Mock, Paper, Scissors

I believe several Scissorheads have professed their undying love to Mary (full disclosure: I know her, have taken classes from her, adore her) following her epic video Just put the F****in’ turkey in the oven, and so here is her recipe for Chocolate Turtles.

These things are fantastic, crunchy pecans, gooey caramel, decadent chocolate, and if you are a good shopper, you can make scads of these things at very little cost. I’ve yet to meet anyone who doesn’t love them. The big deal is the pecan: find the best, freshest pecans you can. Right now is an excellent time to buy them. The harvest is in, the shelves got cleared out for Pecan Pie at Thanksgiving.

Here’s the thing to note: if you do not have a candy thermometer–buy one–or really study the color and behavior of the caramel in the video. You really can tell the stage of the candy by color. It talks to you, too: there is a sound it makes when it goes from one stage to another. Use all of your senses. (Except touch, and even then there are some Chefs who do touch the stuff. Don’t be one of them.)

Take the pan off the heat a little earlier than she says if you are using Enamel/cast iron or cast iron only. Cast iron (with enamel) will continue to cook long after you remove it and achieve the right color. Darker will not wreck it by any means, but it freaks people out. It still cleans up with hot water as she demonstrates.

If you make them, let us know your experience. I checked out the Big Candy Chain store and they sell turtles for a buck each (one pecan!) — you can do this.

A while ago our friend and un-indicted co-conspirator GRS was looking for a recipe for making a soft bread for his daughter (who, like most daughters totally owns her daddy), and I tried and failed to come up with a bread that would suit his needs.

Today I stand before you triumphant, if not immodest.

This is an adaptation from one of those artisian-breads-in-5-minutes-a-day thingies. The secret to those things, by the way, is to make so much dough on the weekend that you pull off only what you need during that 5 minutes each day the rest of the week. More on that later, in the Bonus.

I stumbled upon this bread dough when trying to work through a baking problem for a friend of mine who runs a small diner in town. He does some lobster rolls during the summer and he was unhappy with the standard issue hot dog bun you can find at the market. Anyway, after much plodding along we developed a pretty fool-proof bun recipe than I think not only works for his lobster roll, I think it will work for GRS’ little girl.

The secret here, not surprisingly, is the potato flour and the dried milk. These yield very soft breads. Experienced cake bakers will often add a small measure of potato flour to their batter to make an even more tender cake crumb. The other secret is to not overwork the dough. You don’t want a high gluten product in the end, you want something Wonder bread soft. Err on the side of under-mixing it. You just have to trust me on this.

As always, I measure by weight, but I know most people don’t. Still, if you have a scale please use it.

Ingredients:

• 4 cups (17 ounces) unbleached all-purpose flour
• 
2 tablespoons (1 ounce) sugar (or more if you like a sweeter product)
• 
2 teaspoons salt
• 
1/4 cup (2 ounces, 1/2 stick) unsalted butter, diced into bits. Keep it cold
• 
6 tablespoons (2 1/4 ounces) potato flour (or 1/2 cup (1 ounce) dried mashed potato flakes if you cannot find the ‘tater flour)
• 
6 tablespoons (2 ounces) non-fat dry milk
• 
1 1/2 cups (12 ounces) water
• 
1 teaspoon instant yeast

Make it:

1. Combine all of the ingredients into your mixer and mix until it makes a shaggy blob.
2. Let the dough rest for about 15 minutes so that the flour absorbs all the moisture.
3. Resume kneading the dough for about 5 minutes or until it looks smooth, elastic, and kind of sticky.
4. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl, cover and put in the fridge to rise overnight. The next day you will shape and bake off the rolls.

If you are making hot dog, hamburger buns, dinner rolls:

• Hotdog buns are about 3 oz. of dough and shape it like a play dough tube about the size of the hot dog.
• Hamburger buns are about 4 oz of dough that you shape into a ball and then flatten.
• Dinner rolls are about 2 oz of dough rolled into a ball.

I roll these things out on a silpat mat or on a baking parchment, which I then cover with a piece of plastic wrap that I have sprayed with oil and let it rise, until about double in height. I slip the parchment/silpat onto a baking sheet when risen and remove the plastic wrap.

Slide into a 375° over for about 10 – 12 minutes for buns/rolls. Because of the sugar, the tops will brown nicely, but are not crunchy. Think Thanksgiving dinner rolls, sort of like that.

This recipe makes about 36 oz. of dough, which is enough for 12 hotdog buns or 8 hamburger buns. I think this will make at least 2 regular sized loaves of bread. I would put them in a well-buttered pan and check on them at the 20-minute mark and then every 5 – 7 minutes thereafter until I thought that they were done.

BONUS:

You knew this was coming, right?

The 5-minutes a day thing: Because of the low amount of yeast-to-flour ratio in this recipe, the yeast will continue to feed on the flour for quite a long time before dying or making that bad sour smell. This means you can pull of some dough and bake this daily and have fresh rolls with dinner nightly. My last two batches of this were good for 6 days. It is becoming a habit here at the hut.

OK, it is not spruce, but a fir-tree based drink, but let me elaborate.

Some of you may remember that I periodically wander up to the Pacific Northwest, and that last year I was in Portland Oregon, and you may even recall that I spent a hazy afternoon at Clear Creek Distillery.

I know, hard to imagine given that I am *temperance* personified.

Anyway, one of the best things I tasted during that trip was an eau-de-vie of fir tree (the little green tips, harvested by hand from organically grown trees in a remote, privately owned woods) distilled by Clear Creek into an eau-de-vie. It is the sort of thing that you immediately say, “Wow! But what do I do with it?”

And I am here today to tell you that you make a very specific cocktail from it. This is not a cheap drink, there are no substitutions offered, and you must stick strictly to the proportions. I will not tell you how I know this; I will tell you that I am enjoying a celery-green cocktail on St. Patricks Day that uses a Scottish gin, French Vermouth, and Oregon eau-de-vie that I am sure will surprise even the most discerning Scissorhead.

Ingredients:

• 1 1/2 oz. Hendricks Gin
• 3/4 oz. Lillet
• 1/4 oz Clear Creek Fir Eau-de-vie
• dash lavender bitters
• Orange peel for garnish

Make it:

1. Put the gin, Lillet, and eau-de-vie in a cocktail mixing glass that is 3/4 full of ice, cracked if you can manage that. Shake in the bitters.
2. Stir vigorously with the straight end of a bar spoon. 30 seconds will be fine, but no less.
3. Strain into a stemmed cocktail glass that is well-chilled. I recommend in the freezer for at least 10 minutes, longer if possible.
4. With a lit candle between you and the cocktail glass, twist the orange peel to caramelize the essential oil from the peel as it sprays into the top of the cocktail. Move the candle out of the way, rub the rim of the cocktail glass with the peel, and drop into the glass.
5. Sip and enjoy the Oregon woods.

Comments:

• I thought about using orange bitters, but it seemed sort of obvious.
• I recommend Hendricks Gin for this cocktail because it has a strong floral element, I think some of it is lavender. Anyway, it is lovely stuff and plays really well with the Fir eau-de-vie.
• Lillet is a very floral and not-too-dry French White Vermouth. I highly recommend it anytime you want a softer cocktail.
• There is nothing–Nothing–NOTHING I know of to substitute for the Fir eau-de-vie, and at $50 for a tiny bottle, it is the priciest thing I think I’ve ever had in my bar. It has mystified me for nearly a year: I keep sipping a teaspoon of it at a time trying to figure out what to do with it. This cocktail is the first time I’ve found success.

My Mother used to drive to SF to Union Square to buy one of these cakes for my birthday when I was growing up. There is nothing better. Nothing. I’ve been looking for this recipe for much of my adult life, I’m going to have to give it a try. Oh, and unlike what Mary says, the cake is better in layers with the crunchy stuff in between. It is worth the effort to do it.

(And for those of you keeping score at home, Mary is my cooking school teacher, and yeah, I had a birthday already this year. I’m the oldest I’ve ever been!)

OK, I’ve been busy. Tonight is the big annual cookie party in the neighborhood. The idea is that everyone shows up with a tray of home-made cookies, and then everyone leaves with a tray of assorted home-made cookies. It seems to be some sort of old Italian tradition, and it is really kind of nice.

Anyway, today I made my famous Schweddy Balls:

OK, actually they are Rum Balls. The thing about rum (or bourbon balls) is that the dough has to be able to absorb the moisture from the booze, and the chocolate needs to be strong enough flavored to not be overwhelmed by the rum. And so as you can guess there is a secret to it, but surprisingly it is not about technique, well not much anyway.

Here’s the secret: You start by making a batch of your best brownies from scratch. Please don’t use a mix, you need real semi-sweet chocolate. And here’s the technique part: make them in a very, well-buttered large sheet pan (in the trade these are called half-sheets) so they cook quickly and come out very thin. You want to do this for two reasons: 1) they cook really fast, maybe 10 minutes and 2) they turn out more cake-like than brownie-like. This is important because the cake-like brownie can absorb liquid, where the thick traditional brownie cannot.

Now comes the fun part: after the thin brownies have cooled (at least 10 minutes for me), you want to rip them up into tiny bits and put them into the bowl of your stand mixer; I used two forks and just shred them into crumbs. Once you have the whole sheet pan in crumbs in the bowl of your mixer, use the paddle and start pouring in rum. Dark Rum, the best you can afford.

The hard part is knowing how much rum to add, so pour slowly and when the whole mass starts to form a ball, stop. I find that it is usually between 1/4 cup and 1/2 cup, depending on the weather.

Now break off pieces of the rummy dough and roll them around in the palms of your hands to make, well, balls. You want to make dense, single-bite balls. Put them on a sheet pan and into your fridge for a couple of hours to firm up. If you want, you can roll them around in sprinkles BEFORE you put them in the ice box, but if you did not roll them in sprinkles right after forming them, you can now roll your balls in powdered sugar or cocoa powder if you believe in gilding the lily.

Always let people know that there is booze in these things. You don’t want to cause a relapse if your guests have addiction issues.

Anyway, enjoy my Schweddy Balls this Holiday Season.

Last year, a Scissorhead wrote me and asked me what I thought about the no-knead bread article in the NYTimes. I think I said “not much, but I have not tried it yet.”

I’m suspicious of things that say you can have it all without any work. It makes me think of that swine, Graves.

Truthfully, I like kneading bread, I find it relaxing, and on bad days, I can take out my aggressions on bread dough rather than my friends and family. There will be a lot of bread around here during the 2012 Goat Rodeo, methinks.

But I’m here today to tell you that this thing does actually work and it makes some decent bread; you will not win a prize at the county fair, but you will have a nice chewy loaf of bread that you can enjoy with your soup or salad, and the effort is minimal.

And if you are diligent, you can have bread every day.

How it works

You were waiting for this part, right?

Essentially what you are making is a sponge, closer to a batter than a dough. You mix this up and you let it sit for 10 hours. You do this for two reasons:

1. You want the flour to be completely hydrated
2. You want the yeast to fully proof and develop some character, some flavor.

This sticky mess couldn’t be kneaded if you tried, so don’t try. The author says to drop it onto a counter and fold it a few times – which is essentially kneading it, but Shh! and then roll it onto a well-floured towel (which should be dedicated to this operation, especially if you decide to make this daily), seam side up.

What you are really doing in this step is redistributing the yeast and feeding it some fresh flour, and essentially you are going to give it a second rise at this point. The towel is there to help you move the sticky loaf later and to keep the dough reasonably safe from drying out.

In the meanwhile you have preheated your oven to 450°, and you have put a cast iron dutch oven in it to preheat as well. A word of caution: if you use Le Creuset make sure you have swapped the heat-proof plastic-looking knob for a metal knob. Those plastic ones will explode in your oven somewhere around 500°, and I’d love to tell you how I know this.

When you plop the bread (seam side down) in the now-heated dutch oven, it will sizzle. Remember that it is a very wet dough, and you can shake the oven somewhat to re-arrange it if you think you must. Put the lid on it and stick it in the 450° oven.

What you are actually doing in this step is providing a steamy, hot environment, with the moisture from the loaf enclosed in the dutch oven. Professional bakeries have ovens that inject steam on the loaves, and this allows them to rise quickly before the heat hardens the crust and gives the much-desired crunchy crust of artisan breads.

Cheater’s Method

OK, you knew this was coming, too, right?

I increase the yeast to 1/2 teaspoon and I skip the folding step entirely; it doesn’t need a 2-hour second rise. I just plop the dough out from the mixing bowl right into the oven. It deflates as you handle it, so handle it gently as you can. Yes, it would probably be better if I did all the steps, but when I compared and contrasted them (and I did do side-by-side bake-offs. The things I do for you people!), I didn’t taste a significant difference. The nicely folded version admittedly does look better if you give it the full 2-hour treatment, but it also collapses when you plop it into the dutch oven. They both developed nice crusts, had lots of interesting air bubbles and other structures.

Sometimes I’m asked about what cookbooks I would recommend for new cooks and cooks who want to up their game a bit, and as it is the holidays (and I understand that people give each other presents), here’s a short list of books that I recommend. I’ve used all of them this year.

Baking:

• Baking, by Dorie Greenspan. This is a huge book with nearly foolproof American-style recipes from the author of Baking with Julia. It’s pretty complete for all the sweet stuff, but does not include bread.
• Tartine, by Elisabeth M. Prueitt and Chad Robertson. This is the bakery book from San Francisco’s Tartine, which if you have not gone you must correct that oversight. These recipes are very French and cover the sweet stuff also. They are a bit more challenging than the Greenspan book, but wow!
• The Il Fornaio Baking Book, by Franco Galli. OK, bread bakers, this is the real deal. You want to make all the classic Italian breads? This is the book. From the restaurant and bakery of the same name, they leave out nothing. Bread only. The recipes are fine, but the technique is the real deal with this book. Read through the recipe steps several times before starting. Try to picture what they are doing. It’s a bit frustrating at first, but once you get it, this stuff will change your baking.

Jams, Jellies, Etc.

This year was a very deep dive at Tengrain’s Little Cooking School for preserves. These are the books I consulted frequently:

• Mes Confitures, by Christine Ferber. These flavor combinations the renowned French patisserie uses are remarkable. The book was translated poorly to English, but the proportions are accurate. The only fault I can find is that she assumes you know as much as she does, so instructions on canning are quite missing.
• Putting Up, by Stephen Dowdney. Dowdney is as famous in the US South for his jams, pickles, and preserves as Ferber is in France. The first part of the book is like a master class in preserving. Follow his canning instructions and literally nothing can go wrong. The recipes are distinctly southern and pretty wonderful.
• The Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, by Rachel Saunders. I met Rachel in Oakland at the Real Foods Festival where she was reading from this book and talking about jams generally. This book is encyclopedic, just amazing and features recipes from her very famous Blue Chair Jam company. The scale of the recipes needs to be changed for home canning, but that’s just math. This has the potential of being the Mastering the Art of French Cooking for jam, and she’s just in her 20s.

Specialty Books

• Ratio, by Michael Ruhlman. This is like being in cooking school. Learn the ratios, you will never, ever go wrong. Wanna make biscuits? Just remember the Chicago area code, 312 (3 parts flour, 1 part fat, 2 parts water). You can scale up or down when you know the ratio.
• Charcuterie, by Michael Ruhlman. I’ve been making bacon, sausage, and specialty cured meats following his instructions. All of them have come out perfectly. This book demystifies the whole process. It’s fun and frankly, so much cheaper to make these things yourself.
• The Flavor Bible, by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg. I talk about this book a lot, and you need to find a copy. No recipes in the thing at all, it is just lists of what flavors go well together, arranged alphabetically. So when some ingredient goes on sale, you can figure out dozens of ways of using it without it being boring. Trying to work out a new recipe? This is the go-to book.

If I ran a real cooking school, these would be textbooks:

• Jacques Pépin’s Complete Techniques, by Jacques Pépin. If you want to learn the right way to do something, this book will have step by step instructions with a photograph of each step. You want to learn how to make cornets for piping frosting, he’s got your back. Want to know how to make puff pastry, he’ll show you. There are recipes here that demonstrate the technique, but the real deal is learning how to do it.
• The Art of the Bar, by Jeff Hollinger and Rob Schwartz. These guys run the bar at San Francisco’s Absinthe Brasserie & Bar, which is the perennial winner of the best bar in the United States, and if you do enjoy a snort now and then, you best make your way to Hayes Valley sometime. Anyway, the drinks listed in the book are pretty amazing, and easy to follow along. They recommend glasses to use, spirits to buy, and how to shake or stir it all up. Try the Bob Tailed Nag – it is like a Manhattan that has died and gone to Heaven.
• The Zuni Cafe Cookbook, by Judy Rodgers. Zuni Cafe is within walking distance of Absinthe, FWIW. Anyway, this is a cookbook based upon her award-winning café. There is nothing I can say about it except that everything in this book works. Follow her advice to the letter, and you will become a better cook. Judy is an alumni of Chez Panisse, but I think she may have surpassed Alice Waters.

Welcome back to the MPS speak-easy! Here’s another great addition to the holiday cheer list. It’s a raspberry-strawberry whiskey cordial. I base my recipe on one from the Oregon Raspberry and Blackberry Commission. (Yeah, it’s a real thing.) Their recipe calls for vodka, which is fine if you like vodka, but whiskey has more character. When I make a homemade gift, I definitely want it to have character. So here’s my doctored holiday treat:

-3 cups sugar
-1 fifth (3 cups) whiskey
-24 ounces fresh raspberries
-12 ounces frozen sweetened strawberries

Heat the strawberries until they’re almost completely melted in a large pot on the stove. Add the raspberries and mash with a potato masher to help break up and blend the fruit. Next add your sugar. Do not boil or simmer the fruit/sugar mix. You just want it warm enough to dissolve the sugar. Remove from heat and add the whiskey. Then add to a container with a loosely fitted lid and store in a cool dark place (basement, closet, garage, etc.). Let it sit for 3 weeks, stirring it every day to keep those sugars dissolved and to keep infusing the flavors. The whiskey will prevent any mold or bacteria from growing and the lid keeps out dust, dirt, and bugs. There will be some off gassing, not a lot, so remember to keep the lid loose. Then bottle it in old, clean wine bottles and you’re good to go! It’s nice for sipping or using as a flavoring for other drinks. Caution: it can get you messed up in a hurry.

I scale this up so I’m using 4 fifths of whiskey (3 liters) and a 5 pound bag of sugar. I have a big seafood pot with a lid that I store mine in while it matures. If you like, you can strain the fruit out of the mixture and just have a liquid cordial. There are some people that don’t like the raspberry and strawberry seeds. You can use cheesecloth or an old, clean T-shirt. I like the fruit, again, added character and it gets your pigeons drunk. I strain out the berries and put them in the bottles first. I use a funnel and the handle of a wooden spoon to jam the berries into my bottles, then top with liquid.

You can get wine bottles at homebrew and home wine making stores just about cheaper than any other place out there. They should have an interesting selection to chose from. Small clear bottles are great for gifts because they show off the great color and berries. Have fun, enjoy, and drink responsibly.

Well, it has been a fun, full-year, a deep-dive into learning about canning and preserving food, and this is the last of the challenges from The Tigress. She saved a real challenge for last: Dried Fruits.

I love dried fruits in all their guises; I use dried blueberries in my scones (try it, you’ll probably never go back to fresh), and I won a dessert contest for a tart with dried fruits in a custard that is spiked with Grand Marnier, and sold the recipe to a restaurant (now defunct) in Oakland. I know how to work with the intense flavor of dried fruit in the realm of baking, but not so much in this new realm of canning.

When I was a little boy, my mother needed to have surgery, and my father was not exactly able to look after us kiddies while my mother was in the hospital for a week or two, and so we were dutifully packed up and sent off to my grandmother’s house in southern California. Madame sent me over to her aunts’ house in a nearby town for the duration (I told you she didn’t like me), and thus I experienced stewed fruit for the first time. And not just any fruit, stewed prunes. And they stuffed them with nuts (almonds I think), and served them for breakfast. It really was wonderful. And for the record, I loved being with mesdames instead of Madame. They let me play in the mud and gave me a new Matchbox Car each day. And they had a TV with a remote control and a very loose policy on watching cartoons. It really was bliss.

Stewed Stuffed Prunes

As you may recall, I don’t like the bitterness of the pith from citrus fruits, so in this recipe I supreme the fruit. If you do like that bitter sort of background flavor (or don’t care), then just slice the fruit up. You will be removing it before canning, so you don’t need to be too fussy about it.

This recipe calls for rum. If you are in recovery skip the booze, it is not essential.

Ingredients:

• 1 Cup brown sugar
• 1 Cup granulated white sugar (preferably organic)
• 1/2 Cup cider vinegar
• 2 Cups water
• 2 Cinnamon sticks
• 10 Cloves
• 1 Star Anise, whole
• 1 Orange, supremed
• 1 Lemon, supremed
• 1 pound of pitted, dried prunes (I use Trader Joe’s California prunes)
• Almonds (as many as you have prunes) blanched
• Rum – because everything is better with booze, and prunes and rum are a wonderful combo.

Make it:

1. Combine the sugars, vinegar, water, spices (put them in a sturdy tea ball or wrap them in a bundle of gauze, as you will be removing them later), and bring to a boil until it makes a syrup.
2. Add the oranges and lemon slices, and the prunes. Reduce heat to a simmer, and cover until the prunes plump up. It was about 20 minutes for me.
3. Transfer the prunes to a plate using a slotted spoon.
4. Reduce the syrup – you want about 1 1/2 Cups. You can use the chopstick trick I mentioned in this post.
5. Remove the spices and the orange and lemon slices and discard.
6. Using a paring knife, make a small incision in each prune and stuff an almond inside. Put the stuffed prunes into the sterilized jars and pour the hot syrup on top.
7. Top off the jars with the rum – about 1 or 2 Tablespoons.
8. Process following the Tigress’ instructions on canning. I processed for about 10 minutes, and it made about 4 pint jars.

Bonus Tracks

• I didn’t have enough time to really refine this recipe, but I think I might try it again but use Allspice instead of Star Anise. I had the Star Anise from an earlier canning project and thought it would be good to use it. I think that any combination of the warm Renaissance spices would work well.
• I’m almost positive that mes auntes used almonds, but you might want to experiment with different nuts. I would NOT use walnuts, they have too much tannin and I think would make it very bitter.
• I would serve this with any roasted game or pork; I think that they would make great appetizers with whiskey or bourbon based drinks.

When GRS and I were talking about starting the Speak-Easy feature, this simple French country-side sip came to mind. I made it one year for some coworkers as Christmas presents, and well, let’s just say it was a mystery why they all left work early and the next day called in sick.

When they did show up, they told me it was French White Lightening. I think Madame would be pleased.

This is a really simple thing to make, basically it is a fortified wine. And now that we are in orange season, all you really need to do is save some peels from the oranges you enjoyed eating and dry them in the oven (and they make the house smell wonderful), and they make the finished vin have a deeper caramel color and flavor.

Fair Warning: this does not taste as strong as it is, so let my co-workers story be your guide. It will sneak up on you.

Ingredients:

• Dried peels from 6 small oranges
• 1 Fifth dry red wine – like a Zin
• 3/4 Cup of sugar
• 1/2 Cup of Vodka

Make it:

1. Preheat the oven to 300°. Spread the orange peels on a baking sheet and toast them, turning them now and again. When the pith (the white part) is golden and the outside has turned deep orange, they are done. It takes about 45 minutes for me.
2. Place the wine, sugar, vodka, and dried orange peels in a clean dry jar with a lid and put it in a cool dark place.
3. Daily for the first week, shake the jar. When you notice that the sugar is dissolved, you can stop doing the daily shake.
4. Let it sit for at least a month, preferably longer.
5. Strain the wine through a fine strainer and discard the peels. Decant into dry and cleaned wine bottles, cork them and store in a cool, dark place until you are ready to enjoy it.

Here’s a tip: you can re-use your old wine corks by boiling them in water for a few minutes. They soften up and then you can jam them into the wine bottles. Re-use, reduce, recycle!

While oranges are in season, I try to make a batch of this at least monthly so I can lay down a small stock to last for a while. There is nothing better than a glass of this (on the rocks) on a warm summer evening, shared with some friends before dinner.

A little splash of this in a flute of champagne is really good.

It is torture to my inner Frenchman that this month’s challenge is to choose between apples and pears. Both speak to my Francophile nature. What fruit is more beloved to the French than the Poire, so fragrant, ripe, juicy, and dare I say sensual (I guess I just did)? Perhaps the Pomme might be, it is used in so many tarts and none more famous than the Tarte Tatine?

It is agony to choose! Could you chose one child over another? Of course not! So my decision therefore was to use them both apples and pears for this month’s Can-Jam challenge. Très français, n’est pas?

“C’est impossible!,” you cry, while I reply “Non, c’est délicieux!”

Anyway, here’s the dealio: to marry the pear to the apple, we need an intermediary flavor (a ménage à trois?), and instead of choosing the predictable Cinnamon, I decided on the less conventional Ginger – actually, candied ginger.

We need an acid to make everything food safe for canning, some lemon enters the picture. Meyer Lemon that is, as the season is starting here in the San Francisco Bay Area.

And because it seems a shame to waste the opportunity to use Meyer Lemons, well, we are heading towards a marmalade. So Meyer Lemon Marmalade with Apple, Pear, and Candied Ginger it is.

See how French this is? Oh-la-la! We started off with one love, and now we are juggling four!

The final jam is very soft because we remove the pith before finishing, and the ginger gives it a real sparkle. The scent is stronly of pears (a gift from using D’Anjou pears), but the backbone flavor of the product is absolutely apple; surprisingly the ginger makes its presence known, but does not over power. Use a very crisp apple so that it doesn’t turn into applesauce. You want the texture of all of these fruits to be distinct.

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Growing up, peppers were a curious thing to me. My mother bought the huge California bell peppers and served them stuffed, and so for years, that is what I thought peppers were: bland containers for other foods, and you sometimes were forced to eat them and not just the stuff inside.

My pepper education continued when my eldest sister brought home her future husband to meet the family. He was from Texas, and so of course he and my father got into mu y macho contest involving eating peppers. The hotter, the better. Pickled peppers, pepperocini, whatever either of them could find were presented one night and they proceeded on a course of self-destruction the likes of which my family had never seen before (or since); they were both sick for days afterwards. There might have been booze involved, but I was too young to stay up and watch, so I cannot report honestly on this, but in my mind it was like those scenes in Westerns, but instead of taking shots of booze they were taking bites of peppers until one of them passed out.

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The challenge for September is stone fruits: peaches, nectarines, apricots, for you gardening geeks all of ‘em are in the family prunus. One of my fondest memories is of my parents taking us on a road trip to southern California to visit my grandmother (“Madame” for those of you keeping score); we would drive down US 101 through what was then the stone fruit capitol of the world, the Santa Clara Valley, nicknamed the Valley of Heart’s Delight (before it became Silicon Valley and everything was torn up).

Anyway, we would pull over to fruit stands and buy lugs of peaches or apricots or whatever else to bring to my grandmother. She would send us home with a crate of preserves. It was a symbiotic relationship, and completely satisfying. And so X number of years later, I find myself living in the Santa Clara Valley and making my own jam.

Full circle as they say.

Anyway, I was trying to figure out what to make for this month’s challenge when my sister (Eightgrain) called me and asked if I had Madame’s recipe for plum cake; she wanted to make it for her grandchild to carry on the tradition. As I was the only one of us little ‘Grains to learn French, I had Madame’s old recipe box and dug through until I found it and sort of translated it. I made it a few times just to be sure before passing it on, and the flavors were so good, I knew I had to try to recreate the flavor profile as a jam for the challenge. It’s taken a little longer than usual to get it right, but damn! this jam is the shizzle.

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The food challenge for August is tomatoes, and once again I find this to be a challenge. You see, with that nonexistent climate change thingy, here it is–mid August–my tomatoes finally have blossoms. So while the East Coast bakes under unusual heat, here in the SF Bay Area instead of having our traditional 90° summer, we have only cracked 80° twice. Most days are in the low 70° range, without a tomato in sight.

But fortunately, we do have some excellent farmers’ markets that are supplied from the nearby central valley, so the challenge goes on!

Given that I rarely cook out of season, this challenge represents a real shift in perspective for me. I want to can something that I will use, that will remind me of the best of summer and in someway make my life easier: pretty much a complete dinner in a jar is what is called for, and so I decided to make a meatless gumbo.

This has it all: tomatoes, okra, onions, peppers, garlic… what more could you want in the dead of winter when you open the jar after a long and miserable day and a slog through the cold rain than to have a bowl of bright, sharp flavors from the summer. Serve this over a bed of fluffy white rice and you will be glad you made it now. If you are a carnivore (I am!) you can always sauté some bacon, ham, shrimp, sausage, or a combo to serve with this.

Gumbo

This is not a spicy-strong gumbo, it has really fresh, bright notes. Of course, if you want to make it spicier, knock yourselves out.

Ingredients:

• 4 pounds ripe tomatoes, cored, peeled and roughly chopped (I used red heirlooms – reserve 1 cored, peeled tomato)
• 1 + pounds of okra, sliced (yes, it’s slimy when you cut it, but oh! so good! If you have a little kid on hand who likes gross stuff, boy will he appreciate helping you out!)
• 1 pound onions diced 1/4-1/2 inch
• 2 green peppers, diced
• 1 ounce garlic minced (we’ll talk about this in the technique)
• 1 1/2 teaspoons salt
• 2 tablespoons of sugar
• 3/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
• 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1/4 cup lemon juice
• 1/4 teaspoon citric acid
• 2 Bay leaves (Please use the real kind, not the California bay leaves, they are nasty. Lauris Nobiliss is the real kind. Look for it on the lable.)
• 1/2 cup water
• 1/3 cup of butter, melted
• 1/6 cup of flour
• 2 Tablespoons fresh Thyme, chopped (have all the herbs ready to chop at the last moment so they keep as much of their color as possible)
• 1 oz. Fresh Basil leaves, chopped
• 1/2 oz Fresh Italian Parsley leaves chopped

Make It:

1. In a saucepan, make a tea of the Bay leaves and the water: bring to a boil and then let it steep for about 10 minutes. Discard the Bay leaves.
2. Put the reserved tomato and the herbs in a blender and set aside.
3. add all the remaining ingredients – EXCEPT the butter and flour – to a non-reactive pan, and add the Bay leaf tea. Cook over medium heat, stirring and mashing. Bring it to a simmer near a boil.
4. Make a roux of the flour and butter — we’ve talked about this before, melt the butter, add the flour and cook it. The idea is to get it as toasty and brown as you can before it has a chance to burn. Just keep moving it about the pan, stirring constantly. You can go for as little as a minute, but try to keep going until it smells nutty. Stir it into the gumbo – it will sizzle and it might look like it is making little dumplings–soldier on and stir it into the pot. It will thicken the gumbo.
5. Blend the reserved tomato and the herbs add it to the pot at the last moment before you start canning.
6. Follow the Tigress’ instructions on water-bath canning – I processed the gumbo for 15 minutes because I made 3 quart jars.

Technique and Suggestions

• When I am mincing garlic, I usually use the salt for the recipe and pour it over the garlic. This helps to abrade it, and you can make a really fine paste. Remember, the smaller the garlic is chopped, the hotter it becomes — and the opposite is true too: the larger the pieces the less heat it makes when cooked. You can control the garlic’s heat just based upon how fine you mince it.
• For food safety, the really important issue is the acidity of the dish. Do not skimp on the lemon juice or the citric acid. When you test the acidity on a pH strip or meter, it should come out to 4.3 or below. If not, add a pinch more citric acid or a (small) splash more lemon juice until you get to the right level of acidity.
• Knock yourselves out: I usually double the cayenne at least, and use almost whole head of garlic; I might use some hot peppers, too. It’s up to you how far you want to take it. You can use the recipe as is if you are a civilian, but if you are a Ragin’ Cajun, well, you know what to do.
• I think that the important ratio to keep is the tomato-okra. The okra provides some of the thickening for the gumbo, but it really works it’s magic as a component in this. You can use less, but why would you? It won’t be slimy once it is cooked, and it’s okra, man.

We’ve talked about this before: always truss a chicken before you roast it. It’s not just that it looks better – it cooks more evenly. There are as many ways to truss a chicken as there are stars in the heavens, but this is a pretty good fool-proof way of doing it.

Just try it – what have you got to lose?

(Ruhlman)

The food challenge for July is Cucurbitaceae, a plant family commonly known as melons and gourds, including crops like cucumbers, squashes (including pumpkins), loofahs, melons and watermelons…

Watermelons, you say?

My mother used to eat pickled watermelon rind that she bought at the very fancy market on Piedmont Avenue in Oakland. The pickled watermelon rind from the market came in some sort of appalling green syrup in tall, narrow jars. She would buy them, hoard them, and then dole them out like emeralds — but only to herself. I remember once she caught my father eating one, and to make up for it a very expensive night out in San Francisco was the price he had to pay to restore order to the house. Such were the wages of sin.

Whenever we would ask her for a taste, she would just say that we wouldn’t like them until we were older. Older was always left undefined.

And so it took until now for me to actually eat one. And they are good. Damn good. So this one is for you, Mom, wherever you are!

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Oh, man. This is good. Now that watermelons are starting to arrive in the farmer’s market, here’s a new way to use them involving booze! (or not – it is really refreshing on it’s own. If you are in recovery, you can skip the booze and add sparkling water, it is really good that way, too.)

I served this with barbecue this weekend, and pretty much everyone liked them. They are more on the sweet side than what I normally like to serve, but in hot weather, nothing is as refreshing as watermelon.

You want a ripe melon – it should feel heavy for its size, which indicates it has a lot of liquid in it. I think that there are a lot of different opinions about how to choose a melon, so use whatever works for you. Personally, I find one farmer at the market that I trust and I then make a point of buying them from him.

Ingredients:

• Watermelon – preferably seedless
• vodka – unflavored; I’m not keen on flavored vodkas, they have a chemical taste, I think. If you do like them, then use a citrus flavored one.
• lime
• sugar syrup – optional

Make it:

1. Scoop out the pink flesh and put it in an upright blender and purée it.
2. Strain the juice and reserve; put the pulp into the compost. I got about 4 cups of juice out of half a watermelon – the other half was served as slices.
3. Taste the juice and see if it is sweet enough for you; it probably is, but check to be sure. Add sugar if you want it sweeter.
4. Mix equal parts watermelon juice and vodka, and shake over ice.
5. Pour into chilled martini glasses, and squirt a little lime juice over the top.
6. Enjoy!

Other thoughts:

• If you want, you can use Agar in place of the sugar syrup if you want some healthier choice instead of white sugar.
• I think a light rum would also work well, but be careful: you are getting into Peggy Noonan territory! I would probably use dark rum and forget the sugar entirely; it would make it more complex.
• This could also be served on the rocks like a Screwdriver, but everyone seems to like martini glasses this summer, so what the heck!
• You can add pieces of the rind to water to make a very refreshing Agua Fresca.
• Mint would be a nice garnish, or you could add in a circle of lime to the rim.
• The watermelon juice on it’s own is really good. If it is too sweet for you (and it very well could be), dilute it with water or sparkling water.

We’ve had a bit of a heat wave here in the SF Bay Area, and just about the last thing I want to do is turn on the stove. When it get’s this way (usually in August or September) for weeks on end, I make gazpacho.

The problem is, of course, that right now the tomatoes are not ripe, and in fact in my yard, the tomatoes are only flowers.

So, here’s a gazpacho recipe that doesn’t use tomatoes. Problem solved.

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This month’s challenge was the ingredient that I was looking the most forward to: berries. Ripe, luscious berries, the fruit of summer, the stuff we want most during winter. And as a dedicated jam-eater (I have dedicated my life to eating strawberry jam), this was the challenge that it was all going to come together.

Instead, I have one $100 jar of homemade strawberry jam, and a lot of embarrassment.

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This month in the Tigresses’ Canning Challenge, the secret ingredient is rhubarb (or asparagus); I made things from both ingredients before I left on the trip, and brought the pickled asparagus spears with me in the hamper on the train, and it was delish.

And sadly, like the idjit I am, I did not write down the recipe before leaving.

That said, I did write down the recipe for the base of this cocktail, I did can it, and it did come out so well, it will be featured at the annual barbecue here at the Hut. I highly recommend you make this cocktail (if you are so inclined and do not have abuse issues), but you do not have to can the cordial to make the cocktail; it will probably keep for a several weeks in the ice box without processing it.

Rhubarb and Angelica Cordial from Laundry, Etc.

Anyway, as you may recall from last month’s challenge for herbs, I paired lavender with rhubarb and it was a winner. I wanted to do something similar for this month’s challenge, but not have it be jam. Last month, there was an entry for Rhubarb and Angelica cordials from one of the British food bloggers, Laundry Etc., that really intrigued me. So, in short I built my entry this month upon the success of her entry last month, and the research I did on the lavender-rhubarb jam I made last month.

The secret to working with lavender is to get the right amount of flower-power in your product without going too far. If you add too many lavender blossoms, you really do end up with something that tastes like very good soap — and I had my mouth washed out enough as a young ‘Grain to know.

So let’s get on with it, shall we?

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This month’s challenge was to incorporate herbs in a canning project, and of course I know that herbs play a huge role in developing flavor for any food product. Used correctly, an herb can build a subtle foundation for the rest of the item – it can lift the ordinary to make it extraordinary; used incorrectly, an herb can overpower, wrestle the food to the ground, and rip out its still-beating heart and… oh, wait. that was a movie. Or Liz Cheney. I forget which.

I went out to the yard to see what was in season and all I had was rosemary and lavender. Rosemary is a terrific herb, and it is often used in Italian desserts, and it is especially well-matched for apricots and other stone fruits. The problem, of course is that stone fruits will not be in season for another couple of months (if at all – the late rains this spring are knocking all the blossoms off the trees before the bees have a chance to do their thing). Lavender, on the other hand, is a very tricky herb to use well. Too little and no one notices it and if you use too much, it is like having a mouthful of soap.

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Yes, another bread post, and this one might be especially for Scissorhead GRS, who is becoming something of a baker. He has a toddler who likes bread, but it must be soft bread, and so like good daddies of good daughters everywhere, he makes soft bread for his little darlin’. What is it about daddies and their daughters?

This bread, ciabatta, is so soft, and luxurious, the little GRSette will love it, and her lucky parents will love it too. The great breads of Italy differ from most others because of their use of a starter or bigga. This adds a toothsome quality to the bread, with lots of bubbles and character and yet the bread is so soft you can use it for sandwiches even for little kids who only will eat Wonderbread. It is a win-win for the bread maker in the family

The bigga is made the night before you plan to bake the bread. You let it rest overnight to develop character. It is dense and hard and you will doubt that it can possibly be part of a soft bread. Have faith!

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Scissorheads -

It occurred to me yesterday that we have really accomplished a lot in these little food posts. I thought I should summarize it now in a way that you can see the relationship between all the different things we’ve been doing:

Yes, I’ve been focusing on technique rather than on recipes, but you can see that it all does come together. Learn how to make a roux, and the world suddenly opens up, doesn’t it?

So next time you think that you have nothing in the house to make dinner, start with a little flour and butter – you’ll come up with something.

(And now that it is spring, we will move into different areas of technique.)

Regular readers may recall that I wanted to learn more about preserving food, and got myself involved in the Tigress’ Can Jam Challenge to learn more about the art and science of canning (or as they say in the south, putting up). As most of the rest of the country is still buried under snow, the challenge this month is onions.

I thought about making the famous Zuni pickled onions, but the last two months I’ve made pickled food, and as the Red Queen says to Alice, “Jam yesterday and Jam tomorrow, but no jam today,” well, it has made me cranky.

I WANT JAM!

And so without further ado, here is my recipe for Onion Jam with Pomegranate and Blueberries.

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So what, you ask, does this have to do with the usual beginnings of a cooking school post? Has ol’ ‘Grain finally slipped off his onion?

Well, yes. Today’s lesson is about how to properly dice an onion! It is probably the most basic thing you do in the kitchen, you probably will dice one sometime this weekend, if not indeed tonight, and so why not learn to do it right?

No tears, Scissorheads, today we win the battle of the onion!

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The horror, the horror…

Well, it’s finally come to this: I have succumbed to serving food in a bread bowl, something so cliché and truly ’70s awful that I should probably walk the hall of shame, head low, all the way to the last remaining Victoria Station and commit ritual sepuku.

But you know what? It was good. It was better than good, it was excellent. And my guests ate their bowls. And it made a great presentation for a Caussolet, which is about as far removed from that god-awful Lipton’s frozen spinach and sour cream dip in a hallowed out loaf of bread as you can get.

So, with my head held high, here is how to make the bowl. I’ll leave you to your own devices about what to put in it. If you do make spinach dip, don’t tell anyone!

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My goal with this food-blog challenge – as regular readers already know – is to learn about how to preserve food. This is a skill that is rapidly leaving most American households and as we enter the second (third?) year of the Great Recession, it strikes me that preserving food might indeed be a useful skill. As a dedicated localvore and seasonal eater, this also makes sense to me: preserve the bounty while it is at its peak and enjoy it year ’round.

So come learn with me while I take the can challenge.

If you want to play along at home, you must read the Tigress’ instructions on canning before you begin.

Everyone loves carrots: from your first taste of stewed carrots as a tiny tot to a surly teenager, carrots are probably the only vegetable that you never rejected; everyone loves carrots. I love the crispness of a carrot, the sweetness. It is one of the perfect foods, giving you texture, flavor, and sound. There’s so much there to love in a carrot. Carrots travel the range from savory stews, to crunchy salads, and to sweet (and usually cream-cheese enhanced) carrot cake. Is there anything carrots cannot do?

Recently, I posted the pickled carrots’ recipe for the Super Bowl Bloody Mary, which featured my favorite refrigerator pickled carrots. What I wanted to do was try to get the same sort of flavor and texture in a properly canned pickled carrot. I think it turned out pretty well.

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I’ve been buying the expensive organic milk lately — it comes in glass bottles! — and If I don’t drink it before it expires, it seems like a real shame, and I’m out $4 or more. I noticed this morning that the sell-by date on the milk was two days ago (the milk is still perfectly fine, but who knows about tomorrow), so… it’s time to make cheese!

When you think about it, cheese is preserved milk, there is not a lot that is magic about it, just some simple science, a little bit of elbow grease (a very little bit), and in about 30 minutes you have some fresh ricotta cheese, and you’ve made something from the milk that you might have to throw out in a day.

I probably don’t have to tell Scissorheads this (they being amongst the best and brightest on the innernets), but you can use ricotta cheese to make a terrific cannoli, if you want to do such a thing for St. Valentine’s Day.

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It comes to my attention that there is some sort of televised sporting event this weekend, and I thought Scissorheads might like to know how to make the world’s best Bloody Mary to enjoy while watching the game — and if that swine Graves’ booze and drug addled hints are anything to believe, well, this game will be the sort where having a snort of good booze will be well appreciated. This is much more a recipe post than a technique post, though there is always technique at the end.

The Bloody Mary is a very ingenious drink – with the exception of the booze, the thing is practically health food. If you have an addiction issue, you can enjoy the drink without the vodka, and it will still be delicious.

Every good barkeep will tell you that the secret to the Bloody Mary is to keep the base drink spicy because the hootch and the ice will quickly dilute the flavor. The other secret is to have an excellent garnish. Let’s start with the garnish.

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OK, I can see your eyes rolling already.

“Another French thing that I will never make, eh ‘Grain?” you say plaintively, with just a soupçon of scorn in your voice.

Yes another French thing, and you will make this, and you will like it. A lot. After one taste, your friends and family will be stopped dead in their tracks, bow down on their knees and say, “I am not worthy.”

Here’s the thing about Pâte à choux, it is extremely easy to make, it is very versatile (appetizers – Gougères, main course – gnocchi, and dessert – éclairs and profiteroles all are made from it), and it costs next to nothing.

You generally find gnocchi only in better restaurants, and hardly anyone ever makes it at home, and that’s a shame. It really is one of the great foods of the world, and it is easy to make. Gnocchi is one of those foods that can warm you and comfort you when times are rough. You can nap it with any sort of sauce you want, whatever suits your mood. You can serve it as an early course in a multi-course dinner, or it can be the main deal — so you see, it can be as elaborate or as simple as you want.

My plan for tonight is to saute some fresh chopped chard with a little onion and garlic, and to saute these gnocchi in some butter with a little sage and then mix them together. I’m thinking that the chard will act as a sauce of some sort, maybe I’ll blend it with some stock…

So let’s get started.

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