What's in the tin?

We have a Charles Chips can which is filled with something yummy. Any guesses?

Want a hint?

How about a peak?

It's homemade hot chocolate mix. We've already made two batches this year. It's one of the easiest, most delightful treats to make. We use Alton Brown's recipe. Bill usually triples it and that lasts 2-3 months.

I think you should try it! The hardest part is finding cocoa, so I'll give you a hint - Penzey's. There. Now you have no excuse. This is amazing, yummy stuff. And have you read the ingredients in manufactured cocoa mix? Last I checked it included many chemicals including partially hydrogenated oils, which you don't ever need to eat.

Also - yes - put just a little bit of cayenne in the mix. You won't taste it, I promise. Cayenne just makes chocolate more chocolatey, as wine makes tomatoes more tomatoey and as balsamic vinegar makes strawberries more strawberry...y.

Up next - I'm going to make something other people tell me is easy and delightful: homemade yogurt.

Berries Blue

We got 10 pounds of Indiana blueberries last weekend.

Ten.

Pounds.

Bill made some dutch oven blueberry cobbler over a fire (pictured with homemade vanilla ice cream):

I made jam, natch. One is blueberry lime from the Ball Blue Book. It is my first pectin jam of the season, and the first jam to set. I still need a bit of practice on finding the gelling point. Up till now, I've made a lot of really yummy syrup that will slide right off of toast. The other is blueberry peach (recipe below). It also hit the gelling point. I don't know if that's because blueberries and/or peaches are naturally high in pectin and therefore better at setting, or if I've learned patience.

Can you tell which is lime and which is peach? No? Me either. Which is why we always label jams.

I also made blueberry pie ice cream. It's vanilla ice cream with graham crackers layered with blueberry sauce. Yum. I'd make this again, but I would modify the blueberry sauce a bit to cook more water out of the berries. After only 7-10 minutes of boiling, most of the berries are still intact and freeze into little berry ice cubes. I think a longer cook, or even using some jam, would mitigate this.

Also, I might have to make my own graham crackers. We have a "no transfats in the house" rule, and it turns out nearly all graham crackers are made with partially hydrogenated oils. Except the organic ones. Which taste like cardboard.

After all this, plus freezing a bunch of berries and tons of munching, we've still got some left in the fridge.

10 pounds is a lot of blueberries....

Blueberry Peach Jam
3 peaches, skinned and cut into small pieces (~2 cups)
3 cups blueberries
3.25 cups of sugar
squeeze of lemon juice

Combine into pot, boil to jelling point. Fill hot jars, process 15 minutes in boiling water bath.

Cooking dairy

It's been a dairy-filled weekend. Not much of this is local, but we're practicing for when we have goats.

There's been a lot of milk cooked on our stove the past two days.

This is mozzarella in the making.

This is Bill being impatient while waiting for the curds to clump enough that the whey looks clear. Instructions said "5 minutes." It was more like "20."

Finally, we got to the part where the stretching and balling happens. The resulting cheese is pretty yum. Worth the waiting.

We gave the whey to the chickens. In return, they gave us eggs.

This, similar looking process, is actually the beginning of pineapple-orange ice cream.

It's now in the freezer along with some very rich chocolate ice cream and a batch of pineapple-coconut that we just finished.

It's been a dairy productive weekend.

...dairy.

Bread day!

I hate running out of bread... To avoid that possibility in the near future, today was a dedicated bread baking day.

Today's loaves:

2 loaves of simple french bread

2 loaves of english muffin bread

1 loaf of caraway rye

1 loaf of honey wheat

1 olive oil rosemary loaf.

I am absolutely sold on the awesomeness of baking the bread in a dutch oven. The round loves above were baked in a 5 quart lodge dutch oven that had been preheated to 450 F. The crusty wonderfulness that results from this technique is a very good thing and I find the consistency and predictability to be quite high. Only problem is that I only have one dutch oven so baking throughput is not as high as it could be. It is probably worth buying a second or maybe even a third so I can bake multiple loves at a time.

Should provide a suitable substrate for JoAnna Spring's jams for about a month.

Citrus canning and squash casserole

This weekend I canned two marmalades (grapefruit and orange) and one jam (cranberry orange). It's not quite as much fun as buying a bushel of fruit from the orchard or farmers market, but it provides my obsession with a nice little fix.

These were my first marmalades and they are bit more complex than jam. It is a two day process as the peels need a 12 to 18 hour soak. The first step involves boiling the peels for a few minutes. I made use of our wood stove for this process - and I used the wood stove again at the end for sterilizing the jars and the finishing hot water bath for the full jars. I'm not comfortable enough yet with either jam making or cooking with wood to trust this method for boiling the jam (it's nice to have the instant temperature adjustments of the stovetop), but maybe some day.

The cranberry-orange jam was so pretty. I used this recipe, and boiled it in a hot water bath for 15 minutes. The recipe doesn't have instructions for canning, but I did a little research and decided that it was similar enough to cranberry conserve that 15 minutes was sufficient. I like that the recipe called for honey, which is a local ingredient, instead of sugar, which is not.

The products! Orange marmalade, grapefruit marmalade and cranberry-orange jam:

Bill cooked up one of our many garden butternut squashes yesterday. I love winter squash. They are delicious and it's great that they just sit in the kitchen all winter waiting for us to eat them.

This is how the casserole looks the day after. Still delicious. But my food photography could use a bit a work...

Bill's sausagey butternut squash casserole:

1 medium butternut squash

1 lb spicy italian sausage

1 lb elbow macaroni

3 eggs

1/2 cup cream

2 cups milk

1 tablespoon thyme

bread crumbs

asiago cheese

Cut the squash in half, remove seeds and sprinkle with salt and pepper. Roast on a baking pan at 350 until tender.

Brown sausage. Cook macaroni to al dente.

Scoop out squash guts and mix with sausage.

In a separate bowl, mix eggs, cream and milk. Add thyme. Then add this whole mixture to sausage and squash.

Mix in macaroni, plop whole shebang in casserole dish. Top with bread crumbs and cheese. Bake at 350 for 35-40 minutes.

Yum.

winter shortcakes

It is winter here.

See:

But we have been enjoying desserts of summer! It started with the peach shortcake from the cover of the Ball Blue Book of Home Canning. These are honey spiced peaches canned in July.

We've gobbled jars and jars of this stuff. Today was my first attempt at different fruits. In September I canned pears (peeled and cut in half) and whole plums. They were both hot packed in syrup. I heated them on the stove top, adding candied ginger to the pears and a little crushed all spice to the plums (which I pitted and cut into quarters).

Serve on homemade shortcake with hand-whipped cream. Yum!

Apples in jars!

Today was apple day! We picked a few bags a couple of weeks ago and today turned them into curried apple chutney:

and apple maple jam (with our own maple syrup):

Bill claims that we have earned the right to survive the winter based on the amount of food we have in jars. I believe you can never have too many jams!!! I've got some pumpkin jams to make and perhaps a few more apple concoctions, but we're mostly done for the year.

This makes me quite giddy!

Productive chickens

Despite a bit of drama with a red-tailed hawk in our chicken coop on Friday (we lost a hen), we have been making use of the productivity of the chickens.

We're consistently getting one egg a day now. So Bill has been enjoying one home grown egg and one store-bought egg for breakfast. It is hard to tell from the photo, but the yolk in our eggs is more orange AND, our eggs (on the left) are now roughly the size of those found in the store:

Last weekend we cooked one of our meat birds. Bill boiled the whole bird in a stock pot for about 8 hours. When he took it out, the meat all fell off the bones - half of it was slathered in Dinosaur and eaten on a hard roll and the other half had garden beans and carrots added to it, along with a bit of stock and cornstarch and was eaten over egg noodles.

Yesterday we made our first attempt at canning apples (u-picked from our local orchard) to keep for winter baking. We learned valuable lessons on "packing" the jars. The first two jars looked really full to me...but then we added the syrup and processed them:

From Pictures

We did a little better on the third but there are still lots of air bubbles. I think I need special canning implements (and practice) to perfect this technique.

From Pictures

We also made our first jelly from local apple cider and store bought cranberry juice. Jelly is so easy - and very pretty:

From Pictures

Finally, we were inspired by Julie and Julia to start baking our way through a cook book. Ours, however, was probably a Barnes and Noble bargain book, though it is very pretty (also, as it is a cookie book, we won't have to worry about boning ducks.). First up: bacon cornbread muffins.

Reading through Julie Powell's initial blog, I came across this, alternative view of food, which I found interesting. Thoughts?

Enough of the $40 olive oils and imported semolina flour and "please, Turkish oregano only." If I read one more dining guru gushing about "honest ingredients, treated with respect," I shall vomit, sir. And "Market Menus"? Dont get me started. The well-meant "food revolution" Alice Waters instigated some thirty years ago has metastasized horribly. The Victorians served Strawberries Romanoff in December; now we demonstrate our superiority by serving our organic, dewy heirloom strawberries only during the two-week period when they can be picked ripe off the vine at the boutique farm down the road from our Hamptons bungalow. People speak of gleaning the green markets for the freshest this, the thinnest that, the greenest or firmest or softest whatever, as if what they're doing is a selfless act of consummate care and good taste, rather than the privileged activity of someone who doesn't have to work for a living.

millions of peaches

Two weeks ago we got our second half-bushel of peaches from a local orchard. In addition to doubling our supply of peach butter, we made some honey-spiced peaches from the 2009 Ball Blue Book. After boiling the peaches in honey-sugar-water, we put them in jars and added cloves, cinnimon and allspice. I have high hopes for making some shortbread and turning them into delicious winter treats.

 

 

We also enjoyed our first ear of corn from the garden. We've been sharing it unwilingly with the indigo buntings. 

 

This morning we also shucked some coco rubico beans (and a pod of red kidneys). We have barely enough for a bowl of soup... next year we'll plant more. Now we know.

 

Local dinner

Thrusday night we had a lovely mostly local dinner of Farmers Market lamb steak and garden green beans (uncooked). 

 

The wine was not at all local (but it was good, which Indiana wine is not). 

 

Homemade bread with ginger-spiked peach butter that we made from local peaches for dessert.

 

Sugar approved as well - the sheep had lots of fatty edges, which were a nice treat for the dog. 

 

Today - we can more peaches! We bought a half-bushel (our second of the season) at the local orchard with plans to make honey-spiced peaches and more peach butter. 

No high-fructose corn syrup

Homemade bread. Contains Somerlot honey.

Update: The recipe:

1.25 cups hot water.
~ 1 heaping tblsp. honey
~ 2 tsp salt.
2 tsp active dry yeast
all purpose flour.

Mix honey into 1/4 cup of the hot water, add yeast and mix to dissolve. Add remaining hot water. Add in about 2 cups of flour and the salt. Mix in stand mixer for a few minutes, keep adding more flour until dough is the right consistency (holding together, but not sticking to the bowl.

Continue kneading with stand mixer for 10-15 minutes.

Let rise for 1-2 hours until doubled in size. punch down, let rise again. Punch down again, form into loaves, cover with damp cloth, let rise again for 45 minutes. Bake at 300 F on stone in bottom of oven. Enjoy with butter and more honey spread on top!