No Compromises

I have no intention of compromising while the kitchen/family room is being destroyed.  The only way this is possible is that I have a wonderful mother-in-law. She's let me take over her kitchen to cook on weekends and run the dishwasher - which is a true blessing. I only wish she would take some of what I make for herself and even more wish my father-in-law were there to share it. 
I spent several hours in her kitchen making things we could reheat here for dinner. On the menu this week:
Spaghetti - homemade sauce of course, Chili Jj, Tortilla Soup - from a food network recipe via one of my former students who was a wonderful cook, Cornbread - recipe from a great friend who is never far from my mind, Sausage - for breakfast with Two Pigs Farm maple syrup, Mayo - must have when making lots of sandwiches in tiny kitchen-type space.
That said, demo seems to be going well, some surprises, but that not unexpected. Things are moving along and it can't happen fast enough for me because I realized I'm sort of lost in my own house. The kitchen was mine and now I'm homeless - if you know what I mean. 

Homemade Mayo

I used the new food pross monster* tonight to make may. Super recipe from Cook's Illustrated for quick mayo and it's great. All ingredients I have on hand, takes all of five minutes to do, and tastes - well, it's just too good to be so very simple.  Have decided two things.
1. Will purchase no more mayo. This is too easy and too good to buy stuff from the store.

2. 12 cup KitchenAide Food Processor is ideal (TY MotH)
3. oops, yes there is a three - sixteen year-old loves homemade mayo, esp. for BLT's. Shall have to teach him how to make it - perhaps donate to his independence stash the old 4 cup food processor to impress college girls in the not-to-distant future. 


*What 16 year-old called the food processor when he was a 3 year-old.  

Manage

What do you do when you can't cook? When you want to cook, but your kitchen looks like, well ... this.
I keep reading my food blogs and my magazines and watching my cooking shows, but I can't do anything with the inspiration that come up. I'm going to have to figure out how to store recipes and ideas away until I can do something with them.
Now I do have the weekly (thank the good Lord) cooking sessions at my mother-in-law's home and that will be a saving grace, but that slam cooking. 4 hours to make meals for an entire week - that's work (Good tasting work though). How am I going to manage the times when I really want to be experimenting and goofing around and just trying different ideas? Not to mention wanting my own space back -- the kitchen is my place. So far, I've taken to the back patio with it's humidity and mosquitoes - less than ideal.


Apparently, I have lots of questions about how I'm going to manage and am very short on answers.


Thought: Must let guys at Nature's Produce know that I've not abandoned them, it's just that I don't have a kitchen.

Step Process Jalapeno Jelly - A Success.

I totally forgot ... I made hot pepper jelly in a step process (need better description) and it turned out great. It was totally from being tired. I was making BnB pickles one weekend and had started the peppers, but just couldn't get it done that day. So thinking through the recipe, I figured I could chop the peppers and simmer them in water and boil and then just keep that mush in the fridge until I had time to finish it off (strain, boil, add lemon and pectin, boil the hell out of it) later.
Well, a day turned into almost a week before I could do it, but because I don't leave the peppers in (and excuse me to those who do, but yuck), it wouldn't matter how yuck they looked or mushy they were. So I went ahead with the recipe and except for not gelling the first time (reboiled and it was okay), you never would have known there was almost a week between chopping and jelly - how cool is that?

Excerpt from the Recipe Diary

I just read Michael Pollan's article "Out of the kitchen, Onto the Couch" about the supposed end of cooking as we know it. There are many (too many) parts I agree with, but as someone who makes pickles, puts up pear preserves, makes mac and cheese from scratch (having never subjected my child to any mac n cheese from a box), makes pies, cookies, and cakes from scratch and tries all sorts of new recipes that don't involve dumping anything. I take great umbrage at the sentence (section 5 graph 2, last sentence), "... yet all American women now allow corporations to cook for them when they can." In true and proud gen-x style, I'm throwing the bullshit flag on that one.  Why American women?   hmmmm....


Oh, and Harry Balzer can bite me too.


t.b.c.


Another similar criticism of the article is here .

The Recipe Diary

I keep a recipe diary - initially I did it to help with pickle/preserves recipes because I never, well almost never, follow a recipe exactly except when baking and sometimes not even then. But now I'm using the recipe diary to follow almost everything I make, especially if it is new to me. I have not done a great job of keeping up with what I'm essentially stealing from other people, but I will try to get better at that -- credit and criticism should be given where due.


Recipe diaries help with pickles because often times it's weeks before you can should taste what you've made. So it can be a reminder or help decide what changes to make the next time, if there is a next time, you make a recipe. I make notes, changes, thoughts about changes, my valuable rating system all on the page for that recipe - it's also necessarily in date order which provides an idea of when seasons start and end for certain local foods -- which is becoming increasing important to me.  (Recipe diary needs a better name, but I'm too tired to be creative or cutesy*)


I expect editorial recipe diary comments will likely make it here too. We'll see.


* I'm rarely cutesy.

Food Terminology

Last night, on the 1st episode of Next Iron Chef, the participating chefs kept tossing around the word confit. Now, I know of duck confit, but I've never heard of someone making mango confit or salmon confit. Both sort of defy the definition of the word. If you look at Barron's Food Lover's Companion by Sharon Tyler Herbst, which I have owned and used since 1999 at least, you would not that confit is defined as such, "...is derived from an ancient method of preserving meat (usually goose, duck or pork) whereby it is salted and slowly cooked in its own fat. The cooked meat is then packed into a crock or pot and covered with its cooking fat, which acts as a seal and preservative."


It certainly seemed like everyone had just learned the word so they were using it as much as possible - blame it on the foodie I suppose. groan.


So are they just tossing around words to impress people who don't own a copy of the Food Lover's Companion? If (and that's a big IF) Food Network is interested in getting people to cook - which I realize these cooking contest are not designed to do - you would think they would advocate for proper use of terminology. I would have expected, at a minimum, that Alton would throw the BS flag on the chefs... disappointing. 

Flavors ...

These blog posts are written long hand first. I'm not sure why except I can do it when I want - especially in boring meetings. Another thing I do in boring meetings, an aside: I spend too much time in meetings - is think of flavors combinations that I think would be interesting to try (read: nectarine and jalapeno jam). This is partly due to a fascination with canning. Oh, an due to my love of a new (for me) book The Flavor Bible. It is fascinating - the book has given me a  new way to think about flavor.

When I want to develop a new recipe, often times, I'll sit around eating something (cherries) while smelling or tasting other things. So when I wanted to pickle some cherries, I ate cherries and smelled herbs and spice to see what seemed to fit. I have yet to look at the cherry section of The Flavor Bible to see if I've made some dreadful mistake, but in a couple of weeks when I taste the cherries, then I'll go look at the book.


Recipe Note: Cherries pickled with white wine vinegar, cloves, black peppercorns, and bay. 

Canning on my own time table - an experiment

Is it possible to can something over a few days instead of just one long (hot) afternoon? I think more people would try canning if you could make things in a step-type process.

So that's what I'm going to try and see if it works - there are some recipes that might not work in this type of process, but I think the critical step is where in the recipe you decide to stop.
Where do you decide it's safe to leave off, cool down, refrigerate, and start again the next day (or so).
And another thought - I read somewhere to freeze blueberries during summer and use them to make jam later in the year - even in winter perhaps when heating up the kitchen seems like a good idea. So, I've cut up some local green jalapeno peppers and some local red serrano peppers. I put them in a zip top bag and then those two into freezer bag and found room for them in the freezer.
I figure later in the fall, when the kitchen is done (who the hell knows when that will be), I'll pull them out and make red and green pepper jelly - who knows that might be a Christmas present for a few people.
My logic, if it can be called that, is that since the starting point for the jelly is just water that has be used to simmer the peppers* and not the peppers themselves, time served in the freezer shouldn't have an impact on the outcome of the recipe. We'll see...


* Recipes that are titled "jelly" and still use the peppers are gross and are not jelly.

Dill Pickles

As I have said before, I'm not a big fan of dill pickles, excepting on a media noche - but that is a sublime sandwich experience. That said, MotH and boy both like dills on other things so in an attempt (or two) should be made. 


I'm lazy. These dill pickles are refrigerator dills, but on a first attempt, I think that is acceptable. Perhaps next summer I'll brine for days on end, but not now. 


Sad Note: Local pickling cukes are over and out here now.
Happy Note: Green peanuts still rollin' on in. 


 Wonder:  How much does a bushel of green peanuts cost?
 Wonder also: How much is a bushel ?
 Wonder as well: How long would it take to boil a bushel?

Refrigerator Dill Pickles
Equipment: 5 pint jars, with appropriate lid stuff.


Cukes:
4 lbs of cukes
2 onions (optional)
5 Tbs pickling salt




Put scrubbed whole cukes in glass bowl, cover with boiling water briefly, and drain. Slice into 1/4" slices. Slice onions and place w/cukes in strainer over bowl. Add salt and stir, let sit 3 hours. Rinse and most importantly taste. If they are still too salty, soak in cold water for ten minutes, check again and repeat as necessary until they are pleasantly salty. 


Brine:
3 c vinegar (white wine is lovely)
3 c H2O
7 T pickling salt
1/2 c sugar
3 1/2 t Pickling Spice


Bring to boil, reduce to simmer, 10 minutes.


In each jar:
1 tsp dill seed
1 tsp mustard seed
1/2 tsp black peppercorns
4 sprigs of fresh dill


And ...
Pack jars with cukes and onions in jars that include the above. Pour in brine, release bubbles and seal (in scrupulously clean jars and rings w/new lids)*. Let cool in a draft free part of the kitchen (not right under the A/C vent if you get what I mean) and they go pop pop pop. Put in fridge, wait three to four weeks - if you can (insert evil laugh here). 


* If you do not know what this means, please do your homework at this site or here. 


Sources: Amalgamation (see pickling books in my librarything), plus a little playing around.