Fish Week

While the youngerchild, who despises fish, is away at camp, the rest of us are having a fish-only week.

Sunday we were in Rhode Island and had clam cakes while enjoying the Crescent Park Carousel. I grew up about 3 miles away from there and used to ride that carousel with my friends all the time. We got skilled enough to catch 4 rings with each pass, by leaning really far out and catching one ring with each finger. As you might imagine, that increased our odds of catching the brass ring. But enough reminiscing! Rhode Island clam cakes are a not-so-guilty pleasure of mine. I love 'em. One summer as teenagers, empowered with cars, my friends and I hit every little dinky clam shack on the East Bay side of the state, looking for the best ones. There was a tiny little broken down looking place on Route 6 near a tidal stream, in my opinion those were the best. I don't even remember if the place had a name. Anyhow. Sunday. Clam cakes.

Monday was some of the walleye we'd caught and frozen. I had two bags left, with three filets each. Now we're down to one. Baked with some butter and Ritz cracker crumbs and some herbs. Topped with a shallot cream sauce and served with roasted garlic scapes and a salad with just lettuce, Hakurei turnips, and pickled fiddleheads.

Last night, after I worked for 14 hours, we had sushi from our favorite Japanese restaurant in town. Too tired to cook.

Tonight, I just steamed 3 pounds of mussels and they were amazing!  Briefly: dice and sauté one shallot and one clove of garlic. Add and sauté one link of chorizo, sliced. Add 1 pint Persian spiced tomato sauce (coriander, cumin and lime) and about a cup of water and bring to a boil. Add the mussels, cover and steam for 5 minutes. Voilá. Served with french bread to soak up the liquid. And a nice white wine.

Tomorrow night we will grill some salmon which is currently marinating. Then the youngerchild comes back and there will be, sadly, less fish on the menu.

Accomplishments

After making all that apricot jam, I left the canner out for a few days, hoping it would inspire me to work on those fiddleheads I'd bought. It did; today I pickled them and got three 8-ounce jars of garlic fiddlehead pickles. I followed this recipe but changed one thing, mainly that I used champagne vinegar rather than white wine vinegar. The champagne vinegar is from the batch I made a while back. Also, I'm not sure why it says not to submerge the jars when canning; I did submerge and can them the usual way and they sealed up perfectly.

A little blurry but you get the idea...

The other things I managed to get done today were to get the "yurt" ready for summer and wrap up the soaps I made last month with my friend. Several years ago I bought one of those backyard tent things that you can put a table and chairs in and then enjoy your dinner without all the mosquitos. Ours happens to be hexagonal so looks more like a yurt than anything, although I think it's officially a gazebo. Every year we have to hang up the curtains; I made the mistake one year of hanging them up too soon and the stormy spring weather tore off all the velcro straps so I wait now until the weather finally calms down and the pollen surges have passed.

My honey-beeswax-lavender-rosemary soaps finally finished curing and I wrapped them in parchment paper with little labels so we can either use them here or give as gifts. Two were already gifted so I only have six left. However, each bar lasts a fairly long time; and I still have other bars of soap from my friend to use here if I decide to give them all away.

Tasting Demo

My husband's coworkers, after hearing him rave about my canned goods, asked for a tasting. Today I brought 8 different things to sample, which we set up at a table during lunchtime. This way, people could just wander over. I brought:

Preserved garlic which was, by far, everyone's favorite.
Sweet Fiddlehead pickles. I'd brought 2 jars, we finished 1 and didn't open the second. Popular.
Bread and butter pickles, which also got some rave reviews.
Zydeco beans, nice and spicy.
Salsa verde, not as popular. I suspect that if I'd had the right chips to go with it the jar would be finished.
Crabapple jelly; people who like apple jellies liked this a lot.
Elderberry jam which was my husband's favorite, I think.
Strawberry Lemon Marmalade; this one surprised me at how much the lemon flavor stood out when compared to when I first made it. It was very popular.

It's nice to get some feedback from people who don't often get to eat the foods I prepare.

Walleye with Spring Flavors

So, I've been following this blog for a while:  Forager|Chef.  He's got a nice combination of really beautiful photos, tasty recipes, and foraging tips and I enjoy reading his posts.  Many of the recipes inspire me.  A while back he posted about spruce tips - both as an ingredient in savory dishes and as an ice cream.  The blue spruce in front of my house is covered with new growth so I harvested about a cup of the tips and used half to make a spruce tip puree.  I cut the recipe in half and, even with that, I froze half of the puree since I knew I wouldn't use it up all that quickly.  He said in his blog that spruce goes particularly well with spring flavors.  I came up with a combination that worked very, very well.

We still have several packages of that walleye we caught last summer on Lake Erie, so I thawed one of those.  I also had a bunch of fiddleheads, courtesy of Whole Foods, and some farro.  I went out into the yard and pulled up some field garlic.  Then I set to work:

The fish was baked with just some pepper and an herb mix, 15 minutes at 425 degrees.  While that was cooking, I was simmering the farro with chicken stock.  And warming up a cup of heavy cream with 3 T. spruce puree.  And sautéing field garlic bulbs in butter with the fiddleheads, which had been blanched first.  I also reserved the green parts of the field garlic for a garnish, whole and chopped.

Voila:

What I discovered is that the fiddleheads were cooked so amazingly well, and they were the anchor of the dish - they held onto the spruce-cream sauce and tied the whole combination of tastes together.  The farro, which I hadn't really intended to mix with the sauce, was nothing without the sauce.  The spruce flavor was subtle but lovely.  I would consider thinly slicing the field garlic bulbs as they were a little bitter when left whole.

Next up, I plan to make that ice cream!

Spring Canning

I've been thinking about canning more than I've actually been able to can.  Spring is always a little hectic around here.  I have half of the violet infusion I need to make a batch of violet jelly; I just didn't have a lot of flowers this year and I think perhaps I won't get many more, so I might have to give that up for a year.  Last week I bought a pound of fiddleheads and was hoping to get them pickled but am only getting to them today - a whole week later!  To be fair, if we hadn't gone camping last weekend, I'd have done them sooner....

When I asked my husband if he wanted the sweet or sour fiddlehead pickles, he voted for sweet, so this year it will be just sweet ones.  I packed the fiddleheads into 5 half-pint jars and poured the cider vinegar syrup over them.  They're in the canner now for 10 minutes.

I haven't had a whole lot of foraging luck due to the rain, but I did discover wild carrots in the back yard and tasted a Solomon's Seal rhizome (yum!).  Yesterday at the stables I found curly dock, a huge amount of chickweed, and some kind of cress/mustard green thing.  Tasted a bit like arugula.  Looked a bit like it, too.  Anyway, I brought all that home and I'll be using the curly dock tonight in a risotto, but last night we had a salad with the chickweed, cress, a little of the curly dock (the small leaves), and garlic mustard flowers.  I liked it, but my husband said it tasted like freshly cut grass smells and, being a bitter taster, was abruptly put off by the cress.  As was the 10 year old.  I guess being a bitter taster makes foraging just that much harder.

Currently I'm supposed to be at a Tai Chi class in the park, but it's raining so I bailed.  Not that I mind the rain.  It's been such a dry winter and spring so far!

Sweet and Sour

Hooray for Spring!

Fiddleheads were in the store yesterday. After last year's fiasco, I decided I was better off just pickling them again. I found a series of recipes on the University of Maine website and today made the Sweet Pickled Fiddleheads and the Quick Sour Fiddlehead Pickles. Here are the recipes, sized down to what I had:

Sweet Pickled Fiddleheads
1 pint cider vinegar
2.5 cups sugar
1 teaspoon kosher salt

which was way more syrup than I needed for the 1 pint of fiddleheads I had packed into 2 half-pint jars. Likely it'd be enough for 4-6 half-pint jars.

Quick Sour Fiddlehead Pickles
1 pint cider vinegar
1/2 cup water
1/8 cup kosher salt
1/8 cup sugar
1/8 cup mustard seeds

this was a more reasonable amount for the 3 half-pint jars of fiddleheads, but could easily have filled 4.

Both pickles were processed for 10 minutes in the boiling water canner and we'll see how they turn out!

Soup...and a Hike

It has finally gotten warm enough for us to get outside with the kids for a hike. We started out with a 2 mile hike in a very large conservation area near us (I recognize that "very large" for eastern Massachusetts is probably a postage stamp to you big-state people!) and enjoyed the sunny, warm day.

This afternoon I made chicken soup again as I'd roasted a chicken a few days ago. This was just chicken, celery, carrots, onion, bay, thyme, salt and pepper. I put up 8 pints of soup. This is the first time I haven't put the chicken soup in quart jars. I wanted to be able to take them to work.

I also dumped out the rest of the fiddleheads I'd canned last spring. What seemed like a good idea at the time didn't really pan out the way I wanted. I had hoped that by canning them in the pressure canner I could just drain them and saute them quickly in butter when I wanted them. The first jar turned into mush in about 10 seconds. There was no second attempt. It's not often that I throw out something I've canned, but this one just didn't work out. Maybe that's why pickling them is better. Or freezing...

Fiddleheads Again

Springtime is so wonderful for many reasons - we're all tired of gray skies, itching to be outside, and missing fresh vegetables. Fiddleheads, to me, are the embodiment of Spring - something that is only edible when it's fresh and new. Last year I pickled a bunch trying to recreate a taste we'd experienced a few years prior in New Brunswick. It wasn't quite right, but it was close enough.

This year I decided, since I still had some of the pickles, to raw pack and pressure can a bunch of fiddleheads. The idea is that when I want to cook with them, they'd already be mostly cooked so I could just fry them with a little butter and spices (maple pepper works great, by the way) and serve them in a matter of minutes.

It's been a busy week so, even though I bought them 2 days ago, I finally got to them today. After planting about 30 plants in the garden, including starting up the rooftop garden for the year. Sadly, my soaker hose has a gaping hole in it, so I have to fix that before I can set up the "irrigation system," for now I'll just use the sprayer and try to remember to water them often.

So I washed and trimmed a couple of pounds of fiddleheads, and cold packed them into 5 pint jars. I poured boiling water over them* then sealed them up. They're in the pressure canner now at 10 pounds of pressure. I'm guessing here, since the book doesn't have a time for this particular vegetable, that they are more like leafy greens (70 minutes) than green beans (20 minutes). So we'll do 70 minutes and see what happens.

*we've gotten really used to boiling our water lately. Thankfully that's over with.

Helping Hand

Another reason why this hobby is great is that I can prepare food for people and it won't go bad sitting on the shelf. In other words, when someone is under the weather and people are showing up with food, mine won't take up precious fridge and freezer space. Such is the situation now, so I made a double batch of khoresh and put up 2 quarts which were delivered yesterday. I'm glad to be able to help.

We had company last night for dinner (which is why I made a double batch) and, as a side dish, I put out a pickle tray: toorshi, dilled carrots (spicy!), bread & butter pickles (the ones with the rice vinegar), and pickled fiddleheads. I also set out a bowl of the 3-bean salad with the beets. When I'd made that particular recipe with golden beets, the color leeched out of the beets. I thought the red beets wouldn't do that, but they did. Strange to see white beets and know that they used to be red! But it was a perfect accompaniment to the khoresh and rice. Kind of like having a chutney. Which I didn't remember I had, or I would have served that, too!

Fiddlehead Season

I have enjoyed fiddleheads for many years. I am always so excited when I see them at Whole Foods - and they are in season! Yay! (Yes, I am aware of my weaknesses - see the entry about Meyer Lemons...) I wish I knew where I could harvest them around here - I think that would be fun.

Several years ago we traveled to New Brunswick in the spring and, at a local farmers' market, purchased a jar of pickled fiddleheads. They were quite good and I savored that jar for about a month. Seeing a bin in Whole Foods just filled to brimming with fiddleheads, I had to make some for myself.

I bought 2 pounds of them and some of them have been cooked for dinner, first steamed then sauteed with butter and maple pepper. The rest got pickled. I packed them into jars, 2 pints and 2 half-pints, and then poured the hot vinegar/sugar/spice solution over them. These were then processed for 10 minutes. The one thing which I dislike about cold-packing is that the fiddleheads cooked up smaller and and the jars are mostly vinegar with the fiddleheads floating on top. I'm sure they will taste fine, though.