Forgotten History: Catfish and Waffles

catfish and waffles

Catfish and Waffles   Chicken and waffles is a Pennsylvanian Dutch dish, a way of utilizing a chicken carcass the day after the Sunday roast, using the leftover chicken by making a gravy to pour over the waffles. When I was younger I used to eat waffle after waffle and to this day it is […]

Spruce Tips

spruce

Spruce Tips, a harbinger of Spring. The tender little new growth that grows in the Spring on Spruce trees makes a delightful and refreshing sorbet. Check out the video where Chef Adam Diltz picks spruce tips at The Blind Pig Kitchen Farm and makes a sorbet back in Philadelphia.  

Help Elwood support local charity events

ccap

Elwood is involved in multiple charity campaigns this week! The first is an interview clothing drive with Philadelphia’s chapter of the Careers through Culinary Arts Program (C-CAP). Not everyone has access to the clothing that they need to succeed, so C-CAP Philadelphia is organizing a city-wide clothing drive for new or gently used interview clothing. Elwood will […]

Muskrat Stew

muskrat stew

Muskrat Stew   Hero, abolitionist, spy, nurse, soldier. Of the many things Harriet Tubman was rightly known for, two of those were her skills as a cook and her foraging abilities.  She was a very knowledgeable outdoorswoman and used those skills while leading the enslaved to freedom on the  underground railroad.   When she was […]

Forgotten History: Atlantic Sturgeon

Sturgeon

Rebirth and renewal- Springtime means many things for all forms of life- plants that were long dormant burst through the soil to start a new year, bees leave the hive and start their search for nectar, Bears come out of hibernation to look for food, and let’s not for forget about one of the most […]

Forgotten History: Planked American Shad

shad meal

Yes I know. Cooking fish on a wooden plank is sooo 90’s, a fad that was everywhere and in every chain restaurant you could think of. However, cooking salmon on a cedar plank is an interesting North American tradition, going back thousands of years. It traces back to the Pacific Northwest where the Indigenous peoples […]

Philadelphia Pepper Pot

philadelphia pepper pot

Pepper pot is one of many dishes from Philadelphia’s colonial past that is slowly being forgotten. Just like another famous Philadelphia dish that is becoming rarer to find, turtle soup, pepper pot demonstrates the love for spice and chillies that Philadelphians had during the colonial era. Philadelphia pepper pot has a very well-known origin story. […]

Fermenting Sauerkraut

canned sauerkraut

Some hate it, for others it’s a staple foodstuff. To the northern Europeans it’s a comfort food and a necessity, made in the fall when cabbages are sweetest and stored in the root cellar to get through winter.  I personally love sauerkraut, whether its raw, cooked, or any way it’s served. It’s made with such […]

Lenape Squash

Squash

Roughwood Seed Collection: Lenape Squash Stephen Smith of Roughwood Seed Collection recently dropped off some squash that he harvested. This particular squash is a Lenape Maycock variety, it’s extremely rare and dates back hundreds of years. I’ll let Stephen explain more in the video above, but as he says, this squash is, “basically as Pennsylvanian […]

Pawpaw Season

A fruit largely forgotten but extremely delicious, the pawpaw was eaten for hundreds of years by the Native Americans, before the colonists arrived. Pawpaw is indigenous to eastern parts of the United States, including the Mid-Atlantic region, the more northern parts of the South, and west into Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. It is a hard […]

Strawberry Shortcake

strawberry shortcake

Strawberry season is upon us! And to many Pennsylvanians, that means strawberry shortcake — one of my favorite treats growing up.  A British import to the New World, strawberry shortcake recipes go back hundreds of years in the United Kingdom and not just with strawberries, countless other fruits and berries were made into shortcakes, including […]