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.

Peach seconds

This is the second 1/2 bushel of peaches we've purchased this summer. They are seconds, which means they look ugly, but are half price - perfect for jams.

Some of the bushels were pretty gross - moldy peaches or lots of fruit flies. But this one was good. It takes a little longer to inspect seconds, but it's worth the time. In this 1/2 bushel there were only 4 peaches that were questionable for human consumption and they went to the chickens. These don't look too bad after being blanched, eh?

They became jam. All of them! A few recipes below.

This is my summer jam set up. Far too hot to cook in the brick house, so we have a cast iron propane stove with three burners.


I try to keep the amount of exposed fruit and sugar low to keep the bugs down. Typically I do all the combining of ingredients in the kitchen and just bring the pot outside. That way fruit-covered utensils and sugar coated measuring cups stay inside, near the sink.

My Ball Blue Books (the blue one is from the 40s - I love it!) and a piece of paper to write down recipes as I go. This year I've been experimenting more, but it's helpful to have info on fruit to sugar ratios from the good folks at Ball.


The far blue pot is sterilizing my jars. The close pot is boiling some jam. See the steam! The poor middle burner never gets used.


Important utensils: wooden spoon for constant siring and a skimmer on the spoon rest (which gets washed about 80 times a day during jam season), and my teaspoon on a cup contraption. I scoop a little jam on the spoon and let it sit on the cup to cool a little to assist in finding the gelling point. This is more for the coarse testing - finer testing is done with a freezer plate - but the spoon lets me know when I'm close.

And a cookie sheet (which also gets washed 80 times a day) to help tote everything from the sink to the picnic table.


24 jars of jam! From farthest to closest:

1. plain jam with pectin
2. peach rum jam
3. jalapeno peach jam (below)
4. peach honey lavender jam (same recipe as the strawberry honey lavender)
5. vanilla bourbon peach syrup (below)

Many of these are only soft set, which means they are a bit runny. Because the flavors aren't really what we're looking for on toast, I've left them thinner for ice cream, pancakes and yogurt.

Yum.

Jalapeno Peach Jam
4 cups peaches
3 cups sugar
1.5 teaspoons jalapeno pepper flakes
juice of 1/2 lemon

Put it all in the pot and boil until gelling point (or a little thinner). Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

We're thinking this will go great with goat cheese or brie. Or maybe to accompany smoked chicken/turkey.

Vanilla Bourbon Peach Syrup
4 cups peaches
3 cups sugar
juice of 1/2 lemon
1.5 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 cup bourbon

Toss everything but the bourbon in the pot and boil close to gelling point. When you've only got a few minutes left of boiling, add the bourbon. It's going to thin out a lot - boil until it thickens to your liking. Process 10 minutes in boiling water bath.

If you add the bourbon early, a lot of the flavor cooks out. Adding it at the end preserves the flavor, but makes the jam thinner. Because this isn't really a flavor I crave on toast, I'm cool with that. Most of this is destined for ice cream or maybe shortcake (if I don't eat it all with a spoon, first.)

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.

Variations on Strawberry Jam

Over the past two weeks we purchased three flats of local strawberries at the Farmers Market. That's 24 quarts or 6 gallons! We ate some, made some strawberry bread, froze a bunch and made some ice cream.

But, of course, I had to make jam too!

The first flat of strawberries was a bit under-ripe. It was the first week of the farmers market and I think the strawberries were rushed. They weren't real flavorful on their own, so I chose jam recipes that included a lot of other flavor: Strawberry Lemon Marmalade (with thyme) and Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper Jam (recipes below).

The following week the strawberries were much better and became jam with a greater emphasis on fruit and less on accouterments. In addition to plain ole strawberry, we made some Strawberry Honey Lavender and Plum-Kissed Strawberry (recipes also below).

Strawberry Lemon Marmalade (with Thyme) - adapted from Ball Blue Book.
1/4 cup lemon peel
4 cups strawberries
2 lemons - juice and pulp
5 scant cups of sugar
3 sprigs of thyme

Boil the lemon peel for 5 minutes and drain.
Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Strawberry Balsamic Black Pepper - adapted from Canadian Living
4 cups strawberries
approx 1.5 tablespoons balsamic vinegar
1/4 teaspoon black pepper
3 cups sugar

Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Strawberry Honey Lavender - adapted from here
4 overflowing cups of strawberries
1.5 cups of honey
1.25 cups sugar
1.5 tsp dried lavender

Crush strawberries
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Plum-Kissed Strawberry Jam
4 plums (canned last fall)
2 cups strawberries
1.5 cups sugar

Crush strawberries and plums
Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point
Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Plain Old Strawberry - from 1944 Ball Blue Book
Measure all leftover strawberries. Add 3/4 as much sugar as strawberries. Add everything to a pot and boil to jelling point. Fill sterilized jars and boil in hot water bath for 10 minutes

Pickled Radishes...yum?

In less than a week, we've picked over 11.5 pounds of radishes. It'sa lot of damn radishes. They are totally yum...but really. Eleven pounds is a lot of radishes.

This happened mostly because Bill planted the radish seeds all at once, rather than in two week intervals as recommended on the seed packet. But what does a seed packet know anyway?

There aren't many recipes for preserving radishes. Perhaps because most people read the seed packet and spread out their planting. We did find one old timey canning recipe for pickled radishes. The garden forum where we found it said the recipe is from Colonial times.

2 dozen radishes
1 cup sugar
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tbls mustard seed
1/2 tsp celery seed
2 tsp dill weed

Stem radishes.

Mix all other ingredients in a saucepan. Heat until sugar is melted and mixture is clear. Add radishes to jars, fill with hot liquid mixture.

Keep in fridge, or can in a boiling water bath 20 minutes.

We haven't tried them yet, but the jars sure are pretty. 7 uncut pounds of radishes filled 6 and 1/2 pint jars. I quintupled the recipe above to have enough juice to fill up the jars.

We're going to let them pickle for a week or so and report back on how they taste!

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.

Plums, pears and baking

We picked up half-bushels of pears and plums at the orchard this week. Unfortunately, neither is locally grown. The last time we got peaches we asked about their origin (as we didn't see any peach trees in the orchard) and learned they truck some fruit in. The fruit is delicious, however. A few pears ended up in apple-pear crisp and the plums have been made into butter, jam and chutney. We canned some of both fruits for winter baking.

This is the most amazing thing to happen to homemade jam since yogurt. Jammy shortbread stuff:

The recipe was shared with a canning group on Ravelry. It makes perfect use of one jar of jam (or can be doubled). Our first batch was with peach/cherry jam and it was ahmazing. Yeah, it takes two sticks of butter but just eat it. Trust me. Nom.

Shortbread Jam Squares

1 c. soft butter

1 c. sugar

1 egg

2 c. flour

3/4 cup pecans, chopped (optional)

1 half pint jar of jam or preserves

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Combine butter and sugar in a large bowl. Beat on law scraping bowl often. Add egg and flour. Beat until crumbly. Stir in nuts if using. Separate 1 cup of the batter and set aside. Press the remaining dough into the bottom of a 9 inch square pan. Spread preserves to within 1/2 inch of the edges. Crumble the reserved dough over the preserves. Bake 40 - 50 minutes until light brown. Cool completely before cutting.

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!