Will bake for food

This is Ernest, he's my dog. If you came here from my other blog, you know that I love him and he vexes me. It is his perrogative, he is afterall, earnest.

Ernest is wearing a serious look and a sign that says he will bay for food.  That is a little misleading. He will whine for food, he will jump for food, but he typically only bays for fire engines and other hounds.

However, will jump or whine for food just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way.

We are baking for food, specifically to benefit Northwest Harvest.  On November 20, 2010, between 10am-2 pm,  drop by the University Congregational Church's Ostrander Hall at 4515 16th Ave. NE in the U district. 

What an opportunity to pick up something to put in the freezer to feed Uncle Bill and Aunt Ethel when they descend upon you the following week!

I'll be making my gluten free pear-ginger granola and some gluten free spiced nuts. Both items hold well and would be great items to serve around the holidays.

For more information and see who is participating, visit www.bakeforfood.com

Jam making and other things on a not so hot day

I started a post about two weeks ago and it was eaten alive by Squarespace. I have to pay better attention to such things or perhaps do everything in a text editor and cut and paste.

In any case, or face as the Iranians like to say, it's time to start blogging and writing, because it is hard to improve if you don't try. I'm not making any excuses for my lack of posting. It has been a summer of learning about climate policy, jam making, gardening, house chores and finding my way.

Last weekend's International Food Bloggers Conference or IFBC  pushed me a bit to find my way. Others, including Alice of Savory Sweet Life have done an amazing job of recapping the conference, so I won't bore you with my version. I go to approximately seven professional conferences or symposia a year and somehow my next Time Space Workshop is not going to be as exciting as IFBC.  It could have been the food, it could have been the content, but my guess is that it was the people. Thank you so much for including me in this amazing group of food writers, photographers, stylists and lovers of the food arts. 

I have blackberry jam in the refrigerator ready to can, I promise to get to it tomorrow. I wanted to talk to you about apricot jam that I make every year and honestly, is the best stuff on this planet. I know it is late to talk about apricots, but keep this recipe in mind for next year. I just pulled out a 2009 jar and the apricots are still vividly orange and look very much like egg yolks.  I am currently enjoying apricot/peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, trying to finish off the end of a loaf of bread.  Not really a hardship, but I hate to see a loaf go to waste.

A few weeks ago, we were in Yakima and picked up some of the first apricots of the season at Johnson’s Family Orchards.  I made jam with some of them and dried the others for use later in the year.  If you are ever in Yakima, I highly recommend visiting their farm stand and cherry u pick.

Apricot Preserve (adapted from Christine Ferber’s Bergeron Apricot jam recipe from her book Mes Confitures, 2002).

While Ferber doesn’t give recommendations for water bath canning, I add this step to the process to satisfy my scientist/fastidious side. I have not seen degradation in the final product. Most fruit preserve recipes call for a 5 or 10 minute bath, so that is what I use. I also recommend weighing the ingredients using a simple kitchen scale instead of using measuring cups

2 ½ pounds (1.15 kg) apricots, ripe but not soft this should yield approximately 2 ¼ pounds net (1 kg).
Try and select nice looking, unblemished fruit.

3 ¾ cups (800 g) granulated sugar (I use white sugar, I have not seen acceptable results with the organic light brown sugars, they change the color of the syrup)

7 oz (200 ml) water – depends on the juiciness of your fruit. I sometimes omit most of the water if my apricots are moist.

Juice of 2 small lemons (not baby lemons, but regular store bought lemons)

Rinse apricots in cold water. Cut out blemished parts if necessary. Cut them in half to remove the pit. Mix all of the ingredients together in a ceramic bowl. Next cover the mixture with parchment paper and place in refrigerate to macerate for 8 h or over night. I tend to use a dessert plate to keep the parchment paper from floating.

Pour contents into preserving pan and bring to a simmer. Return to ceramic bowl. Cover with parchment and refrigerate overnight.

The second day, pour contents into a sieve or colander to separate the apricots from the syrup.

Take apricots and attempt to remove the skin. If the apricots are thin skinned, this is easier. If you are mangling your apricots, then stop and recognize this is not a crucial thing. Keep apricots to the side for now.

 In a preserving pan (I use a ceramic Le Creuset dutch oven) bring the syrup to a boil. Skim as you go along and let the juice mixture concentrate until more syrupy. Ferber uses a candy thermometer. The candy thermometer should read about 221 F (105 C) I use my eyes.  Add apricot halves to the syrup and bring to a boil again. Remove apricots from syrup, divide amongst your prepped jars. Boil syrup for another three minutes. Add syrup to jars, leaving ½ inch head space and place in boiling water bath for five minutes, which starts when the canning kettle comes back to a boil.  Remove from bath and wait for that glorious sound of the jars sealing!

Makes approximately 5 half pints with a little left over for a week’s worth of peanut butter sandwiches.

In celebration of meatless week - Addas polo

 

Every culture has its beans and rice dish, some bring you good luck, some keep you from bouncing checks and some just taste good. This week, I am trying to go meatless, and like anything, when you don't have it, you want it. All I can say is that it's pancetta I've been fantasizing about all week long. 

If you read my about me page, you will realize that I was a vegetarian with minor lapses into smoked salmon for about ten years. Those years were great. No one put a gun to my head and told me to eat tofu. I did it by choice. I also stopped eating tofu by choice. Occasionally a tub will fall into my shopping basket. I can't really remember what I ate back when I was a vegetarian. I know it had a lot to do with the Mollie Katzen's Moosewood series of cookbooks, the first one and the Enchanted Broccoli Forest.  Every dish either had dill or cumin, but blessedly never both at the same time. I remember eating a lot of popcorn and baby carrots, but that might have been grad school more than being a vegetarian.

When I was thinking of a suitable vegetarian dish to share this week, I immediately thought of addas polo or lentils and rice. It was one of my favorite dishes growing up. I loved its meatiness, especially when my mom would add extra lentils. I loved it even better with catsup and hot dogs. My palate is more refined these days, I prefer my addas polo with barbeque sauce and cutlets.  It is also my father's stand by dish when he's by himself. Its super easy to make and like most things, is pretty tasty the next day.

This recipe is a little different than my dad's version.  It adds sauteed dates and raisins at the end to give a it nice finish, slightly sweet and a bit more substantive and fancy.

Addas Polo serves four Americans, or two average Iranians

1/2 cup brown lentils, picked over and rinsed

2 cups water

1 cup basmati rice, rinsed with fresh water and drained

1 t salt

2 T butter

1/4 cup raisins

1/2 cup dates, chopped

1/4 cup sliced blanched almonds (optional)

Place lentils in pan with water and simmer until lentils partly cooked, al dente, but not mushy approximately 10 minutes.  Drain the lentils, reserve lentil broth and add water to lentil broth to bring the volume back up to two cups.

Add water back to pan, add rice and salt, bring to a boil, add lentils back in and cook the rice/lentil mixture with the lid off for approximately 10 minutes, or until the water is nearly done. Turn down heat, place lid on pan and steam for approximately 10 minutes.  During the steaming, melt butter in saute pan, add raisins and chopped dates, and optional almonds and saute until they are warmed through anc coated with butter, remove from heat.

When rice is done steaming, remove lid and spoon rice onto a warmed serving plate, garnish with raisins and dates and serve. 

Suggested accompaniments include: a nice low fat plain yogurt, baked chicken legs, persian cutlets and a healthy dose of KC masterpiece barbeque sauce.

Carrot and Cardamom salad

Carrot salads of my youth featured too much mayonnaise and raisins and not enough oomph, they were sweet, pale and overly dressed. I was not impressed and stuck to the not seen in nature colored potato salads.  Later in my life, I would buy bags of "baby carrots" which were sort of slimy out of the bag with a strange plastic odor.  However, these babies got me through grad school, when diet coke, coffee and baby carrots were staples of my diet.  To this day, I cannot walk by a display of baby carrots without thinking of my large scale construction class.

When I started growing my own food, I fell in love with the home grown carrot - not perfect, slightly sweet and tasting of the earth. I know gardeners who believe that carrots left in the ground after the last frost are the sweetest. I have never had any left to test this hypothesis.

In Persian cooking, carrots are used for savory and sweet dishes.  They turn up in savory stews, rice dishes and in desserts.  They are a multipurpose vegetable that lends itself to all sorts of uses.  My TH makes an amazingly simple soup of carrots, a bit of sauteed onion and chicken stock.

I never think to use carrots as the focal point of a salad.  They are the curlicue garnishes and sometimes the disks that end up at the bottom of the bowl.  Most of the time they are relegated to the vegetable tray, where they may or may not be consumed and then end up sitting out on the conference table until someone finally throws them out, three days later.

I have had a few good carrot salads in my time, PCC markets used to make a Morrocan carrot salad that features slightly cooked carrot rounds, lots of cumin and paprika.  I'm not sure they make it now. My friend M makes another salad that has the cumin, but not the paprika and uses shredded carrots. At cookbook club, @kairuy made two salads out of Falling Cloudberries, both were good, but the carrot salad made me swoon.

When was the last time a carrot made you swoon?

Like with many of the recipes in the book, the quantity of the ingredients is questionable and the procedure a mystery, but the premise of adding the sweet scent of cardamom and ginger to carrots got to me.

This salad is delicious as soon as you dress it, but like the chickpea/cilantro salad, it improves with an overnight stay in the fridge, if you can stand waiting that long.

Carrot and Cardamon salad (adapted from Tessa Kiros' "Falling Cloudberries")

serves six as a side dish, or one of me with some leftovers

eight medium carrots, 3/4" in diameter, 10" long (ca. 1 1/2 lbs)

one half a red onion, chopped finely

1/4 cup parsley, chopped

1/2 t cardamom

1 1/4 inch piece of fresh ginger, grated (didn't have this, used 1/2 t ground)

1 t sugar (optional, but I think you should try a little if your carrots are not at their tip top sweetness)

1/2 t salt (the original recipe called for 2t, that is a bit excessive unless you plan to draw the water out of the carrots, which you don't)

juice of 2 lemons

1/2 cup olive oil (I used half of this)

10 mint leaves, chopped or torn

pepper to taste

Instructions:

Grate carrots using a box grater, a Cuisinart with the shredding disk, or cheat and buy them pre-shredded at Trader Joes. Place in a large mixing bowl. Add diced onion and parsley and mix to combine. In another small bowl, whisk olive oil, lemon juice, salt, sugar, cardamom and ginger together. Pour the dressing over the salad. Mix thoroughly until dressing coats all the carrots, you may have some dressing at the bottom of the bowl. Season to taste with pepper or more salt if you wish and garnish with chopped or torn mint leaves.

Refrigerated until served, which could be five seconds depending on your guests, but it does get better with a little marination.