Curried Red Dal

Culinarily, I think this time of year is beyond boring. It’s too early for the farmer’s market. It’s too late to make wintery things.

This year I’m working on cooking up the odds and ends of stuff that turns up in the back of the freezer, forgotten in the cupboard, or lolling around on a pantry shelf. This dish knocked out three freezer things and two cupboard things! Plus it was tasty and interesting to eat.

Curried Red Dal
2 c red lentils
2 qt water or stock (I used one of each)
2 T red curry paste
1 can coconut milk
2 kaffir lime leaves
1 bucketful of fresh spinach or a block of frozen spinach
Salt to taste
Cooked rice

Rinse the lentils and pop them in a pot with the stock or water. Bring to a simmer and cook them 15-20 minutes. Stir in the curry paste, the coconut milk, and the kaffir lime leaves. Cook another 15-20 minutes or until everything is tender.

Meanwhile, I hope you have already started the rice.

While all that is happening, cook the spinach in as little water as possible. Steaming it works great. Drain it in a colander, squeezing it against the sides to make the spinach as dry as possible.

When the lentils are tender, stir in the spinach and season to taste. Serve over rice.

Easy and fun! And soon there will be REAL spinach: market spinach, CSA spinach, homegrown spinach that lives in the same zip code as me! I can’t wait.

Just sayin'

Beet Reuben: grilled Swiss cheese on pumpernickel with sauerkraut, hard-boiled egg, roasted beet, and Thousand Island dressing.

Thanks to Deb and Sean for the idea and Jenn for the inspiration!

Puerco Pibil: A (De)composition

Cooking is creative, right? It’s constructive. You make something.

Making pibil is more like artfully destroying a pork shoulder most, but not all, of the way. First you besmirch it. Then you cook it nearly to death. You tear it down, shred by shred, with your bare hands; and then you reassemble it into a little package its mother would never recognize.

Puerco Pibil
Achiote is something you can make, or get in a Latin grocery store, or find onlines, of course, where you can find every single thing ever.

1 pork shoulder roast, 4-5 lb.
1 block of achiote
½ c of bitter orange juice, or of this bitter orange marinade stuff I found in the neighborhood Latin grocery; or ¼ c lemon juice plus ¼ c orange juice
1 head of garlic, cloves peeled and chopped
2 habanero chiles, seeded and chopped
1 large onion
Salt to taste
Tortillas
Pickled onions, mixed pickles, or lime wedges

First, you have to unmake the block of achiote. Soak it in the juice until you can stir it into a paste. This might take awhile, i.e. hours. I gave up too soon and put the brick-hard achiote in my food processor with the juice. This caused the processor to jump all over the counter, spitting achiote across the kitchen. (The stuff stains. It’s really yellow.)

But when you do succeed at making a creamy paste, then pulverize the garlic and chiles and achiote in the food processor until things are fairly smooth.

Smear the achiote paste all over the pork shoulder and wrap it up tightly in plastic or foil. Watch out for your hands, because the habanero is kind of hot. Like 350,000 Scoville units, so be careful. Also, wear an apron, as you will have another opportunity to splatter achiote paste all over yourself. (It’s like my high school physics teacher used to say: “Entropy happens.”) Marinate overnight.

The next morning, if you are going off to work, slice up the onion and put it in the bottom of the crock pot. Set the roast on top, put the crock pot on low, and go away for 10 hours.

Before....

 I poured in a half cup of water and crimped a piece of aluminum foil around the lid to make a tighter seal. (If I were going to be home, I would have roasted the pork at 250° or 300° for 4-6 hours. Damn, that would have been even better.)

After. Whoa. I should have expected this, but I did not see it coming.

Holy crap! All the juice fell out of the roast while it was cooking. Lift the pork and the onion out of the pan juice. When it is cool enough to touch, pull the pork off the bone and shred it with your hands.

How do you like me now?

How 'bout now?

Now that the roast is totally dissembled, turn to the pan juices. Spoon off the fat and cook the juice down until reduced to about a cup. Pour this all over the shredded pork and onion. Salt to taste.

Now this is the original hot mess.

Heat up tortillas and make tacos. Put a few pickled vegetables or a squeeze of lime on the taco. Something sour will help cut the richness of the pork and highlight its flavor.

Congratulations: your food has been deconstructed and reassembled, like, four or five times.

Thoughts for some friends

On Sunday I was so preoccupied with thoughts of a friend that I forgot a grocery item. That’s maybe the least bad thing that cancer ever did to anyone.

In the past month, I’ve found out that three of my friends have the disease. (Four, if you count the neighbor’s cat.) I learned about two of them within 30 seconds of each other while checking my email on the treadmill at the gym. So I guess cancer ruined my workout. Another not-very-bad thing that someone else’s illness did to me.

Of course it’s self-indulgent to get mad about such minor inconveniences. But listen: it’s just the tip of an iceberg we’re all going to crash into someday.

I’ve been thinking constantly about all these people. The friend with the worst prognosis is the one farthest away, the one I can do the least to support: phone calls, cards, emails. The friend with the best prognosis just wants to hang out, something I’d gladly do anyway. The friend in the middle has rallied her community for help, and I’m happy—even relieved—to pitch in.

Listen: nothing I can do for any of them will make this go away. The best anyone can do is heft a corner of the burden.

Listen: all of us, maybe from the moment of our creation, carry the seeds of our own undoing. They sleep inside us—latent in the tissues of organs, bones, blood. We go about our lives, never knowing when the silent seeds will germinate, grow, and bear their fruit: the horror of the body’s corruption, the perverse self-betrayal of sickness.

Listen: the whole time I’ve been friends with each of these people, a secret hand has been winding down a count known only to God. None of us knows what will happen, nor when, nor to which of us. What can one person say to another under such circumstances?

Nothing more nor less than what we should say to anyone, anytime: “I care about you. I am glad you’re in my life. I am happy to be here with you now.”

And, “I went back to the grocery store and got that last item because I wanted to cook you this.”

As long as we share this life—however precariously, whether sick or well, and especially if we hope to heal—we still get to eat together.

This is Simplest Farro and a modified Early Autumn Vegetable Roast from Lynne Rossetto Kasper’s The Italian Country Table.

Soup Series 2: Rescue Orange!

Bend your ear down to this soup: it’s so orange, you can hear a tiny siren sound.

I found some neglected carrots and abandoned squash in the crisper drawer. They had some soft spots. And a few wrinkly peels. There may have been some sprouting. All right, I admit it: parts of them were brown.

My poor vegetables weren’t going to win any beauty contests; that was for sure. But they were mostly intact and I hated to throw them out. Besides, it was I who had failed them. They deserved more from me. I owed it to them. “You will look just fine as soup,” I told them.

Cooked this way, they look (and taste) exciting and delicious again! A splash of orange juice and a sprig of tarragon rescues them from the trash can.

Carrot and Squash Soup with Orange and Tarragon
Serves 6

2 T butter or olive oil
1 c chopped onion
6 c diced carrots and/or winter squash, such as butternut and kabocha
1 qt broth
½ c orange juice
2 T chopped fresh tarragon
Salt and pepper to taste

Heat the butter or oil in a stockpot. Sauté the onion until soft, about 4 or 5 minutes. Dump in the carrots/squash and sauté that for another 5 or 6 minutes, until things begin to soften up and start hinting at getting brown.

Add the broth and simmer until the vegetables are tender, maybe 15 minutes.

Purée the soup in a blender or food processor. For good measure (and if you need to impress someone), force the soup through a sieve; this will make it super-smooth.

Return the soup to the pot, add the remaining ingredients, and bring it up to piping hot. Serve to acclaim.

Soup Series 1: Harira for Haters

It’s been a long time since I cooked anything interesting! My excuse? It’s late winter/early spring. And I hate it!

I hate how there isn’t anything interesting in the grocery store. Winter foods have begun to bore me and spring things haven’t arrived yet. I hate how it’s dark in the morning. Usually I hate how cold and snowy it is, but this year I hate what the drought and confusing temperatures must be doing to my flowers. My poor flowers! I hate it when winter kills my flowers.

Buh, buh, buh. All this hating and whining can work up a person’s appetite. I dug a couple of soup recipes out of the vaults, and I’ll show them to you one blog post at a time. Soup Series 1 is harira, a cheerfully yellow Moroccan dish of legumes, rice, vegetables, and meat.

As a young professional, I experimented with vegetarianism as a way to stretch my grocery dollars. I kicked the meat out of many a recipe—including this one, which originally called for lamb and chicken giblets to enrich the broth. I’m sure they would be delicious, but I’ve never made this dish with them and I’ve never missed them. You try it and see what you think!

Harira Sans Animals
I believe the original recipe came from Taste of Morocco by Robert Carrier.

1 large yellow onion, minced
1 cup lentils
1 cup chickpeas
1 t turmeric
½ t cinnamon
½ t ground black pepper
¼ t ground ginger
¼ t sweet paprika
1 pinch saffron
½ c rice
1 T dry yeast
1 fistful cilantro, chopped (minus stems)
1 fistful flat-leaf parsley, chopped (minus stems)
8 canned whole tomatoes, seeded and chopped
4 t butter
Salt to taste
Lemon wedges

Soak the lentils and chickpeas overnight in 6 cups of water.

The next day, dump the lentils, chickpeas, and water in a pot and bring them to a boil. Skim off the foam. Dump in the onion and spices, then reduce to a simmer. Cover the pot and cook until the legumes are tender, about 2 hours.

Cook the rice in about a cup more water than the package directions call for. Be careful not to overcook it. Drain off the extra water, reserving it. Plop the rice into the soup.

Stir the yeast into the reserved rice water. Then add the herbs, the tomato, and the butter. Bring the mix to a simmer and cook it for a few minutes. Add it to the soup. Add salt to taste.

Serve the harira with a lemon wedge so your diners can squeeze it onto their bowl. Yum!

Just Sayin'

Scrambled eggs, gravlax with mustard dill sauce (thanks to my colleague Sue and her Danish-born loved ones), and a big pile of spring mix.

My New Toy

The 7" straight carving fork from Wusthof is finally mine.


2001 A Space Odyssey - 02. Richard Strauss - Main Title - Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus Spake Zarathustra)
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Just sayin'

Chocolate cream pie on graham cracker crust with whipped cream.

And I am seriously done eating dessert for awhile.

Venison, Wild Rice, and Squash!

A new job means new adventures, right? Well at least it means new colleagues—and, as it happens, a new window on the world of food.

My colleague Angi’s family are deer hunters, and they shot one this season. I’d been hearing about this dead deer for days: it was hanging in the garage. Angi had to bump past it every day to and from work. Her kids wanted to play with the legs. Her husband made sausage, which she did not want to help eat.

I must be doing something right, because guess what Angi brought me!

And I have a lot of little squashes piling up from my CSA, too. How fun would this be: squashes stuffed with a sausage and wild rice filling thing?

I chose three Sweet Dumpling squashes, each about the size of my two fists. I cut them in half, scooped out the seeds, and set them cut-side down on a rimmed baking sheet. I propped up each squash half on the rim of the sheet—like propping up a lid on the edge of a pot—so they weren’t flat on the metal.

While they were baking, I made a half recipe of fruited wild rice pilaf from a recipe card I found at Kowalski’s Market. I cut the recipe in half, fried up a cup of sausage, and mixed it in.

Then I stuffed my little squash friends full of fruity venison sausagey wild rice pilaf. Aren’t they cute? There was rice left over, so I could have made more or bigger squashes.

The dish was rich and sweet with a bit of tang from the fruit, chewiness from the wild rice, and crunch from the pecans in the recipe. Sage, stock, and aromatics permeate the rice. This would be good with a crisp salad of bitter greens. I pronounce it yummy. Thanks, Angi!

Just Sayin'

Fried egg sandwich with eggs from Bar 5, peas & carrots microgreens from Bossy Acres, and bacon jam made out of Tollefson’s pork from the recipe at Kelli Abrahamian’s blog I Had a Delicious Time. Thank you, Minneapolis and Kingfield Farmers Markets.

Perfect Pecan Pie!

Artist’s conception - real pic below!

In a rare instance of Amy Boland posting a holiday recipe in advance of a holiday, here’s the pecan pie I made last Thanksgiving and plan to make again!

There are two reasons to like this pie. One, it is full of deep, dark, sugary-buttery-caramely-toasty flavors. Two, it calls for bourbon and I don’t know anything about the stuff. I get to learn! Yay!

Last year I blindly got a pint of Wild Turkey. This elicited reactions ranging from indifference to dismay in the bourbon drinkers of my acquaintance.

This year I went to South Lyndale Liquors—where they will, upon request, pour you tiny tastes of booze from sample bottles lined up on the barrelheads of actual casks conditioned specially for them to sell. The guy who poured for me also explained what I was tasting and why the flavors were there. I chose Buffalo Trace.

So now I feel I have picked a winner, and I’m going to have plenty of bourbon left over afterwards. Um. Pie-making party at my house?

Oh, wait, yeah, the PIE! This IS supposed to be a post about pie.

Perfect Pecan Pie

Post-Thanksgiving pie pic update

I copied this recipe out of a column in the Star Tribune in 1997. Usually I don’t post recipes I didn’t create or significantly modify, because I think the person who wrote the recipe should get the credit (and should get stuck doing the typing). But since I don’t think we can go back in time and purchase a copy of the newspaper from an unknown day in late fall 1997, I’m prepared to make an exception.

Also I recall from my glamorous youth, when I worked on food books at a children’s publishing company, that the Copyright Guardians consider recipes to be formulae. So I’m not running afoul of the law, either. Potential haters, please make a note.

1 c dark brown sugar
⅔ c cane syrup OR ⅓ c light corn syrup and ⅓ c dark molasses
¼ c unsalted butter
3 T bourbon
½ t vanilla
½ t salt
4 eggs
2-3 T half & half
2 heaping c pecan pieces
1 unbaked single 9” pie crust
A big handful of pecan halves

Heat oven to 350°. Melt the sugar, syrup, butter, bourbon, vanilla, and salt together. Heat to boiling and boil one minute, stirring constantly. Let cool.

Beat the eggs with the half & half until frothy. Add this to the syrup, beating until well mixed. Stir in the pecan pieces.

Pour into the pie shell and top with a layer of pecan halves. (Make it look pretty.) Bake 45 to 50 minutes or until a toothpick comes out clean. Serve warm or at room temperature.

My Best Chocolate Cake

“It’s your second-best cake,” Beth corrected.

“It is NOT! You don’t know,” I argued. “You’ve never even tried this one before.”

“I don’t need to try it to know. I know the other one is the best,” Beth snipped back.

It is NOT. She doesn’t KNOW. This one is the richest and fudgiest. I modified the old Walker Museum Gallery 8 cookbook recipe for Wellesley Fudge Cake.

Wellesley Fudge Cake

Cake part:
½ c butter, softened
2 c minus 2 T sugar
4 egg yolks
1 c flour
1 c cocoa
4 t baking powder
½ t salt
1 c milk
2 t vanilla
4 egg whites

Frosting part:
12 oz chocolate chips
¾ c sour cream
1 t vanilla
1 pinch salt

First, do your mise en place for the cake:

• Preheat the oven to 325°.
• It is easiest to use an electric mixer for this recipe. Haul yours out.
• Grease, line with parchment paper, and flour three 9-inch layer pans.
• Separate your eggs. Be careful not to get any yolk in the whites. Put the yolks in a small bowl and the whites in a medium to large bowl.
• Sift the flour, cocoa powder, and salt together into a bowl.
• Put the milk and vanilla together in a measuring cup or some other vessel. I dunno, maybe a bowl.

Now you’re ready to roll.

In yet another large bowl, cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Beat in the egg yolks.

Mix in ⅓ of the dry ingredients. Then stir in ½ the milk mixture, followed by more dry stuff, more milk, and the last of the dry stuff.

Wash the beaters; any trace of fat will prevent the next step from coming true. With clean beaters, beat the egg whites to the soft peak stage. (Fat prevents egg whites from whipping up. I don’t know why. It’s probably just hatefulness.)

Fold ⅓ of the egg whites into the batter, then the next ⅓, then the final part. This helps the egg whites stay fluffy and gives your cake batter the best shot at high volume.

Spread the batter into the three pans and bake 20 to 25 minutes, or until a cake tester comes out mostly clean. Cool in the pans on racks for 10 minutes, then invert and peel off the parchment. Cool some more.

While the cake bakes, make the frosting:

Melt the chocolate chips in a heavy-bottomed pan over low heat. Stir in the sour cream. Stir in the salt and vanilla.

Frost your cake with the warm frosting. The frosting will firm up as it cools, producing a cake that resembles a fudge-walled fortress.

Cookin’ the Farmshare

My neighbor Gwen and I share a CSA box from Harmony Valley. We are the perfect CSA companions. Everything she loves best is stuff I can take or leave. Everything I covet is something she thinks is a hassle to prepare. We think it’s a fair split if the single head of romaine goes to her house and the lone celeriac goes to mine. It’s true harmony!

Last week Gwen was out of town, which meant I got to keep the entire share. Whenever this happens, I feel a mixture of glee and guilt.
On the one hand, having an entire box of vegetables to myself is like playing with the Lincoln Logs while my brother is at T-ball practice. You mean I don’t have to split the roof slats with you? I can have all the flat logs? I can build an entire cabin the way I want without sharing?!

On the other hand, I hate to see my friendly neighbor lose out on tasty snacks. So when I opened the box last week, my heart fluttered. Much of the delivery was storage veggies: squash, sweet potatoes, leeks, kale, and beets. They would easily live until Gwen got home. But then she wouldn’t want to cook them.

“Surely, though,” I thought, “she’d like to eat them.” And since I was going to cook for myself anyway…

Leek and Potato Soup (potage Parmentier)
I used the recipe from Joy of Cooking. This soup is supposed to be white, but I used some very roasted, very vegetably chicken stock I froze earlier. I’m pretty sure the stock was made out of Harmony Valley vegetable scraps and a chicken raised by my neighbor Andrea’s mom. That chicken was really good.

Raw Kale Salad with Roasted Baby Beets
Harmony Valley sent red kale and marble-sized golden beets. I used the recipe from Kim Christensen’s “A Year to Eat Freely” 2011 calendar. I wonder if it’s still available on her Affairs of Living blog? This is a favorite recipe to which I keep returning again and again.

I scrubbed the beets, tossed them with oil, tented them with foil, and cooked them on a baking sheet in a 350° oven for an hour. When they were cool enough, I peeled them and popped them onto the salad. The next day, it occurred to me to toss some toasted walnuts on that too.

Sweet Potatoes Roasted with Apples
This one is based on another recipe from Joy of Cooking; but because I altered the cooking method, I will claim it as mine.

2 T butter
6 medium sweet potatoes, scrubbed well and sliced
3 apples, cored and cut into chunks
½ c brown sugar
A splash of water
Salt and pepper to taste

Put the butter in a large roasting pan and melt it in a 400° oven.

Add the sweet potatoes, apples, and sugar. Toss them all together in the pan to coat them. Add a splash of water to the pan.

Cook in the oven, stirring occasionally, until the liquid has boiled down and a sticky syrup remains. This will take perhaps 40 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Mmm, boy.

Have Fun Eating Your Sheep

“Bye, honey. Have fun eating your sheep,” said my sweetheart.

I ended the phone call, turned to Judy, and shrugged. Beth would not be joining us. We were in Judy’s kitchen putting the final touches on dinner. The meal featured breast of lamb, which Judy had found in limited supply at her butcher shop. We’d seasoned it the night before, and it was cooking on her grill. I took a cutting board off the counter and turned toward the back door.

“Why does only half of a couple like lamb?” Judy called after me. Beth doesn’t like it. Judy’s partner, Stu, doesn’t like it. My mother had called while we were cooking and, upon hearing the menu, reported that my stepdad doesn’t like it either.

I put the laden cutting board back on the countertop. “Beth won’t eat it because lambs are cute and fluffy,” I remarked.

“Well that just makes them taste even better,” Judy replied.

Maybe and maybe not. What REALLY makes them taste even better are a dry marinade and a slow fire.

Grilly Lamb
Breast of lamb or some other lamb part
1 lemon
Olive oil
One of these dry rubs:
Let’s Pretend We’re Greek
Mix or grind together:

Minced leaves from 8 sprigs of rosemary
3-4 cloves of garlic, minced
1 T fresh ground black pepper
Grated zest of 1 lemon
2 t sea salt

Let’s Pretend We’re Moroccan
Mix or grind together:

Minced leaves from 3 sprigs parsley
Minced leaves from 3 sprigs mint
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
1 t fresh ground black pepper
2 t sea salt
1 t ground coriander
½ t ground cumin
¼ t ground cinnamon
1 minced cayenne pepper

If you need lemon zest, then zest the lemon before you juice it.

Juice ½ the lemon, add an equal amount of olive oil, and whisk these together. Brush the lamb all over with the mixture.

Rub the dry rub all over the lamb.

Wrap the seasoned lamb tightly in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.

Grill over indirect heat as low as you can manage. Judy cooked at 325° for about 45 minutes.

Take the lamb off the grill and let rest 20 minutes before carving.

Oh. Mah. Gaw.

Menus Stand Still

I had occasion to take a meal to someone, and I decided to see what it was like to be inside Mollie Katzen’s head. I got out her Still Life With Menu Cookbook and opened it to somewhere in the middle.

Menu #21 is a tribute to southwestern cooking: eggplant relish with roasted peppers and ground pepitas; lentil chili; corn and red pepper muffins. (And, randomly, chocolate chip peanut butter cookies for dessert.) The food sounded simple, comforting, unfussy. It would be easy to reheat, would hold up well as leftovers, and would do OK in the freezer. I could double the batches and feed myself, too.

The food did everything it was supposed to do: taste good, fill the belly, comfort and nourish. The startling part was my recognition of the meal as a snapshot of food trends past. I don’t mean this as a slam, but I can’t think of a nice way to phrase it: this food is out of date.

I realized that the cookbook and the menu were put together at a time when the flavors of America’s southwest were new and unusual. Chiles, especially, were novel. Katzen’s recipes specify bell peppers and crushed red pepper, especially for cooks who are not “lucky enough to have access to fresh chiles.” Now it is not unusual, or even worthy of comment, to find dozens of kinds of fresh, dried, or canned chiles in grocery stores all over the nation. One recipe introduces pepitas as an exotic ingredient. Now I can buy them in my local big-box grocery store.

It’s just so... brown

Thinking a little more, I considered how this meal still has a foot in the vegetarian cooking of the 1970s and 1980s—which defined food in a context of meat. Meat’s conspicuous absence was everywhere. Menus still had a main dish and supporting sides. Dinner items had a protein-rich substitute for meat, often intending to echo its taste or texture. Chefs defined their food not by what it was, but by what it wasn’t: recipes titled “meatless” and “dairy-free” abounded. These things do still happen, but vegetarianism has evolved. Vegetables do not need to play supporting roles to a bowl of something brown.

The fact that I can, in 2011, call a menu unremarkable is a tribute to Mollie Katzen and the Moosewood Collective. Katzen’s adaptable and conversational approach to food, coupled with the reach and appeal of her bestselling cookbooks, made vegetarian cooking accessible for cooks across the nation. The fact that southwestern flavors are not news simply means that everyone has tried them and liked them well enough to cook and eat them all the time. And just because they are commonplace doesn’t make them any less delicious.

Kick Butt Biscuits

This summer, Katrina gave me these Ninjabread Men cookie cutters because she likes the Fallen Caesar cookies I make for the Ides of March.

Well, OK! The first opportunity I’ve had to use them is this week. I’m making biscuits to go with a chicken dinner. Maybe it will be even more fun if they are Kick Butt Biscuits.

So, here we go: rolling out the dough and cutting it into ninja shapes.

There is a lot of leftover dough scrappins, too. I balled that back up and rolled it out into squares because, hey, biscuits.

Oh, looks like the square biscuits are itching to join the melee. But no, square biscuits, those other biscuits are highly trained martial artists, you’ll just get your…

…butts kicked. I TOLD you.

This Doesn't Suck

“WHAT?!” I squawked.

“I don’t like it,” Beth repeated.

“But you like corn, and you like cream, and I replaced the lima beans with edamame, and you like that,” I insisted.

“Yes. I like those things, but I hate the succotash taste.” She patted my cheek. “More for you.”

More for me indeed.

Amy’s Take on Tash
The prime elements of succotash are corn and beans. They’re in season now, at the juxtaposition of summer and fall. You can tart it up with other things, too. This serves 4-6 people as a light main dish or a generous side.

4 ears fresh corn (will render 4 cups kernels)
1 pound edamame (will render 2 cups of shelled beans)
1 large red bell pepper, seeded and diced
1 medium onion, diced
1 medium zucchini, quartered lengthwise and sliced
1 T butter
1 c heavy cream
1 t dried thyme or 1 T fresh thyme leaves
Salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste

Throw the edamame, in its shell, in a pot with a half inch of boiling water. Cover and steam them about 5 minutes, then drain and pop them out of their shells.

Cut the kernels off the cobs of corn. Use a sharp knife, stand the ear on end, and cut close to the cob, taking care not to cut into it. Cut off 2 or 3 rows at a time. Then turn the knife over and scrape the dull edge along the cob to extract the “cream.”

Melt the butter in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Sauté the onion, pepper, and zucchini until the onion are translucent. Remove from the pot and set aside.

Pour the cream in the pot and boil gently until reduced by half. Throw all the other ingredients in there and bring them back up to a bubble. Turn the heat down, cover the pot, and simmer for 5 or 10 minutes—until the corn is cooked and the edamame are tender. Correct the seasoning and serve to acclaim!

Just sayin'

Caprese salad with three kinds of tomato, homegrown basil, and Valli dell’Etna “Etna Dario” olive oil; peppers, zucchini, and eggplant sautéed with garlic and onions.

Jam Is Good

Left to right, vanilla pear (made with pectin) from Food in Jars; black plum; and Michigan peach.

Thus say I:

1. It is easy and fun to make jam;
2. It is fun to eat jam;
3. It is fun to say “jam.” Jam, jam, jam. Jam!

Therefore, I am going to make a boatload of jam this fall instead of/in addition to the too many pickles I usually make.
There are many schools of jam: hard-set jam, runny jam. Liquid pectin, powdered pectin, no pectin. Pounds of sugar; some sugar; no sugar. Sealed in a canner; sealed with paraffin. Cooked jam, freezer jam. I’ve been thinking a lot about all these jamways, their various pros and cons, and I have two working generalizations.

First, you can’t screw it up. If you make a good-faith effort and follow the steps, whatever you turn out will qualify as jam. It may be thin, it may be thick; but it will still fall in the jam gamut. The “jamut.” Snrrrrrk!

Second, all jam is good. Like all religions are good! There’s no right or wrong way to make jam, and there’s no right or wrong religion. They are all valid ways to worship fruit or deity, respectively. And there are many paths to thickness, too. Pectin will thicken jam, as will sugar and cooking down. Every one of them is good and right.

Except for my grandma’s recipe for zucchini jam made with cherry Jello. That’s where I draw the line. No, Grandma! That’s not jam. That’s an abomination of jam and Jello salad!

Basic Jam
Usually I am all for specifics, but jam is more a state of being for fruit. Seedy little fruits make jam that thickens nicely on its own. Fruits with little or no pectin will maybe need you to add some; or you may have to cook them down and they will acquire a hard-candy taste; or you can embrace softer jam. Ripe fruits have more flavor, but less pectin, than firm fruits.

Don't be scared! Let it boil hard.

I’ve gotten good results by measuring out ½ to ¾, even as much as 1, cup of sugar for every cup of chopped or crushed fruit; heat up the fruit to boiling; dump in the sugar and bring to a rolling boil; cook around 5 minutes, put in jars, and process in a hot water canner. You can also use wax, which you’ll find in the grocery store.



Directions very much like this are easy to find on many other Web sites and in books. For more reassurance on how jam becomes jam no matter what, see here.