Cranberry jelly

My husband is a cranberry jelly fiend.  It's not a holiday meal (*a*n*y* holiday) without cranberry jelly. I love homemade cooking (duh, right?) but it's one thing he will not get on board with me making homemade.  Cuz nothing is as good as the slices of Ocean Spray canned cranberry jelly. Pthbthbthb.

This year, I found a game-changing recipe.  It's dye-free (important at our house these days, though I don't know for sure whether canned cranberry jelly typically has artificial dyes...didn't buy any this year, didn't check), and uses honey instead of refined sugar.  Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, loved it.  The baby, the boys, my husband, even the especially picky eaters at my table.  It does like strongly of honey, unlike commercial canned jelly which tastes like white sugar. So if honey's not your thing, you might try using a lighter-flavored sweetening syrup like agave or rice syrup.

I did not do this insanely genius thing from Food52, but the next time I make this recipe, I totally will.  It will make it an even better "copycat" of the store bought jelly.  I'm curious to try Food52's pectin-based recipe vs. this gelatin-based recipe, but either way, molding the jelly in a recycling tin can is brilliant.

After you simmer the cranberries for their juice, you're left with a fair bit of cranberry squish.  Use it again to flavor a simple syrup (equal parts water and sugar) for cocktails, or put the cranberry squish in with a bottle of vodka to make flavored vodka (also for cocktails).  Or add some to your next smoothie.  Just be advised that cranberries have very little natural sweetness, so you'll have to compensate with your other flavors and ingredients.

Original recipe from: The Kid-Friendly ADHD & Autism Cookbook by Pamela Compart

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

Blood Mary Cocktail Bites

Finished in-tact celery ribs 

This is adapted from Time Ferriss' The Four Hour Chef.  His recipe uses a thickener called agar agar which I do not typically keep in my kitchen and would have to go a bit far afield to acquire, so I use the more easily found unflavored gelatin.

Agar agar is a vegetarian thickener, whereas gelatin is an animal byproduct, one reason to choose agar agar instead of gelatin if that's your thing.  Agar agar evidently sets up with a more solid, toothier, less jiggly texture than gelatin too (I think this is the reason Ferriss uses it...the section in the book on hunting game and cooking it in the field suggests to me that he's not a vegetarian LOL)  It may also set up somewhat more quickly than gelatin, but I've never actually used it so that's speculation based on what I read on the interwebs when I was trying to figure out whether I could successfully substitute gelatin for the agar agar.

I don't know what the exact conversion from agar agar to gelatin (or vice versa) should be, but I know 1 packet of Knox gelatin thickens 1 cup of liquid so that's what I used (the OR calls for 2 tsp of agar agar to thicken approximately 3/4 cup of liquid).

So my execution notes...
Pin It

Ginger pork chops

I saw the original recipe for this one in an email recipe newsletter (you know, the ones that usually go straight to the junk mail folder sight unseen).  I'm glad that newsletter didn't get automatically junked this time!  I've modified the original recipe significantly in order to make the recipe freezer kit-friendly, a leetle more calorie-friendly and because it's the wrong season to be finding candied ginger easily at the store. 

If your grocery store sells packages of "assorted pork chops" (meaning a mix of bone-in and boneless, loin and sirloin chops), this is a great recipe for those guys.  Please note there is no pepper or salt called for here...the ginger carries plenty of zing so pepper would be overkill and the soda brings sodium to the party. 

To shortcut the actual cooking of this recipe, you can skip the browning step if you are really pressed for time or only brown on one side...if you choose the latter, be sure to put the browned side up in the baking pan.  I highly recommend roasting some broccoli, cauliflower or carrots alongside the pork chops to cut down on the allover dinner workload.

 I like Vernor's ginger ale for this recipe (and just in general). It's got the strongest real ginger flavor IMHO of the ginger ale brands that are widely available. I'm sure there are micro-soda companies making really good ginger ale or ginger beer (not an alcoholic beverage, btw), and if you have some available (especially ginger beer) use that!

Extra double bonus cocktail recipe: Dark and Stormy...1 shot dark rum over ice in a 12 oz. glass, fill with ginger beer. 

Pin It

Wretched excess, grapefruit style

Sauteed Grapefruit Chicken with Salad and Grapefruit Honey Dressing

It's that season...big boxes of all manner of citrus fruit everywhere...in the grocery stores, being hawked by your local high school band members, in the mail from far-away relatives.  Tangelos, tangerines, big navel oranges, small blood oranges, and of course grapefruit.

Personally, after one grapefruit breakfast, I'm done for the year.  But I've still got plenty to use up in the pantry.  The obvious secondary use for excess grapefruit is cocktails, but one Greyhound (like a Screwdriver, but with grapefruit juice) is also enough for me. 

And so I start marinating stuff.  Shrimp, chicken, salad...grapefruit brings a surprisingly sparkly and probably novel flavor to the party.  Here is a recipe I've previously blogged about for grapefruit marinated shrimp.  Today I've zested and juiced 2 medium grapefruit and I plan to get 3 dishes out them for 2 meals. 

Juice and zest divided: 4 tbsp zest with salt and pepper
for Sauteed Chicken (bottom left), 1/2 tsp zest and
1/4 cup juice for salad dressing (top), 1 cup juice
for Un-Buffalo Chicken Tenders (bottom right)

The salad dressing is a variation of a recipe from the classic red gingham Better Homes & Gardens cookbook and makes enough for 8 servings, so you can serve it with 2 separate meals.  The Un-Buffalo Chicken Tenders is a variation of this recipe that I created for my husband's grandmother so that I could "split" the recipe between a spicy version and non-spicy version without needing to cook a totally separate meal for those who prefer to skip the heat.  An overnight marinade in any type of acid (like hot sauce, citrus juice or apple cider vinegar) makes for beautiful fork-tender sauteed chicken. 

Both meals can be prepped ahead, though only the zest-marinated chicken can be frozen for any significant length of time.  The dressing will keep several days in the fridge.  The dressing will also require an immersion blender, electric whisk, food processor or stand blender to properly combine the honey with the other ingredients.

Be sure when you season your dishes not to go overboard with salt.  Citrus hits the same points on the tongue as salt so even a moderate amount of salt will be intensified in combination with citrus zest.

A tip about juicing any citrus fruit...put the whole fruit in the microwave for 10 seconds before juicing, especially if you've taken it straight from the fridge.

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

Go Dawgs!

Butler v. VCU, Saturday, April 2 at 6pm

It's not blueberry season, and I'm otherwise not a fan of blue food, but I do like a blue cocktail.  We will be supporting Butler with the following cerulean libation.




Pin It