Stocking up for Fall

Classes start tomorrow, and today I'm trying to get my house in order, preparing to be submerged in the school kitchens for another eleven weeks. One of the resolutions I made, coming out of my week at the farm, is to waste less food at home. I've slumped into some bad habits; buying groceries with good intentions and then finding sad bags of moldy veg lurking in the crisper weeks later; being lazy about separating food parings for composting; going out to eat when I'm "too tired to cook." I won't promise to be perfect, just to be more mindful, and today I made a good small start.

I sifted through everything in my fridge, and did some cooking for meals later this week. Lucky for my pride, this time the dive into the fridge turned up only one item that had to be composted (a half jar of very expensive fermented carrots, that had molded) and everything else got either cooked or otherwise prepped for use. Here's my list of accomplishments for the day:

Cooked up a big pan of shakshuka sauce
Refreshed my sourdough starter
Cut up a bunch of fresh veg for snacking
Stewed all the veg trimmings to make a quart of vegetable stock

I will freeze some of the pepper sauce and the stock. There are dozens of recipes for shakshuka, but they all result in a strongly seasoned tomato-based sauce, in which you poach eggs before serving it topped with a bit of yogurt and accompanied by good bread. Mine is based on Yotam Ottolenghi's recipe in the cookbook "Jerusalem," though you can see another version of his recipe here. It's a very flexible thing to make.

Shakshuka sauce

Dice 4 or 5 good-sized sweet or bell peppers
Chop 4 cloves of garlic
Heat a tablespoon or two of olive oil in a heavy, deep pan
Add the peppers and garlic along with:
a teaspoon of cumin and of salt
2 teaspoons of tomato paste
a teaspoon of Sriracha or hot sauce of choice

cook this all for about 10 minutes to soften the peppers
add about 5 cups of chopped tomatoes (fresh or tinned, or a mix)

cook until the sauce becomes fairly thick (about 20 minutes)

We're Jammin'

What I did on my summer vacation: made Rhubarb and Whole Strawberry Jam from Christine Ferber's "Mes Confitures".



The farmer's market still had some young rhubarb, and strawberries are peak season in Washington now, so I decided to make some more jam. This is the second recipe I've made from Ferber's book; the first was plain rhubarb jam (blogged here). Ferber's jams are very sweet (to my taste). She prescribes a ratio of 80% sugar (to fruit, by weight). I decided to modify this batch of jam to 60% sugar. I also cut the recipe approximately in half, which resulted in four half pints, plus about 2/3 cup extra.

600 gm prepared rhubarb (trimmed, stalks cut lengthwise, diced)
360 gm sugar
600 gm strawberries (washed and hulled, left whole)
360 gm sugar
juice of one lemon

The directions for cooking the jam are a bit complicated at first reading. Basically you are making each fruit into jam separately, and combining them at the end just before canning. The whole process takes three days. I had to write out a schedule to keep track of all the steps. I found several internet sources discussing the recipe and telling about modifications, which was a big help, and based on their suggestions, I cut back on the most complicated step, which calls for bring the strawberry mixture to a boil 5 times, repeating the sequence four times at 8-hour intervals. EH? The idea is to concentrate the syrup and infuse the whole berries with syrup without mashing them. I cut the interval time down so that I could get this done in one day. I also changed the final boiling step so that I cooked the two fruits together, rather than cooking separately, combining, and cooking again. My process was:

Day 1:

Mix strawberries, sugar, and half the lemon juice in a non-reactive bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Day 2:

Strain the berry syrup, bring to a boil and boil for 5 minutes, pour the syrup over the berries, skim, cover, refrigerate.

Mix the rhubarb, sugar and the rest of the lemon juice in a non-reactive bowl, cover and refrigerate overnight.

Day 3:

In the morning, put the strawberry mixture into a pan and bring it to a boil 5 times (bring to boil, take off heat until boiling stops, return to heat and bring to boil, and so on). Wait 2 hours and repeat. Do the 5 times boiling four times in total.

Get your canning jars and lids sterilized: lids in a pan of simmering water, clean jars in the oven at 225F.

Then take the rhubarb mixture out of the fridge. Strain the juice of both mixtures into a pan. Bring to a boil, skim and continue to cook at a boil until the syrup reaches 221F (105C). Add the fruit; continue to boil, skimming any foam, for 5 minutes.

Fill the jars to the top, wipe the rims if needed. Put on lids and screw down the caps, then turn the jars over to cool. Alternatively, you can water-bath process them (see here for instructions). The "turn jars over" method is the traditional French method.

A note on sugar: in the rhubarb jam I made earlier, I used unbleached sugar, and the resulting jam turned out a bit on the brownish side of red. For this jam I used white sugar, and the color is much better. The jam is very tasty, tart and sweet. I think if I make this again, I'll use a higher proportion of strawberries to rhubarb, perhaps 60/40.

The Lonely Pint

Sounds like a good name for a pub, doesn't it? So, this morning I got everything prepared for cooking the jam. You can (maybe) see in the photo below that the mixture produced lots of juice overnight. I assembled all the tools I thought I'd need for making and canning the jam: plenty of jars, jar-lifter, candy thermometer, strainer and spoon, skimmer and jar funnel (cooking pot not shown). It looked like about a quart of raw fruit, so I got out two pint jars and four half-pint ones.



First step is to make sure the jars and lids are sterile and hot. Jam doesn't require hot-bath canning, so I put the jars in the oven instead of in boiling water (225F). I put the lids in a small pan of simmering water. The jar rings don't need to be sterilized.

The process of cooking the jam is pretty simple: strain the juice, bring it to a boil, skim, and boil until the thermometer reads 221F / 105C. (Note to self: get a different candy thermometer - every time I use this one, I remember how hard it is to read.) When the syrup has cooked down enough, add the rhubarb, bring back to a boil, skim and cook, stirring, for 5 minutes. Ladle the jam into hot jars (this is where the jar funnel comes in handy) and put hot lids on top, then tighten down the rings to seal.

You notice I said "jars".... but this amount of rhubarb yielded exactly one pint, so I only needed one jar. I should have used two half-pint jars, but by the time I realized this, it was too late. On the other hand, the jam makes up in flavor for what it lacks in size. Wonderfully rhubarby with just a slight bite of lemon. Beautiful deep ruby color, too.

Mise en place for Rhubarb Jam

Tis the season for rhubarb, and I have a friend with a healthy plant, so am making rhubarb jam. This also gives me a chance to practice my execrable (according to the French chef at school (note: must also be said with a French accent)) knife skills. I am following a recipe from a book recommended by Chef James, Christine Ferber's "Mes Confitures". There are some delicious-sounding and unusual recipes in the book ("Plum and Apple with Anise and Vanilla" for example) and the book is arranged by seasons, to feature the freshest and ripest fruit.

She has ten recipes featuring rhubarb, and I'm starting with the simplest one: rhubarb, sugar and fresh lemon juice. The recipe calls for 1 kg net (prepared) rhubarb, 800 gm sugar (so 80% of the weight of the fruit) and juice of one lemon. My first step was to wash, trim, dice and weigh the rhubarb. My yield was 465 grams.



The next step was to calculate how much sugar I'd need, and to weigh the sugar. 80% of 465 is 372 grams. I'm making a little less than half the original recipe, so I squeezed half a lemon. Here is my mise en place:



Finally, I mixed this all together, covered it and put it in the fridge. It needs to macerate overnight to draw out the rhubarb juices and let the lemon start to activate the gelling power of the pectin. Tomorrow I will cook and can it.