Capturing the Harvest: Sun-Cooked Strawberry Jam

Here in DC the farmer's markets are hopping and every week there are new crops to enjoy. We are moving on from asparagus and are now drowning in strawberries and cucumbers. Some people are busy making jams and preserves and pickles but me, well, I am still scared of those things. It is my dream to have a root cellar (and a kitchen large enough for a stand mixer, and solar panels; you can keep your stainless steel appliances and granite countertops), but canning, I don't know I worry about botulism and all those things that, you know, can kill you. Blame it on my mother (hi Mom!) who won't eat mayonnaise if it's been out of the fridge for three minutes, but I am a little more cautious than some people.

Enter: Putting Food By. This is the classic book on preserving food, through canning, freezing, drying, smoking, pickling, and root-cellaring. The copy I picked up at an American Association of University Women book sale is from 1974* which makes it as old as me. Hrmph. This is not a book you should use if you want to can because you generally should not use old canning information but the updated version would be a good one to have. A recent New York Times article and a bunch of buzz on the internet has apparently sealed (ha) canning as all the rage. See, for example, this Apartment Therapy post. For safe canning guidelines, visit the USDA National Center for Home Food Preservation.

So, heed my warning and be careful about food preservation. But if you are a little daring, you might want to try this recipe for Sun-Cooked Strawberry Jam.

Sun-Cooked Strawberry Jam
I am typing it verbatim because it is a sweet recipe. From Putting Food By, 1974.

You need a blistering hot, still day to do this. Have a table set up in the full sun, its legs set in cans or small pans of water to keep crawling insects from the jam. To protect it from flying insects, have handy a large sheet of clean window glass, the means to prop it at a slant over the platters, and cheesecloth or mosquito netting to tape like a curtain around the three sides left open to the air. And work in small batches.

Wash and hull berries, and measure them to determine how much sugar you need. Put a layer of berries in the bottom of a big kettle, cover with an equal number of cups of sugar; repeat a layer of berries and cover it with sugar. Set aside for 30 minutes to let the berries "weep" and the juice start drawing. Place over very low heat and bring slowly to simmering, stirring occasionally to prevent scorching, until the sugar is dissolved.

Pour sirupy (sic) berries 1/2 inch deep into large plates or platters. Set platters on the table in strong sun. Prop the glass over them with one edge on the table, the opposite edge raised four to six inches high...Arrange netting around the open sides.

As the fruit cooks in the sun, turn it over with a spatula--2 or 3 times during the day. When it has obviously jelled enough, pour it into sterilized jars and seal.

If the sun is not strong enough or if the weather is windy, the jam can take 2 or 3 days to jell. In that case, bring the platters in each night.

*(Image coming soon, I'm having trouble uploading it).

Peach Muffins: A Snapshot of Excess

"Nature's candy in my hand or can or a pie
Millions of peaches, peaches for me
Millions of peaches, peaches for free"

Peaches, by The Presidents of the United States of America

Peaches slipped from our hands into an overflowing half bushel box at The Homestead Farm and it didn't really feel like millions of peaches. The air was surprisingly humidity free, the sky was clear, as we walked through yellow and white peach orchards with a couple friends of ours talking about local food and less noble things, and eating and picking peaches. But come this morning, when faced with dozens and dozens of peaches (not to mention the many pounds of blackberries we picked, and the 8 pounds of tomatoes, 5 pounds of zucchini, 4 pounds of cucumbers, and assorted other produce from our CSA) it sure felt like millions of peaches.

I wasn't quite sure of my plan of attack, having some vague idea that peaches could be frozen and I could bake with some and we would certainly just eat some of them. There are directions for freezing peaches online and it is surprisingly easy. Still, after hours of boiling, skinning, chopping, coating in lemon juice, and mixing with syrup it didn't feel so easy. And my kitchen was covered with peach bits and skins and juice, like a peach volcano had exploded from the sink.

After getting a few pounds of tomatoes, blackberries, and half a bushel of peaches in the freezer, I still had 20 or so peaches staring at me. And while it was satisfying to see the produce in the freezer and dream of the cold winter day when we will have a taste of summer on our plates, it was impossible for me to leave the kitchen without having made something to eat. Enter super simple peach muffins from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book.

Peach Muffins
These muffins are from the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and are a variation on the basic muffin recipe. The recipe calls for pastry flour, but I substituted whole wheat pastry flour (also called graham flour) since that is what I had on hand. Instead of melted butter, I used canola oil and used soymilk instead of milk. I am the substitution queen and while that may sound like cheating since I am not following the original recipe, I believe it is in the spirit of early cooks who were more likely to use what was on hand than chasing down ingredients. The range of recommended sugar depends on what you are adding to it; I used about 1/4 cup of sugar with good results.

2 cups pastry flour
3 tsps baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
2 Tbs to 1/2 cup sugar
1 cup milk
4 Tbs melted butter
1 egg
1 cup peeled and chopped peaches

Preheat oven to 400. Grease muffin tin (12 regular or 24 small). Mix and sift dry ingredients together. Beat together milk, butter, and egg. Mix wet ingredients into dry until just moist. Gently mix in peaches. Bake 15 to 20 minutes.

Everthing Old is New Again

Since moving into a small condo I have discovered the thing I miss the most about our old house: the garden. In it we had strawberries, rhubarb, horseradish, cucumbers, zucchini, many varieties of sweet and hot peppers and tomatoes, eggplant, lots of different herbs, and whatever else caught our attention at the nursery. Neighbors were encouraged to pick strawberries and vegetables from our garden when we realized we couldn't eat all that we planted. Some food was composted, but most went directly onto our plates or those of our co-workers and neighbors.

We didn't grow the variety of things we could find in the supermarket or even the variety of vegetables we get in our share at the CSA, like beets, greens, asparagus, and potatoes. We sometimes tired of the produce from our garden, the glut of zucchini, the strawberries that we sometimes let rot until only the birds would eat them. But mostly we enjoyed it, building menus around whatever was in season. I never ate raw tomatoes until my husband planted tomato plants in the backyard of the first apartment we ever rented together. That summer not only did I start eating tomatoes, we had tomato sandwiches many nights in a row for weeks on end and never got tired of them.

In this day of war and rising food (and everything else) costs, I have been reading some about victory gardens. During World War II, people were encouraged to grow their own gardens and not waste food. Today, it seems the messages we receive from society, both government and private industry, is that we need to support businesses and the economy more, not less, and the idea of victory gardening is anathema to that. And food waste is rampant in homes, colleges, and restaurants. But I don't know that the spirit of victory gardening was ever new or has ever disappeared: I see it in the "good life" of the Nearing's, and the communes of the hippies, and in the simple living movement.

Even if you can't grow vegetables because you have a shady balcony, like us, or just don't have time or energy to grow your own garden I think we can still live the spirit of the victory garden. Eat locally. Eat seasonally. Don't waste food.

There are many resources out there to get us started on all of this, and I think this video is an inspiring place to start (and it mentions victory gardens!). Also check out the 100 Mile Diet, Local Harvest, and the Wasted Food blog.

Worth the Wait: Easy Rhubarb Pie with Flaky Crust

Yes, it has been about two months since I posted anything and, wow, time flies. There are a few reasons for this but I don't know that it really matters. What is more important is that I am back to cooking, back to searching old cookbooks for recipes cooked by our grandmothers and great-grandmothers (let's face it, it probably wasn't our grandfathers doing the cooking).

We start with an ingredient that is in season right now in many parts of the country. But this rhubarb isn't just any rhubarb it is fresh from my aunt's backyard, picked while we were visiting family in Wisconsin. Yeah, folks, Wisconsin isn't just brats and cheese though we had our fill of those, too. (I digress: we attended the World's Largest Brat Fest in Madison and to my delight they had Boca Brats!). My husband spotted it from across the yard and said, over his shoulder as he started running towards it, "Is that rhubarb?" Sure enough, there was a giant ripe for the pickin' rhubarb plant in the corner of the yard. He hacked off a number of stalks, wrapped it in foil, and placed it in a cooler for the 16 hour drive back home. He planned to make his not quite famous rhubarb bread, but I got to it first.

If you aren't familiar with rhubarb, there is something you really ought to know about it: this stuff is tart. When I mention cooking rhubarb to people it is almost inevitably followed by, "Yeah, you have to mix it with strawberries and lots of sugar." It seems our ancestors weren't so quick to get rid of the tartness as most recipes I found did not mix rhubarb with any sweet fruit, though they do call for sugar. I figured, in this day of super sour candy we can surely handle a little tart fresh rhubarb, right?

This pie is actually made from two different recipes, one for the crust from the Rumford Complete Cookbook and one for the filling from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book. The crust is flaky and tasty, though in my impatience I didn't roll it thin enough. The filling is tart and sturdy, with only four ingredients. This pie comes together really quickly and the results are pretty darn good. My husband thought is was good, too, but shook his head and said, "It's no Mennonite pie." He was right, of course, but I think he wasn't thinking of just the pie but of our day spent lollygagging around the Dane County Farmers Market, sitting on the grass eating bread, cheese curds, and rhubarb pie. It really doesn't get better than that.

Rhubarb Pie
The crust recipe is from the Rumford Complete Cookbook, Revised, 1940, and the filling is from The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1948. The crust calls for "1 1/3 cups lard, or other shortening." Instead of lard, I used 1 cup of Spectrum organic trans fat free shortening and 1/3 cup butter. Also, because my husband loved the Mennonite pie with the crumbled topping so much, and because I was too lazy to roll out more dough to make a lattice pattern on top, I mixed a little bit of the pastry crust with a little bit of sugar and crumbled it over the top. The filling recipes notes "many prefer to scald rhubarb before using," so I scalded about half of it and the rest I left raw. This made the filling a little less tart, and also seemed to be a nice mix of very soft, gel-like pieces of rhubarb and firmer pieces.

Flaky Pastry
3 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 1/3 cups shortening, see note above
ice-cold water

Sift the flour and salt together into a bowl. Blend the shortening into the flour with a pastry cutter or two knives until well mixed (shortening will be pea size or smaller). Add water, about a tablespoon at a time, to form a dough, cutting the pastry the whole time.

Roll dough onto a floured board. Roll only lengthwise. Fold dough evenly into three layers (lengthwise, like a trifolded piece of paper). Turn it half around and repeat. Do this at least three times to make the pastry flaky. If possible, chill the pastry before baking.

Rhubarb Filling
1 1/2 cups rhubarb, chopped in 1/2 pieces before measuring
7/8 cup sugar
1 egg
2 Tbs flour

Heat oven to 375. Scald rhubarb if desired (see note above). Mix sugar, flour, and egg into rhubarb. Pile high in the middle of the prepared crust, and cover with a top layer of pastry, latticed pastry, or crumbles (see note above). Bake for about 50 minutes.

Ode to Soy Nog

Soy to The World*

Soy to the world, Silk nog is here!
Now pour yourself a cup;
Let every fridge be stocked with nog,
Add some bourbon and drink up,
Add some bourbon and drink up,
Add some bourbon, add bourbon, and drink up!

Soy nog's healthy, no cholesterol,
Better than the real stuff!
A fifth the fat, half the calories
Drink it, it will make you buff,
Drink it, it will make you buff,
Drink it, oh drink it, it will make you buff!

*No chickens or cows were harmed in making this song, but three poor little cats had to hear me sing it to make sure it worked to the tune. It doesn't. Suggestions for improvement are welcome.

Surest Sign of Fall

Last fall when we got green tomatoes from our CSA I wasn't sure how to use them. So, of course, I made fried green tomatoes and they were fine, good even, but I didn't quite get the hype. This year I decided to become more adventurous and when green tomatoes were on our pick-up list yesterday afternoon I started thinking about all the compotes and salsas and preserves and other green tomato recipes I've been browsing getting ready for this day.

Is it any surprise that I turned to the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book for a recipe? I know, I know, you are wondering if I have any other cook books and I assure you I do, I just find this one has everything I need. Avocado mousse? Page 144. Honeycomb pudding? Page 553. English monkey? Page 127. And need I remind you that there is a whole chapter on Gingerbread and Doughnuts?

If you follow this little story to the end, you will get a peak at a non-classic cooking idea since the stuff you see on this site is only a small portion of my cooking. So we'll start with a classic recipe, but we'll end with one of my improvs.

Curried Green Tomatoes
Adapted from the Boston Cooking School Cook Book.

2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs minced onion
1 tsp curry powder
2 cups green tomatoes, chopped
Salt and pepper


Melt butter, add onion and cook slowly until yellow. Add curry powder and tomatoes and cook until heated thoroughly. Add salt and pepper to taste.

Now here is where the recipe ends and it would be fine served over rice or scooped up with naan. But because I had a whole tray full of peppers roasting in the oven and because I was trying to be a little creative for a contest I wanted to enter this recipe in, I decided to use the curried tomatoes as the start of a soup.

To the tomatoes I added:
5 cups or so of roasted peppers, mostly red but a couple small green, yellow and orange ones
2 cloves of roasted garlic, smashed
1 can of garbanzo beans
Cayenne pepper
Cumin
Coriander

I let this simmer a bit over medium-low heat, then added:

1 cup light coconut milk
more seasoning to taste

Using an immersion blender, I blended the soup until it was smooth but still had nice big pieces of pepper, tomatoes, and whole beans. And I got this...

Food for the Soul

This week our CSA share included turnips. I'm never quite sure what to do with them and I am sad to admit that I have let a few rot away in the fridge. My dad mentioned that my great grandmother used to mash them, so I went looking for a recipe for mashed turnips and found a few, all similar and all fairly simple. Have you ever had mashed turnips? They are not sturdy like potatoes, they are more watery and taste a bit like cauliflower.

Since they seem to be a fairly neutral side dish, I decided to use them on a soul food platter. Of course, after tasting the barbecued tofu, swiss chard and turnip greens (didn't want to waste 'em!), mashed sweet potatoes, and whole wheat corn muffins, my husband said, "I've had soul food and this isn't it." Whatever. He had seconds.

Mashed Turnips
Adapted from 250 Ways to Serve Fresh Vegetables, 1950.

2 1/2 pounds turnips
1/2 to 1 cup water
1 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper
3 Tbs butter

Pare turnips and cut into cubes. Heat water and salt to boiling, add turnips and return lid to pot to prevent water loss due to steam. Reduce heat and simmer 20 to 35 minutes until soft. Drain turnips and mash together with butter and pepper.

Green Food

Today is blog action day, a day when bloggers write about environmental issues in a way that relates to their blog (or not).

We have to eat. Our choices can become a routine we don't think twice about. But every day we are given the opportunity to make choices that lessen our negative impact on the earth. There are many ways to do this, but here are a couple that anyone can do:

1. Eat locally. Now really, I don't eat everything locally and I don't even strive to. I think the 100 mile diet is a great idea in theory but not practical for me, though we can all learn from the principles. Food trucked in from hundreds or thousands of miles away uses fuel and other resources and encourages alterations to plants so they can make the long journey and still look good. Unfortunately, this food might look good but is often flavorless.

There are a lot of reasons to eat locally and a lot of ways you can make that change. Check out Local Harvest and Slow Food USA. Join a CSA, frequent your local farmers market, or just start paying attention to where your food is grown and produced. I'm still buying coffee and brown rice from all over the world but looking at the picture above showing just one weeks share from our CSA you can see eating locally isn't a sacrifice.

2. Go vegetarian. Yes, being vegetarian is about compassion for animals and that was the initial draw for me. But other reasons for committing to vegetarianism for life are the environmental benefits. Raising animals for meat is a very inefficient use of grain and water and other resources, and there are concerns about pollution associated with large animal farms (like run off from chicken farms in the Chesapeake Bay watershed). Read more about environmental vegetarianism here and consider becoming vegetarian or at least committing to more vegetarian meals every week.

3. Carry reusable bags. Whether shopping at a farmers market or a supermarket we need something to haul our groceries home. If you haven't already, make the switch to reusable bags. You will be surprised at their strength and will probably regret not doing it earlier. My favorite canvas bags are these, but I also carry a couple of these for other purchases that come up.

2 for 1

Is it any surprise? It shouldn't be. Clearly smitten with my great grandmother's cookbook I couldn't help but make not one but two recipes from it. Neither is particularly difficult or unusual. These are the kind of recipes that you make once and then you its yours. Some busy night you are standing, hands on hips, still in work clothes, looking around the pantry and contemplating ordering Thai again, when, aha! Potatoes! Mushrooms! Green beans! And of course, you always have a bottle of wine open or one just begging to be opened (right? tell me I'm right).

The potatoes would probably look nicer under finely chopped vegetables, but the flavor is a nice basic background for just about anything you can think of. If you feel the need to have a significant source of protein with every meal, some variety of white bean would be nice, maybe just added to the beans and mushrooms at the last minute and warmed. Finally, the adapted recipe below reduces the amount of butter and adds olive oil and significantly reduces the amount of liquid called for in the original recipe which was 2/3 cup (water, stock, or wine). I was afraid it would make the mushrooms too mushy but if you plan to use them as a spread on toast or with pasta it might be just fine.

Mashed-Potato Baskets
Adapted from "The Boston Cooking School Cook Book," 1948.

3 cups hot mashed potatoes
3 Tbs butter
1 tsp salt
1 egg
1 egg, divided
milk to moisten

Add butter, salt, whole egg and one egg yolk to potatoes. Mash well and mix in enough milk to moisten. Shape into small baskets with pastry bag and tube. Brush with egg white and cook for about 20 minutes in a 350. Broil until brown on top. Fill with vegetable or any creamed dish.

Sauteed Mushrooms and Green Beans
Adapted from "The Boston Cooking School Cook Book," 1948.

1 pound mushrooms
2 Tbs butter
2 Tbs olive oil
Flour for dredging
2 cups green beans
1/2 tsp salt
paprika (something like this, not just something red and flavorless)
1/4 cup dry red wine, water, broth, or cream

Clean and slice mushrooms. Melt butter in heavy pan, add olive oil followed by mushrooms, salt, and a sprinkling of paprika. Dredge with flour. Add green beans and cook for about 7 minutes, stirring occasionally. Add wine or other liquid and cook for a couple minutes more. Serve alone, over potatoes or rice.

Cool Cukes on a Hot Day

For a couple years, we lived in a house without air conditioning and we were constantly looking for ways to stay cool in the summer. We installed an attic fan, but mostly we opened and closed windows, turned fans off and on, didn't use the oven at all and barely used the stovetop. Instead, we often cooked on the grill or made salads or something else fast and cool, often with produce from the garden.

Moving into a condo meant we now have air conditioning and a CSA instead of a garden, but we still look for cool foods in the summer and I still keep oven use to a minimum. This Cucumber Salad recipe from Slenderella is a great side dish or can be made into a meal with tomatoes and fresh bread. It lasted a couple days in the refrigerator, but it did start to get a little watery.

You can see from the picture that the cucumbers I used aren't standard green cucumbers. They are yellow with pale green insides and lots of seeds, though I don't know the variety. They are a little sweeter than regular cucumbers and, since they were from Clagett Farm, they are organic and didn't require peeling because they had no wax on the outside.

Cucumber Salad
Adapted from "Slenderella"

4 cucumbers, sliced thin (peel if coated in wax)
3 Tbs cider vinegar
2 Tbs sour cream
1/4 yogurt
1/2 tsp salt
1 Tbs chopped dill

Soak cucumber in ice water for 30 minutes, and drain well. Mix together the vinegar, sour cream, yogurt, salt, and dill. Mix with the cucumbers and chill.

Stuffed Zucchini

Despite a drought, the zucchini harvest has been plentiful. One day when global warming or terrorism or sheer stupidity kills us all, there will still be two living things: zucchini and cockroaches.

We belong to an amazing CSA called From the Ground Up located at Clagett Farm. It's a partnership between the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and the Capital Area Food Bank, so not only do they supply us with wonderful fresh vegetables, they do it in a socially and environmentally responsible way. This weeks harvest was large...zucchini, eggplant, potatoes, poblano peppers, tomatoes, lipstick peppers, garlic, and other vegetables, herbs, and flowers.

This is a simple, standard preparation for zucchini from one of my all time favorite cookbooks, Laurel's Kitchen. When I became a vegetarian as a teenager in the late 80's this was the only approachable vegetarian cookbook in our library, which had a handful of old hippie cookbooks.

This recipe isn't quite as outstanding as the authors say it is, but it is good and simple. I adapted the recipe by substituting tomatoes for the celery mostly because I don't like celery, but also because tomatoes sounded right in this recipe and we had lots of nice ones from the CSA. I also added a little cheese on top because cheese makes everything better. Finally, I made this in the toaster oven because it is fairly warm outside and we aren't running the air conditioner.

Greek Stuffed Zucchini
Adapted from "Laurel's Kitchen Recipes"

10 6" zucchini
1 1/2 cups chopped onion
1/2 cup uncooked brown rice
1 cup boiling water 1 tsp salt
pepper
3 tbsp olive oil
1 cup chopped tomatoes
1 cup fresh herbs (parsley, oregano, thyme, anything that you have fresh)
1 cup bread crumbs
3 lemons
2 eggs, separated

Preheat the oven to 350. Cut the zucchini in half and hollow it out. Chop the insides to use later. Cook rice with water, onion, salt, pepper, and oil for 25 minutes. Add chopped zucchini and tomato and cook for 5 minutes.

Add herbs, bread crumbs, juice from 2 lemons, and slightly beaten egg whites. Fill the scooped out zucchini with the mixture. Arrange zucchini in a baking dish. Cover and bake for 40 minutes.

Beat the egg yolks and juice from one lemon. Add some of the juice from the baking dish slowly to the egg mixture. Pour this sauce over the zucchini. Grate a small amount of any hard cheese over the zucchini. Bake for 5 to 10 more minutes.