canning everything in the fridge
August 5, 2013
Saturday I had a run in with some fruit at the farmer’s market and ended up with more than could fit in my smallish fridge.
I found some blueberries, and some lovely ripe yellow apples. I set the apples on the counter in a bowl, and my house started smelling like September…time to throw everything in the pot to jar and fill the pantry.
I mixed blueberries, a package of frozen dewberries, apples, and the juice and zest of two lemons. I added some sugar, but not too much. I simmered the whole thing for about 20 minutes or so, and then let it sit for a few hours. Then I reheated it, and processed the jars in a hot water bath. 
I am planning on making fruit tarts with pastry cream in the fall and winter. Nothing like opening a can of fruit dump pouring it into a pie shell and calling it homemade. Very easy later on down the line.
oats and pie
April 14, 2013
My friend Darin posted a picture of oatmeal pie on her blog a few weeks ago, and I have been wanting to make it ever since.
I started to think about all the things that I like about oatmeal. Milky, sweet, buttery…
I found a few recipes, and altered them a bit to find something that I thought would work. I don’t like things super sweet, so I cut down the sugar a lot. I also really like the toasted flavor of lyles golden syrup (my mom carries it at the At Home Store), so I substituted it for the corn syrup I saw in many recipes. And I added a lot of chopped pecans, some cream, and a dollop of yogurt for good measure.
The final recipe came out like this.
Pie dough for one 9″ pie crust, no top (1/2 the recipe)
Mix the following dry ingredients and set aside:
1 cup old-fashioned oats
2/3 cup roughly chopped pecans
a shake or two of salt
In a separate bowl combine the following ingredients:
2 eggs
1/4 cup cream
1/3 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup lyles golden syrup
1 t vanilla
3 T melted butter
1 dollop (a healthy tablespoon) of yogurt or sour cream
Stir the wet ingredients until everything is nicely mixed together. Add the dry ingredients, and mix thoroughly. Pour into 9″ pie crust. Bake in a 325 degree oven for 50-55 minutes. It will be a little bit golden on the top.
Cool on a metal rack.
The pie isn’t very sweet, and is a little bit crumbly, but I like it that way. It is very rich, but can almost pass off as healthy because of the lower sugar content.
photo credit Chloe Hennesy (My guest, and excuse for pie baking!)
denise’s chocolate cake
September 8, 2011
One of my favorite easy cake recipes. Rich, not too sweet, and full of chocolate.
First was to butter, flour, and paper the baking tins. I learned the hard way not to skimp on this step. The cake comes right out of the pan, no problem, if you do this!
Next I melted the chocolate pieces. (I used 8oz semi-sweet baking chocolate from the store. ) I melted the chocolate in an improvised double boiler, and set it aside to cool.
I mixed the dry ingredients (flour, salt, sugar, and baking soda), and added the slightly cooled chocolate, and then all the liquid ingredients (water, sunflower oil, vanilla, and vinegar).
The vinegar and baking soda worked to raise the cake (it was eggless). The mixture looked a little funny at first, but with a bit of mixing everything worked together well.
I poured the batter into three 8″ cake pans. (According to my mom, three 8″ cake pans are the equivalent of two 9″ cake pans.) The smaller pans make a cute round and tall cake with more layers.
The cakes baked for about 30 minutes. Meanwhile, I made the frosting, which I somehow messed up and it wasn’t very smooth and creamy. I think that I might have melted the butter by mistake…
I made a mixture of preserved peaches and rose petal jam and put this in the layers along with chocolate frosting.
The end.
pita bread
June 12, 2011
A friend gave me a box of za’atar, a spice mixture with sumac and sesame seeds (and I am not sure what else..) and so I made some pita breads for it.
The yeasted dough is left to rise, and then divided into small balls,
flattened, and baked on a hot pizza stone (in my case, several cast iron pans) in a 500 degree oven.
The breads puff up quickly, and then flatten and soften as they cool. It is important to put the cooling pitas in a container to soften.
I didn’t last time and ended up with an awfully hard batch, which was remedied by storing the cooled breads in a plastic bag with a damp tea towel.
To top the pitas, I strained some radiance dairy yogurt and topped it with some of our new Tunisian olive oil, and za’atar. Simple and delicious!
a pear tart
February 27, 2011
It is very exciting to turn these…
…into this….
…and this.
Emily and I picked these pears from a tree in my friend Mary’s back yard. They are seckel pears, a small, sweet, and delicate variety! Heli-Claire, my dad and I peeled them and preserved them in maple syrup with brown sugar and lemon juice last fall. Today I made tarts. I love the simplicity of opening a jar of preserved food, and having an almost instant dessert.
Tart crust: a basic pie dough. One recipe of dough makes two tarts.
Press the dough into tart pans and bake until dough is cooked through.
One quart jar of sickle pears preserved in maple syrup.
Reserve juice for boiling down into syrup.
Part of a vanilla bean, one cup cream, 1 T sugar, 1 T cornstarch, 1 T butter. Mixed, heated, and thickened to form a pastry cream.(Enough for one tart)
Layer the pastry cream in a baked tart shell. Place pears artistically on top. Don’t remove stems. (They were lovingly left in tact in the first place…) Drizzle tart with reduced maple syrup pear juice. Serve right away.
babka
January 4, 2011
I feel like this should be my grandmother’s recipe. But it isn’t. I found it in Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone, by Deborah Madison. A babka, from my understanding, is a cake made with a rich yeast dough, and filled with various things. In this case, almonds, cherries, etc.
I started with the dough. It is a simple yeasted sweet dough, with a bit of sugar, sour cream, butter, and eggs. I mixed it with my mom’s Polish dough whisk, which is my new favorite kitchen tool. By far! The way that it incorporates the wet and dry ingredients is almost magical, and so much easier. I think it has to do with the way the wire is shaped. And the handle is lovely to hold, too. So well thought out!
I set the dough aside to rise, in a buttered bowl, covered with a tea towel. In a cold room, as I was going out for a little bit too long. I never seem to be able to match up my rising and baking times with when I can actually be home to let the dough rise, shape, bake, etc…
I made up the dough and filling, went out for a bit, and returned to a balloon of dough in my red bowl. It punched down nicely, and I shaped it into a large rectangle.
The filling is made up of finely chopped toasted almonds, chopped dried cherries, an egg, sugar, vanilla and almond extract. Oh, and butter!
I spread out the filling and sprinkled the cherries on top.
Then rolled the entire thing up into a log, and made a crescent.
And covered with a tea towel and set to rise again. This time more quickly, right above the fire.
And then into the oven. Bakety bake bake bake. I was tired, so I set the oven timer and went to bed, thinking that I would wake up when it dinged. I am not sure that I did… When I got up, it was still cooking, and ‘nicely browned’ on the top.
This years babka might be a little bit drier and crisper than last years, but still quite yummy. I need to have some coffee for it!
borken pecan pie
November 25, 2010
Pecan pie, from a recipe from my dear friend Jeanne McCanless. Jeanne passed away last week, and we are all thinking of her, and all that she shared with us, taught us, and gave us. She is someone who I am particularly thankful for today!
Here is her pecan pie recipe. Due to a slight spelling error it has turned into “borken” pie, which is how I will definitely remember it.
Utterly Deadly Southern Pecan Pie (Borken Pecan Pie)
4 eggs
1-1/4 cups clear Karo syrup
1-1/2 cups borken [sic] pecans
1 cup sugar
4 Tbsp. butter
1 tsp. vanilla
Boil sugar and syrup together three minutes. Beat eggs (not too stiff) pour in slowly the hot syrup, add the butter, vanilla and pecan meats. Turn into a raw pie shell and bake 350 degrees for 45 minutes or until set.
I didn’t follow the recipe exactly…which is typical. I was afraid to add the eggs right into the hot syrup, so I whisked the butter and syrup into the eggs, bit by bit. I also added an extra 1/2 cup pecans…
The pecans came from my dad. I think that he got them at the Dutchman’s Store, and they are this year’s crop from Missouri. Yum!
Jeanne got the recipe from a coworker when she was a telephone operator. According to Jeanne’s son Jamie, they would actually have the pie on Christmas Eve, as it is super rich! It would be a treat all by itself.
eating the pet (or something maybe a little bit close to it)
November 7, 2010
It is a little bit grim what happens to pumpkins. The seeds are planted, they spend all summer collecting energy from the sun, and nutrients from the soil and water, and then we eat them. Scrub, de-stem, seed, and bake in the oven in a tray of boiling water. Jay took the picture above in the oven with his camera that can capture lovely dark images!
I love my pumpkins. Jay came over today to see the harvest (which was rather small…) and we decided to make a pot of pumpkin soup. With a Long Island Cheese variety.
We cut the pumpkin in half, seeded it and saved the seeds. (I do figure that the purpose of the plant is to continue to create offspring, so my meticulously saving and planting the seeds does count for something after I cut open and eat the squash…)
We baked the pumpkin in a 400 degree oven until it was tender, and the top had browned.
(I is important to wait until the pumpkin is well done. The skin just peels off if you do!)
I mashed the pumpkin flesh with a fork, and added it to a mixture of sauteed onions and garlic, parsley, and a little bit of parmesan cheese rind ready on the stove.
After we mixed everything together the soup was pretty much finished. It was bubbling on the stove for five or ten minutes, and then we served it up. We garnished it with fresh parsley, grated parmesan, and toasted pumpkin seed oil (a real treat!).
We managed to find little spots on the table to eat. I was definitely knocking elbows with pumpkins throughout the meal, but it was fun anyways!
Pumpkin Soup (more like guidelines than a recipe!)
Ingredients:
a smallish long island cheese pumpkin (or any pumpkin or winter squash) cut in half and seeded
a small onion
a few cloves of garlic
olive oil
a few sprigs (or more) of parsley
a bit of parmesan cheese rind
some more parsley, cheese, and pumpkin seed oil for garnish
salt and pepper
Directions:
Bake pumpkin cut side down in an inch or so of water in a 400 degree oven.
Meanwhile, chop and sautee onions, and whole clove or two of garlic in olive oil over medium low heat. Add some salt, and then after a few minutes the chopped parsley and parmesan rind. Stir for about a minute or so, then add a tiny bit water and let simmer for a few minutes and then set aside.
The pumpkin should be about done here, and you can scrape it right from the shell and add directly to the soup. I used the water from baking pumpkin for the soup instead of broth or fresh water.
Stir everything well, and blend or put through a food mill if you like. Let the soup simmer for ten or fifteen minutes before serving.
Garnish with extra chopped parsley, freshly grated parmesan cheese, salt, pepper and toasted pumpkin seed oil (all optional).
too much fruit, too little time..
August 5, 2010
I ran home this afternoon with a brown paper bag filled with peaches to a fridge filled with blueberries (okay, not filled but containing blueberries). I had a few minutes, and wanted to put the fruits together into a baked something. It is too hot right now for me to bake a pie (my kitchen isn’t air-conditioned, and that makes for a wimpy crust, and lots of frustration), so I went for a cobbler.
It is important to peel peaches, and to do so, I dropped them into boiling water for 30 seconds (as per mother’s instructions!). The peels come off very easily after the quick blanch. Then I sliced the peaches and added the blueberries, sugar, a lot of butter and a squeeze of lime to the pans. I put the pans into the oven and let the fruit cook for about 20 minutes. While the fruit was cooking, I made a biscuit topping with cream, butter, flour, sour milk, etc. I topped the baking fruits with spoonfuls of biscuit batter and popped everything back in the oven to finish cooking.
The finished cobblers were really runny right after I took the out of the oven. I was taking them into town with me, and every curve, pothole, and stop sign made the juices come close to dripping out of the pans. I used pie pans, and I think that it would probably be better to use casserole pans to contain the juices.
After the cobblers sat for a while, the top crust soaked up a lot of the juice, and the desserts were a lovely balance of fruit, crust and juice.
when in minneapolis, pick blueberries
July 18, 2010
I drove up to visit Swati in Minnesota last night. Just about the first thing we did Saturday morning was go and pick blueberries. We wanted to bake a pie, and figured that we should use what was fresh and pick-able.
We got to the berry patch around ten, and apparently it was a busy day, and we were late! Fortunately they found us a row to pick berries, and we got going. We noticed that there were more berries on the bushes to either side of us. After we finished our row, we went back to the house to ask for another one, and they said there weren’t any, and to look in our row for more berries…we took the opportunity to jump a few rows over and RAID.
We got a lot more berries that way, browsing the vacant rows.
When we got home, we promptly ate berries with cream. Then we baked a pie.
We ate pie for dessert, then for breakfast. With vanilla ice cream.
living in the woods and making stuff 
