Category Archives: food

Really, it’s just a jelly donut

We came home laden with a box of paczki today.

I’d completely forgotten about these sweet pre-Lenten treats until I moved back to the area.  Twenty-odd years of living a paczki-free existence:  don’t you pity me?  Well, you shouldn’t; they’re fairly nasty, and even as a kid I don’t remember eating them but once or twice.  But buying them and bringing them home, well, this is a little something I can give to my daughter as a bit of local food history.  And…we’re not even Polish.

I do swear if I lived to be 200 and could have 5 or 6 job paths along the way, “food ethnologist” would be one of the careers I would love to have.  Wouldn’t that be fascinating?  Limning the fact from the fiction, the tradition from the myth from the actual reason a food was eaten?  I have always been interested in that great Venn diagram of intersection between land, people, and religion/myth/culture:  there can be a fun mash-up when it comes to food.

And participating in eating that food can be fun:  kind of like world travel without the burdensome passports and vaccines and pesky TSA involved.  And:  there’s something SO unifying to me when you know a whole bunch of other someones are doing the same thing as you (i.e., bringing home a box of paczki), at the same time.

Even if the food is gross.  (The chickens, though, disagreed.)

My goal with this massive winter squash harvest is to come up with multiple, tasty ways of making that squash disappear.  Here’s the latest:  apple/pumpkin upside-down cake.

Use what you have:  Galeux d’Eysines squash puree with our Jonagold apples

With time, I have become more comfortable with seat-of-my-pants cooking, including baking.  I hate to say it but Ruhlman is right:  so much of cooking and especially baking IS proportions:  this much plus that much equals expected output.  And when eating down the stores of something tasty and plentiful, like Thanksgiving’s squash, my other expected output is “well, how bad can it be:  apples, pumpkins, flour, eggs, sugar?”

In a warm oven, put 2 T butter to melt in a 9×13 or similar sized cake pan while you prepare the upside-down topping.  Peel and cube two large apples, retrieve the warming pan and toss the apples in the butter with 2 T sugar and 1/2 t cinnamon; wrap up sides to grease them, then distribute the apples evenly on the bottom and set aside.

Cream 1/4 cup of butter with 1/2 to 3/4 cup sugar (depending on how sweet your squash puree is); crack 2 large or 3 small eggs into the mix and continue to blend until smooth.  Stir in about 2 cups of pureed pumpkin or other winter squash and a cup of yogurt or buttermilk. Set aside.

Sift together 2 cups flour with 1-1/2 teaspoons each of baking powder and baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoon salt, along with another 1/2 teaspoon each ground cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and allspice.  Add this dry mix to the wet and stir together.  Add milk to thin if it seems very stiff.

Bake in a 350* oven until a toothpick stuck in its center comes out clean, about 30-40 minutes.  Let cool slightly, run a knife around the sides of the cake, place a cookie sheet or large platter atop the pan and invert them, tapping the bottom of the pan to free it.  Adjust the apple chunks along the top and try not to eat in one sitting.

Not dead yet

It usually takes giving a tour to someone unfamiliar with the gardens for me to view the place with new eyes.  Like a beloved, sometimes you just can’t get enough distance to really see what’s going on.  I had a visitor this weekend and, despite the constant attention I have recently given the outdoor gardens when putting them “to bed,” my friend said quite clearly:

“There’s still a lot of stuff growing out here, isn’t there?”

Indeed!  So I have made many furtive trips to the gardens, harvesting what I can.  The resultant food I call my “As God is my Witness”*meals:  there’s much still to harvest in the leavings, in the gleanings, in the tail-ends of what’s still in the ground.  And this is a good thing.  Much can be learned from making a meal out of these not-pretty cast-offs.  And it makes me feel…rich.  Wealthy beyond reason, and certainly beyond sense.

I’ll never be hungry again.

*Scarlett O’Hara, upon finding, then throwing up, the only vegetable in her Yankee-raided garden:  “As God is my witness, as God is my witness they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”

Gardening with children can be a wonderful thing.  Their enthusiasm is catching, as is their curiosity:  you want to see your garden differently?  Get on your knees and turn over leaves and rocks with a two year old.  Our girl is growing up in these gardens and it is a fun thing to watch.  And, even better, her help becomes more and more useful with time.

Sewing project

She’s admired the strings of dried peppers hung in the pantry for a couple of years now.  I pull what I need, grinding it or merely flaking it into a dish.  When the new peppers were tiny flowering plants this spring, she asked if she could string them when the time came.  Well, the time was this Sunday, when the peppers were quite ripe.  And quite ably, she strung three two-foot long strings for the pantry.

I sure hope she’s still willing to help at 14.

Wow.  Perhaps it’s just that my Catholic upbringing is still really residually strong (goodness knows the last time I went to mass:  perhaps in service to some dear person’s wedding or funeral, but it has been a while) but Saturday morning whilst canning up some peaches I started reciting the Act as if whom I was offending with the commission/omission of my sins was the winter pantry!

(For those blissfully unaware, the leadoff of a penitent’s confession to one’s priest begins with reciting the first line of the Act of Contrition, following with how long it’s been since the penitent last took the rite of Penance. “It’s been two weeks,” you’d say, or “It’s been twenty years.”)

MY “act” was recited in reference to the fact that it had been almost a month since I last put away some fruit!

Peach jam and peach/cranberry conserve

Ah, the wonder that is small-batch jams, conserves, preserves:  you can really mix it up.  I am awash in peaches now, finally ripening in my car (more on that in a minute), and I am still going through the freezer to use up the old stuff.  *Why* ripen peaches in the car, El?  No fruit flies that way, and it’s nice and cool in the garage.  Granted, I just can’t go anywhere, but that’s fine.

Mix it up and try some small-batch jams. Generally using only 3-4 cups of fruit, 2-3 cups sugar (or not), they stew in a large saucepan, reducing all that juicewater nicely, until you have some delicious thick jam.  I find it a good way to use up the tail ends of a fruit harvest, or to find a place for some frozen fruit.

Sometimes, not often, food can be better than sex.

Tiny but good:  Year 3 of a home-grown seedling

“Mama, looook!  Here’s one that’s ready!”

Other than the beans, the squash, the potatoes, the cucumbers, the tomatoes/peppers/eggplants that populate the harvest baskets at this time of year, it’s quite fun to have something that is special.

Would that I lived in an area where I could get rootstock for artichokes!  Now THERE would be some tasty plants.  As it is, the globe artichokes grown from seed are tasty, but not the same.  Just don’t tell my daughter because she thinks they’re wonderful as they are.

Banner year for the tomatillos

It’s an odd time in the garden and in our food storage systems.  We’re preparing for the onslaught that is the summer produce season, and we’re cleaning out our stored goods to make room for the new things.  And some things are ripening when others are not:  my peppers and tomatillos, for example, are going great guns whilst the tomatoes are only hinting at turning red.  And some stored goods are just plain GONE, like the all-important foostuff that is SALSA.

I took advantage of our daughter’s overnight trip to her grandparents’ to make a very hot and tasty soup that made use of both the new produce and the frozen/canned stuff that needed to be used up.  At the same time, I made an emergency quart or two of some mostly tomatillo salsa, with jalapenos and yellow Hungarian peppers, corn and canned green (color, not ripeness) tomatoes, garlic, cilantro, vinegar and fresh onions.   She won’t object to something spicy if she doesn’t get to eat it!  And both the soup and the salsa were nice and fiery.

This soup takes a while, both in prep and in time cooking it; if you are bound to spend your days in the kitchen anyway, this is a great soup to make while you’re doing other things.  You can skip the chicken if you want a vegetarian soup, but I would add some olive oil and some cooked white beans for fat and protein.

El’s Hellfire Tortilla Soup*

serves 4-6

Soup base:

• 3-4 small jalapenos or other hot pepper
• 7-8 cloves of garlic, unpeeled
• 10 or so peppercorns
• a 2″ piece of cinnamon stick
• one medium yellow onion, cut into thin rings
• one medium sweet red pepper, seeded and cut into thin rings

You are going to make a paste of these items, caramelized and roasted, above.  In one small cast-iron skillet, place the jalapenos, garlic, peppercorns and cinnamon stick on medium heat and roast until the peppers and garlic cloves are slightly blackened, turning frequently.  You can smash the peppers down with a spatula to ensure all sides get toasty, but don’t burst the pepper itself: it’s steaming nicely on the inside.  Set aside to cool.  Into the bowl of a mortar, squeeze the garlic out of its skin, add the peppercorns and crumble the cinnamon stick; pound to a grind and then add the seeded, lightly chopped peppers and pound to a paste.   In a large cast-iron pan or in a hot oven on a cookie sheet, caramelize the onions and the pepper (use no oil) until the onions are golden and the pepper is cooked through.  Add this and the contents of the mortar to the bowl of a food processor, whiz to a pulp.

Soup:

• Chicken:  I used a very large (humongo) breast:  I blanched the breast in a bit of salted water until slightly cooked (about 20 minutes), then I cut the cooled breast into small-ish pieces, adding it back to the broth (about 2 cups of liquid)
• 1 quart tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 teaspoon each:  ground cumin, thyme, Mexican oregano
• Salt and pepper to taste
• Fresh corn:  about two ears’ worth, chopped off the cobs
• 1 green or other mild-ish pepper, diced
• 2-3 tomatillos, diced
• 3 or so corn tortillas:  brown them individually in a cast-iron pan then slice into finger-sized pieces
• minced parsley or cilantro
• juice of one lime

Add the soup base, chicken, chicken stock, spices, salt and pepper into a large stockpot and bring to a boil; reduce to a very low heat and simmer gently for a couple of hours.  About an hour before serving, add the corn, pepper, and tomatillos and continue cooking.  Check for seasonings and adjust accordingly.   Immediately before serving, fish the bay leaves out of the soup and add the tortillas, parsley/cilantro and lime juice.

Garnishes:

• Green onions
• Cilantro
• Sour cream
• Queso blanco
• Avocado
• Lime
• More roasted, chopped tortillas

*I got the beginnings of this recipe from somewhere but it’s gone in the sands of time.  I changed it enough, anyway, to probably claim it as my own, so that’s what I am doing!

Yay!  Another opportunity to show off my latent O.C.D.!

Drying fruit is a fairly straightforward affair.  Preserving vegetables, both as frozen and as dried, requires a few more steps for you but fruit, thankfully, is easy-peasy.  Most of us have an oven, therefore, most of us can dry some fruit, especially if you’d like to try fruit leather.  In point of fact, fruit leather is the only thing I had heretofore tried to preserve, as I didn’t have a dehydrator of my own, either plug-in or solar.  The picture above is one of the school’s 3 dehydrators, liberated by yours truly for the upcoming blueberry onslaught.  Today, though, it’s strawberries.

Evapotranspiration is a mighty big word but it includes a concept (transpiration) you are probably already familiar with, even if you don’t think you are, and evaporation, which you already know.  All produce, all plants, transpire (wick water) as part of “what they do,” and the extreme form of this otherwise natural occurrence is dried produce, dried leaves.  There’s a certain formula of heat plus wind plus relative humidity and soil moisture that farmers look to to see how their crops are growing. On a global scale, evapotranspiration is how water is exchanged in the world (rain to trees/plants and back again), but in your kitchen or in your back yard, you can use it to help preserve your fruit harvest.

I am all in favor as you know of things you DON’T plug in to an outlet, and there are plenty of sites for solar food dehydrators out there.  Here’s one dear to my heart as it’s similar to the chicken tractor, plus it geeks out on the whole process of how it best happens (I do loves me some engineering).  Try this at home!!  Me, I am time-crunched this summer so the plug-in is the way I will go, for now.  These strawberries dried in six hours, and will keep for six months.

Nothing like a little O.C.D. with your project to get you wound up!

SO:  it’s fruit season in this hemisphere:  gotta make hay while that sun shines!  The non-fresh-fruit season is entirely too long in my humble opinion.  Freezing is the best way to preserve any fruit’s nutrients if you can’t eat it fresh. But like anything, freezing has an expiration date:  it is best to eat all frozen fruit within six months of freezing it.

We *love* fruit smoothies around here.  In point of fact, smoothies are the primary way we eat our fruit in the off-season.  I make our own kefir and yogurt, and it’s very easy to just run downstairs with the blender and grab a handful of frozen berries to whiz up for a treat.

Strawberries, cranberries and blueberries freeze wonderfully “dry,” that is, by themselves.  Cherries do too but one should pit them beforehand as trying to do it afterward leads to a wad of cherry mush in your hand.  The best way to handle these berries  is to get fruit at its absolute height of freshness, wash, stem and sort them and place them on cookie sheets.   As you can see one can go a little nutty with the sorting part.  Stick them in the freezer until hard then bag them up, squeezing as much air out of the bags as possible.  You’re now able to open the bags at will this winter and grab what you need, leaving the rest behind.

I also slice fruits like peaches and nectarines and strawberries and coat them with a bit of honey before bagging them up.  You could also cover sliced fruit with a bit of sugar or superfine sugar.  Coating them with a sweetener tends to help them retain their color and their flavor.  Making a syrup of one part honey to four parts hot water also works well:  the fruit is stored “wet” this way and keeps most of its flavor and nutrients intact.  And indeed one can freeze mashed or pulped fruit “wet” too, without sugar.

You know, most thawed fruit is but a pale simulacrum of its fresh self, so for the most part all my frozen fruit ends up in smoothies or cooked items.  I also treat freezing as a form of suspended animation if I have a huge harvest (like, the 30 pounds of cherries from last Saturday) that I can’t get to immediately:  pulling out the bag to make jam or baked goods is a true time-saver.  And I am always looking for more time….

Today’s berry, bubbling in the saucepan:  gooseberries

Gooseberries.  Finally, we have enough to “do” something with them, after three years of off/on harvests, so I grabbed a bowl yesterday and headed outside.  “Do you want to pick the gooseberries with me?” I asked my daughter.  “Nah, too prickly.  Can I pick the strawberries instead?”  Smart child.

I get all misty when I think about gooseberries.  A green variety adorned our wedding cake, they and some golden raspberries and some very red currants.  The cake probably had no flour in it but was made instead with almond flour, honey, and lots of egg whites.  It was a perfect summer cake, perfect for me that is, an avowed cake-hater, especially of the wedding variety.

But today I made four pints of jam.  Because I am usually terribly time-crunched and have no patience to tip and tail these things, what I do with little fruits like these is cook them down and run them through the fine sieve on my food mill.  The skins and those nasty pointy stems are left behind, and I measure out the resulting juice and pulp and figure out how much sugar and pectin is required to make a small batch of jam.  I cook down other seedy fruits the same way:  damson plums, cherries and those aronia berries have seeds too small to reach but (in some instances) too vulnerable to the food mill’s crushing turns so they instead go into a chinois that has a pestle to wring the juice from the pulp.  It sounds like I might have a crowded kitchen and it is true, I do, but the chinois does come in handy.

I just adore fruit, and fruit jam is one way to preserve all this bounty.  I will mention a few other ways in some following posts.

Another day, another berry to blog about

I picked up some aronia berries at a friend’s house on Friday.  This species of native berry is very high in antioxidants, especially the black and purple varieties; it has been labeled a “superfood” for that reason.  The variety we picked, Aronia albutifolia, isn’t so very high in this magical property.  No matter.  The red, sweet, jujube-shaped fruits were plentiful, and I got a gallon with which to experiment.

Traditionally one of the fruit sources found in pemmican, these bushes or shrubby trees normally yield clusters of pea-sized fruit in the fall.  Well, MY calendar told me it was late June, so I kind of scratched my head about this a bit:  can these really be red aronia berries (also called chokeberries)?  It would appear that they are.  Some time ago, these eastern American trees got exported to Poland and Russia and it was there that they became cultivated enough to be used widely as a juice berry, and its progeny got tweaked enough to ripen in June.  Normal aronia berries, the shrub-borne black variety (A. melanocarpa) ripen much later and are entirely too tart to be eaten out of hand.

Personally, I am highly suspicious of anything that is labeled a superfood, a culinary “magic bullet” to cure all that ails a person.  I also think that many people who look to a food as medicine aren’t doing the hard work necessary to maintain basic good health.  Diet and exercise certainly go a long way to keep the doctor away. Eating a decent diet and getting up off the couch is just plain too hard for most Westerners: thus, let’s look for some tonic, hopefully found on my grocer’s shelf, that will offset all my couch-sitting, all those extra pounds around my middle.

I’m also suspicious of the purported health claims tagged on things like aronia berries.  If it were true that eating these things magically cured you from ever getting cancer, do you really think this would be the first time you have heard about them?

With my skeptical eye, then, I turned these into jelly early this morning (with some of our grape juice and fresh cherries to help flesh out the taste).  A little slice of medicine on my morning toast?  Doubtful, but tasty.