Roxy Van

I try not to keep any culinary secrets (other than grandma's cookie recipe - I have no idea why, there's never been a rule about that one being secret, and it's not complex, I've just always felt that it was a family recipe that should stay in the family, and as such I only share it with those who qualify as family) so I share these with pleasure:

-Marmite in savory dishes, esp. vegan ones. The dark, aged, umami flavor it imparts is similar to soy sauce, which I also use. All my beans get a small scoop of marmite. I'm currently wondering if a dash of it would improve my vegan pesto.

-Vanilla bean powder. This is some bougie, expensive stuff, and I can't pretend otherwise, but the extra flavor it adds to baked goods is worth it. I source mine from a local spicery called Oaktown Spice Shop.

-Homemade ferments and preserves. I always have random vinegars, honey garlic experiments, lemon preserves, and other such recipes I'm trying to use up so I can reclaim their precious jars.

I'll share two readings of poems that I'm sitting with a lot recently - one by a modern authoress, and one of the "old classics."


"We Are: A Spell For Cracking Shells" by Anonsee Storyweaver, a "cut-up" style rearrangement/remix of another poem, "I Am" by Laurin Dechae. Read here by Anonsee herself with other members of performing collective The Kallai, acapella with some sound editing and design.


"Desiderata" by Max Ehrmann, read here by Leonard Nimoy with instrumental accompaniment, released as "Spock Thoughts" on his album 'The Two Sides Of Leonard Nimoy." (Fun fact: I initially didn't know this poem wasn't written by Nimoy, upon discovering the recording)

I used to make a fair bit of mead. Probably the best I've ever made was a kumquat melomel, made with fruit donated from a friend's tree & frozen for a month. Someday I will make it again.
Freshly-juiced pomegranate arils combined with elderberry syrup and good quality dark-colored honey will produce a dessert mead identical in quality to a commercial California Zinfandel.
How did your blackberry wine come out? That's one I had less success with.

Tereza Okava wrote:
Could you tell me a bit more about this? People know I love bitter melon and I often find myself with a bunch on hand, I'm always looking for new things to do with it.

Sure! With the caveat that it's a new experiment. The recipe was based on something similar I did last year with serrano chilis and bitter melon flavoring some fermented daikon. I thought I had a radish in the crisper drawer but didn't and went ahead making something because I wasn't sure how long bitter melon would stay good.

I chopped half a small white onion, one bitter melon (I buy them only a few times a year at most and cannot really even guess at how the size of mine compared to an "average") around 4 ounces of birds eyes, and about half a bulb's worth of garlic fairly fine, mixed them into a paste and added about 4% salt by weight. I also poured in about two tablespoons of my friend's backyard honey. I wanted to add mustard seeds but I don't have any of those right now either.

Thekla McDaniels wrote:
NOMA style lacto-tomato water.

What is it?  How would I make it?  Any chance it would exacerbate irritable bowel?

I got the recipe from "The Noma Guide To Fermentation," published by a chef who worked at a really fancy restaurant of the same name (I somehow thought it was NOMA, stylized in all caps, but it is not.) It's basically just tomatos fermented with 2% salt for 3-7 days with the juice strained from the solids.

I don't have IBS or currently cook for anyone who does and don't want to offer any health and/or wellness advice based on pure speculation.

I love forum culture, it does my heart good seeing this thread that was active when I last used the site, revived some weeks ago after 6 years.

My ongoing projects:

-Sauerkraut made from cabbage and scallions rescued from work.
-Tomatos, salted & splashed with just a bit of that kraut water, for NOMA-style "lacto-tomato water." 2 days into the ferment it smells unbelievably fruity, in a way I associate with Berliner Weisse-type ales. I can only assume I've got some crazy wild yeast going on.
-Vinegar I started from some truly bizarre wine that I ended up with, a commercial white with blueberry flavor and blue color added. The temptation of having a blue vinegar on hand was too much to resist. I'm curious to see if whatever blue color they put in it will kill the acetobacteria or something.
-Birds eye chili, bitter melon & garlic relish

I've added lightly-soaked lentils to bread recipes many times to great success. Most of the replies here seem to be about using bean flours rather than whole beans, but I thought I'd put this forward as well.

I have made incidental rice vinegar several times, as I make homemade rice beer, I've never pasteurized it, and that stuff will turn into vinegar on you sooner than later.
Vinegar from rice water is an interesting "extremely zero waste" sort of proposal, and if you added enough of that sugar syrup it stands to reason you would eventually get vinegar, but if you're planning to use this for cooking, I don't think sugared rice-water is going to give you the distinct rice vinegar flavor you're looking for.
I would recommend following the method started from cooked white rice.

I have just set up a pot of potting mix and compost and scattered all the seeds from a batch of "Lady Apples" that were gifted to me in there. These are a variety of crab apples that are apparently being trialed by some commercial orchards - when I look for genetic information I only find articles on the provenance of the Pink Lady Apple, which these are definitely not. I have no idea if I'm hobbling myself or making things harder than they need to be by using a cultivated crab apple. I can't wait to see what happens!

Thanks everyone for your suggestions and comments. I live in an apartment for the time being and don't have the need to trap anything, though I'm sure they would work for that purpose. I think I'll give Tereza's suggestion a try, fish cakes have never been a regular part of my diet but I try to stay open to new things.

We LOVE fish sauce in this house, but I would not love to have poorly-made fish sauce sitting around in great quantities, making me feel compelled to use it.

Hey all, after lurking this forum for a while I come seeking your wisdom.
A few months ago, some neighbors of ours moved away and left us a TON of food they couldn't pack, including a few bags of whole fish that got stuffed into the freezer, covered up by ground lamb they also gave us, and promptly forgotten. Most of it is, unfortunately, badly freezer burned by now, so my partner and I started wondering if there was a way to salvage it into something pleasant to eat.
I tend to keep a LOT of fermentation projects going in my kitchen-currently, there are several jars of carrot kraut, a persimmon mead, and a few different hot sauces bubbling away already. My partner suggested that I try making a garum out of them, as described in Sandor Katz' The Art Of Fermentation. I'd love to do this, but I'm skeptical that anything good will come from freezer-burned fish. Her line of thinking was that the freezing might just break the fish down quicker, my counter was that the enzymes responsible for digesting the fish into garum might not survive freezing temperatures.
To make a short story longer, she said "Why don't you ask one of your weird fermentation groups on the internet?" and I ended up here. Anyone on Permies ever tried a similar experiment? There's not a resident garum expert I should be DMing, is there?