Tag Archives: Wild Rice

Wild Rice and Barley Pudding

A variation on a Christmas classic, using some local pantry items.

I had some cooked barley in my fridge, remnants of a barley-broth.  I decided to employ the rice pudding method to save the left-overs.  (Rice Pudding Method: a lengthy secondary cooking in sugar and milk.)  The barley sucks up a lot of the milk and releases some starch into the pot.

Once a porridge has formed, cooked wild rice and dried cherries are added, and the whole lot is thickened with butter, egg yolk, and a touch of cream.

Since the wild rice and cherries are added at the end, they stay firm for textural contrast.

Wild Rice and Barley Pudding

Ingredients

  • 235 g cooked pearled barley
  • 300
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Cold-Smoking Pickerel

Cold-smoking pickerel on the barbecueI recently picked up some pickerel from Rebekah’s Fish at the Strathcona Market and took my first stab at cold-smoking on my barbecue.

To hot-smoke on my barbecue I just remove the grate from the righthand side and put foil packets of wood chips directly onto the flames.  I put the meat on the left side, which remains off.  This way the meat isn’t over direct heat and will cook evenly.  With the right burner on a medium-low setting, the wood chips smolder and the average temperature inside the barbecue stays around 250°F.

The point of cold-smoking is to impart the flavour of the smoke without cooking the meat.  Examples of food that you might want to keep raw are … Continue reading.

Wild Rice

A fistful of wild riceToday Judy showed up with a bag of Canada Goose wild rice from Fort Assiniboine.  Wild “rice” is actually a misnomer: it’s the seed of zizania grasses, which are not part of the rice family, though they are closely related. Anyways, it’s indigenous to lakes across Canada and the northern United States.

The harvesting of wild rice is a pretty interesting affair.  Here’s a video of some hippies in Maine taking a canoe into the rice marsh.

Because of the high moisture content of the grain, wild rice actually goes through a good deal more processing than its true-rice cousins.  After harvest wild rice is left in large, damp piles to mature for about a week, then dried over a … Continue reading.