It’s starting

April 22, 2012 at 20:30 · Filed under posts, Recipes, The recipe books ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Round about this time of year I start fretting that I’m running out of jam. I never have, and I probably never will, but there were only six jars of jam in the cold room at last count, and I was starting to worry whether there would be enough for two people to eat yogurt with jam between now and the summer fruit season.

But then I remembered the rhubarb, which has just hit the market, albeit in a rather pale and skinny way. Last year’s rhubarb ginger jam was a big success, but I couldn’t find the recipe, so I had to start over.

Here is what I did, heavily gingering a recipe from the Jams and Jellies book from Australian Women’s weekly.

Rhubarb apple jam with ginger

4 cups rhubarb, finely chopped
4 large apples, peeled, cored and sliced
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup lemon juice
3 tbsp grated ginger
1/2 cup candied ginger, sliced thin
Sugar — about 4 cups

Simmer the rhubarb, apple, water and lemon juice together for 15-20 minutes until the mixture is soft and mushy. Measure how much liquid you have, and add the grated ginger, along with 3/4 of a cup of sugar for every cup of pulp. (I think I might cut the sugar and up the ginger a little next time). Boil for 10 minutes until it sets, throwing the crystallized ginger in just before the end.

Bottle. Water bath for 10 minutes if you feel so inclined.

And it’s a beautiful jam, in a delicate shade of coral pink. A little runny perhaps – it seemed to be setting, so I didn’t even do a set test – with a taste that you can’t quite place.

Definitely worth trying again.

Of course canning buddy, fearing that I might have to buy jam, also handed over a few spare jars, including one from 2010, so I’m laughing. How long before I start fretting about having too many jars again?

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Fun with farro

April 8, 2012 at 14:17 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , ,

I’m not sure which particular bucket I’ve been burying my head under for the last few years, but I for one had never heard of farro, the high-protein it grain of 2008 or so (or so the Internet tells me).

But a rider on a bike trip I just came back on swore by it as the breakfast fuel to die for, and given that steel cut oats revolutionized my life when I discovered then a few years back, I thought it had to be worth a try.

I admit it doesn’t look like much — it’s a whole grain that was available at Rube’s Rice in Toronto’s St Lawrence Market – and the cooking process was every bit as long as the Internet recipes said it would be.

But I think I could get hooked on this one, if I can find the time to cook it ahead of time and microwave it back to life in the mornings.

Here’s what I did, in a combination of recipes and invention, because, as anyone who reads this blog knows, following recipes is not my strong point.

Breakfast farro with oats

1/2 cup farro
2 cups water
1 can coconut milk
a handful of dried bananas
a handful of quick cook oatmeal

I brought the water/farro mix up to the boil, switched the pot off and left it, covered, to sit on the stove overnight. That’s the way I cook steel-cut oats and it’s the perfect lazy way to make that work. It doesn’t work quite like that for farro, and by morning the grains were no longer tooth-cracking hard. But they were still a long way from being cooked. So I threw in a can of coconut milk and some very old dried bananas (one of the recipes I was looking at the previous day talked of coconut/banana/faro combination as being an especially good one) and simmered the whole mix gently for another 20 minutes or so.

That seemed to do the trick for the farro, but the mix was somewhat sloppy, and I didn’t really want to throw the excess liquid away, as another of the internet recipes suggested. What about oats to thicken things up?

Add oats, simmer for another five minutes, and there you have it. Four portions of breakfast, one for immediate consumption and three for later (I offered a taste to the spouse, and he rejected the idea). I think it would work with any dried fruit, or with fresh fruit too. You could add milk, or buttermilk, or yogurt too. And the coconut milk is optional too. You could just use water, or maybe even milk. Not sure about the milk. A lot of boiling for that one.

Easy. Honest. And tastes really nice.

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Oranges and lemons (and ginger and spring onions)

February 21, 2012 at 21:29 · Filed under posts ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I’ve been lagging on  updating stuff again, but there were two real marmalade sessions since the Meyer lemon adventure back last month, along with another batch of preserved lemons and a few other odds and sods. The first session celebrated the arrival of Seville oranges in Toronto, and the second one was because one marmalade session clearly wasn’t going to cut it. Then we tried (and possibly failed) to recreate the sounds-nicer-than-it looks apricot date chutney from the New Jersey weekend and threw together a beet relish to give the food processor a workout.  I know I’ve posted about this one before, but I’m damned if I can find the link to post it here. And I have not got any pictures, because I have a new computer and have not managed to download the camera program yet.

But the real revelation in the latest cooking ventures was a ginger scallion sauce from one of those many canning/cooking blogs out there. It probably  probably took 10 minutes from start to finish, including the time it took to dig the food processor out of its hiding place. Recipe is simple. Chop scallions and ginger. Add salt. Heat oil to smoking point and pour oil over the other ingredients, trying hard to not splash yourself with sizzling oil in the process. I’ve been using it to give a zing to cheese and avocado sandwiches, and was planning to add to pasta today before the spouse started cooking ingredients that didn’t seem to want to go with that.

Thanks, Lottie and Doof for the super-easy recipe.

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Meyer lemon … marmalade

January 16, 2012 at 07:56 · Filed under ratings ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

I don’t get this one at all, but one day after the making, that Meyer lemon syrup had turned to an almost perfect marmalade, with a serious bite and deliciously chewy chunks of peel. Time for a few recent ratings from some of the more recent jars we opened.

Lemon meyer marmalade: 4-1/2 (out of five)
It loses half a point for panicking me for a day of the making-it process

Lime pickle: 4 (out of 5)
Nice bite, lovely taste, if a little spicy for me. But I’m not sure what I’m going to use it for. Mind you, the recipe did say wait at least a week, so maybe I should wait a little longer

Grapefruit marmalade: 3 (out of 5)
Nice, but nothing special. I’m trying it with home made rice pudding today, which might work better than the marmalada peanut butter sandwich I had yesterday. Mind you, this is last year’s grapefruit marmalade. Do these things age? Will the one we made on Saturday taste better once we get around to eating it?

Apple date chutney: 4 (out of 5)
Nice, solid, tasty, spicy chutney. Very smooth, which is a little disconcerting, and I will add a notch more spice next time.

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Meyer lemon … syrup

January 14, 2012 at 20:44 · Filed under posts ·Tagged , , ,

I’m going to blame the internet for this one, or perhaps absent canning buddy for storing all the recipe books while we completed the Great Renovation Project I wrote about over in the other blog. But I got myself confused with two different internet recipes today, and created something that tastes lovely, but is definitely not a jam. The idea was to do something with Meyer lemons, which have hit a few of the Toronto stores, although friend and I wavered between an internet recipe that added oranges and one that added pectin. Not quite sure how the confusion started, but I think we added water for the first, sugar for the second and lemons from God only knows where, and no amount of boiling seemed able to transform the resulting concoction from watery mess to proper, well-set marmalade. The peel is floating irritatingly at the top, and the liquid is barely a syrup, although I had this vague hope that it might set a little as it cooled.

It didn’t. Clearly drastic measures were called for.

Introducing my regular lemon ginger cake, with Meyer lemon syrup drizzled over the top to add moisture and a bite.

Now I only have 4-1/2 jars of the concoction to use up.

Bizarre next day update: overnigjht the marmalade set.. Not a firm set, but definitely a set. Curious.

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Cranberry capers

January 13, 2012 at 22:05 · Filed under posts ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

New Jersey canning buddy, the one who introduced me to home made jams and chutneys, snagged a half dozen bags of half-price cranberries in the post-Christmas sales, so I felt morally obliged to head down to New Jersey to help her use them up. We spent an evening scouring the internet for recipes, double guessed ourselves a few times and ended up with a highly gratifying selection. Can’t for the life of me remember where we got all the recipes, and our post-cook taste tests won’t really do justice to the finished product, so I’ll keep this to a picture and a list. In the order we made them:
Cranberry orange marmalade. Cranberries, oranges, sugar and ginger. What can possibly go wrong. I insisted on slicing the orange peel rather than processing it, and I don’t think we needed the pectin the recipe wanted. But it certainly looks good.

Cranberry chutney. A Bernadin/Balls recipe that included chunks of candied pineapple as well as cranberries, apples and ginger. A notch heavy on the cloves, if truth be told, but it may mellow with time

Moroccan chutney. It might have been this one, but we were looking at many options and I can’t remember which one we chose in the end. But I somehow suspect it wasn’t. The one we made seems spicier, and it doesn’t look anything like the picture. Maybe canning buddy can help me out.

Lime pickle. We made this last year, but I never got to take any home with me, so we had to try again this time. I’m not allowed to open it for another week or so (at least that’s what the recipe says), but it definitely has a kick.

There’s something very, very satisfying about a few dozen jars of Home Made Stuff.

 

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My crossover post

December 25, 2011 at 11:08 · Filed under posts ·Tagged , , , ,

We moved over to a new home last week, and acquired the object of every home preserver’s dreams – a separate storage room that’s just for all those jars.

I posted about it in my home renovation blog, which also tells the story of transforming a Toronto semi into a different sort of dream, so all I’m putting here is pictures.

As I said in the other blog, just think of all the extra shelving. I could keep going indefinitely.

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Almonds on steroids

November 10, 2011 at 12:27 · Filed under ratings ·Tagged , , ,

I just want to put on record that the apricot jam from the summer really is rather yummy. As it matured in the cupboard, the flavor from apricot kernels spread stunningly through the whole jam, giving everything an intense almond taste. Apricot kernels are like almonds on steroids, I think. More taste than an almond, and a little less crunch. I have few spoonfuls of the final jar left to enjoy – maybe enough for the rest of this week. But that’s going to be it until next summer. So sad.

Rating: 4-1/2 (out of 5). I’m docking the half point because it set just a little bit too much and hence sank to the bottom of my lunchtime yogurt and needed major stirring to mix it through. I should probably chop the apricot a little smaller next time too — quarter fruit not half fruit.

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New horizons

November 9, 2011 at 20:45 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged ,

This was most definitely an adventure rather than a misadventure, and a successful one at that. But biking buddy (and part-time marmalade maker) allowed me to join her for a morning of bread making last weekend. Sure it took all morning, but it proved to me that making bread is not as complicated or as scary as it looks. She made four wholewheat loaves before I got there, and I did a supervised four oatmeal loaves after that. And then we ate half a loaf fresh from the oven, with home-made plum jam.

It helps that buddy has eight super-cool, industrial strength bread tins, and it also helps that she’s done all this many times before. I remember making bread a million years ago, and I had some success with the New York Times no-knead bread last year. But only recent attempt at start-from-scratch, knead-for-ages bread making ended a dismal failure as the chewy bread declined to bouce out of the tins and I was left with chunks that worked better in soup than for sandwiches. I now know I needed to grease the pan far better. Bread is sensitive stuff.

This time was different. We used fresh yeast, which smells (and works) completely differently from the granular dried stuff I used before, and we measured the ingredients to the gram on buddy’s cool electronic scale. (I now covet cool electronic scale as well as coveting industrial strength loaf pans).

And the results were awesome.  Light, tasty bread with a little hint of the fresh yeast, and oodles of  taste and character. My only complaint is that it didn’t have much of a crust, which makes it very little hard to cut, but the taste makes up for it.

Sandwich-sized packages are crowding the freezer, and I can see pan purchases and bread making Saturday mornings crowding my future. But not until we move, which is perhaps only a month away. Take a look at the home reno blog for the latest details.

And as we tried spreading fridge hard butter onto crumbly warm bread, I was reminded of a saying that my mother said her grandmother used to say: “May God punish you with soft bread and cold butter.”

There are worse curses out there, but this one makes me smile.

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Chutney with a kick

October 22, 2011 at 19:35 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , ,

For three years in a row we’ve made a curried apple date chutney from one of my favorite recipe books and it seems to vary each year depending on the apples, the vinegar and maybe the mood of the chefs. One year we used empire apples, which didn’t break down properly, and one year we used curry powder instead of curry paste and I complained that the finished product was a notch too bland and a notch and a half too sweet.

This year I dared buy the “hot” curry paste from the market, and used a very generous three tablespoons when canning buddy wasn’t looking. We cut the sugar a little, cut the Macintosh apples up nice and small and used a mix of cider vinegar and white vinegar because it’s all I had in the house.

And this is a chutney to die for. The dates and most of the apples melt away into a dark amber paste, with hunks of buttery soft white apple to add to the color and the texture. Even fresh from the pan it was glorious, with a beautiful lingering afterburn. I had the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our 14 jars it in a lunchtime sandwich, with brown rice bread and 7-year old cheddar, and it was so good that I had a second sandwich almost immediately after. And there are seven jars apiece to look forward to.

Serious yummm.

Chutneys always taste better after a while, but the provisional rating has to be high. 4-1/2 (out of 5) perhaps.

Recipe to follow, when I get the recipe book back from canning buddy.

From there we moved on to a pear-apple-ginger preserve from the same book, because it’s the pear-apple season, and it’s never the wrong season for ginger. We upped the ginger (of course) and added a teaspoon of five-spice because that’s my spice of the moment after the stunning successes of a few plum jams.

The results are good, but not as good as the chutney. The pears were not quite ripe, and the apples didn’t melt away to anything particular at all, leaving a well-set jam that’s actually a little lumpier than I would have liked, with a linger of crunch from a fruit that might be either apple or pear. It’s super-sweet as well, but works like a charm on plain, unsweetened yogurt.

Provisional rating. Probably a 3 (out of 5)

But this one has potential. I want to try it again, with a handful of cranberries for a sourish bite.

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