Summer Fruit

Yesterday, in the midst of all the unpacking-cleaning-putting away that normally follows a camping trip I got a text from my friend, Abigail, did I want pears again? They had been talking about taking down the pear tree because it was so large and hard to manage so I was glad to hear they hadn't and after a few texts back and forth I had four pounds of small pears on my doorstep. 

Today, after taking a small poll of the family members who were awake at the time, I decided against making jam and for making pears in syrup. We can only eat so much jam, my husband pointed out. We do occasionally turn to our jars of fruit in syrup if we have run out of fresh fruit. That settled it, and I made 2.5 quarts of quartered pears in syrup. 

Thank you, Abigail, as always, for the pears!

Chocolate and Pears

For my birthday I put together a variation on a few cakes from school. I had a chocolate almond genoise layer in the freezer so brought that out and soaked it in pear syrup from a jar of canned pears I'd made last summer. Then I made chocolate mousse.

First, I placed the soaked cake in a ring and topped it with the caramel pear jam from last week. As an aside, the canned pears and the pears in the jam were from the same tree, just different seasons! Anyway, I topped the jam layer with some chopped pears, like so:

Then I put some mousse in, added more chopped pears, and then finished with more mousse. Voila:

After chilling this for a while and then removing the ring, I'd hoped to top it with actual chocolate curls. Unfortunately, the chocolate I bought wasn't cooperating, so I had chocolate shavings instead. To compensate, I coated the cake with the shavings and served it:

Since I had a fair amount of chocolate mousse and meringue left over, I made little pots of mousse which, when toasted and with the addition of graham crackers, made nice little s'mores themed desserts for the next night. Yum!

The Rest of the Pears

Just now, after a day spent in an escape room, having lunch in Boston, avoiding thunderstorms, and napping, I made Caramel Pear Jam. I had guessed correctly that the remaining pears from my friend worked out to be four cups of purée but I did have to run quickly to the store for brown sugar since I didn't have enough. It tastes like a pear version of applesauce and it's lovely. This is another entry for the fair, I think!

Free Pears

My friend and neighbor with the pear tree emailed me a few days ago, saying the tree had about a million pears and did I want some? Well, she wasn't kidding. That tree really did have about a million pears. It's still relatively early in the season but they'd already started to fall and mess up her yard. I grabbed about 20 pears and left them in my kitchen to ripen for a few days.

One of the things that has been making me a little nervous is that the fair is fast approaching and I didn't have much to enter yet. I decided to revisit a recipe I made pretty early on in my canning hobby, a pear ginger conserve that has chopped almonds in it as well. It's in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 90. Right around the time I was grating the ginger, the pages fell open to another recipe that uses fresh ginger but calls for a cup instead of a teaspoon! I'm glad I caught my error in time.

This used a little less than half of the pears, and I have plans to make another recipe with them tomorrow. Or maybe in a day or two. Our original plans for tomorrow have pretty much evaporated due to impending thunderstorms so we're going to do one of those escape rooms instead. Wish us luck!

More Gifts

This afternoon I stopped by a friend's house as she had offered me some pears from her tree. Like everything else around here, the fruit has been prolific. I brought her a jar of peach jam and took home a bagful of pears which I promptly turned into five quarts of pears in light syrup. This time I left the pears in halves so they took up more space. That being said, I could have had maybe two more pears total, a couple of the quarts have fewer pears than the others.

The other thing I did today was pressure can tomatoes and celery which my mason had dropped by. This was pretty simple - peel, core and chop the tomatoes and cook them down with sliced celery, then put them in quart jars with a little salt and pressure can them. That gave me two quarts to be used for cooking at some point.

A Snowy Pi Day

This year, for Pi Day, I was prepared. I bought some pears before the snowstorm and today, with the help of the elderchild, made a maple pear pie. After slicing the pears, I let them sit with 1/2 cup sugar while we made the crust. Then I drained the pears and boiled the juice with some maple syrup, cinnamon, nutmeg and cornstarch to thicken it. This was mixed back with the pears before filling the pie crust. Here's the finished pie.

Note the vents - the elderchild carved at least 11 digits of π into the crust!

We had some of our neighbors over to enjoy it with us, and it was terrific! Also I made a raspberry tart with the rest of the crust; that was an afternoon snack.

In addition to all that, while the storm was dumping eight inches of snow, and then rain, on us, I made a gallon of yogurt, a batch of cornbread, a batch of chili, and also did a whole bunch of laundry. Oh, yeah, and last night I made bread. All sorts of lovely food!

Days 31 and 32: Final Practicum

Yesterday and today were spent in a stressed out haze. At least until I completed my dessert and turned it in.

This morning was our practicum exam. Each of us were to draw a card and then make what it said. As this was technically the mid term we were given the ingredient list and had to write out the method. Once Chef corrected it, we were to go into the kitchen and make it for presentation to the two tasters. There were eight cards and we knew what they were but we selected our actual card at random. Ahead of time, in addition to studying the methods, I thought about how I would plate each one.

On a whim, I bought stainless steel martini glasses. Just in case I drew the macaron card.

I drew the macaron card.

Yay! The card stated that in addition to making three different flavors of macarons - coffee, lemon, and raspberry - we were to make an ice cream of our choice. Planning ahead again, I decided that a pear cardamom ice cream would go well with each flavor. That had to be made first. I made an ice cream base with pear purée, cardamom, and some pear brandy. While that chilled, I worked on the macarons and sautéed pears in butter, sugar, and more brandy. When it was time to put the ice cream in the maker, at the very end I churned in the cooked pears. It was lovely.

The macarons came out better than they had any right to as we had some oven issues (the opposite problem compared to home, the ovens were too hot. Even though we set them 25˚ lower than usual). The tasters noted they were a little dry. I guess they crumble too quickly. Each one had a matching ganache.

For plating, I chilled the martini glasses and put a scoop of ice cream in each. I had made mini macarons and stuck them on the ice cream. I made sure each macaron was between mini macarons of different colors - pink between yellow and brown, yellow between brown and pink, and so on.

Ultimately, I did well on the kitchen part and I don't have the tasting grade yet but the comments were mostly positive. Now we only have the final written exam left!

Days 5 and 6: Sweet Things

We all made some cygnes, these were mine.

This week we moved away from breads and into pastries. It's quite fun. I'm super tired because between classes and last night's Special Town Meeting I haven't really had much time for sleep!

Yesterday started out with the T being super delayed. Five of the seven of us were stuck at various points along the Red Line for a half an hour or more. The only saving grace is that the chef was stuck, too, so we weren't really late. And then we had our first quiz.

Once that all was taken care of, we started on pâte à choux. This is the flour-water-butter-egg paste that is used to make cream puffs and eclairs. And boy, did we make a lot of cream puffs and eclairs! It took us all day, but we made all sorts of shapes, fondant for dipping, and 6 different flavors of cream filling: coffee, chocolate, rum, kirsch, grand marnier, and praline.

An assortment of cream puffs and eclairs. 

Let's just say that clean up took a very, very long time. We used a crazy amount of bowls and mixers. And piping tips.

This morning was not plagued with commuting woes, which was nice. Today was "Classic Doughs" which meant pie and tart crusts. We learned the difference between pâte brisée, pâte foncer, and pâte sucrée. (Sugar. The main difference is sugar. There are other differences, but that's the biggest.) We made five different kinds of tarts. The large tarts, one per person, were Tart Beausejour - caramelized apples with calvados. These and the pear chiboust tarts used the pâte sucrée and all the others, the chocolate tarts, the "Duo" tarts (peach and cherry), and the apricot-brown butter Tart Catalane, used the pâte foncer. A chiboust is a pastry cream (we made ours with pear purée) with meringue mixed in. That led to the most fun part of my day - using the torch to brulée the chiboust.

I LOVED it.  I think I ended up doing most of them because I was having so much fun.

Oh, and, yes. That's my uniform. Someday I'll get my jacket but for now, that's it. Sorry you can't see the checkered pants.

If cleanup from yesterday was long, today was much, much worse. It was all hands on deck to get that all done. So many dishes!

Happy New Year!

Let's start 2015 off right, by making a pie!

Pears, cranberries and apricots, with 2/3 cup sugar, 1 T. lemon juice and 1.5 T. cornstarch.  One cheese tart and one beach plum tart.  I used my new pastry mat and it was the easiest pie crust EVER.

Mmmmmm.

Free Pears!

It's always great when Abigail's pear tree does well, because Abigail is kind enough to share the fruit with me when she has a surplus.  Even though the output peaked a week ago she had plenty left today for me.  I brought a jar of strawberry jam and came home with enough pears to make a batch of jam and still get 3 quarts of pears in light syrup.

I decided to combine the pears with raspberries for the jam.  The proportions were approximately equal:  2 cups of pears and 2 cups of crushed raspberries.  To this 4 cups of fruit I added 2 T. lemon juice and 5 cups of sugar plus 1 package of powdered pectin.  This made 6 8-oz jars of jam plus a little more.

Thanks, Abigail!

Early Christmas

Since my family doesn't all live in the same place and, since it's easier to travel before or after Christmas rather than during the holiday week, we have part of our Christmas celebration early.  Today, as a matter of fact.

I still had the pie plate from the chess pie my sister-in-law made for Thanksgiving so I felt it was time to return it, filled, of course, with pie!

Today's pie is pear cranberry, from this recipe, but with the addition of some ginger.  I say, "Some," because I just sprinkled.  Maybe it was half a teaspoon, maybe a full teaspoon.  Hard to say.  I used my holiday pie cutters to put snowflakes and holly leaves on the crust.  This crust was 1/4 leaf lard and 3/4 butter (I ran out of the lard) and it was more elastic than usual.  I am not sure why that is.  It was very interesting to work with, much more likely to stretch than to break.  It came out nice and flaky and buttery tasting (we ate the accompanying tarts for breakfast).  Now I can't wait to dive into the pie!

Dropsies

Thanksgiving was wonderful, with lots of food and family and friends, and having a few days off equally wonderful.  I have turkey bones and turkey meat in the freezer for soup making but just haven't had the energy to do it yet.  What I do seem to have the energy for is breaking almost all my plates (the stack of clean dishes fell from the counter back into the dishwasher...) and, this morning, dropping the full sugar bowl on the floor.  I have decided the universe is trying to tell me something - either I have too many things in the air (literally) or not enough sleep.  Or both.  Likely both.

Anyhow, today's project was something I've been planning for a little while.  I just needed pears to go on sale.  I had a cup of black walnuts in the fridge from my little foraging expeditions, and thought the flavor would go really nicely with pears.  Today I made 2 batches of Pear-Black Walnut Conserve - 12 jars in all.  An excellent addition to the gift stash!

Pear and Black Walnut Conserve

4 cups chopped pears (I used Bartletts but I think any would do)

1 T. lemon juice

1 package powdered pectin

4.5 cups sugar

1/2 cup chopped black walnuts

Cook the pears, lemon juice and pectin until hot, then add the sugar all at once.  Bring to a boil and boil hard for 1 minute.  Turn off the heat and stir in the walnuts.  Pour into jars and process in a boiling water bath for 5 minutes. 

Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day trying to pretend I don't have the dropsies.  And work on getting the sugar out of the hardwood floor.

Gingerbread Pears

There's a nice little orchard/farm not far from the stables and every Wednesday after riding we stop and get peaches.  Sometimes we get other fruit, like plums or apples, and lately they have had really good, tiny Bartlett pears.  Yesterday there was a quart of them that were perfectly ripe, so I bought them and quickly realized I needed to use up about 6 of them in the next day.  I decided to poach the pears.

First I thought about poaching them in wine, but then I thought that might not be something the kids would like.  So I found a recipe for poaching them with ginger and I strayed a bit from the recipe:

Gingerbread Poached Pears

4 small Bartlett pears, halved and cored

1.5 cups water

1/3 cup sugar

1/4 cup crystalized ginger

2 T. molasses

Boil the water, sugar and ginger for 5 minutes to make a light syrup.  Add the pears and simmer for 10 minutes.  Remove the pears, add the molasses and boil again, reducing the volume of the syrup until it's as thick as you like.  Pour over the pears.  Voila! 

Finally I Have Some Time

I've been planning on working on my gift stash for a while but something always seems to get in the way.  So I set aside several hours this morning to try to make a dent in it.  I made two batches today - Maple Pear Ginger Jam and Cranberry Rhubarb Compote (same as last year).

For the Maple Pear Ginger jam I made a few changes from the first recipe attempt.  One change was that I added ginger (obviously).  I cut the pears larger and simmered them with some pear juice and 4 big chunks of fresh ginger.  When they were soft I removed the ginger, mashed the pears, and returned the ginger to the pot.  Then I added the lemon juice and the pectin and then, once it was boiling, the syrup and the sugar.  When it was time to can it I removed the ginger.  This made 5 cups and a little bit.

The Cranberry-Rhubarb Compote was easier since I had 1 pound of rhubarb already measured out in the freezer.  (There's that thinking ahead thing - isn't it great when it works?)  That plus 1 and a half bags of cranberries and 2 golden delicious apples made 9 cups of compote.  I now have 21 8-ounce jars and 31 4-ounce jars in the stash.  I might need more, but this is a significant improvement!

Canning with Maple Syrup

In this house, only Vermont Grade A Dark Amber maple syrup will do.

It's expensive, though, so we plan ahead and make a day trip up to Vermont once every 1-2 years to buy it from the source.  Even in the stores up there it's pricey so we buy it straight from the farms.  Last time we found, for the first time, a reliable farm that had plenty in stock.  Dark is hard to come by most of the time, but not there.  We usually buy 2 gallons for ourselves, and then buy a few gallons for other people who wouldn't otherwise make the trip.  With one of those people, for one gallon I get smoked Alaskan salmon that her husband catches and smokes himself.  I think that is a very reasonable trade.

In case you're wondering, syrup does fine on the shelf in a cool place until you open it.  After that, it needs to be refrigerated or frozen.  If you have gallon jugs, like we do, freeze them.  It'll last up to a year that way.  Just thaw it and pour some into a smaller container so you have some ready.  Syrup shouldn't actually freeze, if the sugar content is high enough.  It just gets really thick.

This year we are planning to go in the days after Thanksgiving.  But I think that I may be buying 3 gallons for myself.  This is because I've decided that I should experiment more with cooking with syrup.  I started today by creating a jam recipe with maple syrup.

Maple Pear Jam

4.5 cups of minced pears (3-4 pears, roughly)

2 T. lemon juice

1 cup maple syrup

2 cups sugar

1 package low-sugar powdered pectin

Mix the pears with the lemon juice to prevent browning as you cut up all the pears.  Mix the pectin with 1/4 cup of sugar and then mix with the pears and lemon juice.  Cook until boiling.  Here's where I had a little trouble because there wasn't really any liquid in the pears so it didn't really boil.  Eventually I just added the syrup and sugar and brought all that to a boil.  (Warning!  It is super thick, and bubbles spatter quite high.  Stand back.)  Once it was at a rolling boil, keep that for 1 minute and then remove from heat.  This made 5 cups of jam, which I put into 10 half-cup jars.  I thought it might be a good addition to the gift stash.  

Things to consider:  adding star anise or cinnamon or almonds.  The maple flavor isn't too strong so I wouldn't want to overwhelm it; I think a vanilla bean might be too much.  Another idea is to simmer the pears in some water or pear juice and mash them before doing the rest.

Social Media Delivers

Abigail pinged me on Google+ a few hours ago and said she had some pears for me.  I happened to be on line so I immediately wrote back, hopped in the car and drove to her house.  (I didn't go empty handed.  I brought over some crabapple jelly.  Hope you like it!)  There were just over 4 pounds of pears waiting for me.  The perfect amount for 2 quarts of pears in syrup!

As an added bonus, the 9 year old helped!

(Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving, page 145.)

First Jam of the New Year

For New Year's Eve I slow cooked a ham in pineapple juice. Which meant I had a large can's worth of crushed pineapple sitting in the fridge. What to do? (What do you think?) I found the following recipe on Pantry Eats and added a little extra pineapple and didn't crush the pears.

Today's jam is Pineapple-Pear Jam:

1 can crushed pineapple, drained
4 pears, chopped
1.5 T. lemon juice
4.5 c. sugar
1 pouch liquid pectin

Mix it all together the usual way. I got 7 half-pint jars out of it. It smells really tropical; I almost put some coconut in it but I thought that might be too much...

Crazy Overdoing it Kind of Day

After getting almost no sleep last night due to a house full of 8 year olds, it made perfect sense to do some canning in the aftermath. Since I'm pretty sure we are not getting significant numbers of tomatoes from the farm anymore, I decided to assemble the food mill, bring out those 5.5 gallons of frozen tomatoes, and make sauce. I still don't have any pint jars, so I planned to make quarts of plain sauce. That way, if I only use half the jar at a time, I won't be bound by whatever the flavor is when I go to cook another tomato based dish the next time.

I thawed the bags in a sink full of hot water and put all of it into my lobster pot to start boiling. It filled the lobster pot. That is a crazy amount of tomatoes for me! Then I set up the food mill and waited. While waiting, I received a text from my sister-in-law (hi, Steph!) about canning the applesauce she just made. I called her and convinced her to come over, with the applesauce, and I'd help her can it. Oh, and bring the grapes, I said.

Before she arrived I started running the tomatoes through the food mill. They were already making an awful mess when disaster struck! Not sure why, but the entire screen and screw set-up fell off the rest of the mill. Which then meant that the motor was now no longer counter balanced and the rest of the mill, with the tomatoes in it, fell off the dining room table and all over the floor. Cursing ensued.

I sent the youngest out to get my husband because, clearly, I needed help. He very kindly reassembled the mill and helped me clean up the mess. Just after the whole thing was cleaned up and I had restarted, the doorbell rang and Steph was there. Not only had she brought the applesauce and grapes, but a bag of pears they'd picked that no one was eating. No problem! We decided we'd do those, too.

I need a larger stove top, don't you think?

We reheated her applesauce, got all the tomatoes through the mill and put the juice back into the lobster pot, the only single pot large enough to handle all the juice - it's still cooking down, 4 hours later! Then I set up the canner and got the grapes simmering on the stove. That's 4 very crowded burners...

The applesauce was put into 2 quart jars and processed for her to take home. That pot was washed. When the grapes were mashed and cooked we set up 2 strainers and started to drain the juice. That juice went back into her applesauce pot so I could make the jelly. We started to do that (after the pears), but realized we wouldn't have enough time for her to do that before she had to leave so set that aside. Then we made a batch of light syrup. Steph peeled the pears and I quartered and cored them and heated them in the syrup. Then we took turns loading all the pears into 4 quart jars. We ended up needing to make more syrup to finish those off and, once I got them into the canner, Steph had to leave. She's letting me have 2 of the quarts of pears. This is good, we like pears.

I turned my attention to the jelly. We had gotten about 2.5 cups of VERY potent concord grape juice. I added enough water to make 4 cups and then followed the recipe from the Certo package. Steph will get 8 half-pint jars of jelly and I am keeping the leftovers in a container in the fridge. It's really grapey. Is that a word?

Lastly, those tomatoes (6 quarts!) are still cooking down on the stove. I suspect they'll be ready in an hour or so for canning. And then I will collapse on the couch.

Pears...In a Jar

"What are you making, mommy?"

"Pears."

"In a jar."

"Yup, in a jar."

Our friend (and blog member) Abigail has a pear tree and is up to her elbows in pears. She gave me 10 pounds (yup, I weighed them) of pears which I have converted into pears in syrup. Instead of halving them, since they were many sizes and shapes, it was easier to cut them up in a large dice. It made the final amount smaller but the quarts are more tightly packed. I also ended up with 1 1/2 cups of pear flavored light syrup to which we added water and a little ice and made a sweet pear flavored drink. The pears in syrup recipe was from the usual place, the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. It was actually pretty easy, and peeling 10 pounds of pears was not as bad as you might think. Better than peaches, that's for sure. The pears were also perfect for canning, since they were crisp and not overripe. I'll be bringing a quart back to Abigail in a little while. She was thinking about making wine from some of her harvest, but I'll let her comment on that if she likes.Oh, and Abigail? I have juicer envy.

More Fun with Pears

I was saving the Bartlett pears for the "Seasoned Pear Almond Compote" in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. First I grated the zest off 2 lemons, managing not to thoroughly destroy my fingers in the process. Then the lemons were squeezed and the juice and the zest mixed with 3.5 c. of chopped pears. It took just about 4 pears to make 3.5 cups. Next, I chopped up slivered almonds with my ulu which is much easier to use than a regular knife. These were mixed into the pear mixture along with 6 c. of sugar and then the mixture sat at room temperature, covered, for 1 hour.

The last ingredient other than liquid pectin was 1 tsp. of finely chopped ginger root. I ended up with 7 half-pint jars. This is the first time I've added nuts to anything I've canned. It's rather yummy!