Posts Tagged recipes

Pretty, pink, pickled … rhubarb?

June 11, 2019 at 19:01 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , ,

I was gifted two glorious bags of home-grown rhubarb this year, which brought a hugely successful experiment with rhubarb orange jam, and a slightly bland version of rhubarb strawberry jam (I blame the imported strawberries). There was stewed rhubarb too, with and without hefty portions of ginger, but there were still leftovers. What do I do with those?

After careful consideration, and a fair bit of recipe searching and internet reading, I decided on a single jar of quick pickled rhubarb, because I don’t think I’ve ever seen pickled rhubarb anywhere and it sounded … interesting.

My base was a recipe from the Washington Post, but I tweaked things a bit because I didn’t think a single bayleaf was going to provide an adequate amount of oomph. It was scarily easy, and it’s also scarily good – a crisp, sweet-sour pickle that pairs beautifully with a strong, hard cheese. But there’s only one jar. 😦

Pickled rhubarb (adapted, quite freely from the Washington Post)

10 oz rhubarb, sliced into 1/4 inch pieces
1/2 cup water
1/2 cup white wine vinegar
scant 1/4 cup sugar
about half a dozen black or red peppercorns*
2 inches of root ginger, grated coarsely
1 tbsp kosher salt

Mix rhubarb, peppercorns and ginger in a small, heatproof bowl.
Heat water, vinegar, sugar and salt and simmer for a couple of minutes until the sugar and salt is dissolved.
Pour the hot liquid over rhubarb.
Allow to cool, pack in a large sterilized jar and store in the fridge.

I’m told this will keep in the fridge for a couple of months. It’s rather good. It may not last that long.

*I used red peppercorns bought on an organic pepper farm in Cambodia earlier this year. Maybe that’s the reason the pickle is quite so perfect.

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From tree to table, via pan and jar

January 18, 2017 at 09:25 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , ,

Another on the road adventure, during a short trip to Florida to escape the Canadian winter. Friend here has citrus trees in her lush green yard, but in 30 (or is it 40?) years of living here, she’s never made marmalade. Cue batch no. 4 of 2017 marmalade, which I consider to be one of the best yet. A real classic marmalade, with tangy peel suspended in glorious bittersweet orange jelly. This one might win prizes at the county fair.

We went small on this one. Just two large home grown oranges and one extremely large home grown Meyer lemon, a trio that weighed in at two pounds exactly. That made the 1:1:1 fruit/sugar/water ratio an easy one to follow. Two pounds of fruit, two pounds of sugar, two pounds (or two US pints) of the glorious citrus-infused cooking water.

Orange and lemon marmalade

An equal quantity of fruit and sugar, by weight

Wash and quarter the fruit and cover with water. Bring the water to the boil, and then simmer, slowly, until the peel is really soft. It took the best part of an hour.

Allow the quarters to cool enough to handle, and then scoop out the flesh of the fruits, saving the seeds and the membrane in a cheesecloth bag, which you tie up tight with string or ribbon. It’s the pits and the white stuff that gives the marmalade it’s set, do don’t skimp that one. Measure the water, and add as much as you need to make up the same weight as the fruit – one pound of fruit means one pound (16 fl oz) of water;  a kilo of fruit means a kilo of water and so on.

Chop the peel as finely as you like it and return the peel and the flesh to the pan, along with the sugar, the liquid and the flesh of the citrus.

Heat gently until the sugar is dissolved, and then boil madly until it sets, stirring as you go so you don’t end up with something that burns or caramelizes. It took almost 15 minutes of a rolling boil, but it could be more or less, depending on far too many variables to count. I test for set using a drizzle of marmalade on a cold plate from the freezer. If you can run your finger through the blob and the liquid stays apart, it’s just about done. It’s a test that usually works.

Bottle in sterilized jars.

And that was it. Six jars of golden awesomeness, which was especially good on fresh from the oven home made bread. It’s my fourth contender of the month for the Food in Jars marmalade mastery challenge. Still waiting for the Seville oranges to make it to Toronto for contender no. 5.

 

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What is to be done?

August 12, 2016 at 16:34 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

We’ve had a serious tomato glut this year, despite the best efforts of spouse and self to gorge on tomato sandwiches, tomato salad and various types of gazpacho. A sandwich of home made bread, home made pesto, home grown tomato and artisan cheese has been my perfect lunch. But it only uses a couple of slices of our heirloom giants.

tomatoes

So this morning I turned the oven on very low — still a bold undertaking given Toronto’s prolonged heatwave — halved some of our cherry tomatoes, added salt, pepper and olive oil, put the tomatoes in the oven and retreated to my air conditioned office until mid afternoon.

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And the result is pretty damn good, like essence of heirloom tomato. It’s so simple that it hardly seems worth posting the recipe, but here it is anyway.

Slow roasted tomatoes

Slice or halve the tomatoes (depending on size), put on a baking sheet and brush generously with good quality olive oil. Grind on a little salt and pepper, and add a few garlic cloves, unpeeled.

Roast for 4-8 hours, depending on your mood and how chewy you think the tomatoes ought to be. Mine are still pretty moist. Store in the fridge.

You can cover them with olive oil for a longer shelf life, but I don’t think they are going to last that long.

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Next up. Using some of the spoils in King Arthur Flour’s #bakealong challenge, which this month offers a yummy sounding bread that I might eat in a single sitting.

Something that combines gardening, preserving (of sorts) and baking bread? How can I go wrong.

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Blueberry cake

August 3, 2016 at 17:06 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , ,

Sometimes there is such a thing as serendipity. A few years back, when I first played around with blueberry jam, I had such a glut of the berries that I used some of them for a rather awesome blueberry cake. It was moist, it wasn’t sweet, it oozed blueberries and it tasted really tasted good.

But then I lost the recipe, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember who gave it to me, so I couldn’t ask for a repeat.

So imagine my surprise when I noticed that I’d saved that recipe in a blog post that I never got around to posting. Baking time.

cakeBlueberry yogurt cake

1/2 cup soft butter
1/2 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
1 cup sour cream (or plain yogurt)
3 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
1 tsp almond essence
2 cups sifted flour
1 tsp ground cardamom
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
2 cups fresh blueberries

Grease and flour a 9x13x2 baking pan (or do as I did and use a 10-inch circular pan).

Cream butter & sugar. Add eggs 1 at a time, beating well after each addition. Add vanilla and almond essence and beat well. Sift dry ingredients together; add gradually to the egg mixture, alternating w/sour cream (or yogurt), ending with flour mixture. Fold in 1 c. of the blueberries. Pour 1/2 the batter into the pan and spread it out carefully. Scatter the remaining blueberries on top, and then spoon on the remaining batter, trying not to disturb your berry layer too much. Bake at 350F for 45-50 min (mine took just over an hour, but then the pan was smaller). Cool in pan 10 min, then turn onto a rack to finish cooling.

The friend who gave me the recipe suggests leaving the cake in the pan until it’s completely cool, but I managed to get mine out of the pan without major mishap.And then I struggled to wait for it to cool before cutting myself a sample.

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Blue magic

August 1, 2016 at 15:09 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

One minute I had blueberries. Next minute, or so it seemed, I had jam. Perhaps the easiest jam on the planet.berries

It started with a visit to the pick-your-own farm on the way back from a bike trip this weekend, and we scooped up $10 worth of blueberries in very short order — a surprisingly large quantity.

I did look up a couple of recipes, because blueberry jam is not one of those that I make every year. But I ignored both of them in favour of a modified 6:4:2 ratio — six cups fruit, four (scant) cups sugar and the juice of two lemons. One of the recipes suggested simmering the berries in a half cup of water for 10-20 minutes, so I simmered for five minutes, and I added a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar at the end, because I thought the blueberries could use a little extra tang.

And it was a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it sort of set. First I had a blue liquid, with a few floating berries, and I thought I’d be pouring blueberry syrup on my ice cream all year. Then it boiled up, to double the starting volume, and then quite suddenly the volume went down, the liquid thickened up, and I started scraping seriously jelled jam off the sides of the preserving pan. How easy can things get?

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Blueberry balsamic jam
(makes 5 250mm jars)

6 cups blueberries
1/2 cup water
4 (scant) cups sugar
juice of 2 lemons
1 tbsp balsamic vinegar

Wash the berries, and put them in a heavy preserving pan with a half cup of water, and simmer for 5-10 minutes until the berries start to break down a little. Add the lemon juice, and then the sugar, a little at a time, and then bring to a rolling boil. Boil hard until it sets, which took less than 5 minutes. Add balsamic, and boil for another minute or so, just for good luck.

Bottle in sterilized jars. You should then waterbath for 10 minutes (according to USDA guidelines), but I skipped that stage. The lemon juice and the balsamic should make this jam plenty acidic enough to store, and it’s only a few jars. There’s room in the fridge for that.

Eat on toast, on bagels, on muffins, on yogurt, or spoon it out of the jar. It’s good.

 

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Just chillin’

July 20, 2016 at 19:11 · Filed under posts, Recipes, The recipe books ·Tagged , , , ,

I picked up an almost-new ice cream maker in a yard sale last year, and it sat in the kitchen cabinet all year, which is exactly what the spouse said would happen when I brought it home.

True, some friends and I made one batch of peach ice cream with straight-from-the-farmers market Ontario peaches, and I liked the alchemy of churning a thick liquid into an even thicker ice cream in a supercooled metal drum. But that peach ice cream wasn’t “must make this again” delicious, and I wasn’t a fan of the two-day process of making, cooling and churning. First you make a custard with eggs, milk and cream, with all the angst that that entails (will it curdle, will it set?) and a fruit puree, and then you chill everything thoroughly before the churn.

The final product had little ice crystals, was too hard to scoop from the freezer (it lacks the emulsifiers and other gunk they add to commercial ice cream) and I also admit that cutting corners by not peeling peaches was possibly a mistake. The bits of peel were sort of crunchy.

So that was it until this summer, when I got two ice cream books out of the library and tried again.

Let’s just say that churning so-called no-churn ice cream in an ice-cream maker makes something that’s seriously good. There’s no eggs, no custard and not even any sugar, although you do add a can of sweet, gooey condensed milk.

Amazingly easy vanilla ice cream
(Adapted from No-churn ice cream, by Leslie Bilderbeck)

1 300g can of sweetened condensed milk
3 cups cream (I used one of whipping cream, which has 35 percent fat, and two of table cream, which is a mere 18 percent)
2 tsp vanilla extract
juice of half a lemon
Pinch of salt (to lower the freezing temperature)
Splash of white rum (also to lower the freezing temperature)

I put the condensed milk in the fridge the night before, so I started with cold ingredients. Then you mix everything together and pour the (very runny) liquid into the ice cream maker. Let it churn for 20-30 minutes until it thickens up. Transfer to a freezer-safe container and freeze.

To my surprise, this ice cream is actually scoopable from the freezer, unlike last year’s peach experiment. It’s smooth, and it tastes particularly good with fresh fruit, or even with a runny jam slathered over the top. I will make again, perhaps as early as this weekend. I will not think about the calories.

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So very good

June 20, 2016 at 16:50 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , , , , ,

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Strawberry jam is always a little tricky, not the jam for a novice canner at all. Unless the fruit is seriously unripe, and hence only marginally tasty, strawberries are seriously short on pectin, which means it’s easy to make strawberry syrup, but distressingly difficult to make a strawberry jam that sets. My mother’s method was to boil stuff until the jam is almost brown, or giving up in despair and rushing out to get commercial pectin.

But I’m not a fan of commercial pectin — it adds a taste and a texture I don’t like — so I’m always looking for alternatives. For the last couple of years, I had a lot of success with the surprise addition of a kiwi fruit to a batch of jam (the little black seeds are marginally disconcerting, but you don’t taste the kiwi at all). But this year I discovered a few cubes of homemade crabapple pectin languishing in the bottom of the freezer.
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If I threw one of those into the mix toward the end of the boil, would my jam set? And what about the taste?

After three quick batches of strawberry jam, two of them with mint, I report astonishing success. This jam is deep rich red, with satisfying chunks of fruit. It mounds pleasantly on the spoon, rather than drizzling down the sides, and it tastes of summer. All I need to do is boil up more crabapple pectin later this summer, and I’m good to go.

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Strawberry jam

6 generous cups strawberries
4 slightly skimpy cups sugar
juice of 2 lemons
1-2 tbsp finely chopped mint (optional)
1 cube of crabapple pectin

Wash and hull the strawberries, and cut them into halves or quarters. Add sugar and lemon juice and allow to sit while you prepare the next batches of fruit. Heat gently until the sugar is dissolved, and then bring to a rolling boil for five minutes. Add the pectin and boil for another five minutes or so. Test for set, bottle in clean jars, waterbath for 10 minutes.

Try not to eat it all at once.

Rating: 4.999 (out of 5)

I admit I didn’t skim off all the foam, so there are little white flecks in some of the jars, which means it wouldn’t win any competitions at the Ex. But what’s a fleck or two between frends. This jam is knock your socks off awesome.

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More yellow magic

October 30, 2015 at 18:03 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , ,

My thought-provoking tomato jam barely made a dent in the carpet of ripe yellow tomatoes on the table in the sun room, so I moved promptly on to chutney, a yellow tomato-apple option that hit any number of my chutney must-have buttons. In addition to some 4 cups of chopped up tomatoes (and this was half the recipe) it used  apples and onions for flavour, chilli, ginger and mustard for heat, cider vinegar for bite and golden sultanas and white sugar for sweetness. The recipe demanded a single clove of garlic too, which seemed so small as to be totally irrelevant. I left it out. But I did throw in two cups of tomatillos, using up the last of the 2015 harvest. I liked tomatillos last year, when I only had a dozen of them. This year it’s been a struggle to use them up. chutney

And while I know chutneys need to wait a month or so for the flavours to meld together nicely, I couldn’t resist trying one of my eight jars. Two conclusions: it’s quite pleasant, even straight out of the preserving kettle. And it could have used more heat.

Sweet yellow tomato chutney (adapted from the Bernadin book of home preserving)

2 cups cider vinegar
5 cups chopped, peeled apples (I used a mix of Macs and Empire)
4 cups quartered yellow tomatoes (recipe said to peel them. I didn’t)
2 cups quartered tomatillos (or just use more tomatoes)
1-1/2 cups golden raisins (sultanas)
1-1/4 cups sugar
2 small chili peppers, seeded and chopped (use 3 or 4 next time)
2 tbsp mustard seeds, lightly crushed
1 tbsp chopped ginger
1 tsp cinammon
1 tsp salt

Put all the ingredients in a big pan, bring to the boil and then simmer until chutney thick (about 30 minutes). Bottle in sterilized jars. Waterbath 10 minutes.

Chutneys take time to boil down, but you can’t really find a more simple recipe.

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Tahini cookies

March 25, 2015 at 09:58 · Filed under Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , ,

I know sesame works for sweets (halva, sesame bars), but tahini, which is made from crushed up sesame seeds, always ended up in hummus, or even in a simple tahini-lemon-garlic-yogurt-water sauce for drizzling over roasted vegetables. But tahini in a cookie? This is something I have to try.

The recipe (adapted as always) came from Ottolenghi’s Jerusalem cookbook, which is one of the few cookbooks that I’m actually looking at right now. Ottolenghi uses heavy cream in his mix, and cinnamon on top, but I went for Greek yogurt (because it’s what I had at home) and cocoa nibs for the topping, because I love the contrast of bitter cocoa and sweet cookie. I felt tempted to substitute almond essence for vanilla extract, and I wish I had. I can’t taste the vanilla, but think the sweet bitterness of almond would be a good thing to add. Next time. There will be a next time.

cookies

Tahini cookies (adapted from Jerusalem)
100g sugar
150g butter
110g tahini
1/2 tsp vanilla essence
25ml Greek yogurt
270g flour
cocoa nibs for the topping

Mix butter and suger until a little bit creamy (recipe says don’t let it get aerated, so I tried not to). Add tahini, vanilla and yogurt, and then add flour and mix until it comes together to a dough. Knead gently. Pinch off little balls of dough (about 20g each) and roll to a circle, and then dip one end in the cocoa nibs (I put them on a saucer), and put onto a cookie sheet, spaced an inch or so apart. I lined my sheet a silicon mat, so it’s easy to remove the cookies when they are done. Flatten the balls gently with the base of a glass or mug.

Bake for about 15 minutes in a preheated 400C oven. They should be golden at the edges.

Cool on a wire rack, then store in an airtight container.

Enjoy

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More marmalade

January 25, 2015 at 11:13 · Filed under posts, Recipes ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

marm1I really wasn’t planning to blog about marmalade this year, if only because I’ve written about it so many times that there may be nothing new to say.

But then this year’s batch of marmalade is shaping up to be rather nice, with the perfect set, the perfect sweetness and even the perfect peel. We (mostly) cut the peel a little more finely than in previous years, and we didn’t skimp on the sugar, which has been a mistake before. But the Seville oranges were unusually large, which meant we effectively doubled the recipe, so it took longer to set, and filled the pan alarmingly full. There were a few nervous moments as large bubbles of boiling jam spattered onto the floor, the countertop and any exposed flesh they could find.

It was worth it. There were only two jars of marmalade left in the store cupboard, and that wasn’t going to last the year, and the brief Seville orange season had just started.

Here was the rough recipe:

Seville orange marmalade
(Adapted, vaguely, from Jams, Jellies and Chutneys)

9 Seville oranges
3 regular oranges
2 lemons
2 kilos of sugar (plus a little bit)

Scrub the fruit, cover with water and simmer for about an hour until they are very soft and the pith is orange rather than white when you cut the fruit in quarters. I used two preserving kettles for this one. If you take the fruit out too early, and the pith is still white when you quarter them, just throw the quarters back in the water for another 15 minutes or so.

Take the fruit from the water, and cut them up, before fishing out the seeds and pith and slicing the peel, as thinly as you like. Let the fruit cool down a bit between the quartering and the peel-slicing. Save the seeds and pith in a cheesecloth bag – that’s what gives you the pectin, and that’s why the marmalade sets.

Meanwhile measure our the water you have left from simmering the fruit. We had eight cups of water, which seemed about right for what was (in theory) only 1.5 times the original recipe.

Add the sugar, then the fruit and the bag of seeds and pith. Heat gently until the sugar dissolves, and then bring to a rolling boil until it sets, stirring frequently. Fish out the cheesecloth, squeezing it between two spoons to get out as much of the precious, pectin-rich elixir as you can. Be careful. It’s hot.

Bottle in sterilized jars. These oranges were, as I said before, unusually large, and we ended up with 17 jars.

Waterbath for 10 minutes (although I reckon this baby is probably acidic enough that bugs wouldn’t grow anyway).

Eat, on toast for breakfast, with yogurt for lunch, or (my favorite) as a peanut butter and marmalade sandwich on a bike ride or a ski trip. You can even bake with it, for a seriously yummy chocolate marmalade brownie style cake.

Enjoy.

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I now have this irresistable urge to experiment with quince orange marmalade, after spotting quinces in the market on Saturday. I only need a couple of quinces and 4-6 oranges, right? Just a small batch?

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