Season to Season

December

Season to Season is a monthly look at the various foods that are available fresh here in the Northwest. The column provides tips for selecting food to bring home or enjoy when you're dining out.

Tasty Healthy Chicken Stock: The winter months, especially around the holidays, is the time a lot of recipes call for chicken stock. Soups, dressing for turkey and even paella often call out for chicken stock. Have you ever tasted the kind you buy in a box at the store all on its own? Not very flavorful in a good way and even the low sodium versions are still packed with salt. So how can we get around this and get a better stock?

It's actually very easy, takes about an hour in the kitchen and a little extra space in the freezer. I begin by going to the market and buying a whole organic chicken, then I take it over to the butcher and ask them to bone it and save all the bones for me. While that's going on I pick out some fresh carrots, celery and a big yellow onion; then go back to get the bird, check out and head home.

In a 4 quart stock pot or slow cooker (crock pot) I make a nice vegetable stock and add in the chicken bones using this recipe. Six hours later I let it cool and place it in the fridge over night. In the morning I skim the fat and fill six two-cup containers, tucking them away in the freezer. This provides me all the stock I need through the winter and when the last one is gone I make some more.

It's much more flavorful and I can control the sodium content. For that I actually sub in NuSalt (Potassium Chloride) which helps keep my potassium level where it should be and reduce my sodium intake.

Shallots: Looking for an alternative to onions? Shallots are it. Although part of the same family as the onion, shallots provide a milder flavor and can be stored up to six months. Because of their smaller size, I find them easier to work with in the kitchen. I have an entire series of cook books, Healthy Ways with Cooking, that uses shallots exclusively instead of onions. Interestingly that series came out through Time Life in the 1980s.

They work nicely when you're sautéing vegetables or meats. Work them together with a little garlic before adding them to oil in your pan or use them together in a meat rub. A favorite of mine is Tom Douglas' Mustard and Shallot rub he uses for the prime rib recipe in his Seattle Kitchen cookbook.

When I'm doing burgers at home, I like to slice some shallots up, coat them in oil, wrap them in foil and roast them on the BBQ while the meat is cooking. Then I take the little frizzled things and enjoyed grilled onions on the burger. And speaking of burgers...

Healthy Beefalo: I bumped into this one while shopping at Ken's Market in Greenwood. Breeders bred up 37.5% bison and 62.5% cow to create beefalo. The meat is lower in fat than cow meat and lower in cholesterol as well. In Washington, the Beefalo Meats cattle company in Ellensburg grows the herds and sells the meat locally to markets like Ken's, and we find it at Ballard Market as well. It's lower in cholesterol than any of it's kin. That's right - lower than bison and certainly lower than cow meat. All the beef is grass fed and no drugs are given, so you're getting lots of Omega 3s when you enjoy it at a meal. Thought you could only get that in fish - right? More information is a www.beefalomeats.com.

I have yet to see it on any menus around town, so I work with it at home a few times a month. My two favorite ways to enjoy it are getting the tenderloins and barbequing them on the grill, or making burgers with ground beefalo. In fact, I've come up with a nice Northwest burger using beefalo (Ellensburg), Dave's Killer Bread (Portland--unfortunately they stopped making their burger buns, we I simply use their bread) and Tillamook cheddar, then I add some fresh organic lettuce and tomato and I've got the burger I can't get anywhere else. If you like onions on your burger, use the shallot grilling technique above, or dice some onion up and work it into the ground beefalo before you grill it.

Cheese secret for burgers: Always place the cheese under the patty, not on top. That way the juice will run away from the burger, rather than into the bun.

Blood Oranges: We can all eat locally some of the time, but there's some things that just don't grow in the Northwest. Blood oranges are one of them. These red taste treats start showing up on grocery shelves in the late fall and are usually history by February, so you gotta get 'em while you can. Some are grown in Mexico, but California, Texas and Florida all have crops that make it up this way as well. They make an excellent choice of juice for cocktails.

On the restaurant side of things, they start showing up in various cocktails right about now. Saltoro in Broadview makes a nice sparkler with them and Serafina will be happy to make a screw driver for you with the vodka of your choice. Over the last few years, the fruit has taken off bar-side and now there are several manufacturers of blood orange purees which can be had almost anytime of year. This is a more processed and concentrated version of the fruit itself, but it does make it possible to enjoy the fruit in a summer drink.

We're also seeing them being used as a demi glaze or reduction on certain entrées.

Back at home, you could squeeze up 1 cup of blood orange juice in a press or juicer, add in 1/2 cup of yogurt, 1/2 cup of fresh berries and 1 banana. Just like you would a smoothie, puree it using a regular blender or hand mixer, then pour it into several large ramekins, freeze it for six hours or more and you've got a delicious blood orange frozen yogurt dessert.

Last Call: Local pears and persimmons are on their way out. Your mission this month is to poke around on the web, find something simple, healthy and delightful to do with them and woo your family and friends.

Wash your fruits and veggies well and we'll see you next month!

Tom Mehren/Winter 2014