Steemit Iron Chef 2018 Act 01 Round 10: Wild and Sweet White Desserts

A wild assortment of desserts from wild plants and homestead harvests. With an extra kick from flavored gin and brandy!

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This week's theme for @progressivchef's Steemit Iron Chef is to make a Monochrome Plate. No doubt about it, colorful food like the orange, red, and green examples that @progressivechef showed are especially attractive. But somehow, I got fixed on the idea of a plate of white-shaded food. There are so many shades and tones and tints of white! I'm not saying they make the most attractive food colors. But it definitely poses a challenge!


Taking Stock and Digging Roots

The first step was to take stock of what might work, from my larder of preserved homestead harvests. I harvest white flowers from Black Locust trees every summer. I use some of them to flavor gin with their intoxicating floral fragrance. I soak the flowers in gin for a few weeks and then can enjoy the gin in cocktails. But I also save the soaked flowers in my freezer!

I also have canned, unsweeted pear puree from my early-ripening Ubileen pear tree. And homestead honey from back when I had bees. I have rose petals that I dried this summer, from an old shrub rose that's been here on the homestead for decades. And I still have snowballs in my freezer!

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Top left: Black locust flowers. Top right: The black locust flowers soaking in 2 different brands of gin. Bottom left: Ubileen pears that ripen in early August. Bottom right: Honey from bees here on the homestead, harvested a few years ago. It's crystallizing, but honey stores for years.

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Top: That pear sauce on the left tastes like summer! When I remove the black locust flowers from soaking in the gin, they still have a lot of flavor. I store them in a separate jar in my freezer. With the snowballs! Bottom left: Dried rose petals. Bottom right: Rose petals soaking in milk. I ended up using almost the whole jar.

Because my Monochrome color is white, I wanted to use some wild carrots, too. Their roots are still in great condition, because the over-wintered plants still haven't kicked into their spring growth. Some of the roots I find are substantial, almost the size of garden carrots. Wild carrots are so under-appreciated!

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Top left: Wild carrot roots. Top right: Roots, lighly peeled and trimmed. Bottom left: Thinly sliced roots. You can see here how wild carrots are just like the domestic ones! Bottom right: I decided to flavor the carrots with brandy that I've been using to soak organic orange peels, from fruit my neighbors gave me after they returned from travels to Arizona.


All Put Together

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Not all white food is equally white! But at least they are each some shade or tone or tint of white! This all turned out to be a delicious combination of desserts! I will make and eat more of each one of these -- they are all so good!

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First up: Rose Petal Tapioca Pudding Topped with Plum Flowers. Ingredients: Rose petals soaked in milk, tapioca, egg, sugar. The rose flavor is incredible. It's a light flavor, but it has real depth, too. The flavor is as much up in my head as it is on my tongue. If you like the scent of rose cold cream, you would like this rose petal tapioca pudding!

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Next up: A Sweet Black Locust Gin Flower Snowball. I ground the black locust flowers to a paste, sweetened with sugar and powered-up with some of the flower-flavored gin. I cut a snowball in half and soaked it in the gin. This is a powerful dish! I ended up adding another whole snowball, cut in halves. This is so delicious -- and I got pretty looped! The snowball lasts a long time in that alcohol!

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Next up: Orange Brandy-Glazed Wild Carrots. With A Pear-Honey-Goat Cheese Spread. I steamed the wild carrots until they were tender, then slowly glazed them in the orange peel-flavored brandy, with just a touch of sugar. The spread is a simple mix of my pear sauce, honey, and goat cheese. They are both absolutely delicious! The pear mix is so summery. The carrots are so tender and have an amazing orange flavor! I was surprised how they took on an orange hue, after starting out so white!

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I wish you could try this mix of desserts! They are so good! I'm glad I put some of my summer harvests -- wild and garden-grown -- in my larder to use later!


What Do You Think?

  • Do you save any of your summer harvests to use later?
  • Have you ever cooked with rose petals or black locust flowers?
  • Do you ever forage wild carrots?
  • Would you eat my plate of wild sweet white desserts?

I eat a lot of wild plants and show you how, because I believe that we can all have lives that are richer, more secure, more grounded, and more interesting by getting to know the plants and the land around us – in our yards, our parks, and our wild places.

Thanks @progressivechef for creating the Steemit Iron Chef contest series!

I try to make content that's interesting! If you found this informative and helpful, please give it an upvote and a resteem.


Plant List

  • Black locust tree - Robinia pseudoacacia - flowers
  • Wild Carrot or Queen Anne's Lace - Daucus carota - 1st year roots
  • Ubileen pears - Pyrus communis - fruit
  • Rose - unknown yellow shrub rose - Rosa spp. - dried petals
  • Snowballs! - Hydrogen dioxide - for the chemists, lol! ; )

Haphazard Homestead

foraging, gardening, nature, simple living close to the land

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All looks so good and especially with the coffee. I did not realize you keep your own bees ... or rather they let you keep them. LOL. But you could totally experiment making your own mead and maybe had some wild flowers to add complexity.

Thanks, @prydfoltz! The bees had me, a few years ago. They were all wild swarms that I captured and put into boxes. I had 3 hives at one point. But they all got caught up in the colony collapse disorder and just disappeared. It was so sad. Once the big box stores stop selling flowerbed starts that have systemic neonicitinoid pesticides in them -- next year, supposedly -- I'm hoping the bees can make a comeback. They made a lot of honey! At least I have a a couple gallons left, still.

If it makes you feel any better ... in Vancouver we have what seems a copious supply in the summer. Perhaps we have already banned the pesticide ... I am not sure. But we have turned a lot of our city green areas over to keeping bees and even a local hotel keeps an apiary. Little honey bees and big fluffy bumbles too. We love our bees.

The U.S. has been so slow on banning the neonicitinoids. I do like the bees. Especially the native bumblebees.

They are the cutest ... the rhododendron garden in Stanley Park gets a lot ... they are so drunk on nectar they will just bumped into you as they clumsily fly about. No stinging though:)

That's a funny image of the stumbling bumbles! : )

They were doing just that ... bumping around.

haha -- quite the image!

I usually have my summer harvest till end of february, now is everything away... Have a great weekend:)

Thanks, @liltammy! I'm glad you are able to store some of your summer harvest! And February is a good long while to have your summer harvest on hand. Here's to good harvests this summer, too! :D

The flowers apart from being beautiful offer us their flavor to eat, I grew eating flowers like the hibiscus flower that becomes a flavoring tea or tacos, the rose petals for a quail recipe that is absolutely exquisite for those who eat meat, Izote flower for a tasty stew, and others that escape from my memory.
Thanks for such a beautiful post.
Have a nice day @haphazard-hstead

That is a nice selection of flowers that you use, @glaysstillwagon! Those Izote flowers really are good cooked! In my area, hardly anyone knows how good they are, but I enjoy them and they are so pretty, too. @galberto had a recent post about them. I would like to see your version of cooking with them, too! You and @galberto know these plants for cooking much more than I do!

Having a take on a wild monochrome dish was really very brave from you my friend and I can confirm that you did deliver a very high class entry again!
Bravo for that!
I really wish I could taste your wild foods one day...hmm those wild carrots...the snowball soaked in that black locust infused gin...and your pear-honey-goat cheese spread...simply amazing and so mouthwatering!

Wow you really need to cook me a meal lol this looks and sounds delicious :)

Thanks, @karenb54. I would serve any of these desserts to company. It was a change from all the green weeds I eat, lol. : )

A nice sweet change :)

Beautiful white dessert…. I love the white flower. The pears look fresh and yummy.

In the meantime, I think I like the Rose Petal Tapioca Pudding Topped with Plum Flowers most. Well done! ;)

Good choice with the Rose Petal Tapioca pudding, @tangmo! :D

Ah! I have wide smile now.... ^____^

I like that wide smile! :D

Oh! I'm so happy to hear that! ;)

It seems I will never going to get tired of screaming I WAAAAANT!! in your posts! 😀

That's A-OK! I want more of it all, too! ; )

Your recipes are always so healthy and inspiring! Nature seems to be very abundant where u are!

Thanks, @celestialcow! Nature is everywhere around here, alright! I sure appreciate it, too. It's a lot more pleasant than going to the grocery store. ; )

wonderful food photography D:) friend @haphazard-hstead , i like your post. thanks for share

lovely