Spring is in the air! It’s time for Sunday Suppers, brought to you in coordination with Slow Food Buffalo, in order to provide you with easy and delicious ways to feed yourself, your family or your friends by offering recipes from local chefs, utilizing local ingredients.
This month, Sunday Suppers will reflect the soon-to-arrive plethora of vegetable garden delights with a nutritious and delicious recipe from Trudy Stern of tru-teas on Elmwood. There, the Grain Bowl graces the daily menu, a dish that combines quality ingredients in a simple way that nourishes both the body and the soul.
Trudy’s Grain Bowl is chock full of ingredients that can be easily found at the Lexington Co-op, located directly across the street from her adorable little shop. If you haven’t visited tru-teas before (located in The Neighborhood Collective), you probably don’t realize that they offer a broad assortment of teas (by the cup or the ounce) and a good selection of the sweets that complement this warm and comforting beverage so well.
A lovely lunch offering of sandwiches, salads, wraps and homemade soups is served every day of the week, with special brunch selections appearing on Sundays. Available for off-site catering, on-site private dinner parties, English high tea and tea tastings, tru-teas has options to fit every need. If you’d like to sample a Grain Bowl before adding it to your culinary repertoire, stop in for lunch; the components change daily, but the flavor is always there.
tru-teas’ Grain Bowl differs from a traditional recipe in that its ingredients can vary dramatically, but the ratios remain the same. Each is comprised of an organic whole grain, an assortment of fresh vegetables (some raw, some cooked), a variety of aromatics, and a “pulse.” Pulse is a term used by the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations to define specific legumes*. Pulses are high in protein and amino acids and play a fundamental role in healthy crop rotation.
Trudy’s response to the term pulse? “Beans would do,” she says with a smile, “but I think I like it because as a nurse, it reminds me of the pulse of life, the heart of diet, the rhythm of the music of food...Don’t get me started!”
·2/3 whole prepared organic grain: quinoa, brown rice, millet, wheat berries or pearl barley
·1/3 prepared pulse: lentils, adzuki beans, chic peas, cannoli beans, kidney beans or black beans
·fresh greens dressed in fine vinaigrette: lime or balsamic
·cooked veggies: steamed, stir fried or roasted: beets, squash, carrots, kale, peas, etc.
·raw veggies: red cabbage, cucumbers, julienned snow peas, daikon, red pepper, scallion, etc.
·fresh aromatics: shoyu, garlic, chopped chives, green onions, cilantro, ginger, toasted sesame seeds, fresh basil, tru-teas’ Mad Yak sauce, rice vinegar, salt and pepper
“One of the best things about the Grain Bowl, “ Trudy explained, “is that you can put together all kinds of things. Once you get the philosophy behind it, anyone can make it.”
On our visit, the Grain Bowl Trudy prepared was made with steamed organic short-grain brown rice that had been drizzled with toasted sesame oil, wheatless shoyu (high-quality, organic soy sauce) and tru-teas’ very own Mad Yak sauce. Added to that were chic peas, cabbage, diced snow peas, onion, garlic and ginger that had been sauteed in olive oil, and some fresh greens dressed lightly with a citrus vinaigrette. Mad Yak sauce, a combination of chilies, ginger, garlic and sesame oil, is available for sale at tru-teas.
tru-teas
810 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 14222
716.887.2921
Lexington Co-op
807 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, 14222
716.886.2667
*“Pulses are annual leguminous crops yielding grains or seeds used for food, feed and sowing purposes. The denomination “pulses” should be limited to crops harvested for dry grain only, excluding, therefore, crops harvested green for forage...and also crops harvested green for food (green beans, green peas, etc.), which are considered vegetables. They exclude those used mainly for extraction of oil, e.g., soybeans. Also excluded from this group should be those leguminous crops whose seeds are used exclusively for sowing purposes, such as alfalfa and clover.”