Yes, I know I've been MIA

To tell the truth I am getting overwhelmed with emails and facebooks and tweets and texting and blogs. So something had to give. I am just going to accept that I won't be putting as much energy into this as I used to. After all, it is clear that I'm not going to be making a living doing this. And, anyway, I just started a "cottage" business crocheting and sewing bags for sale on etsy.com. I'm very proud of myself for being able to add the code to this blog for the Etsy button it now sports.

So, enough to do!

But absence here does not mean I haven't been cooking, of course! Most interesting in the past few months is a Meyer lemon and ginger marmalade I made and canned. Lots of work zesting a dozen lemons and peeling and grating ginger but the end was worth the means. I'll make that again. Great on gingerbread, pork, and seafood.

Other highlights this winter have been Dungeness crab turnovers and bacon jam. That bacon jam is killer in a Monte Cristo sandwich, by the way.

Oh, and Happy New Year! I just know it is going to be great.

Some summer adventures

Dang, all this social media stuff is VERY hard to keep up with! I tweet, I FB, I try to blog, I email...and sometimes I have time to sleep. Oh well.

Some notes about things I've been doing:

Quick puff pastry from Nick Malgeri's "How to Bake" is da bomb. I made great peach turnovers with it. Tossed the peach slices (unpeeled, even) in brown sugar and tapioca. I may never buy puff pastry again.
(But my husband will, for some reason.)

Crab stock + chopped mushrooms + heavy cream = mushroom crab bisque, a wonderful thing. Add some "dumplings" made from the Mascarpone Crab Cakes recipe in "I Love Crabcakes" by Tom Douglas, and you have a great meal.

An Aerogarden is a wonderful thing for having a few fresh leaves of greens with everything. Just need a bit of French Dijon vinaigrette, so easy to throw together. Then serve alongside or on top of most any savory dish.

Sear diver scallops, deglaze and flame pan with brandy, add some heavy cream and reduce drastically. Pour juices off of scallops back into pan, add a bit more brandy, reduce again and serve over the scallops. Be sure to have a lot of scallops, you will want more.

I am going to be selling crocheted shopping bags and quilted brocade totes online later this year. I make them myself, am a bit worried that it will cut into my cooking time. As I tweeted today, maybe I should combine my passions and make/sell cooking bags. I will post here when I actually turn on the sales and where you can find them on Etsy. (It will be ShellysBags.)

I still love fresh roasted beets with blue cheese. I think I was ahead of the curve on this, by a very long time. I was eating blue cheese dressing on salad bar beets when I was a kid. Liked red onions with them, too, for the texture I think. Of course, I didn't grok that way back when.

If you're in Seattle and haven't been to Blueacre Seafood, what are you waiting for?'

I used a dried mix for making mint chutney as a seasoning rub for lamb shanks. Worth doing again.


Time to get ready to go to the baseball game. I'll try to be better about this, really I will!

I really haven't been gone...

...I've just been a bit overwhelmed with posting on FB and tweeting and email groups. It sure doesn't mean I haven't been cooking! I have also been spending time crocheting, sewing, and learning how to knit. And then, there was the trip to Barcelona...the market was amazing, as you can see:

Our CSA farm basket started just a couple of weeks ago. Already I've made arugula pesto and pickled Walla Walla sweet onions. Romaine lettuce with tiny Oregon pink shrimp. Mustard braised with homemade bacon. Roasted French breakfast radishes and bok choy.  This week I made corn tortillas to go with the pork I cooked in cumin broth and turned into carnitas. Yum. Add a bit of Mexican fresh cheese and some chopped sweet onions, and it is heavenly.

For not-so-local stuff I butterflied chicken breasts and stuffed with prosciutto, minced sage, and fresh mozz. Breaded in panko and baked them on a rack, so the bottom got as crispy as the top.  Sauteed greens with that.

Tomorrow I need to go up to the market to get some fish to cook with the fennel bulbs we got this week. Probably a bit of halibut, maybe halibut cheeks en papillote with fennel and greens. And then there's the summer squash. Five of those, a lot for the two of us. I will probably cut them into 1/2" cubes, salt and drain them, and saute them with onions. If the corn looks good I can add some of that to the pan, too. And I just remembered I have fresh poblanos, too, and they are great with that mix. Looks like fancy calabacitas is on the menu for the weekend.

Spicy cookies

This one is copyright 2010 Vivian Johnsen (just for the record )

Mexican Hot Chocolate Cookies

1 stick Mexican cinnamon
2 chiles de arbol
4 C sugar cookie mix
6 T water
2 T honey
6 T cocoa

Grind cinnamon and chiles together until fine. Add 1 T of the mix to a mixer with the rest of the ingredients. Combine the rest of the cinnamon/chile mix with 3 T of sugar and set aside. Form the dough into 1" balls and flatten slightly into the sugar mixture. Bake at 375 for 5-7 minutes.

Recipe testing for Cook's Ilustrated

I have my fourth recipe to test for Cook's Illustrated magazine. It is fun to do - I certainly felt special when the first recipe I tested, for beef stroganoff, was in the April issue. Today I am doing cookies. This is the first time I have found an error in how the recipe is written. The flour and sugar are given in both cups and ounces. The sugar is divided, but the weight of the division is not provided. And if you measure cups, the total of the parts does not equal the initial amount measured. So I made an educated guess. First tray is in the oven. I think the dough was waaaay too soft, so put the rest into the fridge for a few minutes. We'll see how it goes. At least I am looking forward to eating my results!

Lobster and Dungeness Crab Newburg crepes

A relative of mine just sent an email about how my cooking is always a "deluxe event." I think what I am trying to do with my cooking is make “deluxe” an everyday thing without it seeming too fussy.

However, the lobster and Dungeness crab Newburg crepes will not be an everyday thing. Aside from being complex and using way too many pans and bowls for one day, they are awesomely rich. Now, I made them a little more rich than the usual Newburg sauce recipe by going back to the original way of making the sauce a lovely pink – instead of paprika, I steeped lobster roe in melted butter and then sieved that through a tamis. A tamis looks a bit like a tambourine, with a fine mesh screen stretched across one side. You pour a mixture into it and then use a flexible pastry scraper to push whatever it is through the screen, making a very fine-textured puree. As lobster eggs are, well, fish eggs, they do have membranes associated with them so to get a nice buttery texture you really do have to get just the essence of them into the butter. The tamis worked quite well. Then you have to use that butter to make a cream sauce thickened with egg yolks. You whisk the butter and heavy cream together in a bowl over simmering water, then whisk a few tablespoons of that into egg yolks you have whisked (with yet another whisk) in (yet another) bowl to warm them, then whisk the egg yolk mixture back into the double-boiler set-up. Whisk constantly for about ten minutes while you strain to read the cookbook you left on the counter too far from the stovetop…because you have all the mess from making the crepes, and the crepes themselves still cooling on a rack on the counter, between you and that cookbook, as well as a cutting board with the lobster and crab you just diced up to go in the sauce when it is ready. And at the other counter you have your partner buttering a couple of little oblong casserole dishes to hold the crepes and sauce. Then he is cleaning the two nice big artichokes you’ve decided will go perfectly with the crepes. And he has never cleaned artichokes so you are directing him to get an oblong glass dish out so they can steam in the microwave oven as well as a cutting board to cut off the top inch or so of the artichokes and a bit off of the stem and, oh yeah, you tell him to get out a bowl as you reach with one hand down into the cupboard with the cider vinegar so he can make a bit of acidulated water to dip the cut edges of the ‘chokes in so they don’t brown…and he understands that he needs to put the ‘chokes stem up in the dish, and that if he is putting plastic wrap over them that they need to be completely covered. And you reach back into your brain to remember how long it takes big artichokes to cook in the microwave. And then the sauce is nicely thick and you concentrate on seasoning, ground white pepper (oops! just spilled some of that on the counter) and a couple of pinches of kosher salt, and is it good? You put a bit into Dave’s mouth to see if he agrees more salt, even though the seafood about to go in is salty. Then bowl of sauce over to counter, fold in the seafood, ooh that is good!, and see if you can roll it up into crepes gently draped into those buttered oval dishes – can’t just lay them out on a cutting mat because the filliing is pretty soft, and you’ll never be able to pick up the filled crepes and put them into the dishes without them splitting and falling apart. You silently thank yourself for realizing this before you try it and make a mess. You get the crepes filled a rolled with minimal hassle. Tell Dave to turn on the artichokes for another five minutes, please. Crepes into preheated oven. Crepes should be in there for less than 30 minutes so…whew!...you grab a glass of sparking cava (Spanish version of Champagne) and go in to watch some of the pretty dresses on the Oscar red carpet show. And are very glad that the lobster and crab were cooked and cleaned a few days before and that mess all cleaned up already. And that you know you’ll make a stab at cleaning up the mess after dinner, but Dave will shoo you out of the kitchen and take care of it.

Hmmm, I was only going to tell you about the right way to make the sauce pink. Those crepes were wonderful, by the way, and the artichokes were the right thing. Got the inspiration from "Two Cooks in One Kitchen" by Jinx and Jeff Morgan, Doubleday 1983.

Been busy

Wow, guess it's been a while. It's not that I haven't been cooking! My
current project is another try at corned beef. Only one brisket this
time, though! You might recall that a couple of years ago I did three.
I trimmed it very close and cut it into four pieces. Might take a
little less curing time. I also used a premium pickling spice that is
wonderfully aromatic. Might even be ready by the 17th.

Our condo has started taking advantage of a composting program so now
I have something better to do with meat and plant waste. Sure cuts
down on the garbage -- even can put the crab shells from tonight in
there. Nice little compostable bags we use to collect it all.

The crab? Crab salad rolls for dinner. Yum.

Shelly / sent from my iPhone

Comparing chicken

About ten days ago we went to a local market that had free-range chickens on sale at a great price (.97/lb). Picked one up, rubbed it in and out and under the skin with kosher salt and let it sit for two days. Rinsed the skin and then put some butter flavored with black truffle trimmings under the skin on the breasts, thighs, and legs. Cut out the backbone and flattened it, cooked it in a broil/roast manner. Probably the best chicken we've ever eaten.

Need to see if this is repeatable, and if the chicken was that good because of what it is, or it black truffle butter just makes everything wonderful.

So went back and the chickens had gone up in price but just to $1.29/lb, so picked up two of them. Also went to Costco and picked up two Foster Farms chickens. Have salted all four of them, and Thursday I will prepare one of each in the broil/roast method and the others I will roast and probably glaze with cranberry. Then we will evaluate. And of course I will tell you, just as I promised the meat dept manager at the store I would share the results with him.

Duck posole, pork posole

Skinned a duck. Put the skin in a roasting pan in a slow oven to render fat and get crispy. Boned breasts are marinating in homemade red chile sauce. Carcass is in the stockpot. Blue corn posole is soaking with Mexican oregano and cumin. Leg/thighs are waiting for the joining of the stock and the posole, along with green chile. Yes, I know I made posole stew on Monday. Oh, I forgot to tell you about that. Trimmed out the leanest tenderest part of a pork shoulder, cut into stewing cubes. Used Hatch green chiles (frozen) that DH brought back from Albuquerque and dried blue corn posole I brought back from Santa Fe last summer. It was amazing, very spicy but the flavor triumphed over the spice. I had a duck defrosted in the fridge, and caught Emeril doing a duck posole on a rerun last night, it inspired both of us. So I am making a deluxe duck posole stew today. It will freeze beautifully, I am sure. Or if there is really a lot I will can it. Gotta go skim the stock....

Trying a chiffon cake today, candied orange sections

Something one of my mom's cousins mentioned on email a couple of weeks ago has stuck in my mind: chiffon cake. I have all of my pieces in place to make one today, an orange chiffon cake. Am on hold until hubby gets home to get my tube pan down from a high shelf. While I wait, I am going to try candy-coating some clementine sections. I am using the zest from the clementines in the cake. It is kind of a lot of fuss over a cake that I will have to give away, as that's way too much for us to eat. But the eating isn't the point, I guess. I have a quart of thick syrup left over from preserving some plums and while it is not flavorful it has a pretty pink color. I'm heating it up to the crack stage and will dip the clementine sections in that. An orange glaze with bits of zest and some of the sections should make a pretty decoration on the cake.

Ricotta crab dumplings

I think these might be a bit like gnudi, which are Italian dumplings that are like the filling of ravioli without the pasta: 2 C homemade ricotta 2 eggs, beaten 1.5 C homemade crab salad Mix together. Wrap 1-oz portions in plastic wrap and secure into golf-ball shapes. Poach in simmering water until firm. Blend 1 can chopped tomatoes, 1/2 C heavy cream, a pinch of white pepper, a pinch of salt, a pinch of dried thyme, and a pinch of ground fennel. Bring to a brisk simmer. Ladle over dumplings.

Another great Hawaii food experience - fruit and loco moco

Well, we're back from two weeks in Hawaii. The time when I always have fried rice on hand and a maitai in hand :)

I think I love all the fresh fruit the best. I learned the joys of champagne mangos this trip. Intensely floral and oh, so sweet. I'm still having a little trouble differentiating rainbow papayas from strawberry papayas. So I just ate them. Best app is just a mixed fruit bowl with Maui pineapple, nice ripe papaya, and of course the champagne mangos. I like to make sure they are all cut to about the same size.

And those apple bananas! Best to get a serving of the fruit salad and then slice a banana over it at the last minute.

Oh, and for fun, a bit of dark rum. Yum yum.

Back to the fried rice. I think I did an entry on loco moco a couple of years ago. If you've never heard of it, in its basic form it is a hamburger patty on white rice with a fried egg on top then covered with brown gravy. Of course I can't leave that combo alone.

First, I want fried rice instead of white. Small dice of carrots, some diced Portuguese sausage, a minced clove of garlic, some grated fresh ginger. Some diced Maui sweet onion and some finely sliced green onion. Start the sausage in a non-stick skillet and cook until it starts to brown. Add some oil to the pan and add the garlic and ginger. When it is nicely fragrant but the garlic hasn't started to brown, add in the carrots and sweet onion. Saute for about two minutes until the carrots start to soften. Put in a few cups of cold cooked rice. I like to use medium-grain rice, the chewy consistency works great in fried rice and adds another texture. Pour in a tablespoon or so of soy sauce, preferably Aloha brand. Cook and stir until you've broken up all of the rice into grains. Move the rice to the sides of the pan and pout two eggs beaten with soy sauce into the center of the pan. Stir it around as it cooks to make small soft curds. Yes, some of it will spread into the rice and that's no big deal. When the eggs are barely set stir everything together. Mix in the sliced green onion and taste for seasoning, adding plenty more soy sauce to your taste.

Next, instead of the burger patty, I like a thin patty of spicy breakfast sausage. So fry up a couple of those or some burgers. Or whatever breakfast meat you want, ham or bacon are also very very good.

The egg needs to be over easy, or sunny-side up if you like it that way. The egg yolk is an important part because it is the sauce. I like to break two eggs into a small nonstick pan that I've rubbed with butter. Add a sprinkle of salt and a small splash of water and cover the pan for four minutes, over medium or medium-low heat (depends on the stove). When you remove the lid the thin coating of whites of the eggs of the yolks will have cooked and the whites will be cooked. Put on top of the meat and season to your taste.

Now, where you go from here is up to you. The traditional sauce is brown gravy from a gravy mix. Sometimes I like that but usually for me the egg yolks are sauce enough. If you want gravy, make it while you are cooking the rice and meat (the microwave is a good tool for this). Then pouritovertheeggsontopofthemeatontopoftherice. (supercalifragilisticexpealidocious)

Yes, it is a little time-consuming to make, which is why I make up a large batch of fried rice at the beginning of our week stay and also cook up the meat and gravy (my husband likes the gravy more than I do). Then it is a matter of heating up the components and frying the eggs.

Learning to cook elk meat

I am a city girl, so don't encounter game meat a lot. But I have uncles and a sister who hunt and usually get "their elk" every year. Some of that meat finds its way into my mom's freezer, and mom gave me a package of frozen elk meat a while back. I finally got around to cooking it a couple of nights ago.

I've never done anything with elk other than grill steaks, and I thought they had given me steaks. But the 2-lb package contained several 3/4” slices of meat, and I wasn’t sure where on the animal they were from. It looked to me like round steak.

What was important to me was to do a good job, one that honored the hunted and the hunter. In thinking about how to prepare them, I first considered that I wanted to minimize gaminess. If you don’t eat game much, that characteristic can really get to you. So first I made a paste of orange zest, juniper berries, ground coriander, salt, and fresh rosemary and sage. Spread that over all of it and put it in the fridge to chill for two days.

Next I had to consider the cooking method. Elk is very lean. I considered what meats I already knew about that were like elk, and I realized that veal is similar in structure as it is very lean. As the meat was cut across some muscle groups there was silverskin running across the pieces. Silverskin is not like other connective tissue – you can cook it forever and it will still be a rubber band. So some cutting into smaller pieces was going to have to happen. Okay: like veal, not steaks or chops, smaller pieces. That meant the meat needed to be cooked with moisture to get tender. So braising was the appropriate method. I settled on something that turned out a lot like Swiss steak.

I wiped off most of the rub, trimmed the meat of silverskin and then dredged it in flour. I used a “jacquardizer” with 47 razor-sharp blades to run across both sides of the meat. This worked the flour into the meat a little more and provided more tenderizing. It is similar to using the edge of a saucer to pound floured round steak. Then I cut the ½” thick cutlets into 1” squares and tossed them in the flour left from the dredging. From here on it was a pretty classic braising job: brown all of the meat in a dutch oven (two batches) and remove from the pan. Put in one chopped onion and sweat that while scraping up all the brown fond from browning the meat. Add ½ cup of water to speed it up. Then add 1 clove of minced garlic and a can of diced tomatoes with juice. Put the meat back into the pan and bring it to a simmer. Put into a 350-degree oven for an hour, serve over egg noodles.

It was very good. The flavor of the marinade can through and the orange and juniper flavor with the tomatoes was a real treat. It really did look like swiss steak, really tender meat (“like buttah”) with a nice gravy of the tomato juice and meat juices thickened with the flour. Dave was very happy to take what little was leftover for lunch the next day.

Making Fresh Ricotta

I've been wanting to make "real" fresh ricotta for a long time. Then, a few months ago, I was in one of my favorite neighborhood restaurants. I was talking to the sous chef, and he introduced me to a cheesemaker for one of the premier artisanal cheese makers around here. The cheesemaker told me I could come around any morning during a certain time frame and he would give me whey that normally goes down the drain. Whoopee! Many people make "ricotta" using whole milk, but that's not really right as ricotta means "re-cooked." This morning I picked up five gallons.

The whey is now on the stove with a small amount of cider vinegar added. When it comes to about 185 degrees, the curds will start to form and I will take it off the heat. After letting the curd develop for a little while I will ladle it into a china cap lined with a flour sack towel. It won't make as much as whole milk, but will be the real thing.

A day for large pots

Today is a day for large pots. But, not surprisingly, in the garden. Six as of now.

I am canning Mediterranean vegetable soup and mustard greens with lima beans and homemade bacon. That means the biggest pot, the pressure canner. And two soup pots for reheating six+ quarts of the greens and four quarts of the soup. Really both are soups but for clarity I am distinguishing them. Right now there are three quarts and four pints of the greens and four pints of the soup in the pressure canner. Has to go for 90 minutes because the processing time for greens is 90 minutes. I have two quarts of soup still, not in jars. I am holding off freezing that because...

...the cast iron Dutch oven is in the oven cooking roux for gumbo. Since I tend to make too much of anything of the nature of a soup or stew, I am sure there will be plenty of leftovers. So we'll dig out some more jars and probably have one more canner load of soup and gumbo. That one will go faster because I will do them all in pints. Dave loves having those to take to work for lunch -- and I will admit it is cool to give Campbell's a run for their money! Of course it is more expensive to make, but my canned soups and stews leave commercial in the dust when it comes to flavor and quality.

Another pot has the shellfish stock I am making for the gumbo, and the last isn't really a big pot but a sauté pan in which I dry-fried the okra.

Right now I have to go and dice all the vegetables for the gumbo. Tempis fugit!

Fall arrives, so do comfort foods

This evening I’ve been making two comfort foods for future meals. We’ve gotten a couple of bunches of mustard greens in our CSA basket and also got some bunches of tatsoi, an Asian cabbage that looks quite a bit like a bald African violet. I pulled out a couple of the last chunks of my home-cured pork belly and made a stock with it, just a quick 30 minute visit with some water. Half of the pork belly I sliced down and put aside to brown on Saturday, it is beautiful and will make a great entrée. The rest I cut into lardons (1/4x1/4x1”) and put back in the pot with onion, garlic, a couple of dried red chiles, and all of the greens. Cooked it the old-fashioned way, for a couple of hours. Have adjusted the seasoning and that “pot likker” is really good. I’m thinking to have that with some cornbread later this week.

The other item is a Mediterranean roasted veg soup. This is part of all the eggplant, squash, onions, and tomatoes I diced and roasted a while back. Six cups of that were in the freezer so I put it in a pan with a quart of concentrated chicken broth, oregano, thyme, bay leaf, and salt. It has simmered for a couple of hours also, letting the vegetables add flavor to the broth and vice-versa. That will get put into freezer containers for Dave’s lunches. Sometimes I don’t even label those; we use a specific 2-cup container for those so sometimes he just gets to grab a container and be surprised, always pleasantly.

It continues to feel like fall here. It came so suddenly three days ago - 78 degrees one day, 60 the next. I have a lot of friends on Facebook who are complaining about it, but I don’t really mind. You see, it really doesn’t rain all that much in Seattle (more in Boston and Chicago, in fact) but we have many more cloudy days.

I have included a photo of our dinner from Monday. Those potatoes were twice-fried so they puffed up quite nicely, I guess they are pommes souffle, kind of neat. The Spanish “tortilla” of course is known as a frittata in Italy. Filled with homemade sausage, onions, and jack cheese. Those orange heirloom tomatoes are just so full of flavor and were a perfect accompaniment, just enough acid to balance out the fat of the sausage.

Back to package up my kitchen results.

Another year, another birthday dinner

Tomorrow is Dave’s birthday. He’s not much on presents, but we do try to eat well on his birthday. This year he has opted for eating in instead of out. So I worked with him to develop a menu that includes many, not nearly all, of his favorite things. You know, some years it is duck, others lamb. This year it turns out is a pretty traditional steakhouse dinner, and I am pretty much making everything from scratch that can be, including the bread, the salad dressing, and the ice cream:

Mussels and clams steamed in white wine with baguette for dipping

Iceberg wedge with blue cheese dressing and tomato concasse

Chateaubriand for two with green peppercorn-cognac sauce

Steamed haricot verte (skinny green beans)

Individual purple potato casseroles

Rich chocolate cakes with chocolate velvet ice cream

I have been doing shopping for the past two days and lots of the prep work today:

- Tomato concasse are little tiny cubes of tomato flesh, no skin, no pulp, no seeds. You fillet the tomato much as you skin a fish fillet, taking pieces of the tomato and running a knife between the skin and the flesh with your knife parallel to the board.

- The blue cheese dressing is a recreation of one Dave loves at one of our local restaurants, mayo, sour cream, lemon juice, grated garlic, minced parsley, minced chives, and lots of chunky blue cheese.

- Tonight I will “butcher” the meat. I bought a whole tenderloin as the price has dropped to $8/lb, and there is so little waste. For $50 I will get at least ten portions of meat for us, including trimming I can grind up for luxe hamburgers. We were watching an old rerun of “Julia and Jacques Cooking at Home” and they were doing beef dishes. Jacques took the “head” of the tenderloin, wrapped a towel around it, and beat it with a pan to make the thickness even. Dave wants us to do that.

- I also still need to make the cooked part of the ice cream base tonight that blends semi-sweet chocolate, cocoa, and milk; tomorrow I will beat eggs and sugar with cream and blend both parts together. Have to do that in the morning. The ice cream will take about an hour in the machine then it needs six hours in the freezer to firm up.

- The cake is one that I’ve been making for years, it uses a dark chocolate mix but you don’t fix it according to the package. You add sour cream, oil, chocolate chips, and walnuts to it. It is usually baked in a Bundt pan but I am going to cook it in 8–oz Pyrex dishes. Only after making it for a dozen years or so did I see the recipe printed somewhere else, it was called (no kidding) Chocolate “Better than Sex” cake.

- I’ve picked out a Champagne to go with the first course and a Chateneauf-du-Pape we brought back from France for the main course.

Been busy canning

If you are wondering where I have been for the past couple of weeks, it's where I usually am: the kitchen. The current big project is fermenting cucumbers for kosher-style dills. It seems to be going fine, though a little slower than I would like. It is also a little labor intensive. I have to open up the 5.5 gal pail every day and skim off the scum that comes from the fermenting. Because of that, and the fact that it is a very heavy pail, it is living on the kitchen counter beside the sink. After almost three weeks it is getting a little old. But still kind of magic. A few hollow cukes but apparently to be expected. A little garlicy, a bit of chile burn. Probably need another week. I decided this year that fermenting pickles in the house might smell better than curing pork and beef in the wine cooler. That was one stinky project.

Other “fruits” of my labor:

- Honeydew syrup (left from candying honeydew melon. It really does taste like honey!

- Blueberry pie filling, dark cherry pie filling, and cherryberry pie filling. Was a bear to find ClearJel, and had to buy it in a 25-lb bag! ClearJel is a modified cormstarch that holds its jell even at pressure canning temps.

- Stone fruit compote. Just too much stone fruit in our Tiny’s CSA basket, hated to have it go to waste.

- Blueberry butter. Spiced like apple butter, you use the liquid component to make and can blueberry syrup. About a dozen of each.

- Jalapeno-mint jelly. It is made for pouring over cream cheese! Have done that for two parties and everyone sucked it up like kids at a party when they know the punch is spiked.

- Sweet-and-sour pickles. More vinegar in the syrup than for plain sweets, these are processed like you are candying fruit or making sweet gherkins. Avowed sweet-pickle haters are fans.

- I got a big pressure canner this year and so am canning my stocks, including lobster, shellfish, chicken, and beef as well as the "juice" for Italian beef sandwiches. I think I am also going to preserve my veal demi in half-pint jars.

- Tomato sauce. Just from one box of Romas but may pick up some more at Cash&Carry and do some more.

- Green chile salsa. Charred the chiles myself, mix of poblano and Anaheim. Muy delicioso!

I'll say it again: Preserving is just kind of magic. Despite the fact that I have picked all of the hottest days of the year to run my canners!

Something different

This week I did something I've only ever done once before: enter a cooking contest. This time, the "Build a Better Burger" competition, in the alternative burger category. A wonderful creation of pork and seasonings. Guess I'll find out in three weeks or so -- not that I expect any good news, there are tens of thousands of recipes sent in. But it was interesting testing and reformulating the recipe. I think it was in about 2000 that I entered the PBS "Master Chef" regional competition. My recipes, this time for a three course meal, got me selected as a regional semi-finalist. So I had to go to the cooking school at a nearby community college and cook the dinner, main course and dessert only, for a panel of judges. I didn't win, but I sure had a great time. What i remember most was singing nearly the entire time I was cooking. Anyway, I just threw my hat in a ring again. I just got the cookbook that has all of the Pillsbury Bake-Off winning recipes; I shall study it and maybe I will enter that someday, too. Oh, and yesterday I canned 11 half-pints of mixed stone fruits in light syrup. Today I took delivery of 40 pounds of pickling cukes. Guess I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

A canning blizzard?

So far today I have skinned and boned out two dozen chicken thighs. I even got picky and removed the blood vessels because I think they are unattractive in the cooked chicken. All of those thighs (almost a gallon in volume) are in a nice brine now, waiting for the canning storm. All of the trimmings are in the stockpot with the quart of broth I made two days ago. I plan to use this broth in the canning process. A few sprigs of fresh rosemary and thyme, bay leaf, and peppercorns to perk up the flavor a bit. I'm planning to can these in pints, better portions for two people or two lunches for DH. I will use the raw pack method as described in the USDA Guide. What I have will probably make 10-12 pints. While the chicken is brining and the broth is brothing, I am making blueberry ice cream. Or more like blueberry yogurt ice cream. Some thick yogurt, some heavy cream. The mix tastes quite good. Back to the kitchen...