste
• 2 teaspoons poppy seeds
• 4 tablespoons fresh lemon juice

Mix all ingredients together. Chill until needed, or pour over salad and toss immediately.

I’d like to share how simple and fun lacto-fermentation of vegetables can be. I’ve only done a bit of it, but enough to see that lacto-fermented vegetables taste fabulous and are very easy to make. What I love the most about it is that I don’t have to heat anything (though some recipes call for a bit of cooking) and that measuring is not that precise. This is the kind of anti-cooking I like!

First, though, let me tell you why lacto-fermentation is so cool. Forgive me if you already know this. Just skip ahead to the recipe. If you already know this recipe, just skip right on out of the room…

Traditional preservation of food was done without freezers or canning machines, through the process of lacto-fermentation. In this process, the sea salt and/or whey inhibits the growth of putrefying bacteria until enough lactic acid is produced to preserve the vegetables for many months. But, the lactobaccili which produce the lactic acid to preserve the vegetables do much more! They enhance the digestibility of the vegetables, increase vitamin levels, produce enzymes, offer antibiotic and anticarcionogenic substances, and support the growth of healthy flora in our intestines. My goodness, all of this from pickling! Compare that with today’s pickles, which offer nothing but pasteurized vegetables floating in an acidic brine of white vinegar.

All of this information is paraphrased from Nourishing Traditions on page 89. This book contains so much more information that I encourage you to read it for yourself for a better understanding!

To make these lacto-fermented foods properly, you must start with the highest quality vegetables, sea salt, and homemade whey (optional in purely vegetable recipes). You also need quart-size canning jars with metal bands and lids, preferably wide mouth. (Even so, I have been having good success with regular-mouth jars.)

This particular recipe is a modification of the Pickled Turnips in Nourishing Traditions on page 99. I don’t follow the quantities listed, but rather, use what quantities of vegetables I have. Also, I have omitted the onions. I love the flexibility!

Lacto-Fermented Turnips and Beets

You will need:

• naturally-grown turnips – peeled, quartered and sliced
• naturally-grown beets – peeled, quartered and sliced

For each jar full of peeled, quartered and sliced turnips and beets (fill the jar up to within 1-inch of the top), you will need:

• 1 cup of pure water with 2 tablespoons of sea salt –OR– 1 cup of pure water with 1 tablespoon of sea salt and 4 tablespoons of homemade whey (dripped out of kefir or yogurt, not from cheesemaking)
• additional pure water

Update 12/09: Now that I have made this more than a few times, I have found that if I make these without whey and with the additional salt, the veggies turn out on the salty side. Soaking the veggies in water for a time draws off the salt, making them tasty. One could also use less salt, but experimentation would be necessary – you need enough salt to suppress the putrefying bacteria.

Start by peeling, quartering and slicing the turnips and beets.

Mix them up to incorporate. Then fill as many quart jars as required to use up all the prepared vegetables. Press down on the veggies to make sure they’re packed in well and don’t fill up higher than within 1-inch of the top.

How many jars did you fill? Use that information to determine how many cups of water with sea salt — OR water with sea salt and whey — you need.

Mix the sea salt and water (and/or whey) together so the salt is mostly dissolved. If using water and sea salt, add 1 cup to each jar. If using water and sea salt with whey, add 1-1/4 cups to each jar. Then top off each jar with more pure water to cover the vegetables.

Put the lids and bands on the jars and tighten securely. Leave on the counter in a warm room (usually the kitchen) for about three days. The process of the lactobacilli’s proliferation should take about three days when the room temperature is 72 degrees. You will know the process is working because the mixture in the jar will be very bubbly. Then transfer the jars to cold storage until you are ready to eat them.

I usually serve our pickled vegetables topped on a green salad, or as a side with a cold cut type of meal (meat salad, bread, and cheese). These veggies taste bubbly, spicy, and fresh, while offering a great crisp and crunch. I love them! I should admit that not all my family loved them right off the bat (some are still getting used to them). For the kids, I have been putting just a few slices on their salad each day, increasing the amount slowly as they adjust. The other day, Naomi admitted to me that she doesn’t think they’re so bad anymore. Truly, I am baffled how they could not like them right away. I think they’re fabulous. But to each, his own. I am the one who adores the kefir and plain yogurt, and not surprisingly, lacto-fermented vegetables! Try them and let me know what you think.

Now what I need to know is… what do I do with the liquid leftover from this natural pickling? I hate to throw it away because I’m certain it is filled with tons of good bacteria. I think it could be used in salad dressings and dips. Anyone have tips for me?

Pop on over to Real Food Wednesdays to see more real food posts! Or, join in with your own real food post!

More water than you think will drip out in those few hours. Better to let it drip out than let the sprouts sit in this water when stored in the refrigerator.

After a few hours’ dripping, I transfer the sprouts to a large refrigerator storage dish. They will keep several days in the refrigerator this way, clean and dry. The refrigerator slows the growth.

I still always smell and feel the sprouts when I’m about to use them in a salad. If they concern me the least little bit, out they go to the compost, or I will give them a quick rinse for freshening.

The sprouts shown are a mix of red clover, alfalfa and fenugreek.

Related: The thrift store glass jar I found to store my pumpkin seeds!

© Copyright 2008 by Wardeh Harmon.

I’ve written about growing microgreens before, but am now following a slightly different growing method. Instead of planting dry seeds under a thin layer of soil, I now follow the soaking and sprouting method of Ann Wigmore’s book “Sprouting.”

This entails soaking the seeds overnight (about 1-1/2 cups per growing tray), then sprouting them for a day in half-gallon mason jars. Then I spread the sprouting seeds out right on top of the soil. This keeps the greens much cleaner come harvest-time, because instead of popping out and bringing dirt with them (as they would if under the soil), they root down and sprout up from the top of the soil and stay clean. I like that cleanliness.

I also like that the growth rate seems to be better, because they’re already sprouted when going into the soil. As long as I make sure the soil stays moist, they continue to grow. With the summer heat, I do not find that it is necessary to keep the trays covered. But I have to watch that the soil doesn’t dry out.

The other difference between mine and Ann Wigmore’s method is that instead of pulling up the roots and composting them (once a tray has been harvested), I just chop up the soil and the roots of the old greens right in the tray. The roots can break down right there, providing organic matter for the new crop of (soaked & sprouted) seeds, which I lay right on top of the soil/old root mixture. This seems to be working. I suppose at some point, I might have to change out the contents of the trays with new soil and compost, but for now, the decomposing old plants are there to nourish the new. In addition, I rotate where each new crop grows. For instance, I plant buckwheat greens in the tray that last contained sunflower greens and vice versa.

Our salads contain a bed of microgreens topped with sprouts grown indoors, and other items as they are available (cherry tomatoes, sliced zucchini, olives, etc.). I dress the salads with our favorite olive oil and balsamic vinegar salad dressing.

© Copyright 2008 by Wardeh Harmon.

With the weather warming up, we sure feel like having lighter, cooler foods. This is a deliciously simple chicken salad. We like to eat it with Quinoa Dinner Cakes. Yesterday when we were out clearing brush and cleaning up our property, I brought out a bowl of this chicken salad and a bunch of the dinner cakes. Yummy lunch — or dinner!

Yummy Chicken Salad

• 1/4 to 1/2 onion, finely diced
• 2 to 3 cups cooked chicken, diced
• sea salt and pepper
• few pinches of dried basil
• generous drizzle of extra virgin olive oil
• few splashes of balsamic vinegar
• finely grated goat cheddar cheese (optional)
• chopped olives (optional)

Toss all ingredients. Adjust seasonings to taste. Serve atop greens, in a sandwich, or alongside Quinoa Dinner Cakes.

© Copyright 2008 by Wardeh Harmon.

The main thing you’ll want to make sure of is that you don’t overcook the green beans. They must be blanched only and still stay crisp. Also, you’ll want to make this salad several hours before you plan to serve it. This allows all the flavors to mingle together. It really does make a difference.

GREEN BEAN SALAD
taken from “The Healthy Kitchen” by Andrew Weil & Rosie Daley

• 1 pound green beans (preferably French) — can be frozen or fresh
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1/2 bay leaf
• sea salt
• 1 lemon, washed

Add green beans to boiling water. Blanch for approximately 5 minutes. Do not overcook. They need to be bright green and still crunchy. Drain and cover with cold water. Drain again. Toss with oil, garlic, bay leaf and salt. Peel 4 strips of yellow zest from lemon. Add to beans. Toss. Let stand at room temperature for several hours. Discard bay leaf. Toss. Serve.