A fruitful, nutty challenge

Making a day of meals from only tree products for Arbor Day

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Could you make three square meals and a dessert out of only ingredients that come from trees? That’s the ridiculous question I posed to myself in honor of Arbor Day, which saunters through on April 24 in the unfortunate shadow of that fat cat Earth Day.

The answer depends. For the amateur cook, like me, it was a tall task. For a professional or experienced cook, it would be a fun, if arbitrary, exercise. But there is just enough room for creativity and for error that if you have the time this weekend and don’t want to celebrate by sitting in a tree’s shade or planting a new sapling in your backyard, I recommend doing it.

Note that in absolutely no way does preparing meals from tree food support sustainable or eco-friendly practices (what Arbor Day partially stands for) — most of the ingredients I used were shipped in from around the globe, and many tree ingredients require massive quantities of water in areas they’re not getting a lot of water.

Maybe plant that sapling after all. 

The first task was to identify what foods I had at my disposal. The rule was that as long as the fruits, seeds, barks, leaves, etc. grew on the tree, they were fair game. This, after much thought, does not include animals or products from animals that live exclusively in trees. So no sloth steak. No koala cheese. The products also have to come from trees, and not shrubs or bushes.

I divided my options into four categories: nuts, fruits, spices and miscellany. I didn’t use every product from every category, and I certainly didn’t perform exhaustive research to make a comprehensive list. But, for instance, nuts included almonds, cashews, hazelnuts, macadamias, peanuts, pecans, pistachios, walnuts and more. Fruits included apples, apricots, avocados, citrus, coconuts, mangos, peaches, pears, plums and more. Spices included allspice, cloves, capers, cinnamon, bay leaves, nutmeg, juniper and star anise. And the miscellany category included carob, hearts of palm, oyster mushrooms (which grow on trees), plantains, figs, olives, sago, sassafras root and maple syrup.

The immediate challenge was figuring out how to centralize dishes. With no main protein or grain, I was working from the outside in on meals, pairing flavors and searching fervently for something to combine it all. Without meat or vegetables, stock was out and so were many soups. Without eggs, there was the maddening search to find a suitable emulsifier. Without dairy fat, white sugar or salt, I had to find a way to make it taste good. Without leafy greens or mainline starches, it was hard to make breads and bases for each dish.

Thus, the challenge. 

I immediately found a friend in the coconut. I don’t know if you can do this with every fruit, or if we’ve just been putting all our NASA money into coconut research, but there is a surprising amount of coconut products that were beneficial to a project such as this. I used coconut milk, coconut oil or coconut flour in nearly every dish. Also beneficial was sago flour, which you have to send away for. Sago is a starch that is derived from the stems of palm trees. It’s used a lot in Southeast Asian cuisine, and when cooked into tortillas or pancakes, it’s sort of grainy and tasteless.

Now, to the menu.

Breakfast 

Coconut and carob chip pancakes; Dominican-style mashed plantains with baking spices; fruit smoothie

Off to a bad start. Pancakes need a delicate balance of flour and egg in order to properly cook and fluff. Well, when you don’t have common flours, eggs (or baking powder), it’s a crapshoot what kind of pancakes are going to come out. Instead of wheat flour, I used coconut flour and instead of eggs, I used apple sauce. It was a challenge to get the consistency right. Some mixture of coconut flour, apple sauce, solid coconut oil and coconut milk eventually resulted in a batter that tasted fantastic, but was hard to cook on the griddle. When the sides browned, the middle did not rise. There was too much apple sauce, and it just needed a damn egg. I did look outside for robin’s eggs, which I would have counted due to its resourcesfulness, but had no luck.

The mashed plantains were a much greater success. I made two batches, one with extra ripe plantains, one with unripe plantains. The ripened ones were much sweeter and softer, and caramelized more after throwing them, halved, in the oven on medium heat for a half hour. I put cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg on them before cooking, and topped them off after mashing with the same spices and a drizzle of maple syrup.

The smoothie was a smoothie. Pick any fruit that grows on trees, throw it in with homemade coconut milk ice cream or not, or ice, and have a field day.

Lunch 

Grilled champagne mango and fig flatbread; trail mix (cop-out)

There was much improvement at lunch. I cooked two flatbread bases, one with coconut flour and one with sago flour (again using apple sauce and coconut milk), and the coconut flour just would not solidify. The sago was a bit better, and crisped on the edges, making a really nice char to go with the tart and savory flavors on the flatbread. I lathered the breads with fig preserves. I also halved two champagne mangos, peeled off the skin like an avocado and grilled them on a cast-iron stove-top grill. Fantastic.

I threw some bay leaves on for aromatics and cracked some fresh black and pink peppercorns and threw it back in the oven. Ten minutes later, I took it out, drizzled some light and spicy Tuscan olive oil over the top, removed the bay leaves, and had a nice little dish. The crust was still not crispy, and the coconut flour crust was a bit too mealy. In short, it tasted like tree pizza.

There was a thought here to make root beer, which you can do by steeping dried sassafras roots and adding in treebased spices, but time was an issue. The trail mix I planned was dried apricot and mango, almonds, pistachios, walnuts and carob chips, but I’ll trust Boulder to make their own trail mix — that’d be like giving Tiger Woods pointers on his short game.

Dinner 

Mushroom tacos with hearts of palm, apple and caper slaw; coconut milk horchata

Tortillas were by far the hardest product to make. As I went to roll out a dough of coconut flour, apple sauce and coconut oil, the whole thing just crumbled apart. Sago was the same way. I ended up matting a bunch of the dry dough in my hand to a thin consistency, throwing it down on the griddle and closing it shut. The resulting tortilla did not fold, but I used it as a base on which to throw the taco toppings.

Knowing this would be tough, I bought flour tortillas from the store for $1.99 and took the easy way out on this.

But the fixin’s were all-tree. I sautéed oyster mushrooms in homemade nocino, a barrel-aged amaro made from unripe walnuts and other spices (I used star anise and juniper). On top of that, I placed peeled hearts of palm (which were a revelation in this exercise), a stripped gala apple, sliced black olives, capers and sliced almonds. Then I scooped out a dollop of avocado and the whole thing was pretty decent for a tree taco.

The horchata was a little thin (as there was no rice in it) but I basically just combined coconut milk, water, a dash of maple syrup, cinnamon and nutmeg.

Dessert 

Amaretti cookie sandwich with coconut milk ice cream; nocino

I whipped up a quick batch of amaretti — sliced almonds, almond extract, apple sauce replacing egg whites, and a dash of maple syrup to replace the sugar. They came out like little spiky cookies, remarkably light and even though a little under-sweetened, delicious. I scooped some store-bought coconut ice cream between two cookies (you can make coconut milk ice cream at home but I had other stories to write this week, alright?).

Finishing with sips from the walnut liquor, I debated my future as an arbortarian. But I looked at the dishes, looked at my grocery bill, and decided arborphile is good enough for me.