Prickly Pear Sparkles in Holiday Cocktails

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Welcome guests with tasty prickly pear cocktails.

Welcome guests with tasty prickly pear cocktails.

It’s Carolyn Niethammer here this week. First, I want to welcome all the new subscribers. I speak for my fellow bloggers when I say we are so happy to have you join this little community of food lovers. Please feel free to join in at any time with ideas and comments.

Today I want to talk about using prickly pear syrup in holiday cocktails. We all know and love prickly pear margaritas, but there is a world beyond that beloved beverage. And these cocktails don’t have to include alcohol. In fact it is nice to be able to offer your non-drinking guests something tasty and sophisticated way beyond diet coke and seltzer with lime.

There are several keys to delicious cocktails. One important ingredient is fresh juice. It makes a big difference and here in Arizona we have an easy abundance. Some of you need only walk as far as your backyard to grab a handful of oranges or tangelos.  If you are using alcohol, you can choose vodka, tequila or rum.

Make your prickly pear syrup.

Make your prickly pear syrup.

If you have stored some prickly pear juice in your freezer, make a syrup with 1 cup juice to 1 cup sugar.  Simmer gently to evaporate some of the liquid.  If you didn’t get around to storing any juice this year, there are several good commercial syrups made by local entrepreneurs.  You can find Cheri’s Desert Harvest products widely in stores or on-line and Jeau Allen is at farmer’s markets with her products and they are available on-line.

You can buy commerical syrup and a special prickly pear/lime blend.

You can buy commerical syrup and a special prickly pear/lime blend.

To elevate your cocktail with a more sophisticated flavor, you need to add a bitter or sharp flavor such as you get with ginger.  To make ginger syrup, I grate a 5-inch piece of fresh ginger and simmer for 30 minutes in a cup of water.  Strain out ginger and reduce liquid to a half cup.  Add a half cup sugar or agave syrup and cook a few minutes to dissolve sugar. You can also add a few drops of bitters. Angostera bitters is the most available brand and they hold their recipe closely, but bitters is usually a blend of herbs and spices.  You can find some recipes to make your own here and here.

As a final step, top each glass with a little flavored sparkling soda.

Here are some recipes to get you started. Then experiment.

Arizona Sunset

Fill glass with ice. Pour 3/4 full of fresh orange juice. Add a shot of tequila or rum and a tablespoon of ginger syrup. Add two tablespoons of prickly pear syrup. It will sink to the bottom and look like one of our gorgeous sunsets (see picture at top of blog).

Sombrero

1/2 cup pineapple juice

1 ounce rum

1/2 ounce Triple Sec

5 drops bitters

1 ounce prickly pear syrup

1/2 cup crushed ice

Combine all in a blender and serve in a glass with a swizzle stick speared onto a chunk of pineapple.

Carolyn’s Christmas Cocktail

2 ounces fresh orange juice

2 ounce fresh lime juice

1 ounce prickly pear syrup

1/2 ounce ginger syrup

2 ounces cranberry sparkling soda

Combine first four ingredients and pour over ice in large wine glass. Top with cranberry soda. Garnish with lime wedge or circle on glass edge.

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Want more prickly pear recipes?  Take at look at The Prickly Pear Cookbook.  Available at Native Seeds Search, The Tucson Botanical Gardens, your local bookstore  or on-line here. 

 

Heirloom Beans for Holiday Feasts!

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Colorful Christmas lima, also known as Chestnut lima, will keep some of its purple color and its shape in cooking. Photo by Muffin Burgess

Colorful Christmas lima, also known as chestnut lima, will keep some of its purple color and its shape in cooking. Photo by Muffin Burgess

Among beans, Christmas Lima is a giant not only in size but in flavor!  This heirloom Phaseolus lunatus is dramatic mottled purple and white, and lends itself to many colorful dishes.  Try a holiday tip from the Heirloom Bean Queen “Tia Pan Dulce”—sure to please vegetarian and omnivore alike:  Curried Christmas Limas!

The evening before cooking, sort and wash ½ lb of dry Christmas Limas.  Presoak overnight in plenty of water (at least a qt) as they will swell.  Next day give remaining water to your compost and add a qt of fresh drinking water.  Simmer limas without salt until they test tender (1 ½-2hrs stove top; 2-3hrs solar oven; 3-5 hrs crock pot).  Some people prefer them al dente.  I like them soft and done through but not mushy.  Reserve the bean liquid.

Saute ½ cup chopped onion, ½ cup chopped celery, ½ cup thin-sliced winter squash, and ½ cup chopped sweet pepper in olive oil and stir in 2 tsp curry powder.  (My favorite curry powder is from Santa Cruz Chile and Spice Co, available at most southern Arizona groceries.  If you are ever in the Tubac area give yourself an olfactory adventure by visiting the SC Spice Co outlet just south of Tumacacori Mission Nat Hist Park.)

Add cooked limas to the veggie curry stir-fry adding either veggie stock or the reserved bean liquid as needed.  Simmer on low heat until flavors are blended (about 1/2 hr) and salt to taste.  Serve with brown rice or polenta for a complete protein complement.

(Here’s another idea to try with cooked Christmas limas:  If they keep their shape as individual beans when done, you can serve them as veggie hors d’oeuvres with toothpicks dipped in your favorite sauce.  Try BBQ or Asian or chilpotle sauce.  They are better than meatballs and much healthier!)

If you want to GROW Christmas limas for yourself, save a few seed out of the bag you find at Sunday’s Heirloom farmers’ market or at the Native Seeds/SEARCH store (3061 N Campbell, Tucson).  Plant them in April where they can vine their way up a trellis in dappled light or into a low-growing tree.  They are long-season, so plan on tending them thru heat of May and June until the monsoons give them a boost.  You will be climbing the tree or trellis to harvest big pods in the fall, ready for homegrown holiday cookery next year.

Bright and beautiful Four Corners Gold beans are used in the traditional winter ceremony by the Zuni. These beans are truly light-returning and life-renewing. photo by Muffin Burgess

Bright and beautiful Four Corners Gold beans are truly light-returning and life-renewing.  photo by Muffin Burgess

An important heirloom for the season– used by Native cultures of the Southwest since time-immemorial to celebrate the Winter Solstice—is the festive yellow and white Four Corners Gold Bean (aka Zuni Gold).  It will lend itself to any hearty dish you may want to have simmering in a crock pot ready to drive off any chill from ski-ing, hiking, cycling, or dog-walking thru these short wintry days.  Try them in a bean soup with an oxtail from Jojoba Beef at the farmers’ market; or as chile beans with Native Seeds/SEARCH’s amazing chilpotle chile powder; or as a dip mashed with a Tarahumara bean masher, dashes of Red Devil tabasco sauce and 1 tsp of cumin powder.

"Moon Beans" spiced with Pipian Rojo Mole from Mano y Metate makes an exceptionally festive vegetarian dish! photo by Muffin Burgess

“Moon Beans” spiced with Pipian Rojo Mole from Mano y Metate makes an exceptionally festive vegetarian dish! photo by Muffin Burgess

My grandmother always served us black-eyed peas for New Year’s telling us grandkids that the number of them we ate was the number of dollars we would make in the new year.  In her tradition of black-eyed peas, as New Year’s approaches, I like to fix a Southwestern version of black-eyes:  Moon Beans!   For a festive flavor try moon beans with pipian rojo mole as a centerpiece dish, adding the prepared mole powder from Mano y Metate in the last half hour of bean cooking.

Solar-cooked Moon Beans can be downright celestial.  If December 30 or 31 is going to be sunny, and if you know you will be “hanging out” available for re-orienting your solar oven every ½ hour or hour, soak your Moon Beans the night before, change the water next day, and in a saucepan with plenty of drinking water add a ham hock and/or chopped onions and veggies to your Moon Beans.  A few hours of solar cookery will provide a New Year’s home-made feast worth a million dollars.

Happy Holiday-time with Heirloom Beans– and Bon appetit from Martha Burgess!  http://www.flordemayoarts.com

Slowing it down: Super-Slow-Rosemary-Crusted-Steak

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hearth as heart -

It is early winter, and as the days become shorter, things slow down in the natural world.  Egg laying is noticeably slower. Honeybee brood cycles are are scaled way back; the drones having been cast out (weeks ago) to preserve the resources of the hive. Our cattle are moved to winter pasture; and while we could keep a few cows near the house for milk/cheese,  we prefer to let the girls rest after the rough (read: drought) summer here.  Not taking milk allows the cows a chance to rest and recondition. This slowing down is a part of regeneration.

Humans, often forgetting our animal nature, can be out of sync with the rythms of particular seasons –  especially the slower more inward season that we are in now.  We continue the ceaseless output of energy that culture demands, as if it were perpetual spring – energy bursting upward and outward, rather than inward and in to our metaphorical  roots. .  We are a part  of the animal, insects, and plant kingdoms with which we live.  And seasons, with their increase and decrease in light and energy, offer different things to us. The winter kitchen is one of the few places where we can enjoy the slowness of this season, because winter meals often take time to simmer or bake.  We are nearing the winter solstice, which occurs between December 20th and the 23rd , wrapping the animals, insects, and plants, living on this side of the planet,  in darkness.

This recipe for Super-Slow-Roasted Rosemary-Crusted Chuck Steak, from Shannon Hayes’s THE GRASSFED GOURMET COOKBOOK is a flavorful way to both practice and delight in the Slowness of the Season.  And precisely because it   T A K E S  T I M E, the flavors  have time to mingle sensuously, another perk of the cold season.  More oddly, I feel it gives kitchens – sometimes forgotten as the “heart” of the home –  a chance to embody their mission.  Cooking meals slowly allows the kitchen to warm the home from the kitchen outward; you may find that family and friends linger a little longer, basking in the aromas and warmth and heartbeat. Forgive me for saying it, but I think I hear the kitchen smiling.

Harvesting range/grass fed beef

RECIPE: Super-Slow-Roasted Rosemary-Crusted Chuck Steak

Preheat oven to 250 degrees F.

Rub Garlic Rosemary Rub into the chuck (see below***)

Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rest for 30-60 minutes.   Roast the meat in a shallow pan for 30 minutes, then lower the oven temperature to 170 degrees F. Continue to roast for 4-6 hours,  (depending on the weight the larger the cut the longer it takes to roast), or until an internal meat thermometer registers 120 F to 125 F. Hayes suggests that you do not cook it beyond 125F or you will loose tenderness.   And in keeping with the Spirit of Slow: allow the meat to rest (with loose foil tented) for 5- 10 minutes before slicing.

*** Garlic-Rosemary Rub: 2 Tablespoons of dried Rosemary, 1 clove garlic, minced, 1 ½ Tablespoons coarse salt, 2 Teaspoons freshly ground black pepper.

Note: I cannot recommend Shannon Hayes, The Grassfed Gourmet Cookbook enough. It will likely change the way you look at farming, flavors, and how they/we are connected.

* If you are a veggie/vegan try slow roasting  winter’s roots vegetables with the oil of your choice and the same spices in the rub, but do not cook them as long, just till as tender and as flavorful as you love.

Please note: The photos were taken by me to share with you; I would love it if you would please leave them here (and not abscond with them to other parts of the internet). Thank you so much.

Seasonal Flavors and Scents of the Southwest Spice Up the Holidays

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Wake Up Holiday Salads With Chiltepines!

Contributed by Tia Linda

Chiltepines add zip to holiday salads.

Chiltepines add zip to holiday salads.

The red, round fruits of  the ancient chiltepin are making a comeback this year, after a rough bout with erratic weather patterns.  This is “their” time of year, as they mature between October and December, giving us just enough time to dry them for use throughout the holidays.  Marinated Kale Salad is easy to make, and offers a fresh, raw energy to the heavy-ish meals often served at the holidays. Prepare it the night before you wish to serve it, to give the juices of the lemon and tomatoes time to work their magic and soften the raw kale.

Here’s the recipe: In a bowl, combine 3 bright red chiltepin (crushed),  3 medium tomatoes (diced), the juice of 5 lemons,  about half a cup of olive oil, and salt to taste.  Then chop about 5 cups of raw Kale (also grows in your garden this time of year, here in the SW) as finely as you wish and add it to the mixture.  Place it in some kind of container with a tight fitting lid so that you can periodically shake the green mixture, allowing the juices that inevitably fall to the bottom of the container the chance to coat the kale above.

Kale salad lightens heavy holiday meals.

Kale salad lightens heavy holiday meals.

Make a Sonoran Scents Pomander

Contributed by Jacqueline Soule

Pomanders are used to add fragrance to stored clothing while they are said to also deter moths.  Pomanders have traditionally been made by sticking cloves into oranges, or mixing cinnamon and nutmeg with applesauce.  For those of you that love the scent of creosote bush, here is a Sonoran Pomander recipe I invented.

Dry creosote leaves until well dried.

Dry leaves of creosote bush. Collect more than you think you need!

Dry leaves of creosote bush. Collect more than you think you need!

Turn them into leaf “powder” in a blender.  Mix three parts leaf powder to one part applesauce.

Mix powdered leaves with applesauce.

Mix powdered leaves with applesauce.

Form into walnut sized balls, or pat into thick disks.  If you get the mix too wet and have no more leaf powder, use a mild spice (like nutmeg) to add more “powder.”  Don’t use something moths eat, like flour or mesquite meal.

You can use nutmeg if you run out of powdered leaves.

You can use nutmeg if you run out of powdered leaves.

Use small cookie cutters to make impressions if you wish.

Use small cookie cutters to make impressions if you wish.

Add ribbon if you wish to hang them (later!).  Poke ribbon into the center with a toothpick.
Allow to dry for three to seven days.

Insert ribbon into still moist pomander with a toothpick.

Insert ribbon into still moist pomander with a toothpick.

Notes:
* Substitute white glue for some or all of the applesauce.
* Hang one of these in your car and carry the desert with you as you drive!

* To learn how to grow creosote in your yard, visit my other blog on creosote, available on http://nativeplantwildlifegarden.com/lovely-larrea/

* You can also read more about using creosote bush (and other native herbs) in my book Father Kino’s Herbs: Growing and Using them Today (available at amazon.com).

Winter Veggie Gardeners’ Alert!

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Hi, I’m “Tia Marta” (Martha Ames Burgess) and I am honored to be welcoming you from my green patch of garden in the desert with some ideas for your own planting!

Amazing–our Sonoran Desert has THREE totally different seasons for growing delicious foods.  Here comes “winter”– time to try these cool-adapted tantalizers:

Protein-packed Pulses

Peas–Peas to all who come here!–fresh peas, sweet Oriental peapods, dry peas for soup, flowering sweetpea…..winter is time to enjoy peas in the low desert.    I recommend these heirloom Tohono O’odham peas from Native Seeds/SEARCH (NSS store 3061 N.Campbell Ave, Tucson) www.nativeseeds.org, or Pima peas from San Xavier Coop Association (520-295-3774).

Keep the faith--soon your Tohono O'odham green peas and I'itoi's onions will be emerging!

Keep the faith–soon your Tohono O’odham green peas and I’itoi’s onions will be emerging!

Lentils—if you have a space protected from little herbivores and heavy freezes try any kind of lentil.

Fava beans aka “habas”—these large meaty beans lend themselves to marinated dishes or roasted for crunchy snacks.  Plant in dappled sun protected from wind as they can grow tall with care.  Available from Flor de Mayo booth at Sunday St Phillips farmers market and at NSS.

Here's an idea for watering your garden rows with either ditches or leaky hose

Here’s an idea for watering your garden rows with either ditches or leaky hose

Luscious leafy greens:

Spinach, kale, kolrabi, chard, fennel, Brussels sprouts—seed racks are full at every hardware.  A good place for organic seed is NativeSeeds/SEARCH.  Sunday’s farmers market also has starts and seeds.

Tarahumara mostaza roja—prolific, tastes great steamed, stir-fried or in salad.  Find it online at www.nativeseeds.org.

Tarahumara mostaza roja will give you fresh delicious greens and flowers late winter into spring! (photo by Rod Mondt)

Tarahumara mostaza roja will give you fresh delicious greens and flowers late winter into spring! (photo by Rod Mondt)

Lamb’s quarters—aka “chuales” and “orach,” these spinach relatives can grow in a low-desert garden or harvested wild, providing cool season greens.  Find purple orach seed at Mission Garden, Friends of Tucson’s Birthplace (FOTB) www.tucsonsbirthplace.org, and NSS.

Sensational Spices/Healing Herbs:

Cilantro (coriander)—for salsa & salad–produces all season until spring hits, then save coriander seed!    (available from FOTB or NSS)

Mrs Burns’ famous lemon basil—versatile!   This fragrant basil leaf makes great tea, salad garni, lemon chicken, amazing pesto, honey.  When weather gets hot, basil blooms–bees will thank you with a precious gift to beekeepers.  (NSS and Johnny’s Seeds)

Look what I made with Mrs. Burns' Lemon Basil--a luscious scented herbal soap! (photo by Jan Willkom)

Look what I made with Mrs. Burns’ Lemon Basil–a luscious scented herbal soap! (photo by Jan Willkom)

Swain heirloom dill—butterflies will appreciate the flower umbels rising in your garden.  Save seed  and “dill weed” foliage for pickling and dressing–a good producer from NSS.

Raging Root Crops:

White, red, purple potatoes—Here’s a trick an old gardener taught me:  before cooking, take thick peelings from your favorite grocery potatoes and plant them.  Each peeling will have an “eye.”  No need to use huge potato chunks!  Keep mounding soil around your potato plants as they grow.

Onion sets—give yourself a headstart—plant “sets” are available in almost any nursery or home-store.  Intercrop them to deter unwanted pests.

I’itoi’s onion—the best for low desert, a small shallot also great for chives.  Find ready-to-plant bulblets at NSS.

a savory harvest of I'itoi's onions--a delicious shallot

A plentiful harvest of I’itoi’s onions at Mission Garden–a delicious shallot (photo by Bill O’Malley)

Here’s wishing you joy in your winter garden and great tastes at your table!  By late winter you will be reaping nutrition and flavor from your labors.

Be sure to check out the new issue Vol 3 of Edible Baja Arizona for more winter gardening ideas  (see pp 115-118).

I invite you to find native foods–and native foods in art– at my Flor de Mayo booth at Sunday St. Phillips Heirloom Farmer’s Market and on my website www.flordemayoarts.com

Pear and Mesquite: A Perfect Combo

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Mesquite Ginger Pear Tart Ready for the oven.

Mesquite Ginger Pear Tart Ready for the oven.

Hello everyone.  This is Carolyn Niethammer and this is my week for the Savor the Southwest blog.

With mesquite millings happening all over Arizona, it’s time to plan for what you’ll make with your delicious mesquite meal.  Pancakes are fine for mornings at home, but when you are headed for a holiday potluck, something a little special is required to show how attuned you are to our desert foods. This Mesquite Ginger Pear Tart fills the bill.  I adapted the recipe from an old Joy of Cooking recipe for an apple cake. This is better! Ginger, a warm spice, always goes so well with mesquite.

I give you the recipe at the bottom, but here are the steps.  Works best if you have a springform pan so you can remove the sides of the pan from the finished cake without disturbing the topping. However if all you have is a regular cake pan, just carefully tip it over onto a plate, then flip it back.  You may have to reposition a few nuts, but it will taste great.

First make the batter.  Use your fingers to push it to the edges of the pan.

Spread the cake batter with your fingers.

Spread the cake batter with your fingers.

Cut a perfectly ripe pear into quarters, then into nice even slices.

IMG_0938

Arrange the pear slices on top of the batter.

Make a pretty pinwheel pattern with the pear slices.

Make a pretty pinwheel pattern with the pear slices.

Mix the topping and sprinkle over the pear slices.

Crumbly topping will add sweetness and crunch to your cake.

Crumbly topping will add sweetness and crunch to your cake.

After baking, cool and remove from the springform pan.

Fragrant Mesquite Ginger Pear Cake.

Fragrant Mesquite Ginger Pear Cake.

Now that you know the method, here’s the recipe:

Mesquite-Ginger Pear Cake

1 cup flour

¼ cup mesquite meal

3/4 teaspoon ground ginger

¼ teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons sugar

3 tablespoons butter

1 egg

½ teaspoon vanilla

¼ cup milk

2 large pears, sliced

Topping:

½ cup sugar

¼ cup mesquite meal

3 tablespoons melted butter

¼ cup chopped pecans or walnuts

Prepare a 8- or 9-inch springform pan by lining with a buttered piece of paper cut to fit the pan. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.

In a medium bowl, combine flour, mesquite meal, salt and sugar.  Fluff with a fork until well combined. Add the butter and rub with your fingers or cut with a pastry blender until butter is worked in.

In a glass measuring cup, put the ¼ cup milk and then beat in the egg and vanilla. Stir into the dry ingredients to make a stiff batter.  Press into the prepared pan with spatula or your dampened fingers. Arranged sliced pears in a circular pattern on top of batter.

In a small bowl, mix the ½ cup sugar, mesquite meal, and melted butter.  Sprinkle evenly over cake and pears. Top with chopped nuts. Bake in preheated oven for about 25 minutes. Remove sides of pan and cool. Serve with a dollop of whipped cream.

Delicious slice of Mesquite Ginger Pear Tart.

Delicious slice of Mesquite Ginger Pear Tart.

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Looking for more ideas to use your mesquite meal? Check out Cooking the Wild Southwest: Delicious Recipes for Desert Plants.  It includes recipes for 23 easily identified and gathered plants that grow all over the Southwest.

Welcome to Savor the Southwest ! Savoring Honeycomb

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Blog Post # 1

This is Tia Linda, one of several “food friends” who will be collaborating on this blog, and the lucky soul who gets to welcome you to Savor the Southwest, a blog Savoring the wild plants, herbs, and animals that grow here in the Southwest.  The focus for my part of the blog is to converse with you about the animals and insects that we live among.  You might already be raising animals, or may flirting with the idea.  Some of my posts may be “notes from the hive”. Some will come from the corrals;  some from the coops. And all will have an offering of some relevant food or recipe.

This week we greet Halloween,  Dia de los Muertos, and less well known, from the Celts Countries, Samhain.   Samhain  means the “End of Summer” and is considered the years third and final harvest. It is generally celebrated on October 31st, but some traditions prefer November 1st.  Originally a “Feast of the Dead” it was celebrated by leaving food offerings on altars and lighting candles. Extra chairs were set out as an invite to the spirits of loved ones to come home while the veil between worlds thinned.   Symbols at Samhain included apples, Jack-o-lanterns, and gourds, among others.

Image

“Apis Mellifera Becomes Apis Calavera”  (a quilt by me).  On display at Raices Taller 222 Art Gallery here in Tucson; proceeds will be split equally between Raices (to support one of our best local art venues) and Xerces Society (for quality bee research and protection)

Dia de los Muertos, whose roots are traced back to an Aztec Festival, is celebrated throughout modern Mexico as well as the Southwest.  Favorite foods and beverages of departed loved ones are placed at private alters or gravesides. In the spirit of both Dia de los Muertos and Samhain (and Asian and Afirican cultures have similar rituals)  my offering this year extends beyond the human family to the insect world. Because of my love of bees, and because they are so crucial to our food supply, I am Remembering the vast number of honeybees colonies that have died in the past few years of Colony Collapse Disorder. By setting out honeycomb at my beehive alter, I am both welcoming them home and acknowledging their place – very significant place – in the interconnectedness of all things.

Image                                             So the first food offering to you from this blog is:  Honeycomb.  I offer it both as a food of interest,  as well as to the departed bees that may visit my alter. If you have never eaten honey straight from the honeycomb,  you have a real treat in store.  It is the purest form of honey that we can eat. It is not processed by human hands at all. In fact, the last “hands” to touch it were those of the worker bees, as they placed the wax capping over hexagonal cells holding the honey.

What do you do with the wax? You can swallow it;it will pass right through your system. Or just spit it out. Some people like to chew it like gum. Find a local beekeeper and taste honey from the plants/trees that live in your environment. Mainstream markets will be unlikely to have comb honey, so visit your farmers markets and local health food stores. And consider getting to know the local beekeepers around you.  More than that,  consider becoming a beekeeper yourself!  It will  transform you from being “just” a food consumer, into being a food producer – even if you keep just one hive. Small scale beekeepers play a powerful role these days … but that is for a future post!

Bye for now.

New Blog, New Voices

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Welcome to our new shared blog of the food and plants of the Southwest.  We are a group of friends who for years,  have been learning from each other. Now we are going to extend our little community and share with you the knowledge and recipes we have been sharing with each other.  We all come to this subject with different personalities. Some of us are practical and straight-forward, others more philosophical. We’ll write in rotation.  But it won’t be just about us.  There are so many other people doing interesting work in local and wild foods, we hope to interview some of them along the way.  Occasionally we’ll ask someone to do a guest post.

We always invite your comments as we want to make this a community conversation.  Whenever I’m with a group of  Southwest foodies, I come away with something new, something that makes me go, “Wow, what a great idea. I never knew that.”  So share with us and the other readers your new ideas for edible wild plants or local animal foods.

Our first post that will arrive in a few days is about bees.

Here’s who we are:

Carolyn Niethammer

Carolyn Niethamm

Carolyn Niethammer writes about Southwest cuisine and edible wild plants of the Southwest. She is happiest when working in her flower or vegetable gardens, out on the desert gathering wild foods, or devising new recipes for the plants she has gathered.  Her five cookbooks range from the way Native Americans cooked wild plants to a collection of recipes devised by the Southwest’s top restaurant and resort chefs for incorporating the area’s iconic ingredients in delicious dishes.

Aunt Linda

Tia Linda (design by Jennifer Parker Designs all rights reserved)

 

Tia Linda is both an urban and a rural food producer. She ranches in the Sierra Madres foothills in Northern Mexico. She also keeps honeybees and fosters native bee habitat in the urban Southwest. She enjoys raising poultry, with a special fondness for heirloom breeds. She sees herself as an extension of the hives, flocks, and herds that she lives among.

Martha Burgess

Martha Burgess

Mentored by Tohono O’odham Elders, Martha Ames Burgess came into ethnobotany from the inside out, learning how to harvest, prepare, store, and eat many Sonoran Desert edibles, and to make use of desert plant “first aid”.  With O’odham farmers and Native Seeds/SEARCH cofounders, she was taught desert gardening with native heirlooms.  Her mission is to pass along this wildcrafting and gardening knowledge so that new Baja Arizona dwellers may better appreciate and adapt to our desert home, especially in these times of climate change.  She uses on-site outdoor teaching, poetry and art for sharing the awareness.

JAS avatarJacqueline Soule has been writing about plants in the Southwest since the 1980’s, and growing and using them since even before that.  An award-winning garden writer, she is delighted to be the instigator of this venture.  She welcomes you to her free lectures at the Pima County Libraries.