Cassava Stuffing - An All Local/Homegrown Recipe

There is nothing to inspire thankfulness and gratitude more than sitting down to a meal that is all home grown.  When all the sweat and worry is yours, when you have watched the seasons turn as small seeds became large plants, as chicks became pin feather-studded adolescents, and finally a flock of magnificent birds with copper-trimmed feathers, you know the fruits of labor and the incredible workings of nature that support our lives.

The Thanksgiving stuffing tradition in my family was always from store bought wheat bread.  My grandmother always used chestnuts from her tree in the back yard, but the rest was bought at the store.  Since we have been growing our own food, it always seemed strange every Thanksgiving to be roasting a home grown bird, with all home grown and local side dishes, and then to use stuffing made from ingredients grown who-knows-where and made in a factory.

Last year was an abundant year for the cassava, and I was inspired to create this grain-free, Paleo-legal stuffing recipe to reflect our locality here in North Florida.  All the ingredients can be grown locally and are in season.

Cassava Stuffing

2 quarts of water

3 cups of cassava (also called manioc, or yuca) , peeled and chopped into bite-sized pieces

2 cups peeled chestnuts or pecans, chopped

1 large onion, or a few smaller ones, chopped

 1 cup dried wild plums, pits removed (raisins or dried unsweetened cherries or cranberries can be substituted - or even pieces of roselle)

1 cup butter, ghee, or lard

1 clove of garlic, grated (or 1 teaspoon garlic powder)

1 teaspoon dried thyme

Salt and pepper to taste

1 Tablespoon Chopped fresh parsley, or  2 teaspoons dried  

1.  In a medium to large pot, bring the water to a boil and add the cassava pieces.  Cook until they are tender, about 20-30 minutes.  Drain and set aside in a large bowl.

2.  Melt the butter in a frying pan and gently sautée the chopped onion, dried wild plums/raisins or cherries, and chestnut or pecan pieces.

3.  Meanwhile, season the boiled cassava with the garlic, dried thyme, parsley, salt and pepper.  When the onions are soft, pour the butter/onion/nut mixture over the cassava and mix well.

4.  Use like regular stuffing - stuff into a roasting  bird or you can also bake it separately in a pan for about 20 minutes at 350F.

Note:  The chestnuts are easy to peel if you cut them in half with a sturdy knife and boil them for about 5 minutes.  Drain, and immediately slip them out of their peels.  There is more information on preparing cassava here.


Wishing you a wonderful holiday!!!  Thank you for reading here!

SALADE DE TOMATES: Tomato Salad

{These French recipes are from a French cookbook called La Cuisine:  Guide Practique de la Ménagère by Chef R. Blondeau.  This book was passed down to me from my great-grandmother, who was from Alsace, a North-eastern region on the Rhine river plain in France.  It was published in 1930 as a guide for cooks hired to cook for a family.

 I am translating the recipes from French, testing them out with home-grown or raised food, and re-writing them in a modern format, with notes about what worked for me in the kitchen} 

*     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

 
The tomatoes are finally succumbing to the drought and heat in the garden, so this is the last of them.  And the last of the onions, too.  For this recipe I had to make a few alterations because we have the tiny cherry tomatoes (no, I am not skinning and de-seeding every single one - they are smaller than grapes!).  Also, it is not parsley season, and the dressing calls for parsley, an herb that grows beautifully in the spring, fall and winter, but bolts in the heat.  I substituted basil, which is still growing in abundance.  I also subbed elephant garlic (actually not a garlic, but a kind of shallot) for the shallots, because I still had some from the garden.

At this point my big kids are "sick" of cherry tomatoes, and won't eat anything that has them in it.  They'll make an exception for tomato sauce, as long as it's been milled and you can't see the cherry tomatoes in it.  Rose helped me assemble this salad, and made the comment, "Wow, this looks good.  Maybe I'll actually try some."

"You're not allowed to," I said, joking.  "You don't eat cherry tomatoes, remember?  You said they make you gag."

"But I want to try this!" she replied. "It's better than what you usually make."

So if that's not a recommendation, I don't know what is.

SALADE DE TOMATES

Remove the first skin on five or six large tomatoes, cut into slices, remove the seeds, and arrange them in layers alternating with sliced onions, with salt, pepper, vinegar.  Allow to marinate two hours, remove and drain your tomatoes, and serve them with a vinaigrette.

SAUCE VINAIGRETTE

 Slice finely together parsley, shallots and onions; add salt, pepper, a spoonful of good vinegar, and two spoonfuls and a half of oil.

Mix well together, serve in the salad bowl or the saucière.

Tomato Salad With Vinaigrette Dressing

5 or 6 large tomatoes (or, in my case, about 2 cups of cherry tomatoes)

1 large onion, peeled and sliced

salt and pepper

vinegar (I used apple cider vinegar, but wine vinegar or balsamic would be wonderful, and could change the flavor and character of this salad for variety)

1.  Peel the tomatoes - I skipped this step as mentioned above, but an easy way to peel tomatoes is to plunge them into boiling water for just a minute, and then immediately submerge them into cold water.  This loosens the skin and it can be easily peeled off once the tomato is cool enough to handle.  Also slice them open and remove the seeds.  Then cut the peeled and de-seeded tomatoes into slices.

2.  Lay some of the tomato slices on a plate or in a bowl, add onion slices on top, and then salt and pepper and a sprinkle of vinegar.  Repeat until you run out of tomato slices.

3.  Allow to marinate for two hours.  Then drain off the liquid (actually I saved it and used it as vinegar in the dressing - it tasted too good to discard).  I think you are supposed to also take out the onion slices, but they were really good as part of the salad.  The vinegar had taken the bite away, and they were just sweet and onion-y.  Do as you prefer....

4.  Dress with vinaigrette:

For the dressing:

 1 tablespoon chopped parsley or basil

1 small onion, chopped fine

1 shallot, chopped fine

salt and pepper

2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon vinegar

Mix all ingredients well.  Serve either on the side, or tossed into the tomato salad.

SAUCE TOMATE

{These French recipes are from a French cookbook called La Cuisine:  Guide Practique de la Ménagère by Chef R. Blondeau.  This book was passed down to me from my great-grandmother, who was from Alsace, a North-eastern region on the Rhine river plain in France.  It was published in 1930 as a guide for cooks hired to cook for a family.

 I am translating the recipes from French, testing them out with home-grown or raised food, and re-writing them in a modern format, with notes about what worked for me in the kitchen} 

*     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

That's tomato sauce, in case you couldn't tell....as I have mentioned before, I only had a few large tomato plants this year - mostly we have gotten by with Matt's Wild Cherry tomatoes (15 of them).  They are much more work to pick (and you have to pluck off the green tops, too), but they have so much flavor, and are so much less work as far as keeping the caterpillars away.  Usually every evening after I milk, I am in the garden picking army worms off of the tomatoes.  They are a numerous foe, and generally I win the wars but lose the battle (I would still rather hang out in the tomato jungle and find lots of caterpillars to feed the happy chickens than use sprays, even "organic" ones like Bt).

We get a few of the horn worms that everyone always complains about, and I would much rather have them.  They do very obvious damage on the plant, and get very large and easy to see, and turn into a lovely moth that I have always admired.  I usually relocate them to the wild nightshades when I find them.  Army worms are sneaky - they are small for a long time, and hide in the foliage.  If you disturb them, they drop off and hide in the mulch.  They target the fruit, and make ugly rotting holes in perfectly good tomatoes.  They also ate up my cabbage, collards, potatoes and calendula this year.  It was very annoying.

Somehow the Matt's Wild Cherry is resistant to them.  Either they have stronger biochemistry, or the army worms can't keep up with the loofa-vine like growth habit they have, but we have been slammed by cherry tomatoes this summer.  We have to spend about an hour picking every other day to keep the vines picked, and even then there are some that are missed and spoil.  This yields a shocking amount of tomato, and you can only eat so many tomato salads, even if they are creatively put together!  So naturally we have been making sauce.

SAUCE TOMATE (direct translation)

 

Wash six large tomatoes, cut them in pieces, put them into a pot with a bay leaf, a sprig of thyme, a head of garlic, and an onion cut into rounds.

Cook over a low fire, without water.

Watch over the pot, and stir the tomatoes minute by minute, so that they don't stick to the bottom of the pan.

When they have given up all their juice, pass your sauce through a strainer with a pestle, to remove the seeds and skins.

Put back over the fire : add salt, pepper, a pat of butter, and leave to simmer for twenty minutes.

It was not difficult to change the recipe to also accommodate cherry tomatoes.  I tried for Estimated Tomato Volume (I eye-balled it).

The sauce was very good, and, not totally surprising, reminded me of the little pizzas we had bought at the market in Nice when we were there (when I stayed there when I was a child, my aunt always cooked and we hardly ate things like that).  It was the herbs, I think.

Also, a Foley Food Mill, which is what I imagine the "strainer and pestle" refers to, is invaluable not only for this recipe, but also for anything that requires straining/puréeing.

Tomato Sauce

6 large tomatoes, washed and chopped into pieces

A bay leaf

A sprig of thyme

1 head of garlic, peeled

1 onion, sliced into rounds

salt and pepper

1 teaspoon butter

1.  Put the tomato pieces, bay leaf, thyme, garlic and onion rounds into a pot, and cook over a low fire.

2.  Stir often, to keep the tomatoes from sticking.  Cook until the juice has been released from the tomato pieces, and they are soft.

3.  Remove the bay leaf and thyme sprig.  Put tomatoes through a food mill (see above), or you could try using a wooden spoon and a fine-mesh strainer to remove the seeds and peels.

4.  Put the resulting sauce back into the pot over a low fire.  Season with salt and pepper, and add the butter.  Cook slowly for twenty minutes more.

HARICOTS VERTS A LA LYONNAISE: Lyon-style Green Beans

 {These French recipies are from a French cookbook called La Cuisine:  Guide Practique de la Ménagère by Chef R. Blondeau.  This book was passed down to me from my great-grandmother, who was from Alsace, a North-eastern region on the Rhine river plain in France.  It was published in 1930 as a guide for cooks hired to cook for a family.

 I am translating the recipes from French, testing them out with home-grown or raised food, and re-writing them in a modern format, with notes about what worked for me in the kitchen} 

*     *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *    *

R. Blondeau details three ways that beans are prepared:  as green beans before the seeds develop (haricots verts), or after the seeds develop as shelly beans (haricots ecosses, or husked beans), or as dry beans.  Snap beans (called le mange-tout) are tender enough to be eaten whole, seeds and husks.


I had two kinds of beans planted this year - a French snap bean, and a Roma bean.  Unfortunately our huge buck, David, who is quite a jumper as we have discovered, made his way over the fence and into the garden and grazed down more than half the snap beans, and about a quarter of the Romas.  Alas, such is gardening, especially if you have goats.  The Romas were already loaded with beans, and would have been such a loss, I can only be glad they were not as tasty, or most likely he didn't get around to it before he was removed in disgrace.  So I have Roma beans for the haricots verts.

In the case of this recipe, the beans are pre-cooked, and then added to the rest of the ingredients.  There is a specific recipe given for pre-cooking:

CUISSON DES HARICOTS VERTS (Cooking Green Beans)

Choose the finest, in that they are not fiberous, break both ends and cook them in salted boiling water without covering.  Remove them when they don't resist the pressure of a finger.

Cooking time:  thirty minutes.



I am always curious about the "Lyonnaise" recipes.  Lyon is a very historic city, and my great-grandfather was from Genas, France, very close by.  He died quite young, from lung complications of being gassed in the trenches of WWI during his youth.  (his grandfather, I believe, won a war medal under Napoleon).  He was a train engine mechanic when my grandmother was a little girl.

Strangely, every time I've tried to go to Lyon, I have always gotten stuck in the train station overnight.  The trains get cancelled, or the one I'm on is late, and I miss a connection and have to wait there for nine hours.  The youth hostel is far from the station and closes early, and the hotels are all very expensive.  I've spent so many early, sleepless hours there, waiting, that I can still remember exact details of that train station, down to the panini cart at the front doors.  I have never been stuck in any other train station for so long, and I have never stayed in Lyon except at the train station!  It's very uncanny now that it's happened three times in my life.  I'm almost afraid to go back.

HARICOTS VERTS A LA LYONNAISE (direct translation)

In a pan, brown diced onions, with a pat of butter the size of an egg, salt pepper, and add your cooked green beans.  Fry everything together, sprinkle with chopped parsley, pour over one spoonful of vinegar while the pan is still hot.

Lyonnaise-style Green Beans (a modern version)

1 medium onion (I used two smaller ones)

A pat of butter the size of an egg

1-2 lbs of green beans, ends snapped off and pre-cooked as above in salted, boiling water

Salt and pepper

Chopped parsley

1 Tablespoon vinegar

1.  Melt the butter in a pot large enough to hold the green beans, and brown the onion.  Season with salt and pepper, and add the pre-cooked green beans.

2.  Fry for a few minutes, stirring, until the green beans are heated through.  Turn off the heat, sprinkle with chopped parsley, and pour over the spoonful of vinegar.  Mix well and serve.

Notes:  I really liked the tangy flavor of this recipe.  The kind of vinegar is not specified - I used Balsamic vinegar, as that was what I had on hand, but apple cider vinegar would also be good.  I would recommend a vinegar that has something of it's own flavor to add, rather than just distilled white.  The warmth of the pan brings out any fruity flavors.