Freezer Jam!

No, not a concert featuring cryogenically frozen rock stars.

It's jam you make and store in your freezer, that's all.  I've been doing freezer jam for several months now - it's quick and easy, and costs less than boughten jam.  A quick Google* will give you dozens of recipes, but they all come down to about the same proportions.  Today, I used this one to make Strawberry jam, which gets consumed at an alarming rate at my house.

I started with some organic strawberries**, some sugar and some pectin.

Cut up the strawberries and mash them in a bowl***, then mix them in with the sugar:

Bring the water and pectin to a boil and add that to the strawberries and sugar:

Then you just put it in jars:

Let it sit for 24 hours, then stick 'em in the freezer.  Bing bang boom, you got some jam.  

* - Yes, I know we're not supposed to use "Google" as a verb, but I will anyway.  Deal with it, Google.

** - "Organic" as in, grown according to organic farming principles, because all food is organic.  I took chemistry, me.

*** - IT HAS BEEN 8 DAYS since there was an injury requiring medical treatment in my kitchen.  Shut uuuppppp!

Insert Cheesy Jokes Here

Har!

Saturday, as it turned out, was cheese day.  My wine hasn't quite fermented enough for racking, so instead I got out my cheesemaking equipment and ingredients (most of them Christmas gifts, some that I picked up last week from the good folks at Austin Homebrew Supply):

 This cheesemaker takes no crap.  I'm like the Samuel L. Jackson of cheese, sort of.  With a bit more hair.

This is where my homebrewing gear came in handy - I scoured my 5 and 8 gallon stock pots (also good for making turkey soup, BTW) until the interiors were spotless and sterile, then set them up as a double boiler for the milk.

 One the milk was at 90F, I added mesophilic starter culture,

 then stirred vigorously.

After adding the rennet, I stirred some more, then let it sit until I got curds, which I broke up and let sit for a bit longer...

 ... and then (carefully) poured them into a cheesecloth-lined colander to drain.

 Once drained, I transferred them to a clean bowl so I could remove more of the whey*.

 Then they were ready to knead with cheese salt...

 ... and put in the cheese press.

 

 After about 4 hours of pressure, it looked like this:

And after being pressed overnight, it looked more like a wheel of cheese:

I've got it sitting out so the rind can dry, then it'll be 3 weeks of curing, at the end of which I'll have a little over a pound of Caerphilly cheese.

Next on the agenda, probably either Edam or feta.  Maybe both.

* - The whey, I've discovered, makes for delicious bread and pizza dough, so I've got over a gallon of that to use up by the end of this week in the fridge.  Mmmm, carbs....

Rejected Blog Post Ideas

Not so much cooking stuff here as a list of ideas I have rejected (some summarily, some after a little thought) for posts on this blog in the last week:

1. (video post) Cooking In Our Winter Underwear
2. Horrible Meals People I Love Have Cooked For Me
3. Dog Food - Is It Really That Bad For Humans?
4. Foie Gras - Those $#@*!?&%$# Geese Deserve It
5. A Week Of Toast
6. How Intoxicated Can You Be And Still Use A Dull Knife To Slice A Hard Bagel?

I'm working on either a video post or a series of photos of me cooking something - likely pizza, or a soup.  

Coming soon, I'll be making cheese.  There will be pictures of that mess in action.

Baking The Blues Away

It's been a while since I blathered here, and I offer my apologies.  I've been busy, trying to get everything sorted out for Christmas here - gifts to buy and packages to mail, and various and sundry other errands to take care of.

Had some bad news tonight - not surprising bad news, but confirmation of something I'd been expecting, so I'm feeling down.  Tomorrow, I'm going to do something about it.

I'm going to bake bread.  No mixer, I'm going to burn out my frustration by kneading the dough by hand.  It's too cold and rainy to exercise, and I don't go for that anyway, so it'll be a day of clearing my head of anything except the dough and the very next step I have to take.

That'll do the trick, I think.  If not, well, I have wine.

Tortillas!

The meal plan called for chicken soft tacos, and I decided that I would make homemade tortillas, which I haven't done in a while.  When the kids got home from school, they enthusiastically agreed, and asked to help.

It's A Crazy Idea, But It Just Might Work...

Planning for our New Year's Day get-together, and I'm thinking I'll make a lucky soup, because everyone could use more of it.  I set up a poll on Facebook to get some ideas for tasty ingredients that might touch on the  "luck" theme.  I'm starting with duck broth, so pop on over and voice your thoughts.

AT LAST, MY HAND IS COMPLETE!

I recently bought a new knife.

We've had the same wooden block of kitchen knives since we got married.  The knives were good enough, but *coughcough*twenty years*coughcough* was a long run.

So since my sister-in-law recently started selling Pampered Chef products (hi, Laura!), I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone.  A new knife, to gradually rebuild the set to replace the wobbly-handled, perpetually dull, old knives and also, I help out someone in the family.  I ordered a chef's knife, since that's my go-to Implement Of Kitchen Destruction.

Gotta say, I'm loving it.  Got a knife with one of those self-honing sheaths, so it's always nice and sharp, and it's made a huge difference.  It's easy to forget how much difference quality tools can make in getting work done - I get things cut and chopped faster, and it's a great deal safer, too.  Given my impressive record of self-inflicted kitchen injuries, this is an important thing to take into consideration.

Next up, I need a paring knife, and then I'm thinking of upgrading our single-use gadgets - a vegetable peeler, a new garlic press, an extra set of measuring spoons, and then maybe a new food processor.

My current favorite kitchen tools:

(1) Kitchen-Aid mixer.  These things are awesome - indestructible, sturdy and simple.  I need to get some attachments, like the meat grinder and the pasta roller, to round it out.

(2) The Knife.  Nicely balanced, sharp and I don't let anyone else use it.

(3) Wooden spoons.  I use them for everything from stirring soup to tasting to waving in a threatening fashion at people or animals that get in the way while I cook.

(4) The dishwasher.  It's a standard model, but it's a true labor-saving device.  It's so nice to just load it up and run it without having to stand and wash and rinse everything from dinner.

How about you?  What are your favorite things in the kitchen?  Apart from the food/beer/wine - that's a given.

Another Thinky Thoughts Post

I'm still finding my feet on the blog, and sorting out my voice. I'm partly running off of feedback I get, and partly making it up as I go along. Let me know what works for you, and what doesn't.

That said, I'm moving into winter mode. I'm planning lots of soups for the menu, and looking forward to Thanksgiving, and the pies that come with it. More homemade bread, as well - I'm trying out some new cooking methods, including baking the loaves in cast iron skillets, and trying some inclusions, like cheese and baked garlic. Or dried fruit.

I've done some homebrewing in the past, and yesterday, I picked up (thanks to some friends that really want me to do it) the equipment necessary to make wine at home.  Thanks, guys!  I've got a kit for a malbec shiraz and a reisling, and will start with the shiraz.  I'll post photos of the process, for them as are interested.

Also, I bought some local blackberries at the grocery store today, along with pectin and the rest of the stuff I'll need to render those into some freezer jam.  My peach and strawberry jams were hits at home and in the neighborhood, so I have high hopes for the blackberries.  Photos of that process will be posted as well.

I've got some thoughts about school lunches and Halloween to post, as soon as I get them sorted out.

BBQ Sauce

As even a casual BBQ eater knows, there are a variety of sauces, rubs and dips available out there.  They originally varied geographically, but in our mobile society, you can find then everywhere.  Purists make their sauces from scratch, simmer them for hours, can them and age them.

I don't have the time for that, so I'll tell you how to make your own sauce, the way I learned.  The basic recipe I got from my father, who in turn learned it from his friend Mickey, who grew up in Tennessee.^*  I've made my own modifications, and never written it down before now.  There aren't any exact measurements, because it's not about precision, it's about taste.  I taught this recipe to a friend once, and he spent the entire time writing down everything I said, estimating "so, about a quarter cup of sugar?" and stuff like that.  I almost couldn't do it - it's like the story about how the centipede could walk just fine, until someone asked him how he coordinated his legs, and then he was thinking about it so much, he couldn't walk.


* - Correction, the recipe here is based on my father's own recipe, Mickey's recipe was mustard based.  This is what happens when you rely on your memory instead of asking questions.

A Cook's Journey

I'm turning into one of those cooks, the ones that can't make anything the exact same way twice, because they're always futzing about with the recipe, trying a pinch more of this, a little less of that, and a whole lot of "Hey, maybe we substitute these for those and flip the whole arrangement the other way and how does that work?"

I wasn't always like that - when I was a callow youth, I learned just enough to be dangerous in the kitchen.  Oh, I thought I could cook, but it was clumsy and frequently terrifying.  Every once in a while, I'd screw up in just the right way and make something not just edible, but tasty.  That just served to make me go back in and cook some more, with usually unappetizing results.  The chocolate chip cookies I baked made me think I could do more, and I made brownies (but forgot the sugar).  I baked sugar cookies, but was out of vegetable oil so I used olive oil.  Seriously, I look back and want to reach through time and shake myself.

About 3 years ago, I lost my job.  Well, not so much lost, as got it pulled out of my hands and shipped overseas.  I'm only a wee bit bitter, because some things have worked out better for me.  I've had time to be with my kids, and while the money's been tight, I've also been able to devote more time and energy to cooking with Real Food, not foodlike products.  My wife, Mel, has a good job, and we're doing OK.  Not great, but OK - which in this economy, I guess is better than OK.

At first, my focus was on getting something on the table, anything.  Lots of macaroni & cheese, some simple recipes that aren't really cooking, just assembling ingredients.  That got boring, though, and convenience food is expensive.  We've got a nice selection of cookbooks - several editions of the Joy of Cooking, Julia Child's The Way to Cook, some regional cookbooks and others.  I started poring through those, googling lists of ingredients to find meals, and eventually, I'm not sure when, I was actually cooking, not just painting by the numbers.

It's a good feeling, even when the kids turn their noses up at whatever I've cooked.  I still screw up occasionally - the grouper filet I cooked was, while not a disaster, certainly not terribly edible.

Mel teases me that, if I wrote a cookbook, it'd be full of recipes like:

RABBIT STEW

Serves 4
First, catch a rabbit....

I like to work backwards, and see how the type of ingredients you start with change things.  I've brewed beer, made butter, cheese and pasta.  I lived on a farm during high school, so I've raised chickens, turkeys, pigs, ducks, geese, goats, rabbits and cows, and slaughtered and dressed most of that list.  I've grown my own vegetables and fruit, and helped can them.  It's fascinating, though not always efficient, both in terms of money and time.

I have my "go-to" recipes - or, rather, recipe frameworks - and I try to work themes around them.  We're slightly limited in that Mel, by ethical choice, prefers not to eat mammals.  It's a choice I respect, though I'm more catholic in my animal flesh consumption.  So it's a lot of chicken, turkey, fish and shellfish.  When she's out of town on a business trip, I'll often grill some burgers or steaks for me and the kids.

Lately, I've been trying different grains - white rice led to brown rice, and from there to quinoa, orzo, risotto, polenta, red rice, wild rice.  Finding the right combination of spices and flavors to make the chicken and grain and vegetable complement each other is, right now, trial and error.  As I go along here, I'll post some photos and describe some meals - the successes and the failures.

Next time, I'll talk about pigs and what they're good for.