Spring Dinner

Yesterday we went for a walk at one of my favorite conservation lands, which has meadows and forest and lots of beehives. My top bar hives, which I gave away last year, ended up there, and there are at least four other collections of hives. There is also a Victory Garden and some marshes. As you might imagine, there are lots of birds and lots of foraging. 

I'd hoped to snag some garlic mustard to make a risotto to go with dinner, but I'm a little late; the garlic mustard has already flowered and would likely be [more] bitter. But I did see nettles just starting to come up, right when they are at their best. 

Despite my lack of gloves, I picked the tips off about a cup's worth of nettles, tossed in a few violet flowers, and brought them home. My fingers definitely got stung, and they tingled quite a bit for the rest of the day. Worth it -

Once I got home, I made a nettle and field garlic risotto, using the field garlic from the yard (you know, the stuff that grows everywhere that looks like chives). This was served with chicken piccata and a salad garnished with those violets I picked. A fresh tasting dinner to celebrate Spring!

This...

...is AMAZING.

https://cafedelites.com/slow-cooker-honey-garlic-chicken/

That is all.

Fermented Hot Sauce

Using this recipe, for the last week I've been fermenting various red and yellow peppers along with carrots, garlic and shallots. Today I ran it all through not just one but two blenders (the first one is the kind in which you can unscrew the bottom with the blades and this happened accidentally, so a lot of my sauce got spilled onto the counter). Ultimately I got one cute bottle full and one squeeze bottle full. It's rather mild, likely because I didn't add too many seeds and because the peppers themselves were milder. Either way, now we have some chili sauce and a way to use up all those hot peppers!

Parsley Garlic Bread

Using Legion, I made a batch of parsley garlic bread. As I mentioned in the previous post, the recipe calls for bread and rye flours, neither of which I had. Instead, I had all purpose flour, corn flour and white whole wheat flour, so I used a combination of those. The parsley is mixed in at the end of the kneading process and the garlic gets folded in before proofing. I made two loaves - one round and one more like a ciabatta. The proofing took far less time than anticipated so even though the fermentation step took all night, the proofing took about 90 minutes. I ended up baking them in the morning yesterday before I went to work.

For dinner last night I made cheese fondue and we used one of the loaves as the dipping bread. The garlic added a really great flavor to the meal. The rest of the cut up cubes will be frozen and saved to make stuffing when Thanksgiving rolls around. I have the round loaf yet to use but that will need to be used soon before it goes stale. Maybe for dinner tonight or tomorrow?

Project Completion

Today I finished a batch of sweet relish I started yesterday. First you have to salt the vegetables and let them sit overnight or, in this case, about a full day before you rinse them and boil them with the syrup. This is a variation of "Grandma's Golden Relish" from The Ball Complete Book of Canning. The changes were that I used half cucumbers (3 cups) and half zucchini (3 cups) and that all the peppers were green. This made 7.5 cups of relish.

I added the white wine to the sauerkraut and also added a little brine since there wasn't enough liquid to cover the cabbage. Now it can ferment for a few weeks in its crock and I shouldn't have to worry about it.

Lastly, I used up three eggplants making "Pickled Eggplant with Mint" from Preserving by the Pint. I didn't have red wine vinegar so I used up my tarragon and champagne vinegars and then made up the difference with cider vinegar. I hope that works - it might be a little harsh. For the mint, I harvested a bunch of stems from my pot of mint in the backyard. Supposedly this is good with some feta cheese and olive oil so I'll have to try that this winter.

After all this work, I can now see the back of the fridge again.

Happy Birthday, Mom

So my Mom had a birthday and I decided I would make her a cake. It took three days, if you consider I made the cake and then froze it for a day until I could do the rest. One of my favorite cakes from school was a white genoise cake with strawberries and kirsch flavored mousseline. I decided to make it with a chocolate genoise instead. The genoise was easy. (I used half of the recipe in the text, and that made enough for one cake. Perfect.) The rest used every pot I had: kirsch flavored syrup to soak the cake, pastry cream and buttercream for the mousseline. Here's the sink when I was done with all that:

I then chilled the cake and yesterday morning removed the ring (using the torch) and then decorated the top with more berries and a little chocolate. Then glazed the berries using apricot glaze mixed with a little strawberry jam.

Mom was pleased. 

I also brought the last baguette to their house and made garlic bread with it for dinner. It was phenomenal.

Day 14: Petits Fours Demi-Sec

It's taken me a few days to have time to post about class on Tuesday. We focused on the second type of petit four: demi-sec or semi dry. These are still cookies but more cake-like. Madeleines, financiers, macarons, macaroons (they are different), and other meringue based cookies.

One of our class was absent so there were only six of us; we divided into two groups. In addition to baking the four recipes we'd made the day before that needed to rest for a day in the fridge, each team made two flavors each of macarons. Our team made lemon and coffee; the other made raspberry and pistachio. Each was filled with the appropriate flavored ganache. I piped all the coffee ones and made the ganache for it; another one of our team did the assembly. I did help pipe the lemon ones, too! The lemon ones were good but the coffee ones were sublime. Mmm.

Our class also made madeleines, pistachio financiers, raspberry financiers, various almond meringue cookies, and two different kinds of macaroons. After we finished all the assembly, we set aside more cookies for that event.  All told, in two days we set aside about 30 dozen cookies for the event. The rest were divided up amongst the crew and any extras shared with the savory students; in return they gave us steak!

That evening we had our second lecture about fruits, herbs and spices. This week was spices and we were tasked with making either cookies or ice cream with unusual spices. I made an ice cream with Aleppo peppers and toasted fenugreek. It had a nice kick in the back of the throat and the fenugreek provided a maple-y flavor. I really liked it... although some of my classmates thought it was weird, I think! Because I had my ice cream base set up quickly, I offered to and ended up making the evening's snack: baba ganoush. Eggplant was roasted and then processed with tahini, lemon juice, salt, cumin, and garlic. It was served with toasted pita bread, kalamata olives, and parsley. It was a perfect dinner to offset the cookies and ice cream.

I'm getting so spoiled with all this terrific food! So is my family. My father-in-law said he won't be satisfied with regular cookies anymore.

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.

More Vegetables

With yesterday's farm share pick up, my vegetable drawer is rather full. Since we just can't eat that much, it's time to start making things with the veggies. First up, a batch of caponata. For this I had 2 eggplants, so I scaled the recipe up by 1/3 and used 4 peppers (instead of celery), 4 small onions, 4 tomatoes, and the last of my Kalamata olives. I didn't have any green olives for this batch. This made 3-1/2 pints of caponata and I'll take one jar to my parents' tonight.

The next thing was another 2 quarts of green beans, which are currently in the canner in 4 pint jars becoming "Zydeco Green Beans." Essentially, they are dilly beans without the dill. Instead, there is garlic, mustard seed, and a chili pepper in each jar.

The farm share is a bit out of control: 1 spaghetti squash, 1 pound of carrots, 1 bunch of beets, 1 head of lettuce, 1 bowl of arugula, 3 heads of garlic, 4 onions, 8 peppers, 2 quarts of green beans, 1 bunch parsley, 2 quarts blackberries, 1 quart peaches, 2.5 pounds of summer squash, 30 leaves of kale, 1 quart cherry tomatoes, 2 pounds of regular tomatoes, 8 tomatillos, and I didn't even get the flowers, husk cherries, basil and seasonal herbs. As soon as I got home I made a salad for dinner, used some of the tomatoes and onion in our enchiladas, and baked a peach and blackberry crisp. Which was dessert and breakfast. The berries had been too squishy to eat straight so I needed to bake with them. I contemplated a peach-blackberry jam but the crisp seemed a better option.

I've been keeping an eye on the bees, and have made a pint of "Bee Food" concentrate: sugar, water, lecithin, lemongrass oil and spearmint oil. This is added to the sugar syrup, 1 tsp. per quart. When I replace the quart jar tomorrow afternoon, that will be the first time they get it, hopefully they will like it. It's supposed to give them some essential nutrients.

Pickles from the Farm Share

This week, I needed to get the farm share early. We are still working through last week's share, but there's not too much left. Mainly just the greens, which take time. Today's share consisted of another head of garlic, 2.5 pounds potatoes, 1 bunch carrots, 1 bunch spring onions, 2 pounds zucchini, 3 pounds cucumbers, 4 turnips, a head of fennel, and some flowers. First thing I did when I got home was start a half-batch of bread and butter pickles, using almost all the cucumbers, the spring onions and 2 heads of garlic (I had one from last week).  After dinner and their 3.5 hour soak in salt, I made the pickles, using the same recipe for "Old Fashioned Bread and Butters" on page 95 in The Joy of Pickling. For fair purposes, as I intend to enter the 2 half-pint jars in the fair, there were 7 pickling cukes (just under 3 pounds), 2 heads of garlic and 5 spring onions (10 oz).

For dinner, I sautéed zucchini and carrots with scallions and a shallot and served them over chicken tortellini and a homemade alfredo sauce (2 eggs, 1 pint light cream, some pepper and nutmeg, and parmesan cheese, simmered until thick) and topped with shredded fresh basil. Fairly easy and quick, and everyone loved at least part of it - as you can imagine, the 10 year old had issues with the cooked vegetables. But did eat the cucumber and raw carrots at least...

Little Tiny

We went down to visit my parents today, so we stopped by the farm near their place which has pickling cukes and peaches in their respective seasons. I was lucky enough to snag the last peck of teeny tiny cucumbers, the ones that are 1-2 inches long, for canning. I hadn't been planning on doing this today, so I wasn't entirely prepared, but I had enough to get started.

I have set aside 1.25 pounds of the very smallest (yes, I sorted the whole peck) to make cornichons. They are currently salted and resting for a day. They will be ready to work with around 5 pm tomorrow. I had a few cucumbers from the farm share and I added the largest of this new bag of cukes to make a half-batch of bread and butter pickles; these were sliced along with one onion and 1.5 heads of spring garlic and mixed with salt and ice and sat for 2.5 hours while we had dinner. 2 quarts were put into a jar with garlic, dill seed, a chili pepper, and brine and they will ferment into half-sours. There is also a batch of "Favorite Dill Pickles" (see below) and the rest will be made into gherkins; which are currently sitting with ice water in the fridge. Tomorrow I'll finish those up.

Before dinner, I made the batch of dill pickles - using the recipe on page 133 of The Complete Book of Small-Batch Preserving. These have garlic, dill seeds, mustard seeds, and a little sugar in addition to the vinegar-water-salt brine. The recipe made 6 pints, not 4, as I left the cukes whole. I had to make an extra half-batch of the brine in order to fill the jars. Two jars have been set aside for the fair, as long as they taste good when we open them up.

After dinner, I finished the bread and butter pickles: using the recipe on page 95 in The Joy of Pickling, but cut in half, the only other change was using the spring garlic. I hope it isn't too overwhelming to have the garlic flavor but I thought it'd be nice. Half a batch makes 4 pints.

That should be plenty of cucumber pickles for this season!

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!

It's Late February, So I Must Have Been....

Looking toward Breckenridge from Copper

...skiing!  This, plus the final push at work, and taking a class in Boulder, CO, explains why I have done almost nothing of note in the kitchen in the last month.

Well, that's not entirely true.  We brought 1 jar of salsa and 2 jars of jam with us on the trip, and brought home 3 empty jars.  We had our usual go to meals, with a few variations.  Since there were a few more people this time, I started with roasting 2 chickens.  One chicken was dinner the first night with mashed potatoes and green beans, and the meat from the second chicken was the protein for the burritos another night.  The bones all went into making soup, which was lunch for several days.  We had BLT night, and pasta-with-Rick's-famous-lamb-sauce night, and went out for dinner one night.  At that point, I left the crew and headed to Boulder for my class, and they were on their own with instructions to eat up whatever was left.  They did pretty well, actually, only bringing back a little bit of food to my sister's place.  My sister had been kind enough to buy all the groceries before we got there, which saved us a HUGE amount of time and effort.  I think it was, quite possibly, more groceries than she'd ever bought at one time ever in her life!

While in Boulder, I recertified as a Wilderness First Responder.  It was an adventure!  I was one of the three people who got to be doused in cold water and shoved out into the snow so the rest of the class could rescue someone with hypothermia.  To be fair, I did kinda volunteer.  It was fun, in a shivery sort of way.

I got home last night, and today involved a lot of quality time with the laundry machine and some time spent chipping away at the ice that covered half our driveway.  I did make 2 loaves of bread, and I have a pork roast in the oven.  I think we might use the last of the spiced crabapples on the roast.  And preserved garlic.  I can't wait for dinner!

Tomatillo Salsa

This week the entire farm share came to me - which is rather daunting.  I now have:  2 pounds beets, 1 pound carrots, 1 pound peppers, 1 pound + 1 quart tomatoes, 3 garlic heads, 1/2 pound of shallots, a bunch of huge scallions, 1 bowl of arugula, 1 bowl of mixed greens, 2 pounds eggplant, 3 delicata squashes, 1 peck of apples, 1 head of cabbage (add that to the 2 I already had at home), a quart of tomatillos, a pint of hot peppers, parsley, and a handful of cilantro and a few raspberries.  I didn't even try to get the blackberries, husk cherries, or flowers.  That was enough!  In addition to cabbage at home I still had beets, peppers and poblano peppers from last week.

There were 3 tomatillos in my kitchen from last week and when I added them to the quart from today it was just enough to make a batch of Tomatillo Salsa.  I used garlic, cilantro and hot peppers from the farm share, although I used red jalapeños rather than green chiles.  So it isn't really a salsa verde, it's more Navidad, perhaps?  I also did not have enough plain cumin, so I used what I had and added a little of the cardi (coriander and cumin mix).  Still, it made just over 4 cups which are in 3 jars: 2 half-pints and one pint.

I have a plan to make more tabouli salad tomorrow, to use the scallions, parsley and some of the tomatoes.  If I don't use up all the tomatoes I'll freeze them in my collection for sauce.  Someday I'll have time.  The apples will get made into applesauce soon as well.  I also have a collection of poblano peppers that I hope to roast a little and maybe stuff with cheese or something.  I'll figure something out. 

Dill Pickles

Well, I got home from my shift, got a nap, and then felt good enough to get started on a batch of dill pickles.  I always use the recipe from the American Family Cookbook but I'll rewrite it here (I make a double batch, which makes 7 quarts):

6 cups cider vinegar

6 cups water

3/4 cup kosher salt

28 cloves garlic, halved

peppercorns

dill seed

cucumbers

Once the brine is boiled (vinegar, water, salt and garlic) then each hot quart jar is filled with 8 garlic halves, 6 peppercorns, 4 T. dill seeds and sliced cucumbers and filled with the brine, leaving half an inch of headspace.  Then they are processed for 10 minutes and I leave them in, off the heat, for 5 minutes after so they don't siphon or anything.  Most of my cucumbers were too long but 3 or 4 of my jars have smaller, whole cucumbers mixed in with the slices.  I also made a point of cutting off the blossom ends from the slices since I read somewhere that they can get mushy if you leave them on.

The finally tally for a peck of cucumbers:  15 pints of bread and butter pickles and 7 quarts of dills.  Plus 6 for eating.  I think we're set for a while, on pickles, anyway!

Two Foraged Dishes

Gotta love the blogosphere!

Not great lighting, but it is 10 pm....

I found this recipe for wild onion kimchi on one of the blogs I follow and I thought, I have plenty of field garlic, I like kimchi, why don't I try this?  Well, for one thing, 1.5 pounds of wild onions or wild leeks is attainable.  1.5 pounds of tiny little field garlic bulbs is, in my opinion, not.  Certainly not if you want to do other things in your day!

After about a half an hour I did get 1.5 ounces.  I thought maybe I just needed to scale down the recipe.  Turns out that the volume of the field garlic was larger than I thought so I only cut the recipe amounts in half and that was just right.  I still ended up with just a pint of fermenting stuff but, really, how much do I need?  Not much.  Should be ready in a few days. 

Today was also my first nettle picking day.  Last week they looked like they were starting to grow and I figured that this week they'd be just right.  I brought home a bag full and blanched them.  I used them to make a mushroom and nettle risotto that came out really tasty.  I used a small container of baby bellas and chopped them into 1/2 inch pieces, which I sautéed with garlic before adding the rice, turkey and vegetable stocks (1 pint each), nettles (also chopped, with stems removed) and romano cheese.  We had the risotto with steaks (served with homemade horseradish, a gift from my boss who makes it yearly for Passover, it's terrific) and some really good strawberries.

Potato Leekie Lambie Sheepie Soup

There I was, sitting on a rock at the stables, letting the horse I'd just showered dry and graze in the sun, and I looked down and found a HUGE patch of sheep sorrel!  Yum!

A quick search with my iPhone suggested that I could make a potato sorrel soup and, oh, look!  I have leeks and shallots and garlic from the farm and oh, hey, here's some lamb's quarters instead of spinach!  I can make this soup, from one of the White House chefs!  Only with all farm share or foraged ingredients!  (Well, except for the butter and the spices...)

I picked a big bunch of sheep sorrel and about a cup, maybe a little less, of lamb's quarters leaves.  I grabbed a sprig of what I thought was thyme but turned out to be oregano, so I ended up not using it.  I followed the recipe otherwise exactly and created a yummy soup which I will take in a thermos to work tonight.  

Preserved Garlic

It would appear that I have made garlic candy.

I'd found a recipe for preserved garlic on one of the blogs I follow, and had thought it sounded really good so I wanted to try it.  Yesterday at the farm there was "hardneck" garlic, and lots of it.  I grabbed 14 heads as it was part of the mix and match so you could take as much as you wanted as long as it fit in 2 big bowls.  I should have gotten a few more, as I only ended up with 4 cups of cloves, not 5.  Silly me, thinking 14 heads of garlic was sufficient!

After laboriously peeling all the cloves, I sent my husband to 3 different grocery stores to find sherry vinegar while I cooked the cloves in the olive oil and salt and then caramelized them with the sugar.  The addition of the vinegar deglazed the pan and made everything smell so rich and complex.  After I put up 3 half-pints of the garlic I scraped some of the sugary residue off the pan.  Garlic candy indeed!

In addition to this project, I made some tabouli salad and started a basic sauerkraut using a recipe for "Wine Kraut" from The Joy of Pickling.  It's fermenting, I hope.  Tomorrow I add some wine.  And then I wait.