Archive for the 'preserves' Category
Today’s post is more of an introduction to some friends of mine you may not have met yet than a report on dinner (if you’re dying to know, we got home after 7 from picking up the very last of our CSA boxes and I made pork tenderloin with apples – in under 20 minutes – which we ate with carrots from the farm and cherry tomatoes from the back yard). Thanksgiving is imminent, and I’ve been chatting with them, wondering how they can stay so upbeat and chipper the busiest week of their year, and realized I never did share the farm visit we made over a month ago now – on the first day of school, in fact.
If you’ve not yet had the pleasure of their acquaintance, this is Darrel and Corrine. They raise turkeys on the 480 acre farm Darrel was born on (not literally, but he lived there from that day on) in the southern Alberta hamlet of Dalemead, just 3 km south of highway 22X along a Canadian Pacific Railway line.
Darrel and Corrine are always at food-related events, supportive of our community, offering up help to anyone who needs it and welcoming visitors to their farm, where they keep a flock of about 11,000 birds. They’re always smiling – and leave me (and W) smiling each time I see them.
All Winter’s turkeys are free-range (meaning a meat-free diet and access to forage in a large outside yard), hormone and antibiotic-free. Their diet consists of whole grains – wheat and hay grown in fields alongside the turkey houses and garden – blended with soy, flax and canola meal. The turkeys live on the open, sunny farm, with lots of room to roam and new straw bedding provided regularly by Corinne, Darrel and their daughter, Laurel.
Their turkeys take 17-19 weeks to grow, although some Toms (male turkeys) can take 29 weeks to reach their full size. (To compare, commercial turkeys are sent to market at 13 weeks, far before their prime.) The birds are processed in a small family-owned facility in St. Paul, Alberta and frozen naturally-many commercial varieties are immersion or spray-frozen in food-grade propylene glycol.
I’m a turkey fan, so their birds aren’t limited to once or twice a year around here. (And luckily they’ve decided to make the foray into turkey sausage – it’s lean and wonderful!) If you’re looking for a good-quality, locally raised and processed bird for your dinner table, pick up one of Darrel and Corrine’s. Winter’s turkeys are available at Calgary Co-op stores, and can be ordered at smaller groceries like Valta Bison and Planet Organic.
OK, I have a recipe for you too. I did this for a recent issue of Swerve magazine, the one that comes out every Friday in the Calgary Herald.
Roasted Coronation Grape & Pear Chutney
A change from the usual cranberry sauce, this deep indigo sweet-tart chutney is delicious on roast turkey, chicken or pork. It keeps well, so you can make some now for the holidays – a large batch ensures a stash to give away, too.
3 cups Coronation grapes, washed and stemmed
canola or olive oil, for cooking
1 purple onion, peeled and chopped
1 Tbsp. grated fresh ginger
1 garlic clove, crushed
1 tsp. curry powder or paste
2 medium ripe pears, coarsely chopped
1 cup packed brown sugar
1/4 cup balsamic or cider vinegar
pinch dried red chili flakes (optional)
Preheat oven to 450°F. Place grapes on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle with oil and toss to coat. Roast for 15 minutes, or until they release their juices and turn soft and squishy.
Meanwhile, heat a drizzle of oil in a medium pot set over medium-high heat and sauté the onion for about 5 minutes, until soft. Add the ginger, garlic and curry powder and cook for another minute. Add the pears, brown sugar, vinegar, chili flakes and roasted grapes, scraping any juices that have collected in the bottom of the pan into the pot, and bring to a simmer.
?Cook, stirring occasionally, for about 30 minutes, until thickened. Cool completely and refrigerate for up to 2 weeks or freeze for up to 3 months. Makes about 4 cups (1 L).
October 07 2010 | preserves | 10 Comments »
Got tomatoes? Me too. And even though I have them in my back yard, I can’t help but pick up more when there are so many overflowing bins of them at the market. And so this year I made ketchup (takes up less space than sauce or whole tomatoes – not that I’ve ever preserved my own that way anyway) – since W is such a ketchup fan, and because the bottled kind you get at the store is largely liquid sugar, I thought I’d make my own before he gets old enough to discriminate against any ketchup that doesn’t start with an H and end in a Z. I posted it over at the Family Kitchen, and it went a little bit viral – turns out it’s not just me who thinks homemade ketchup is a good idea. We talked about it on CBC yesterday morning, along with the issue of tomato classification.
To recap: Botanically, tomatoes are indeed fruit, but they are also vegetables. The term is purely culinary, referring to any plant whose fruit, seeds, roots, tubers, bulbs, stems, leaves, or flower parts are used as food. So from a culinary standpoint, a tomato is a vegetable. In the garden, it’s a fruit. Whatever you call it, I’m just happy that my plants are producing some. (Emphasis on some.) In case you do get pulled into the fruit vs. vegetable debate, you can play the Supreme Court card: legally, tomatoes have been considered vegetables since the late 1800s when the US imposed tariff laws that included a duty on vegetables but not fruit, forcing a court decision. (Furthermore, tomatoes are the state vegetable of New Jersey – 8,682,661 New Jerseyers can’t be wrong.)
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September 22 2010 | freezable and preserves | 18 Comments »
That’s what Pierre called it when we were charged with choosing one out of twenty entries at the Bowness Harvest Fair on Saturday morning. I tough job, but somebody’s gotta.
We tasted all of them. Some a few times. What amazes me in contests like this is how completely different everyone’s entry is. There was peach, crabapple, nanking cherry, raspberry, strawberry, saskatoon berry and blueberry, and I’m certain I’m forgetting some. (Come to think of it, there was no plum. What gives?) There was apple butter and peach butter and even one chutney. One sweet jelly was made with wine and was meant to be served with goat cheese. Another thick, runny strawberry jam was flavoured with fresh mint and black pepper.
Yet another was named for the Saturday afternoon it was made on. I loved this. I wanted it to win just by virtue of its hand-written label. But the jam inside – thick and pulpy (he too values the nanking cherry and wants to get as much off the pits as possible – yes, it was a man who made it) it wasn’t too sweet, and tasted like fruit. It was a runner-up.
But the best damn jam was the purest raspberry – there is nothing better, don’t you think? Just raspberries, a bit of lemon juice, sugar and pectin, I think. I’m hoping to get the recipe, but really, it’s all about the berries. And I hear this guy (another man! yes! men who make jam!) has a pretty sweet raspberry thicket behind his house. I have envy. I’ve managed to destroy my raspberries, and so far as I can tell, you can’t make jam out of chard.
For the rest of Saturday I cooked for a Great Gatsby-themed party – flapper pies, lemon cakes, pigs in pastry (a reference to the book – homemade sausage rolls), chicken satay with peanut sauce, pesto salmon bites, ham and sweet potato frittata, gruyère gougères. Today Sue arrived to work on our book – we go gangbusters on food photos this week. She came in time for Feast of Fields – such a great event if you ever have the chance to go. And we discovered a sure-fire cure for insomniacs: wine in the afternoon, then several hours of book editing.
So because it’s late and I don’t have a recipe to offer, here’s a recap of a post on jam-making from August of last summer. Because I’m newly inspired by all the wonderful homemade varieties out there, how many entrants were new at it, and how really un-scary jam making can be if you Just Do It. There isn’t much better than toast with your own jam.
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Although fruits have been preserved in sugar for thousands of years, people have only in recent decades developed a fear of jam-making. The common opinion has come to be that jam is difficult to make, difficult to set, and will take the better part of a day (or at least an afternoon) to procure. Not so. And although a jar of jam can be easily had at any corner store, it really is worth the effort to simmer some fruit yourself. To simplify the process, fruit + sugar = jam.
If you are among the nervous, take comfort in the fact that runny jam is perfectly acceptable; delicious, even. (I far prefer a loose jam to one that resembles stiff Jell-O.) If it’s exceedingly runny, you have yourself a lovely fruit syrup, one that will enliven pancakes, waffles, ice cream, fresh biscuits and angel food cake – just pretend that it’s exactly the way you intended it to be.
To get all scientific about it: the main components of jams and preserves are fruit, sugar, pectin and acid (such as lemon juice). Fruits vary in their pectin content, but typically under-ripe fruit (such as strawberries with white spots) contains more pectin and acid, both necessary elements for the jelling process. (Fruits higher in pectin include apples, currants, oranges and plums; middle-of-the road fruits include blueberries, raspberries, cherries and rhubarb; low-pectin fruits include apricots, peaches and strawberries.) Commercial pectin can always be used as extra insurance, but isn’t really necessary. Apples (with their seeds) and citrus peels are high in pectin – I’ll often add some to the pot (if I’m straining the mixture to make jelly) or wrap in cheesecloth to simmer, then pull out after the mixture has cooked.
When making jam, aim for 1 cup sugar to every 2-3 cups chopped fruit. This is not as much as it sounds – a great many recipes call for equal quantities of sugar and fruit, so feel free to use more. You’ll want to cook them together, rather than cook the fruit and then add the sugar, as the sugar helps pull water from the fruit but leaves the pectin. Add about a tablespoon of lemon juice per pound of low-acid fruit. (If you’re not sure if your fruit is low-acid or not, add it anyway.)
Bring the lot to a rolling boil and cook, skimming off any foam that rises to the surface, until it thickens and looks like loose jam. (Keep in mind it will firm up as it cools.) To test, either use a candy thermometer (it will set at around 220°F) or drop a spoonful on a small dish you’ve chilled in the freezer. If it sets up into something that resembles jam, and wrinkles on the surface when you push it with your finger, it’s done.
Sugar acts as a preservative in jam and jelly-making, so if you haven’t followed a precise formula and are nervous about properly sealing and processing it in jars, simply store small quantities of jam in the fridge for a week or two (keep a jar for your own family’s use) and freeze the rest – jam freezes beautifully.
Clear as jam?
September 12 2010 | preserves | 22 Comments »
They’re coming. It’s about that time.
If you have an apple tree in your back yard, they’re about to start abandoning their post, if they haven’t already. You may have already experienced the little tarts dive-bombing your head, or they may be starting to compost themselves right there on your lawn. Don’t you love sliding through an apple that has already turned itself into applesauce on the inside? Slippery little so-and-sos.
We talked about crab apples on the Eyeopener yesterday morning. It’s a fascinating topic if you have a crab apple infestation problem. Also very cool: the Calgary Urban Harvest Project (formally Calgary Fallen Fruit Rescue Program) – a team of volunteers who will come harvest your tree, then divvy up the fruits of their labour: some for you, some for them, some for the food bank, and some for sale at the Hillhurst-Sunnyside Farmers’ Market on Wednesday afternoons. They even do fresh-pressed-on-the-spot crabapple cider! How very cool is that?
The thing that makes people so crabby about these apples is their size. No one wants to bother peeling and coring as many as you’d need to get a pie out of it. People make jelly because you can just cook and mash them, and the cores have tons of pectin, so it sets up well. But there isn’t a jelly maker in all of us. Nor wine – a project I’ve yet to let take over my dining room. But crabapples have some selling points – they’re tart and flavourful, with potential to be more than just compost.
So what to do with them? During a spontaneous conversation on the subject in the RedPoint offices last week, someone told me about her mother slow-roasting them with cinnamon, then snacking on them by picking them up by the stem, and pulling the soft fruit off with her teeth and pulling the wee core out by the stem. What makes this even more brilliant is that you don’t even have to bother stemming them. And how easy is dumping a bunch of apples out on a rimmed baking sheet? You don’t even need to haul out your largest pot.
I tried it, and it worked, but the cinnamon didn’t stick much. For the second batch I drizzled the apples with just a tad of canola oil and rolled them around – this made the dusting of cinnamon stick, and it also gave the apples a nicely roasted exterior.
All you do to slow roast apples is spread them out in a single layer on a rimmed baking sheet, drizzle them with a bit of oil if you want, dust them with cinnamon if you want, and roast them at 300?F for an hour and a half. You may want less or more time if your apples are smaller or bigger than mine, which are about 1 1/2″ in diameter. Really, you just want to roast them until they’re soft and wrinkled. There’s no need for sugar, even though mine are tart when they’re raw – although I imagine a drizzle of maple syrup would be most fab.
Then I made chutney. I’m a fan. Chutney is easier to make than jam, if you’re intimidated – it doesn’t need to set, and is a thick, sweet-tart fusion of fruit, onions, sugar and vinegar, spiced with whatever you like – curry powder or fresh thyme from the garden. Or whatever. The beauty of a chutney is its chunkiness, which comes in very handy when you’re trying to disguise an apple core. I experimented by putting a whole whack of whole (stemmed) crabapples in the slow cooker with cranberries, onions, sugar, vinegar et al, and it cooked down into this wonderful stuff in which no one could detect apple core, which were of course pretty small to begin with. Victory.
Crabapple-Cranberry Slow Cooker Chutney
6 cups whole crabapples, stems removed
2 cups fresh or frozen cranberries
1 onion, chopped
2 garlic cloves, crushed
2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 tsp – 1 Tbsp. fresh thyme or sage, chopped, or 1 tsp. curry powder or paste
Put everything into the slow cooker and cook on low for 6-8 hours, until dark and thick; mash it all up with a potato masher or spoon, breaking up the apples. Cool completely and refrigerate for up to 3 weeks, or freeze for up to 6 months. Makes about 8 cups.
And yes, I pickled some. Because every time the topic of WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THOSE %$%#!! APPLES came up, someone’s mother or grandmother used to pickle them. And if you can pickle an onion or a beet with delicious results, why not a crabapple? I used a similar formula to the one I use for beets, and added some whole spices and rosemary sprigs, because they were there. I haven’t stored them for longer than a day so far – I’ll keep you posted. But aren’t they purdy? They need big old glass mason jars for storage – you can sometimes find them at Value Village, or at garage sales, or in my basement.
Spiced Pickled Crabapples
I don’t use measurements here because really you can pickle as many apples as you like, and the brine is made from equal parts white vinegar, water and sugar. Whole spices are put in each jar, so those numbers will depend on the number of jars you use.
crabapples – as many as you want to pickle
white or apple cider vinegar
sugar, white or brown
whole allspice berries
cinnamon sticks
whole cloves
sprigs of fresh rosemary
Wash and if you like, stem the apples. Bring equal amounts of vinegar, sugar and water to a simmer, add the apples to the pot and cook for about 10 minutes, or until just tender but not split open. Put a cinnamon stick (or half one, if they are long), a couple allspice berries and a few cloves into each jar, and a sprig of rosemary if you like.
With a slotted spoon, pack the apples into clean, hot jars, leaving about 1/2″ headspace between the apples and the top of the jar. Pour hot liquid overtop and seal. Refrigerate for up to 3 weeks.
September 08 2010 | preserves | 21 Comments »
I’m home, guys. In my own bed and kitchen. I have lots to tell, but I’ve taken to working on other stories in bed, and so wind up feeling like I’ve written a post here when I’ve actually been completely slacking in that regard. From now on I’ll relegate work to my desk (or couch/front step/coffee shop) and be more selective about who I bring to bed.
In my three-day absence I learned of some fast food trips (those five year olds are talkers) and that W’s new favourite dinner is something called egg hot dog, in which two poached eggs are served up drippily on a leftover hot dog bun from the Big Birthday Party, presumably because there’s no other bread in the house. (There was, however, plenty of fresh spinach, kale and chard that remained untouched. And wait till you see the garden.) I think I should instigate Mike Mondays, and make him cook. What do you think?
Some rummaging around this morning produced a couple scones from the freezer and upon doing inventory of the fridge (I’ve only been home about a day and a half since we cleaned out the fridge and left for Tofino) I came upon a jar of this rhubarb-ginger jam I made when it did not seem possible that the counterload of rhubarb would in any way squeeze into the freezer. And I’m pretty good at Tetris.
I won’t even pretend to write out an elaborate recipe for this – all I did was chop and cook it down, with a thumb-sized piece of ginger lazily sliced in and then plucked out afterward – you could grate it instead, and cook it down with the rhubarb.
Rhubarb-Ginger Jam
5 cups chopped rhubarb
2 cups sugar
a few slices of fresh ginger, or a few chunks of chopped candied ginger, or a drizzle of ginger syrup
Put everything in a pot, and add a splash of water only if you feel you need the help to get things going. Bring to a simmer and cook, stirring occasionally, until the mixture is soft, thick, and jam-like. Cool, pluck out any large chunks of ginger (if you want to) and store in the fridge. Makes a few cups.
August 12 2010 | preserves | 9 Comments »
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