kimuchi
March 2, 2010
I saved baby bok choi from my CSA share for a week and a half to have enough for this recipe (it requires for about 4 baby bok chois). Kimuchi is a Japanese style kimchi, that I found in my usual canning book, Joy of Pickling. The recipe is normally made with napa cabbage, but Joy of Pickling suggests that you can use other types of cabbage as well. Since we reliably get bok choi in our CSA, I decided to try it instead.
The cabbage is sliced into sections, ready to be salted…
…and pressed overnight.
Salting draws out the moisture in the cabbage, and works as a preservative. The salted cabbage ends up looking quite shriveled.
I chopped the salted bok choi into 1″ squares, and added slivered carrots, grated apple, and the usuals: ginger, garlic, green onions, salt, and hot pepper. I used a little less hot pepper, to experiment and see what happens.
The kimuchi now has to sit, loosely covered, for a few days before it is ready. My last batch has been living in my fridge now for about a month, and it seems to get better with time. The flavors aren’t quite as sharp…
kimchee (finished)!
February 11, 2010
Quick update.
I opened my jar of kimchee today. According to my recipe it said 3-6 days sitting, depending on how sour you like it. A much quicker turn around time than its Western counterpart (sauerkraut)! I was kind of excited to try the finished product, so I called it finished after 3 days. And to be honest, it doesn’t change much in color, and seems to mellow somewhat in flavor. Actually, mellow isn’t really the right word. Maybe more like the flavors come together. My kimchee ended up very spicy, very garlicy, and full of ginger! A perfect combination to keep healthy in this cold weather.
It is really spicy though, and Heli suggested for me to eat the kimchee with a fried egg or rice to cut the heat. (definitely helps!) I am really excited to try making a batch of kimchee with some other greens, such as bok choy, more kale, and other assorted items that I get from my CSA share.
kimchee!
February 8, 2010
Here is my first attempt to make kimchee.
I found a recipe for kimchee in The Joy of Pickling, by Linda Ziedrich. My kimchee is a simple mixture of napa cabbage, a little bit of kale, ground hot pepper, slivered green onions, and lots of garlic and ginger. The whole mixture sits in brine for several days, until the desired sourness is obtained…
Step one is to chop and brine the cabbage overnight. So last night, I chopped my cabbage according to directions, into 2″ squares. I placed the chopped cabbage in a bowl, covered it with salt water, and placed a plate on top to keep the cabbage submerged.
This afternoon, I added the additional ingredients to the chopped and drained cabbage. Slivers of green onions, lots of garlic…
…coarsely grated and chopped ginger. I couldn’t find my smaller grater, but the chopping seemed to get most of the big bits out. I added a little extra ginger to the recipe, as I love it, especially in the winter!
I was excited to use the dried peppers that I put up last summer. In the summer I always seem to acquire more fresh hot peppers than I know what to do with. As a result, I usually end up with more dried peppers than I know what to do with. This was a perfect use for some of my lovely dried peppers. I did have to grind them into a powder, which was a little difficult, with their spiciness…
I placed the cabbage mixture into a glass jar, with a plastic bag filled with brine solution on top. Looks like I put a little too much brine into the actual kimchee…
Here is the jar, all tidied up and ready to ferment in a cool corner of my house (not a problem, as I have many).
pears poached in grapefruit wine with cranberries
December 29, 2009
I made these a few weeks ago, and they were delicious! And way too easy. I have a shelf of canned pears in my pantry. They are preserved in a 30 percent simple syrup. I also have a somewhat dwindling (but still plentiful) supply of grapefruit wine. I simply opened the jar of pears, plopped them into the pan, added a cup or so of grapefruit wine, and put the pot on the woodstove to simmer over lunch.
If you don’t have home canned pears and grapefruit wine, I would recommend peeling and poaching fresh pears in water with a little sugar to taste. You can add a cup or so of regular white (or red) wine, and some additional citrus peel here as well.
Meanwhile, I prepared a sauce of cranberries. Place a handful or so of cranberries in a medium sized pot on the stove (medium heat). Add a few strands of orange zest and a sprinkling of sugar. Not too much that it makes the cranberries sweet, but not so little that they are unbearably sour. If you have just rinsed the cranberries, the water left should be sufficient, but if you are starting with dry cranberries, add a sprinkling of water. Cook over medium heat, stirring until most of the berries have popped, and the sugar has caramelized a little. Set aside.
Ladle the warm pears and a generous amount of the liquid into a little bowl. Spoon the cranberry mixture over the top and serve right away. I would definitely serve with fresh cream. The bitterness of the grapefruit wine complements the sweetness of the canned pear syrup, which is almost a juice, and the cranberries give the whole thing an extra zing!
(They look really pretty, but I didn’t get around to taking a picture of the final product…)
brandied cranberries
December 9, 2009
Last Monday my dad and I went down to the Dutchman’s store in Cantril. We found a nice collection of items including a new pair of lined pigskin gloves for firewood duty, some potting soil, hotpads, peanut butter filled pretzels, and cranberries! Fresh Wisconsin cranberries to be exact. Two large bags of them…
I can’t resist a good looking batch of fruit, and so I grabbed them up and brought them home, thinking the whole while about everything that I could make.
Brandy, cranberries, cinnamon, sugar, and orange zest. That is it! The recipe is from Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves, by Linda Ziedrich. I made one batch and liked it so much that I made a second! The recipe is simple, and the preserves can be processed for storage, or eaten right away! I put mine in little jars to give away, or open and eat all by myself. (Sometimes pint or 1/2 pint jars are too big for me to finish soon enough, so the smaller servings come in handy. And they are cute.)
I used one of my favorite tools on this project; a citrus zester. There are sharpened little circles across the top, and you drag the zester down the side of the orange (or lemon, lime, etc) and it peels nice even strips off. The hole on the side is for larger pieces of zest. I am not much of a gadget person, but this particular tool is awesome!
Cranberries, sugar, and zest, ready to be baked in a slow oven. The sugar almost caramelizes a little, and the flavors mellow and come together. I would guess that most of the alcohol cooks out of the brandy, but the taste is definitely still there!
The finished preserve is a rich dark red, with a hint of cinnamon and a refreshing tang.
finishing and starting
November 17, 2009
Today was a finishing old drinks and starting new drinks day. There is definitely something about drinks tasting really good after sitting for a while… for different reasons of course! I put up some raspberries in vinegar a month or so ago (when there were lots of them to pick). They sat in my pantry, imparting all their flavor into the apple cider vinegar and red wine vinegar that they were soaking in. Today I strained them and made the syrup for a “shrub.”
A shrub is an old fashioned vinegar fruit drink. I have found lots of different recipes and variations, and the recipe that I used was from The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and other Sweet Preserves (as per usual). I strained the raspberries from the vinegar by passing it through a damp cheesecloth, and then I boiled the resulting raspberry vinegar with some sugar. (I am a little concerned that my house will smell strongly of vinegar and raspberries for a while after the boiling process.)
I tried a teaspoon full of the syrup straight, and it nearly made me choke it was so strong. I added the syrup to water, and it turned into delicious, uniquely flavored, zingy drink. It is almost a better drink for warm weather, so I think that I will try to bottle some of they syrup up and save it for the summer…
On the other end of things, I started a batch Vin de Pamplemousse (I like to think of it as pamplemousse juice as it rhymes nicely), a recipe from Saving the Season, my favorite blog on canning. The recipe, which takes about 40 days to mature, has been conveniently posted about 40 days before the New Year..
The recipe calls for a whole bunch of grapefruit, sliced and placed in large jars with some vodka, sugar, lemon, chamomile, vanilla, and a whole bunch of white wine. I made a single batch, which filled two 4 liter jars, and one 2 liter jar. The process was really fun, slicing and gently crushing the fruit, and releasing the fragrance of the vanilla, citrus, and chamomile. I am really excited for this (warming) drink to be ready!
canning kraut
November 11, 2009
I came home last monday night to a “matured” crock of sauerkraut. I left it with my mom for this last week, and when I returned, it was a lovely golden color, tart, and crunchy! I started the sauerkraut about 3 1/2 weeks ago, and it sat in my kitchen, periodically scenting the whole house. I had to watch it, making sure that the top remained clean throughout the process of fermentation. Making sauerkraut is much easier than I had initially imagined. It is amazing to me how simple a recipe can be, yet taste so good! Basic sauerkraut is made with salt and cabbage. Thats it!
Fully fermented sauerkraut was traditionally placed in a cool location to spend the winter. Now days, around here anyway, it is canned, frozen, or eaten when it is finished. I used a recipe for processing my sauerkraut from The Joy of Pickling. The remaining kraut I have put into jars to hand out to family (and the little left is going to go in the freezer). I know that sometimes freezing is better, but for some reason I really prefer to can things. I guess it has to do with the possibility of a storm leading to a power shortage, leading to frozen goods going bad…
canned pears
October 22, 2009
There are certain things from my childhood that evoke specific experiences. Canned pears are one of those things. When I was six my family drove out to the desert in southeast Oregon. We drove across country in a converted school bus, and very carefully planned and packed our bus with supplies, including many cans of pears. I remember the smell, texture, and taste of the pears, floating in syrup. I remember eating pears in syrup at dusk, while watching for wild horses in the distance.
When my friend Clint (with the pear tree) gave me another bag full of pears I decided to try canning them in halves, as I remembered. The process of making canned (technically “jarred”) pears is simple. I got the basic directions from the recently revised Joy of Cooking.
I peeled the pears and put them in an anti browning solution of lemon juice and water.
Meanwhile I made a sugar syrup using approximately 1/2 cup sugar for every quart of water. Joy of Cooking gives guidelines for how much/little sugar should be used, an I went somewhere in the middle, on the less sweet side.
Then after cooking pears, I carefully placed each slice into warm jars and processed according to directions. When I tried fitting the pear halves into the regular pint jars that I had I realized that they wouldn’t really fit. I decided to get some wide mouth jars as well, so now I have some jars with pear quarters and some jars with pear halves.
And thats it! Very simple, and the result I tried for breakfast this morning. The pears were rather firm to start with, so they maintained a nice texture even after cooking and processing in the boiling water bath. I am looking forward to lots of cozy pear treats this fall and winter!
sauerkraut
October 17, 2009
Today I went to my friend Moni’s house and she showed me how to make sauerkraut! I have been wanting to make sauerkraut for a long time now, and have spent quite a bit of time reading about how to make it, looking at different recipes, and methods, etc. Although it is simple to make, with a basic ratio and set steps, I have been a little shy to try it. But last weekend when I was visiting Heli in Ann Arbor, cabbage was available at the farmer’s market, and I grabbed a few heads to take home. I love cabbage, fresh and fermented, so I figured that I would be able to make use of it even if I didn’t make the kraut. Heli kept telling me that I should call Moni, her friend Daren’s mom, so I did, and not only did she tell me all about how to make sauerkraut, but she had me over this morning, shared cabbage from her garden, and taught me all about how to make sauerkraut. It was so much fun!! We had lots to talk about (she knows all about gardening, canning, and insects, to name a few things), and the process went by very quickly.
Moni has been making sauerkraut the same way her mother taught her. The first step is to prepare the crock (which Moni lent me and is now happily situated in my kitchen). This particular crock is huge!! 
The number 5, stamped on the side, indicates that it is 5 gallon crock, which means a lot of cabbage. The crock must be cleaned thoroughly, and fitted with a plate, which will be placed over the cabbage at the end to weigh it down.
Then the cabbage is cleaned, trimmed, and either thinly sliced or put through a food processor. This year was a very wet year so the cabbage was huge, and some of the heads that we used were even bursting open!
We both shredded and chopped our cabbage. Then we added the cabbage to the crock, a little bit at a time, mixing it with salt to taste as we went.
Adding salt to the mixture draws the moisture out of the cabbage, which creates the briny solution that the cabbage ends up “stewing” in. According to Moni, the best time to pick cabbage for sauerkraut is in the morning. The more moisture in the cabbage, the quicker the liquid is released to form the brine.
After all the cabbage was added we mixed the contents of the entire crock to make sure that there was enough salt. We ended up adding more, and as we were remixing, I noticed that liquid was already collecting at the bottom of the crock. By the time I got home with the crock, and added the plate and weighted bottles, the liquid had reached the top of the cabbage.
The plate covering the cabbage is there to keep the bulk of the cabbage submerged in the brine. I placed two clean quart bottles full of water on top of a dinner plate, which fit perfectly inside the crock. On top of all of this I tied a tea towel to protect the contents from any fruit flies or other possible vermin.
Now it is time to wait and let the lactic fermentation take place!!!
I will post more pictures as the sauerkraut develops.
green tomatoes (not fried)
October 15, 2009
Yesterday and today I made some green tomato pickles. I used two different recipes, one that reminded me of my Grampa, and the other because it called for lime (calcium hydroxide) which I have never used. Both recipes are from The Joy of Pickling, by Linda Ziedrich. I started the pickles yesterday (after a trip to the store for lime) as they required an overnight of soaking before they were ready to process. 
Freshly sliced green tomatoes. So many shades of green, marbling in and around seeds and cavities.
Tomato slice soaking in a solution of lime (calcium hydroxide) and water. This process creates much crisper pickles. I soaked the tomatoes overnight, and when I took them out of the solution they were stiff as a board! Quite different from the tomato slices soaking in salt for the curry pickles.
After rinsing and soaking, rinsing and soaking, and rinsing and soaking again, I mixed the lime tomatoes with onions and spices and simmered for a little while, and then I had to stuff them into the jars. The lime made them so stiff that I ended up cutting the big ones in order to fit them in.
The second pickle was made with curry powder and other spices. I made them because they reminded me of my Grampa, who always seemed to like spicing food with curry powder. The tomatoes for the curry pickle were significantly softer (no lime, just sitting out with salt).
These are the lime pickles after the jars were processed in boiling water. It is always sad to me when fruits and vegetables lose their vibrant color. They have to sit for at least three weeks now until they are ready to eat!
