Mirepoix: Beef Pot Pie

Here's another way to use the wild rice soup starter from Julie Languille's Meals in Jars.

Pin It

Chicken/Turkey Noodle/Rice Soup

Another one from Julie Languille's Meals in Jars.  Another one involving pressure canning.  Again, if you have the freezer space, you can absolutely package this up as a freezer kit using vacu-seal bags.  I really, really recommend vacu-seal bags instead of ziptop bags when dealing with cooked chicken to ward off freezer burn.

If you prefer not to use bouillon or soup base, omit it and plan to substitute broth for water in the same amount when you cook the kit.  You could freeze homemade broth, can homemade broth or keep shelf-stable store bought broth on hand to finish the meal prep.

Pin It

Canned Mirepoix

Our garden has produced very well this year and since I am not spending my autumn pregnant or caring for an infant for the first time in a few years, I am really committed to harvesting, using and putting up what's out there.

Hence the canning.

We harvested 5 gallons of carrots, something I would want in the bleak midwinter for making delicious soups and stews.  So I've canned them and dehydrated them as elements for starters for soups and stews.  This involves pressure canning which I know is not everyone's thing, and these recipes could be preserved by freezing if you prefer.  I personally am running out of freezer space, egads.

The first thing I tried was the starter for a wild rice soup from Meals in Jars by Julie Languille.  It's a good basic mirepoix, although I choose to can it with regular strength chicken stock instead of concentrated soup base as the OR calls for.  That way, it's more versatile and can be used to start soup, pot pie or chicken and dumplings equally well (recipes to come...stay tuned).

Pin It

Bloody Mary Mix

Tomatoes.  Oh my gawd, the tomatoes.  We've canned, dehydrated, canned some more, made soup, had salad, sliced them for BLTs, snacked on them right off the vine, canned some more...  And now this.  This is good.  This is different.  I like this.  I really like this with tequila.  That is called a Bloody Maria, by the way.

If you have loads of little half-pint jars, put this mix up in those...fill them three-quarters full.  This allows exactly the right amount of room for a scant shot of liquor, an ice cube or two, and a ring of pickled jalapeno...put the canning lid/ring back on and shakeshakeshake...instant cocktail in its own serving cup.  Package up two or four of these guys with a 4 oz jar of homemade spicy pickled somethings and a miniature bottle of vodka or three, and it's a darling holiday gift.

The original recipe is here.  I used some jalapenos out of our garden instead of hot sauce and added lemon juice to each jar in the amounts recommended by the Ball Blue book (2 tbsp per quart, 1 tbsp per pint, 1/2 tbsp per half-pint) to insure that the tomato juice was acidified enough.

How much you get out of this recipe depends on how thick or thin you want your final product (i.e. how much water you add).  We like ours fairly thin, so we got about 4 quarts worth.  Your mileage may vary (YMMV)

If you don't want to use this as a cocktail mixer, it would also be an excellent tomato soup.

Pin It

Advanced Prep-ahead: Beef Burgundy and a Cookbook Shout-out

Pressure canning/dehydrating is probably a step beyond what most people are willing to do to prepare and store meals in advance, so I'm going to keep this pretty short.  But I do highly recommend this book, as there are many complete prep-ahead meal recipes that do not involve pressure canning.

I tried a recipe out of a cookbook called Meals in a Jar by Julie Languille for Beef Burgundy.  I dehydrated my own mushrooms (although you can buy dried mushrooms at the store and skip this part) and did a scaled back version of the recipe (hers called for 16 lbs of stew meat and made 16 6-serving portions of finished beef burgundy), leaving out a meal's worth to have for dinner that night.  It was delicious and I'm awfully glad I've put up the 6 quarts I have along with pre-portioned cornmeal and rice for side dishes of polenta and pilaf.

There are LOADS of recipes in this book that are made entirely out of store-bought dry ingredients and can be assembled and stored in jars without canning at all, but there are also a lot of recipes for canning things that I don't think freeze very well (pulled pork and mushrooms being two of them).

I'm definitely going to hang onto a few recipes for things that would make great new baby/home from the hospital/get well type casserole gifts but that wouldn't require the recipient to make room in their freezer.

Also I gotta say, if I still lived in Florida (where our big natural disaster threat was hurricanes which will knock out power for days or weeks at a time and you'd lose a big freeze stash if one hit), I'd do more prepping ahead like this.

Some pictures...

Pin It

Garlic jelly

Due to a startling number of requests for the recipe, here it is! 

I use this jelly about 1/4 cup at a time...a little goes a long way.  Mix with a couple teaspoons of mustard and use it as a glaze on roasted chicken, meatloaf, ham, or pork roast.  Spread it on dinner rolls.  Or put a bit on a roasted chicken sandwich on rye...yum!

An overview of home canning is here.

Adapted from the Ball Blue Book (the authors of which didn't think to use yummy wine ;) ).


Pin It

Brown Sugar Double Apple Jam

Of all the sandwich spreads, jam is my favorite (to eat and make LOL).  I'm thinking about entering this one at next year's State Fair.  It's apple pie-y and slightly caramel-y from the unusual addition of brown sugar.  It's a "double" apple jam recipe b/c I use apple cider instead of water, the same way I do for applesauce.  I think I may play with the spice combination a bit, but as is, it's a delicious twist on regular apple jam.

I've tried a variety of chopping methods to make apple spreads, and the best IMHO is putting the apples through the coarse grating plate of my food processor.  The pieces come out uniformly and it's so much faster than hand-dicing.  The apples do seem to brown a bit faster when they're mechanically cut vs. handcutting (I guess b/c the plates aren't quite as sharp as my knives, and "tear" the apple flesh more, creating more surface area to oxidize?) but since you're using brown sugar anyway, color matters a little less.  You can toss the grated apples into some lemon-infused water if you want, but I think that just makes them wetter than you want for jam-making.

By the by, when you see butter called for in a jam or jelly recipe, it's to cut down on the foaming that occurs once the protein-heavy pectin is added to the pot. 

Pin It

Eat it the way you found it: Apples

Harvest Pink Lemonade

Making applesauce is no extraordinary feat of cooking.  But figuring out what to do with all the peels and cores can be.  You could just chuck them into the compost, OR you could turn them in a delicious, refreshing pink apple lemonade. 

I like using store-bought lemonade to make life easy on myself and for the fact that I usually find store-bought lemonade to be too sweet and too lemony...when cut with the pink apple juice rendered from the "leftovers" of your applesauce endeavor, it is just right.

I prefer Jonagold apples for making applesauce.  The flavor is so spot-on that I don't add anything except apple cider while cooking.  Good produce ultimately means less work for a better final product, so it's worth finding a local orchard and finding out what good sauce apples they grow.

I don't sieve my applesauce, as I think it's wasteful and I happen to like chunky applesauce.  Most recipes give a yield of about 2 pints per 3 lbs of apples, but that's if you sieve.  Unsieved, I got 11 pints from 10 lbs, or about 3 pints per 3 lbs of apples.  I give the following recipe per 3 lbs. of apples, scale up as desired.  I needed a 12 quart pot for 10 lbs of apples, and it took about 25 minutes for them to cook fully.  The peels and cores from 10 lbs made 3 quarts of pink apple juice, or 6 quarts of pink lemonade.  I froze the apple juice in quart-sized amounts.

And today's I Screw Up So You Don't Have To...if you make loads of applesauce and plan to can it in a water bath process, keep waiting jars in a pot of warm water.  That way, when you put 2nd or 3rd batches of jars into the already-boiling water bath, nothing explodes.  Just a friendly tip.

Lastly...bonus cocktail recipe!  If you get cidered out, try a Chimayo...a surprisingly un-tequila-like mix of tequila, apple cider, lemon juice and cassis (and if you don't know what else to do with the cassis, try a kir or kir royale).


Pin It

Tomato Soup

I am not a Campbell's tomato soup fan, but I do like homemade tomato soup, especially with summer-ripe garden tomatoes.  If you can or freeze, a pint of homemade soup boiled to half its volume will replace a can of store-bought concentrated soup for recipes that call for it.  Just leave out the milk for all make-ahead preparations, and add 1 tbsp per cup of soup when you reheat it.

I have a couple of favorite recipes, but here's the most versatile of the bunch.  You can peel and seed the tomatoes before proceeding with the recipe which saves a good bit of straining at the end, or skip this step (especially if you're only doing a small batch of soup) and sieve out seeds and skin at the end.  You can also choose to roast or not to, depends on your time frame and preference.  For putting up, you can freeze or can...if you can a soup made with a stock (be it beef, chicken or vegetable), you really should pressure-can...although before I knew what I know now, I canned tomato soup containing chicken broth in a boiling water bath and have lived to tell the tale.  So do as you will.

Cored and "X"d tomatoes

Peeling tomatoes is not hard (especially compared to sieving 3 gallons of soup a ladleful at a time).  To peel tomatoes, take a small paring knife and cut the stem out in a cone-shaped cut.  Cut a shallow "X" on the bottom of the tomato and slice lightly across any cracked bits of skin (important if you're using heirloom or homegrown tomatoes which tend to be tastier but also less "perfect" than store-bought). 

Parboiled, in the cold water bath

Bring a gigantic pot of water to the boil (or a smaller one, but give yourself time to let the water reheat between batches), and drop the prepped tomatoes in.  Have another large pot filled with ice and water at the ready.  Boil the tomatoes 1-2 minutes.  Keep an eye on them, and pull the ones whose skins peel back first.  Different varieties, different stages of ripeness affect how long the tomatoes need to boil before they start peeling.  Pull tomatoes as they begin to peel, and leave the tougher ones a minute or two more.  Drop them right into the cold water, partly to keep from cooking the bejeepers out of them and partly to make them easy to handle quickly. 

Peeled "zombie" tomatoes

Once all your tomatoes are chilly, start pulling the skins off.  It's kinda like peeling a sunburn ::blark::  Don't worry if you don't get every bit of skin.  To seed them, just squish the tomatoes like they're stress balls.  Cut big ones in half before squashing them silly.  Don't worry if you don't get every last seed out.  Now you'll have a pile of really horrifying-looking but delicious seeded, skinned tomatoes.  Proceed with your recipe.


Pin It

Salsa V.

Despite looking like paper-covered green tomatoes, tomatillos are related to gooseberries, which probably still doesn't tell you much about them. Underneath the inedible papery husk, they are a bit sweet and tart all at once, rather like an unripe berry. They have the "green" flavor of a green tomato, but with a fruit-like acid tinge. And I caught my 18-month-old chomping on peeled tomatillos today like they were apples...there, does that help? 

I grow tomatillos in my garden for the express purpose of making salsa v.  One or two plants should do you, unless you REALLY like salsa v.  They tend to come in all at once (at least here in Zone 5B) which makes them ideal for this type of "putting up".  Rake in your whole harvest, make salsa and process...bing, bang, boom.  Any stragglers can go into late-summer fresh salsas.  This recipe scales up or down by the pound/pint, so you can make as little or as much as you want...the basic proportion for 1 pint of salsa v. is 1 lb. tomatillos, 1 jalapeno, 1 garlic clove, 1/2 onion, 1/2 tsp salt, 2-3 tbsp herbs.

Roasting the tomatillos before turning them into salsa gives a dimension of flavor not present with unroasted fruit.  You can sear them over a grill, under the broiler or on a cast-iron pan...or not at all, your choice.  Toss the dehusked fruits with a bit of oil, and give them a good 10-20 minutes of high direct  heat, until the skins are brown and the fruits are popping open.

Pin It

Final State Fair tally

For those keeping track and waiting with bated breath for the results of my final State Fair entry...

Lavender Jelly...nuttin'
Corn Cob Jelly...1st place
Edamame Pickles...Honorable Mention
Honey Walnut Pie...3rd place

Woot-woot!  That's 3 ribbons out of 4.  Watch out next year State Fair judges, I'll be back!

Pin It

Blue Ribbon, baby

I am too stinking excited about this.  I am now an official Hoosier...1) I entered jellies and pickles at the State Fair and 2) I won.  Probably 1st out of 3 entries or something like that, but I won!!  1st place in the low-sugar category for low-sugar corn cob jelly and Honorable Mention for Pickled Edamame (below).








Pin It

Fried Green Tomatoes

I couldn't wait for all these gorgeous tomatoes hanging on our tomato vines to come ripe (and I'm a little scared of how many tomatoes we'll have when they do), so I thinned the herd and made fried green tomatoes. 

I prefer Paula Deen's buttermilk-and-flour recipe to the cornmeal-dredged recipes I've eaten before.  Using actual buttermilk (rather than reconstituted from dry buttermilk powder) produces a thicker batter coating, but you can get tasty results with the thinner reconstituted buttermilk as well.  The upside to a flour-egg wash-cornmeal coating, however, is that you can do all the dredging ahead and freeze those guys.  Just fry them from their frozen state.  The flour coating will turn into glue in the freezer.  So pick your process and product.

You can also can sliced green tomatoes for future frying.  If you still have a bumper crop of green tomatoes right before your first killing frost in the fall, you can put them up same as you would ripe tomatoes.  Slice them, pack them into clean canning jars, add 2 tbsp of lemon juice to each quart canned, fill with hot water and process for 45 minutes in a boiling water bath.  They'll come out softer than if they were fresh, but they're still dredge-able and fry-able. 

Lastly, an A.Ma.Zing thing to do with leftover fried green tomatoes is make paninis with bacon and provolone...put a few fried green tomatoes on a hoagie roll with a slice of provolone and a couple slices of bacon, and toast it up in a sandwich press (or a George Foreman grill, which is our ersatz panini press).

Pin It

Eat it the way you found it : Corn Cobs

I know making one's own jelly out of corn cobs sounds like tragically hip foodie meets crunchy granola hippie meets total whackjob off-the-gridder and that I risk losing some of my 7 readers by suggesting it, but hear me out!  The cobs have a ton of that sweet, summery flavor that you like so much about corn, so why throw them out?

I wouldn't use corn cobs that teeth touched for making stock. I know they'll get boiled, but it still squicks me out. So I keep cobs that I've cut the kernels off in a ziptop bag in the freezer until I've got enough to make stock. If you use raw cobs, you'll need fewer to get more flavor than if you use cobs that were boiled or roasted once already.

The original jelly recipe was found in a Depression-era cookbook that clearly demonstrates the frugal zeitgeist of the time.  You'll get every last drop of flavor outta that corn, by golly, if you just boil them up and use the stock to make jelly.  You can actually use corn stock in more than just jelly (like creamed corn or corn chowder, below), but the jelly is interesting enough to discuss here.  It's like making your own honey without all the stings. 

I'm doing a version that uses less sugar than the original.  A low-sugar jelly will always be slightly soft-set and won't ever pass the "sheeting" test (a metal spoon dipped into the boiling jelly will form two drops of jelly that merge and "sheet" together).  I compensate with extra pectin and a longer boil time for a firmer set.

Pin It