January round-up

The last of a batch of cranberry-apple butter - more info below

Well, that was quite a month, wasn’t it? My two weeks off over the holidays feels like a looooong time ago, to say nothing of the various situations in my home and adopted countries. But I have been working to stay on track with my resolutions, which helps with feeling like I have a semblance of control, even as the world seems to be tilting on its axis. Here's my update for the month:

1 handmade project: this is definitely not done. But it is probably 50% done, and considering I didn’t know how to crochet a granny square 4 weeks ago, I think it’s coming along pretty well!

Me trying to figure out 1) how far along I am towards an actual afghan and 2) how to integrate squares using two different (but hopefully complementary) types of yarn

Peaches plus

Peaches and rhubarb are only the beginning of peaches-plus combos I have come to love over the last few years; just this summer I’ve also experimented with peach-raspberry tarte tatin, peach-blackberry crumble and, over Christmas, peach-redcurrant jam.

Peach-redcurrant jam

I used what I had in the fruit bowl to make this when I realized I had enthusiastically overbought redcurrants, forgetting that no one but me likes them. This batch was probably about 600 g/20 oz fruit, roughly 65/35 peaches/redcurrants. I added in half the weight of sugar – some of it from my stash of citrus sugar. It wasn’t a long cooking job, as it was such a small amount; I followed my usual method and I got about 2 jars out of it – one 360 g/12 oz size, and one 240 g/8 oz. I didn’t bother with canning for only 2 jars, just stashed them in the fridge for easy access for breakfast toast, yogurt-and-granola, etc.

The peaches and redcurrants make for a great sweet-tart combo – worth a try if you can a) get your hands on some redcurrants (this batch is the only time I’ve seen them for sale anywhere in Australia in the past 6 years) and b) don’t immediately eat them all yourself.

February round-up

Whoosh! There goes another month. Items of note, as recorded on my phone photo album:

My boss sent me flowers! To say thank you for my hard work on the giant project I mentioned a couple of posts back. They brightened up my kitchen for the better part of two weeks and made me happy every time I looked at them. It was such a nice feeling to know why they were there.

Peach-blackberry crumble! I made this for dinner guests early in the month, with some stellar fruit from the farmer's market. I used this crumble topping recipe and topped it with homemade vanilla ice cream (have I mentioned that I got an ice cream maker for Christmas? More on this later, I expect). Although I suspect the shot above might actually be Greek yogurt, which is my preferred crumble topping these days, just FYI in case you're inclined that way.

Birthday cake! Three people on DP's team have February birthdays, and so he asked me to provide a cake for the birthday lunch. You can't see my favorite part: I always end up with extra colored frosting, no matter how lavishly I decorate, so this time I put some of it between the layers as a surprise. Next time I'll do it on a home cake and get a picture.

Scones! Which are actually a vehicle for what's in the jar - spiced pear-blueberry butter. Backstory: I have coffee every Wednesday morning with a group of parents from Miss B's school. Attendance varies, but there is a core group of about a half-dozen of us who are almost always there. For the last couple of weeks, one regular, J, has been bringing bags of pears from his tree to give to all of us, and the cooks among us have been experimenting with them - one of them a fellow food blogger who just posted her second pear creation.

For my contribution, I cooked down about 1 kg/2 lb of pears in the slow cooker until soft, then pureed them in a food mill and returned to the slow cooker to thicken further, along with a generous handful of blueberries. Once the butter had thickened enough that a spoon left a trail across the bottom of the slow cooker, I seasoned with some lime zest and juice, a large pinch of salt, lavish shakes of cinnamon, cardamom, ginger, and nutmeg, and finished with a good slug of maple syrup. (Fruit butters don't usually need much extra sugar, as the natural sugars are concentrated through the cooking process.) I decanted into sterilized 120 g/4oz canning jars, which I hot water bath canned, making sure I had enough to share, as well as one to serve with scones I made first thing last Wednesday. I used this recipe, omitting the berries and adding half a lime's worth of zest instead.

I didn't get a picture of my favorite dinner of the month, which was last Sunday, when we had a small bunch of friends over. I was in the mood for American food, so I made this kickass honey barbecued chicken, along with potato salad, coleslaw, and rolls. I finished off with a chocolate icebox cake topped with salted caramel sauce, and we ate outside on a perfect late summer evening. It may well have been the high point of this summer for me.

And that wraps up February - first day of autumn tomorrow here in Australia (though temperatures tomorrow are scheduled to be over 30C/90F). What's in store for March?

Bluebarb jam

NaBloPoMo, Day 19.

So here's that jam I promised you the other day; I'm pretty sure the flavor combination isn't original, but it popped into my head when I came across a stand selling blueberries at the farmers' market the other day. I grabbed a bunch of rhubarb as well, and prepped it all on Saturday afternoon. I got about a kilo of fruit, roughly 50/50, added in half the weight of sugar, zested and squeezed in a lime, stirred, and left it to macerate over Saturday night. I cooked and canned it following the usual procedure on Sunday morning, getting 7 jars of jam out of it -  4 of the 4 oz/120 g size and 3 of the 8 oz/240 g size.

(The upside-down one in the picture is the only one I didn't hot-water bath can, as it wasn't quite as full as the others; I decided to try an old-fashioned method, and turned it upside-down to see if it would seal just from the heat of the jam - it did. Not only that, but the jam is now stuck that way, with the gap at the bottom, even when right-side-up. Not bad for a jam with  no added pectin!)

So the holiday prep continues apace. Which reminds me that Thanksgiving is looming on the horizon - more on that tomorrow....

Christmas prep

 

I hope that title hasn't given anyone heart palpitations; it's just that I'm feeling slightly more on top of things than usual for a change in preparing for this year's holiday gift bags. (I'm sure it won't last, so I have to enjoy it while I can.) This is mainly because, a few weeks ago, one of my Canberra friends alerted me to the fact that my local Big W was stocking Ball canning jars. I made a beeline into Civic, and secured both the 4 oz/120 g (the ideal size for cramming into a well-stocked goody bag) and the 8 oz/240 g sizes at a good price - definitely more than I would have paid in the US, but much, much cheaper than getting them shipped from a supplier in Melbourne, which has been my only option up to now. Replenishing my jar stockpile coincided with the return of jam-worthy fruits to the farmers' market, and I've got a couple of batches of strawberry and strawberry-rhubarb jam lined up and waiting for December. And I'm trying out a new combo this weekend - more on that tomorrow, I hope.

Weekend recap

1. I made a batch of sour cherry jam, following my usual method. It tastes good, but it came out really chunky - the cherries didn't break down very much - and it looks more like pie filling than jam. So I might use it for that instead; stay tuned.

2. In preparation for a Friday after-school playdate and our Saturday Tidbinbilla trip, I baked a batch of banana-chocolate chip muffins and used the last of a log of essential cookie dough to make a batch of sandwich cookies, half filled with chocolate ganache and half with strawberry jam.

3. DP got home late last night, so today he took Miss B out for the afternoon and I had a clear field to do stuff around the house and prep for my upcoming work trip: I'm going to Melbourne this week for my organization's regional symposium. I worked on various notes and slide decks, and organized my packing, using this brilliant capsule wardrobe concept to keep my overpacking tendencies in check. I even polished my shoes!

4. I used my food processor three times today - once to process a batch of sweet crumbs, again to make a batch of salsa, and finally to chop the soffrito for the risotto I made for dinner. Quite possibly my favorite kitchen tool, running neck and neck with my slow cooker.

5. I confirmed today that I've invited 14 people for Thanksgiving dinner, and that they're all coming. Keep your fingers crossed that I can track down a turkey.

Hope your weekend has been equally enjoyable.

Sniffling Saturday

I have a cold. A knock-you-flat, no-energy, even-spicy-Thai-food-doesn’t clear-your-fuzzy-head cold. A sneezing-so-hard-I-may-have-just-sprained-something cold. A so-zonked-I-can’t-think-of-one-coherent-thing-to-say-in-this-blog-post cold.

DP has it too. And he never gets sick. Especially not so sick that he cancels things on the schedule, which he did today, rainchecking a dinner guest invited for tonight until next week. Probably for the best, since the very thought of cooking anything beyond the most basic dinner makes me want to go lie down. To say nothing of passing this germ along to an unsuspecting visitor.

But after having sat aimlessly at the computer for a good chunk of time, when I had intended to do something productive (why, I don’t know), I thought I could at least share my latest successful jam-making experiment. I don’t have a recipe as such, because I kind of wing-it with jam-making nowadays. I followed my usual procedure (based on Julie’s jam without a recipe), using these components:

~8 green pears

~6 purple plums

raw sugar (half as much sugar as fruit)

lemon juice (~2 Tbsp/kilo of fruit, or ~1 Tbsp per pound)

a chunk of fresh ginger (~2.5 cm/1 in long), peeled and grated finely

generous sprinkles of cinnamon, cardamom, and nutmeg

I chopped and cored/stoned the fruit; I didn't peel it, but put it through my food mill when the fruit has softened completely. And produced Spiced Pear-Plum Jam – otherwise known as Autumn in a Jar. Perfect on toast on a chilly Canberra morning, and something for you northern types to file away for about five months from now.

Cumquat curd

Wow, am I glad I took the road less traveled and didn't make those windfall cumquats into marmalade. This curd is stupendous. I had enough to fill a little more than two jars for canning - one to bring back to C. as a thank-you for letting me forage in her garden and one to hoard for myself for a bit - plus just enough left over for a Sunday lunch dessert I'll tell you about later. For now, here's the recipe. 

Cumquat curd
I adapted what appears to be a pretty standard lemon curd recipe to make this, and I didn't bother straining out the zest (as some recipes suggest), as it had already been chopped pretty finely in the food processor and I thought it would add some nice texture to the finished curd.
 
6 egg yolks
1 cup/210 g sugar
½ cup/120 ml cumquat julp
2 heaping Tbsp cumquat zest
½ cup/120 g unsalted butter, cut into pieces
generous pinch of salt*

In a medium saucepan, whisk together the egg yolks, sugar, cumquat julp, and zest. Cook mixture over medium heat, stirring very frequently with a whisk until the mixture comes to a boil and thickens. Remove from the heat and stir in the butter. Set aside to cool.

Makes enough curd to fill to half-pint/250 ml jars with a few large spoonfuls left over.

* I used a big pinch of rosemary salt here - a fantastic combination with the cumquats.

Small batch

As soon as I found my stockpot, canning rack, and jars, I plunged back into canning after a more than three-month hiatus. I watched everyone in the northern hemisphere reveling in summer’s bounty while I tried to keep my feet warm through a Canberra winter and tried to manage everyday cooking in the TUK. I really missed my whole domestic routine, of which canning has become an integral part since early last year.

Well, Saturday was the official first day of spring in the southern hemisphere; my kitchen is nearly back to being fully stocked; and there are already fantastic strawberries available at equally fantastic prices at the farmers’ market. So I’m back to my regular schedule of small-batch canning. I’ve been on the receiving end of a few incredulous responses of the “What are you, Superwoman?” variety from recipients of my first jars, but I’m so in the routine of it now that it doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. I decided to document this week’s session as representative of my usual commitment of time and effort.

Small-batch strawberry jam, Friday 21 September

I often do canning projects on Friday afternoons - if time and work commitments permit -  when I’m ready to wind down after a week of work, school, and running around. (Yes, if I have enough time and if they’re not overwhelmingly big, I do find canning projects relaxing.) Plus, it’s a good way to make room in the fridge before my Saturday-morning trip to the farmers’ market.