10 Feb Kitchen Wins in Taos

We’ve been doing a TON of fun cooking here in Taos! We’re provided an amazing amount of staples and fresh food to feed the 5 of us volunteers living on the property, plus usually at least 1-2 meals a week cooked together as a team with Muna for a group meal.

One of our first days here, Shakira taught us how to make dumplings! We made a meat version with ground beef and spices and a veggie version with finely chopped onion and mushrooms. Shakira made the dough and taught us how to roll it out and pinch it shut around the filling. The dumplings ended up being super yummy and spicy! Some of Shakira’s other great dishes she’s made: homemade pizzas, fruit tarts, pancakes and too many breakfast skillets to count!

Muna roasted a smoked turkey for a birthday dinner for a property worker, Hunter, and tasked us with all the leftovers! The turkey was one of the best we’d ever had — very tender, flavorful and moist! We pulled all the meat from the bones to save for other dishes and placed the remnants in a crock pot for 2 days. This yielded close to a gallon of turkey broth that was both savory and super nutritious! Once the bones were close to deteriorating, we threw them all to the chickens! Much of the leftover white turkey meat went into a fabulous turkey salad: Aaron homemade mayo, then we added cranberries, walnuts, celery and black pepper. The turkey salad was a hit with everyone around and was gobbled up easily in 2 days.

Among the freezer gems that were cleaned out and brought to our community kitchen were several pieces of venison. We took one bag simply labeled “Deer 5/21” and got inspired to try our hands at cooking venison for the first time! We put the roast in a crock pot with mushroom broth, onion, garlic, oyster and Shitake mushrooms, potatoes, celery, parsnip, carrots, tomato paste and red wine. We cooked the crock on low for over 8 hours, until the meat was easy to pull apart. The stew turned out great and the venison meat was juicy, nicely flavored and very tender!

We celebrated another birthday for our fellow volunteer, Kali — and our host Muna pulled out all the stops once again! We helped make a fabulous meal of Turkish meatballs with peanut sauce (ground beef, egg, squash, zucchini, onion and spices), roasted squash, Jerusalem artichokes (freshly dug up from the grounds here), salad loaded with bean sprouts, and everyone’s favorite: salmon sushi!

The food here is so amazing! We’ve been learning lots of kitchen tricks and recipes from Muna, who is an exceptionally efficient and skilled cook: saffron rice with lentil dal, egg fu young, dal pancakes, mung bean hummus, Horno Chicos (clay-oven roasted corn that’s a local specialty here in NM), and too many soups and stews to keep track of! We feel incredibly lucky to be both learning from everyone here and having lots of people around to cook for!