Homemade Jam: As Easy as Pie

Homemade jam. Go ahead, think about it. The mess, the effort, the special equipment, the self righteousness. Now think again.

If you have fruit and sugar, and you do, homemade jam is at your (sticky) fingertips. You don't have to pick the berries. You don't have to hermetically seal the end product. You don't have worry about odorless, tasteless, killer bacteria.

You don't even have to be a hipster. You just have to cook a little fruit with a little sugar.

I had some strawberries that were on their way out. They weren't even local berries, just some Big Organic (not that good for the planet, but also not that bad, right?) fruit that I had lying around, getting a little fuzzy around the edges. I halved them and simmered with less sugar than you think goes into jam for less time than you think jam cooks for.

I didn't add pectin. I didn't add rosemary or anything else that doesn't belong in jam but increasingly finds its way there.

As soon as the heat and sugar permeated the fruit, my limp, squishy strawberries transformed into vivid, cartoon like fruit. They went from looking like something that you wouldn't want to eat to looking like something that you wouldn't want to eat because you'd think they'd been dyed and thickened with cornstarch.

But no. The thick, ruby red concoction was more natural than most of the girls who went to my South Florida private high school. The berries were plump and toothsome, full of seeds that popped and crunched between my teeth. The flavor was tart and fruity, just a shade sweeter than what you might pick from the vine, and nowhere near as cloying as, say, Smuckers.

It was easy. It tasted amazing. It resurrected my fruit.

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Recipe: Homemade Strawberry Jam

-strawberries that no longer look good enough to eat fresh
(about 2 cups)
-enough water to cover the bottom of the pan - no more!
-a fat pinch of unrefined sugar

1. Wash and halve the strawberries.
2. Combine all ingredients in a small pot or pan.
3. Cook until the berries are vivid and surrounded by thick syrup.
4. Cool and store in the fridge, if it lasts that long.

A Rind is a Terrible Thing to Waste... I Think

Thanks to recycling, I'd just as soon throw a can into the trash as a dog would pass through its invisible fence. In other words, every now and then I do, but it causes me great pain.

I'm hoping that after reading this post, people feel the same way about citrus rinds. Though precisely why that is I don't yet know.

Here's what I do know. Every time we eat a clementine or a squeeze a lime for a michelada, we simply toss (or compost) the rind. But the rind is a powerhouse of vitamins, and it's used in everything from marmalade to Chinese medicine. In other words, there's a deposit we can claim on this bottle.

I haven't decided what to do with the rinds I'm saving, so for now they're simply thumbtacked to the kitchen wall, where they've dried quite nicely and look like tropical snakes. I first thought to save my rinds when I read the following in Joan Nathan's Jewish Cooking in America:

"The [orange] peelings were to be scattered all over the room, so that they could fill it with their aroma. When they began to wither, they were to be cooked for a long time and then used for preserves."

The quote hails from a Polish immigrant who was experiencing their first orange and clearly intended to make the most out of it. If someone handed me an orange for the first time, I certainly wouldn't throw any of it out. Especially not during the Great Disruption.

A Ukranian friend of mine suggested hanging the rinds up in closets as moth deterrent, but I was hoping for something I could eat. Any suggestions?

Cured Duck Breast à la Ruhlman

In December Michael Ruhlman blogged about how incredibly easy it is to cure your own meat, here and then again here. The original post was entitled "Salt!"

And those are really the only two ingredients you need: salt and enthusiasm.

I couldn't imagine that it was as simple as Mr. MR said, so I decided to test his most basic recipe. I took a duck breast, wrapped it in salt for 24 hours, rinsed it off, and hung it up in a red bandanna not unlike one you might find dangling from the stick of Emmett Kelly.

Pre-salting it looked like this:



Post-salting it looked like this:



The flesh had darkened to a deep, almost purple red, as though somewhat cooked (which is what the salt does). I realize these photos would have a stronger before-and-after effect if I had shot the same side of the breast each time, but I didn't. So shut up.

When the appropriate length of time had passed (one week), I sliced off a piece, giddy with anticipation. It was disgusting.

Elise pointed out that it may have been the way I cut it. If you think of biting into a thick hunk of prosciutto (or prosciutto Americano), you can imagine it validating the too much of a good thing theory. I tried slicing it thinner, a difficult task for someone with knives like spoons. It wasn't bad, which of course means that it also wasn't good.

Once I trimmed the fat (saving it for rendering), I found that a thin slice was quite palatable. Still, it seemed like Ruhlman was right about being able to cure with nothing more than salt, but not about having it be something that you're particularly interested in eating. When I fried some up, all that changed. Crisped in a pan like bacon, the cured duck was extraordinary.



Ruhlman was dead on. With nothing more than salt, meat turns from a ticking time bomb of expiration to a delicious treat that you can keep enjoying from the time you cure it until the time at which you become neurotic about how long it's been since you cured it.

The duck bacon performed best when slivered, crisped in skillet, and served with something of contrasting texture and flavor. For instance, on top of a root veggie mash, as pictured at top.

In addition to tasting great, Ruhlman's simple salt cure provides an extremely low tech solution to making food last. No doubt this is an ancient answer to a problem we now counter with machines that require massive amounts of ill begotten energy.

How convenient that nature provides fixes to its own problems. God made meat that goes bad quickly, but god also made salt. And Michael Ruhlman.

Finally, Something That Does Grow on Trees

As I pulled into the driveway last night, I caught two interesting objects in my headlights. One was my dog Oli, chewing a stick twice his size while on a walk with Elise. The other was a plastic gallon jug that clung to the trunk of our neighbor's maple. If you're from New England, you probably know what that means: syrup season.

Turns out that our neighbor, a retired engineer, started tapping all the sugar maples on the block about two years ago. When I inquired about the presence of the many floating milk jugs, he gave me a tour of the trees and explained the process, which he kept describing as "really easy" and "so simple!"

Though legally blind, he can still make out the sugar maples by their bark. He drills two to three inches into them, inserts a short metal tube, and sticks a milk jug on it. The sap flows when you've got freezing nights and warm days, and on a good day he might get a gallon of sap from a single tree. Of course this has be cooked down to about one fortieth its volume, but the (clean) plastic trash can in which he stores the sap already has about 30 gallons in it, and the season has just begun.

When I came home last night, I was hot, tired and cranky after an eight hour cooking shift. I parked the car, saw the jug on the tree, and didn't think twice. I walked over to the maple, lifted the jug off the tap, and took a swig. The tree filtered sap tasted like the cleanest water I'd ever had, with an unmistakable maple flavor. It was ice cold, it was delicious, and it was straight out of the tree.

Of course that's one-fortieth of a mouthful of syrup we won't get, but it was worth it.

I Made Corn Stock. Now What?

All summer and fall, Elise and I added our corn cobs to a bag in the freezer with the hopes of making a stock come winter. (Okay, we both added the cobs, but only I had the hopes.) But now that I've done so, I don't know what to do with it. Suggestions?

For months the cobs lay dormant beside goat kidneys, the tougher bits of chicken of the woods mushrooms, and other such ingredients I had not yet figured out what to do with. Yesterday, while working from home, I finally freed the cobs from their icy slumber and filled up the stock pot I had originally found on the curb in Somerville.

I let it simmer with nothing else but a fat pinch of salt for a few hours until the amount of liquid had reduced by half, the other half now clinging to the insides of the windows as condensation (corndensation?).

The stock was thick, rich and golden in color, and it tasted as sweet and grassy as you'd hope it would. But such a summer flavor now seems out of place, and I can't quite think of what to pair it with.

Ideally I would use it with actual corn to accentuate the flavor, but I didn't save the corn, just the cobs. I like wringing flavor and nutrition from something I've already finished, and would just as soon make stock out of something I could eat as I would support growing edible crops for biodiesel. In other words, I wouldn't.

Egg drop soup? Grain-on-grain risotto? Take a corn stock bath? Your thoughts are most appreciated.

Homemade Tortillas

For no good reason, in all of my 28 years I've never made a tortilla. Pita, crepes, pancakes, yes. Tortilla, no. (That last sentence was in Spanish.)

And I still haven't, but last night Elise did, and the results were transformative. If only the standard, suburban "taco night" style dinner would replace packaged tortillas with the real deal, that horrible imitation of Mexican food would become less wooden puppet and more boy. If you then improved on ground beef with "taco seasoning" and shredded iceberg lettuce, so much the better.

But even if you're having DIY burritos or fajitas and you've assembled the world's finest fillings, relying on the contents of that telltale slim ziplock bag for your wrapper can still undo all of your efforts.

Last night I realized that there's nothing like holding a homemade tortilla in your hand. It's durable, yet pliant. Soft, yet firm. It's like holding the hand of a trusted friend, and then eating that hand.

We (Elise) also poached a couple of chicken legs and made a simple sauce with a can of diced tomatoes, dried poblanos, and a splash of the cooking liquid from the chicken. We rolled up the meat from the chicken with a hearty dose of the red sauce and a spear of romaine and were in heaven.

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Recipe: Tortillas
From the More-With-Less-Cookbook
(makes 8-11 tortillas)

Combine in mixing bowl:

2 c. unsifted flour
1 t. salt

Cut in with pastry blender (or a fork or your hands):

1/4 c. lard or shortening (we used butter)

When particles are fine, add gradually:

1/2 c. lukewarm water

Toss with fork to make a stiff dough. Form into a ball and knead thoroughly on lightly floured board until smooth and flecked with air bubbles. To make dough easier to handle, grease surface, cover tightly, and refrigerate 4-24 hours before using. Let dough return to room temperature before rolling out.

Divide dough into 8 balls for large tortillas or 11 balls for common 8-inch size. Roll as thin as possible on a lightly floured board, or between sheets of waxed paper. Drop onto a very hot ungreased griddle. Bake until freckled on one side. (Takes only about 20 seconds.) Lift edge, turn, and bake on second side.

Homemade Granola

I can't remember the first time I had granola, but shortly afterwards I wrote it off. As a kid, it was too healthy. As an adult, it wasn't healthy enough. What began as a wholesome, grain based snack had at some point morphed into candy for rich hippies. Until I made it myself.

Ah, the power of "homemade." After years of eating a food dictated by popular consensus, in your own kitchen you finally gain the satisfaction of unchecked creative control. Want a salty granola? It's your call. Granola dotted with marrow croutons? Yes, we can.



Making your own version of a commercially available food is deeply satisfying for any home cook on a budget, especially if you have control issues. When I made my first batch of granola, and I've made more since, it finally tasted how I've always wanted it to and it cost what I've always wanted to pay: next to nothing.

While it might seem like a specialty snack, I didn't even have to buy anything to make it. If you feel the need to load it with acai and gogi you'll have to make a trip to the obnoxious store, but otherwise you can make do.

I adapted Bittman's recipe to what I had on hand, combined with observations from having watched others make it in the past. My version is not candy, but I do eat it as though it were. And it makes the house smell like winter should.

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Recipe: Tons of Great, Cheap Granola

6 cups (real) oats
2 cup sunflower seeds (or whatever)
1 cup dried currants (or whatever)
1 cup dried coconut
1 cup honey
2 tbsp canola oil
pinch of salt
dash of cinnamon

Pre-heat the oven to 325. Combine everything but the currants and oil and mix well.

Spread the oil on two baking sheets, divide the granola between them, and toss lightly.

Bake until brown but not burnt, stirring as often as necessary (about 4 times, about half an hour.)

Let cool. Feel cool.

The Best French Fries I've Ever Had

Until now, the best fries I'd ever had were in Ithaca, NY. It's no secret that I have a soft spot for the town, but it's with good reason.

A friend of mine who is also a former Chez Panisse employee is considering moving from the Bay Area, and Ithaca is near the top of her list. Partly because she's interested in a grad program there, but partly because it's one of the few towns in America that won't make a former Bay Area foodie feel like they live in the desert outside of the house in Beetlejuice.

So it was no surprise that I had great fries there, especially because the region is also known for something called salt potatoes. But yesterday, all that changed. Elise had a rare free night now that her new show is up, and there was only one thing on her mind: making fries.

They were the perfect fry, with crisp skin and light and creamy guts. She admittedly has a heavy hand with salt, but in this case it was just right, going toe to toe with the surprisingly sweet taste of the taters. Crispy, fluffy, sweet, salty - may my epitaph be so kind.

We have three guesses as to why they were so ethereal. First was her general skill, including the decision to steam and then fry. Then there was our luck of having the right potatoes chilling in the hallway thanks to our winter CSA. But the third and most unusual reason was the choice of fat, or fats, rather.

We just so happened to be low on all oils, so she made a blend of peanut, canola, and olive. We wouldn't have done so for any other reason but necessity, but it just might have been the killing stroke that made these the best fries of my life.

Now who's gorges?

A Complete Waste of Apples

One of the reasons I was excited to move to my current place of residence was the apple tree in the front yard. I can't pin down the variety, but it seems to fall somewhere in the red delicious family. They aren't the best eating apples, but they bake like nobody's business.

So you'd think I would have used them for baking. Nope! I decided on cider, despite the fact that I didn't have any of the necessary equipment or know-how. This was also right before I learned that good cider contains a carefully blended mix of different apples selected for complimentary flavors. Instead, I just took all the scraggly ones left at the end of the season, ran them through my neighbor's juicer, then used a piece of an old pair of pajama pants for a filter.

The flavor was all wrong, the texture somewhat chalky, and I lost a high percentage of the liquid due to the inadequacy of my filtering setup. What would have made loads of fantastic crisps, tarts and pies made less than one wine bottle's worth of cider.

"At least I'll have alcohol made entirely from my front yard," I thought. Wrong again. It went moldy. It was, as the title of this post suggests, a complete waste of apples.

That said, I did dump the cider/vinegar/mold onto the ground by the tree, figuring that it might at least be appetizing to the bacteria which colonize the dirt. In doing so, I performed a rather tradition wassail.

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RECIPE: Ruined Cider

Take lots of apples that would be great in something besides cider, and make cider from them.

Incorrectly ferment the cider, rendering it useless.

More on Cider

After traveling for the holiday, Elise just returned home and checked in on our latest batch. I had stashed it in Grolsch bottles, not quite sure what would happen. She had this to say:

Last night I drank a 1/2 bottle of cider and it was superb. It was still a little sweet, but definitely had become alcoholic and moved beyond the soda phase. It was the best of both worlds because while the alcohol had a warming, relaxing effect, the tonic qualities made me think I was doing something good for my body. I did lose a bit of it to the sink, however, when I opened the bottle to an excited POP and the foam immediately began to bubble over.

Not So Hard Cider

I'm glad to see that hard cider is catching on again, nowhere more so than in my kitchen. It's by far the easiest homebrew, requiring no special ingredients or equipment and almost no effort. And if you start with good cider, the end result will be just as delicious (and intoxicating) as the $12-a-bottle variety.

The only trick is finding a cider that doesn't have preservatives. If it's been pasteurized, it should still work, but if you can find one that has not been, all the better.

In the past I've let cider go pretty far, allowing most of the sugar to be consumed by the natural yeast to yield a strong, crisp, dry brew. But lately I've been much more into half-fermented cider. I drink it sooner, as a bubbly, tangy, naturally carbonated sort of apple soda. The above photo doesn't quite do it justice, because in real life the stuff has a head like beer.

Maybe it's those friendly, naturally occurring yeasts, but I swear it has a tonic effect in the old fashioned sense of the word. This is the kind of food prep where you "let" rather than "do."

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Recipe: Homemade Hard Cider

Acquire cider without preservatives, and ideally without pasteurization.

Pour it from its plastic container into something glass, like a large mason jar or empty wine bottle.

Cover the neck of the container with a piece of cloth and a rubber band. A snip from an old (clean) T-shirt makes a particularly fine barrier for dust and fruit flies.

Let sit until it has reached the desired level of fermentation. About a week for the tangy, natural apple soda, two to three for booze.

Savory Fruit Leather

I received this amuse bouche from someone who got it at the The Common Ground Country Fair, which is perhaps the only place on Earth where you can eat sustainable funnel cake.

A far cry from the fruit roll ups I grew up eating, the flavor of this leather was tomato-garlic-basil. When I heard that I thought "yuck" and then "hmm." When I ate it I went "yuck" and then "mmm!" and then "yuck" again.

But it got me to thinking about different interpretations of fruit (or vegetable?) leather, and sure enough a little research proved that there are people out there who are making varieties of edible leather that are also pretty out there. Still, the one I ate is the least appetizing I've encountered.

Are you or someone you know making strange kinds of edible leather? Can you trump the weirdness of tomato-garlic-basil? IMWTK.

Mexican Pineapple Vinegar

The choice is yours: make your own homemade Mexican Pineapple Vinegar or just keep throwing away pineapple peels like a fool.

After butchering my mom's latest pineapple crop, shipped direct from her backyard in Delray Beach, FL, I recalled a use for pineapple peels in the counterculture foodie instant classic Wild Fermentation. Like all of the author's recipes, this is ridiculously simple, surprisingly productive, and yields a free, healthful, flavorful and homemade food almost out of thin air.



Looking back on all the pineapples whose rinds I've simply discarded, I now see lost opportunities for bottles and bottles of this miraculous liquid. All you do is soak cut up hunks of pineapple peel in sugar water, and wait. That's it. The result is a compelling yellow liquor with the flavor of the fruit and the bite of vinegar. Besides tasting I have yet to use it, but I'm thinking it will serve as a secret weapon in my next salsa, guacamole, or gazpacho. Other suggestions?

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Recipe: Pineapple Vinegar
From Wild Fermentation by Sandor Ellix Katz

1/4 cup sugar
Peel of 1 pineapple
water
cheesecloth (or old T-shirt)
glass jar

Note: Unless it's coming from your mom's backyard, you probably want to go organic here. You want pineapple vinegar, not pineapple-doused-in-poison-and-food-grade-petroleum vinegar.

1. In a jar or bowl, dissolve the sugar in 1 quart of water. Coarsely chop and add the pineapple peel. Cover with cheesecloth to keep flies out, and leave to ferment at room temperature.

2. When you notice the liquid darkening, after about 1 week, strain out the pineapple peels and discard. (compost!)

3. Ferment the liquid 2 to 3 weeks more, stirring or agitating periodically, and your pineapple vinegar is ready.

Another Note: I left the peels in for about three weeks and never "agitated" and it worked just fine.

Bottoms Up

If there are 33 reasons to drink tea, there must be even more for wine. But here's one you may not have thought of: garden edging.

I first saw this creative recycling technique outside of a health food co-op in Savannah, GA. Originally I didn't think having glass on the ground was a good idea, but as anyone who's seen the nose bashing scene in Pan's Labyrinth knows, the butt of a bottle is actually quite strong.

To be more accurate this would technically fall under the "reuse" part of the earth friendly trinity. Think about it this way. You want a border around your garden. You have wine bottles that you need to get rid of. You don't want to give your neighbors the chance to judge you by the amount of empties in your recycling bin.

I installed this barrier around a friend's herb garden, and the effect was Pavlovian. One look at rosemary growing next that familiar green glass and you can't help but think of great meals.

Remembering Spring, Pt. 2

Superman had kryptonite, and I have rhubarb--my great weakness. In the presence of rhubarb I lose all sense of modesty and proportion. I just harvest and/or buy it until there isn't any left. Last year I trundled across town in an April snowstorm to follow up rumors of the season's first stalks. One day I will look back on my family's rhubarb patch as a formative experience.

I've cut rhubarb through July, and maybe later, but in the markets it's an early season item--probably because people inevitably associate it with strawberries. Fanatics like myself stock up, and freeze.

Last week I laid in my annual supply of strawberry rhubarb jam and hardly made a dent in the rhubarb. Next up was rhubarb ginger, a genius concept I first tasted in Killarney. Liberal amounts of diced ginger lend a warm spice to the jam without detracting from the rhubarb's killer tartness. I started with a double batch, in case the proportions weren't right, but they were spot on--the jam is neither gelatinous nor mushy. For better or worse, I've run out of jars, so the rest gets frozen. In October, when I find that I've somehow eaten all my jam, I'll thaw it out for a rhubarb crisp. Ladies, gentlemen: to rhubarb.

Okara "Soysage"

One way you can look at the last era of American food is a test of the effects of bounty. What happened when we, a thrifty, pioneering people, were suddenly given never ending supplies of food and water and garbage that magically disappeared when placed on the curb? The answer: all hell broke loose.

Just in the past six months, fuel costs have soared to record highs and the price of wheat has tripled. The global food crisis is no longer a matter of sympathy, as we can now empathize with all those peoples around the world who we've so thoroughly screwed in procuring the cheapest, most consequence free food in human history. Of course this has been happening for decades, but it wasn't until my access to affordable fuel and bread came into question that I realized how hard we've socked ourselves in the gut.

However, hope remains. I stayed over with some friends in Maine last night, and for breakfast they served up a hot batch of okara soy "sausage," aka soysage. This hearty, flavorful and highly nutritional meal was made entirely from the by-product of their new soy milk maker. They put in the beans, out comes soy milk, and from the remaining solids they're able to make a whole other food.

While soy is a relatively new crop to our shores, their thrifty use of it is nothing fresh. Not only has okara been a staple in many Asian countries for centuries, but their making it in the U.S. represents a return to the way we've always done things, here and everywhere, for all of history. In a way, it's a good thing that we're losing our magical ability to consume whatever we want, whenever we want it, turning up the air conditioner on those increasingly common record temperature days. God is finally taking away our toys, so we're going to have stop playing with our food.

Fortunately, unlike other revolutions (ie: the French one), the food revolution promises to be delicious. It was tough convincing racists to adopt Civil Rights, but it shouldn't be as hard to convince people to eat food that happens to taste a whole lot better.

Save us, soysage.

Bottling Kombucha

An ancient beverage thought to date back to the Qin Dynasty in 250 BC, Kombucha has only recently tipped here in the U.S. Perhaps that's because it was a well guarded Chinese health secret, but more likely it's because it's weird and slimy.

Making it at home is much more rewarding and infinitely more cost effective than buying it. And like many homemade products, it's also usually much worse.

Until now. For fifteen bucks I bought a bottle capper and caps at a local brewery supply shop, poured the brew into beer bottles, and capped them off. The capping alone won't stop fermentation, so I stuck them in the fridge, except for one, which I left out for a few more days. That one was as fizzy as a Coke.

To avoid confusion, I labeled each of the bottles, which formerly housed my roommate's Amstel Light, with a piece of masking tape marked "kombucha." I wouldn't want him to get healthy instead of drunk.

Hojicha Kombucha

Quite serendipitously, I ate five fermented foods yesterday: yogurt with breakfast, eerily green Japanese pickles and miso with dinner, and a mid-day nosh of the homemade pink kraut. But the finest by far was this home brewed hojicha kombucha. Besides assonance, consonance, and a nice rhyme, it also had fantastic flavor and fizz, that golden (beige?) fleece of the kombucha homebrewer.

To describe the taste of kombucha is to risk insulting it. Vinegar, beer, wine and rot come to mind, and yet the taste is pure and clean. This particular batch has a distinctive, toasty, caramel flavor thanks to the hojicha. I was given a bag of it by a good friend and decided to stretch out the last few portions by feeding it to my kombucha mother. Apparently she liked it as much as I do, and now I'm drinking her delicious babies.

Pink Kraut II

A boyhood wish has been fulfilled - I finally have all the sauerkraut I want!

About a month ago I chopped up the remaining good parts of the eleven heads of green and red cabbage I bought at the season's last FarMar.



Salt plus time plus magical wild yeast, and poof! Fresh, living, zingy pink kraut. This one doesn't have the same snappy, fruity flavor that my last batch did, but I think it's just because the cabbage was pretty pooped by the time I got around to it. It's still great and a thousand times better than any of that pallid shred you get from a can or jar. Plus, I've managed to stretch out locally grown veggies deep into a Massachusetts winter.

Aloe Drink

My grandmother swears by drinking aloe, and judging by her health as an octogenarian, I probably should too.

To ensure an affordable, consistent supply, she basically ran her own small aloe farm from the eleventh floor balcony of her North Miami Beach condo. I copy her recipe whenever a leaf from the plant in my bedroom becomes damaged. I slice it off, chop it up, cover with boiling water and let sit overnight. At first the pieces dance up and down, as captured in the photo above. The liquor then becomes yellow and deepens to red.

Maybe it's not for everyone, but I find it thrilling to consume something that's grown in my bedroom. In fact, I like it so much that I just ordered a bunch of heirloom seeds for a little bedside salad garden.

I haven't had enough aloe to comment on its medicinal properties, but rest assured that a quick google search will yield plenty of wildly contradictory, crackpot testimonials.

As a drink, aloe is slightly astringent, with a familiar flavor like strong mineral water. The raw gel is gag-reflux bitter, and I always thought the drink was too. But after my last brew, I took one sip of Honest Tea's plain, iced green and realized how much nastier an incompetently brewed comellia sinensis is. Like the avocado leaf tea and the hibiscus, it's a subtle and wild taste that probably predates the cultivation of tea, or frappuccino.