Beet Tart

Tonight we had friends over for dinner and I made use of all the golden beets I'd gotten from our farm share. First I roasted the beets until soft, slipped off the skins, and sliced them. For this I used a little less than a pound of beets. Two onions were sliced and caramelized. Then I made a pie crust with leaf lard and flour.

To assemble, I rolled out the crust and placed it on parchment. Next came the onions, and then the sliced beets. Lastly, I crumbled honeyed goat cheese over the vegetables and seasoned with pepper and tarragon. Then I folded the crust over to make a rustic tart, brushed the crust with milk, and baked at 375˚F for about 35 minutes until golden brown.

It was delicious!

Cornichons and Gherkins

This morning, I made Sweet Gherkins using the recipe on page 306 of Preserving Summer's Bounty. It called for honey, which might just be the first time I've ever canned anything with honey in it. Basically, after soaking the little cucumbers overnight in ice water, I cooked them in a mixture of cider vinegar, turmeric, pickling spices, cinnamon and celery seeds. To this mixture, 2 cups of honey are added. That's a lot of honey. I used up the local honey I'd bought for the bees and then added in some more *gasp* store-bought organic honey. The recipe says it makes 10-11 pints, but I only got 4 and a half, so I don't know what's going on there.

Then, after the other cucumbers had sat in salt for a day, they were ready to become cornichons. This recipe comes from page 90 of The Joy of Pickling. These cornichons are pickled but not canned. After rinsing and drying the cucumbers, they are packed into a quart jar with 4 shallots, 2 dried chilies, 1 bay leaf, 10 peppercorns, and 2 sprigs of fresh tarragon. Then the jar is filled with white wine vinegar. I finished my bottle of white wine vinegar so had to top off the jar with some tarragon vinegar instead. Now it sits on the shelf for a month before eating them. With paté.

Easy and Efficient Travel Meals

The market in the rain

You've probably noticed that we like to travel.  We've been away, which explains the posting hiatus.  For half the time, we had apartments with small kitchens that were reasonably stocked with utensils and the like.  So we ate in, a lot, which meant shopping.

The extra stuffing just baked around the chicken

In the center of Zurich there is a farmer's market twice a week.  There are others, in other parts of the city, on different days.  I didn't want to spend every day at the market and I knew about this one so I made sure we got there when it was open.  We walked around, bought some cheese and bread for lunch, and then I found a wonderful stall full of terrific looking veggies.  I bought some green beans, and the proprietor threw in some tarragon.  That's just what they do when you buy green beans, I guess.  I had decided that the easiest thing for me to do was to roast a chicken for dinner that night, so I picked one up at the grocery on the way home.  I made stuffing out of leftover stale bread, some carrots, apples and onion, and the tarragon.  I hoped I was using a baking dish and not an ornamental serving dish to bake it.  All worked out in the end and it turned out beautifully.

Yum!

After dinner, I took the leftovers, some extra pasta from the previous night's dinner, and more carrot and onion and made soup, which was dinner on another day with more bread.  It was easy enough; I did have to buy salt and pepper.  At least there was that tarragon!

Enough For Jam

Week 2 of the farm share and I brought home a bunch each of scallions, radishes, and Hakurei turnips, 15 garlic scapes, a bowlful of spinach, some komatsuna (that's what the long, bok choy like vegetable from last week was), a large bunch of kale, some dill, cilantro, and tarragon (most of which I promptly added to a small bottle of apple cider vinegar), and 3 quarts of strawberries.

Yeah, you heard right. 3 quarts.  The share distribution of berries has never been that large.  One quart, sure, but three?

They were pretty ripe so it was clear I needed to do something with them soon.  After consulting with the 12 year old who originally wanted a pie but acquiesced when it was clear I didn't have time to make a crust before dinner, we decided on a batch of jam.

Well after dinner, after the kids were in bed, and well after I should have been sleeping, I made a batch with those two quarts:  5 cups crushed berries, 1 box pectin, 7 cups of sugar.  It made 9 8-oz jars and a bit more.  We had a friend over after dinner who watched me do all this; he got to take a jar home.  It was almost too hot to carry!