On Thursday, Dishing hosted The Locavore Pantry at The Rose in connection with the Shift Festival. This event showcased various local chefs and industry experts demonstrating different homemade skills and recipes, including fermentation, nut milk/cheese, dairy, hummus, tamales, gnocchi, creamed horseradish and pistou.
I got the chance to speak with everyone and learn some tricks of the homemade trade. I discovered that that it’s easy to be healthy when adapting a homegrown lifestyle. It just takes a little time and consideration for new things.
Due to the overload of delicious tricks I learned, I am going to share the information in a two part series.
Here are a few easy ways to help you and your kitchen ingredients become more homegrown:
Almond and Cashew Nut Milk Starter Kits
Jessica Marlo, and her team from Healthy Being Juicery, demonstrated how easy it is to make nut milk and cheese at home, and how much healthier it is to do so. They demonstrated an almond milk and a cashew nut cheese. I have to say that these two alternative versions were so much better than processed or store bought milk and cheese; they don’t contain any GMOs, chemicals, preservatives, or additives. The basic instructions for making nut milk and cheese at home are simple: soak the nuts in water, drain and rinse, then add whatever else you’d like. Milk is a great canvas for spices such as cinnamon, cardamom and chai. 
The cheese just needs a little lemon juice, garlic and preferred seasonings and a quick blend in the food processor. I tried the cheese on healthy baked chips, and it was so tasty and perfectly crafted; I never knew nuts could transform into such cheesy goodness. The most healthy aspect of using nuts for dairy production is that sprouted nuts produce nutritional enzymes, which make it easier to break down than animal milk or cheese.
I stopped by the do-it-yourself dairy station to learn how Martha Berkesch from Mother Nature Nutrition makes her own paneer, yogurt and kefir. All three of these have one thing in common: the culturing; that’s what makes it so healthy and much better for you than processed dairy. Paneer, a cheese used in traditional Indian cuisine, is a great way to prevent waste; it involves mixing some form of acid (lemon juice or apple vinegar) with stale milk that is no longer suitable for drinking. Yogurt is easy; it’s all about temperature control. Full-fat milk can be mixed with full-fat yogurt and put into a yogurt incubator. A certain temperature allows the cultures and healthy bacteria to thrive, therefore offering a gut-healthy yogurt. Kefir, a form of dairy that is also related to gut health, involves adding kefir powder to whole milk and letting it sit in a warm area for a couple of days. You can add different flavors to change up the taste.
Chris shows Annie and Christina how to sprout your own garbanzo beans at home.
Chris Hogberg, half of the Teton Hummus team, demonstrated how to create healthy hummus using sprouted garbanzo beans. The hummus is easy: Soak the garbanzo beans in water for a couple of hours until they are squishy, then add olive oil, garlic, lemon juice, tahini, salt and parsley for garnish. The kicker ingredient is pumpkin seed oil; it doesn’t take much to add extreme flavor, while offering its own health benefits. Sprouted beans are better for many reasons. They taste better They’re easier to digest. They’re offer a great increase of vitamins and minerals and 35 percent more protein. This is another reason why homemade foods are better than processed foods.
Stay tuned for the second installment sharing wonderful tips on how to sprout and create healthy foods at home. Stay tuned for the next blog, which will share how to make kimchi, sauerkraut and kombucha via fermentation, creamed horseradish, gnocchi, tamales and pistou.
