I Can Has My Dream!

Behold. A brand-new, copper, jam-making pan.

My jam brings all the boys to the yard...

Shepherd's Pie and more jam!

Saturday afternoon, after the reglementary Trip to the Supermarket (which didn't involve much food shopping, other than for Greta- Peter is away most of this week, and then most of next week as well), I started off by re-boiling my blood orange jelly, as it hadn't set.

I think I didn't get enough pectin out of the skins during the initial cooking phase- despite keeping it at 221F/105C for a while, it's still pretty gloopy. However, it tastes unutterably yummy, so I'm just going to keep it, and use it to drizzle on things (hey, my Citrus Cake!), and in things (yoghurt!). I've labelled it as Blood Orange "Honey".

Whilst that was boiling, I chopped strawberries and rhubarb up, weighed them (just over 2kg, about half of each), and put them in to macerate with the same weight of sugar. And the juice of (my last) two small lemons. One of them was getting a bit hard, but fortunately it was still pretty juicy.

I did surf around, looking for Rhubarb and Strawberry Jam recipes, but I couldn't find any that floated my boat- every single one I found used pectin, and I don't do pectin. Christine Ferber says that pectin is unnecessary, as long as you cook things down long enough, or use fruits that have a higher concentration of pectin in with ones that are low. I don't really like that sort of dogmatism on recipes, but it's worked so far (mutters darkly about orange jelly).

Thus, I made my jam without a recipe, adapting what I've been doing so far.

I did discover a couple of interesting other blogs, though, which I shall wander through before deciding whether to add them to my blogroll!

After setting my fruit to macerate, I peeled and boiled a kilo of potatoes, and put them on to boil. There was a whole thread on the Guardian Word of Mouth blog last week about mashed potatoes, and I found it all very interesting. I know about the discussion on whether to use a ricer or a masher when making your mash, if that makes it lighter/fluffier, but I must say that I've never used either. I boil my potatoes, drain them, then chop them with a knife in the saucepan, after which I add either milk or cream, then mash them with a fork. Then butter.



In this case, I added a tablespoon of mascarpone (using it up), then about 3-4 tablespoons of double creme de Gruyere (ditto), then a few slices of butter, then thinned it out with some milk. None of which I heated, although I do sometimes. I then salted it, and left it all to sit in the saucepan.

In the meantime, I'd taken the remains of the leg of lamb from last week out of the fridge, removed all the remaining meat, and cut it into mouthfuls. I put that in a frying pan with one onion, chopped, and a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. I fried them up until the meat, which had been very pink, was slightly less so, and the onion was translucent. I then added a bottle (700ml) of passata, lots of black pepper, some herbed salt, some herbes de Provence, and let it simmer until thick- but not too thick.

I then tipped the whole lot into a pyrex casserole dish, left it to cool a bit, and topped it with mashed potato. It all went in the oven at 200C for about 45 minutes that evening (with a piece of greaseproof paper underneath to catch the drips!), and we ate it with much pleasure. A surprising amount of pleasure, in fact, as it was absolutely delicious.



And, a definite bonus, Greta actually tolerated a few mouthfuls of mashed potato! Last time I tried her with it, she spat it all out in utter disgust. I so hope this new period of eating things continues- I'm going to keep trying her with all sorts of things!

(She did spit out a mouthful of cauliflower the other day, and gave me such a look for having snuck it in around the side! But at least she didn't burst into tears and refuse to continue to eat her chicken...)

On Sunday, I cooked my rhubarb and strawberry jam (having to use my friend Mousecatfish's casserole dish again, as mine is too small- reminding me that I really do need to get my hands on a proper dish to cook my jam in!) bringing it up to the boil and keeping it going until it hit 221F/105C, and stayed there. It was very bubbly at the beginning, and kept on threatening to boil over, but the last half hour it was calm enough for me to have my lunch, Peter and Greta having had theirs. And I got to finish off the shepherd's pie, yum! And eat strawberry jam scum for dessert, also very yum.



Of course, the whole thing was so relaxed that I burned the bottom of the jam, but I was careful and didn't stir it in- and it really seems to only have affected the very bottom level of the pan, and that layer has gone in the one pot, which latter is already in the fridge, not being full, and, actually, tastes pretty damn good.

I didn't want to stir it too much anyway, because my rhubarb and orange jam I stirred a lot, and the rhubarb all broke up, and various other recipes that I've read since (including Alice B. Toklas!) say to stir rhubarb jam as little as possible to avoid this. Nevertheless, the rhubarb seems to be pretty much mush, whereas the strawberry quarters have stayed in nice chunks. It is a bit darker than I expected, and a bit caramelised, but the flavour has a nice few layers in it- sweet strawberry (also sweeter than I expected, as when raw they were as tasteless as strawberries bought in March should be!), nicely sour rhubarb, and then this odd caramel layer.



Tonight I have to roast a chicken (for Peter's dinner, then to feed Greta with for the rest of the week), but myself, I shall be back to eating apples and celery, as I've had the most outrageous craving for chocolate the last 10 days, and have given in to it to an extent that I really should not have...

Blood Orange Marmalade

I shot out of work during my lunchbreak last week and managed to track down the last three bags of blood oranges in the supermarket- hidden in a huge pile of bags of "oranges blondes". Three bags of 2 kg each- thus I had to haul 6 kilos of oranges up the hill (see my header pic!) from the train station that evening. Fortunately I bumped into a neighbour, and he carried one of the bags for me. Since I was also carrying 2 packs of four pots each, as well as three cookbooks... I appreciated having 2 kilos less!

The cookbooks I'd picked up at the second-hand bookshop. I had found a copy of the Alice B. Toklas Cook Book, a 1925 copy of Louis Maillard's La Cuisine des Familles (which will be the subject of a future post!), and a book about medieaval feasts.


I had hunted through the Internets, and come up with five recipes for blood orange marmalade/jam. I then realised that two of them were actually based on one recipe- so I pulled that up, and had a look. It looked like a very good recipe, with plenty of detailed explanations, and, after all, the books always say that marmalade is a tricky thing, so I thought we'd better go with that.

I then printed two copies off (by mistake), and, when my friend Mousecatfish turned up at about 13:30, handed her a copy. We divvied up the work, determined that the oranges were far too ripe to be zested before being juiced so we were going to have to do this the long way round, and started.

She juiced the oranges, measuring the juice until we had 8 cups- because, of course, we'd decided to double up! In the mean time, I removed the pulp and segment remains, dropping them into one bowl, and then cut off the white pith, julienning the peel. When she'd finished juicing, she joined me. I think that this part took us well over an hour!



We had 8 cups of juice, and... however many cups of julienned peel, it didn't really matter by that stage, we decided. We then realised that we'd forgotten to add lemons, and, as Greta had suddenly turned up in the kitchen, Mousecatfish played with her whilst I repeated the juicing and julienning with three nicely juicy lemons. We then tipped all the juice and the same amount of water into the big casserole dish, added the zest, I put the segments and pips in a cloth which I'd ironed and tied the top with some string, and we boiled the whole lot for about half an hour. Sort of. We weren't really paying attention- we just fished out a couple of bits of zest, tasted them, determined to cook them a bit longer, tried again, and took it all out.

We measured the juice and zest mixture, with Peter laughing at us in the background as we were saying things like "So that's one of however much this measure is, and another one... So that's 7 of whatever the measurement is, plus up to the two, so that means 7 times up to just about here, plus one up to the 2 on the other side of the measurement." He told Greta that she is to grow up to be an engineer, and take proper measurements.

Hey, these were proper measurements! We just weren't quite sure what the exact nature of the measurements was...

We then measured the sugar out into the cup, measuring seven times (we thought- maybe it was only six and we missed one) up to "just about there", and one time up to 2 on the other side, and tipped it back into the juice and zest mixture. There was some insane giggling here, as the last three jugfuls of sugar made the mixture bubble in a way that... was rather rude. I put on the thick rubber gloves, and squeezed as much pectin as possible out of the cloth bag, finding that although it was mostly juice at first, it was eventually oozing out thick clear/white stuff.


We then added my incredibly stylish and funky brand new sugar thermometer, and started the boiling. Whilst it heated up, we tried my blood orange curd (verdict- nice, tasty, tangy, but needed to be thicker), and my rhubarb and orange jam (verdict- despite only one orange in there, you couldn't taste the rhubarb, and it tasted only of orange. It was nice, but disappointing if you were expecting the taste of rhubarb).

At 18h, the temperature was going up and down by about a degree at a time, but was nowhere near the 220F recommended. As I also had dinner to cook, I took a head of garlic, a pack of thyme, minced them up together in the smacky/choppy, added a couple of slugs of olive oil, some black pepper and the bottom half of a pot of black olive tapenade, smeared it on a leg of lamb, chopped up a red pepper and put that underneath the lamb, and put it in the oven at 180C.

About 20 minutes later, Mousecatfish had to go. I went on boiling the jam, which was slowly creeping up to 217...

At 218 F, it started to try to boil over. I took it off the heat for a moment, turned it down a bit, tried again. It kept on trying to boil over, and I was having to juggle with the heat very carefully, stirring it to cool it a bit whilst making sure that the temperature went on rising, but that I didn't end up with a hob top covered in jam!

Of course, at this point, Greta, who had been sitting happily drawing at the table, wanted out of her chair and into my arms. Impossible! So I took her out of her chair, and set her down on the floor. Unimpressed with me, she stomped out of the room, and closed the door on me. I fiddled with the jam a bit, then went out to see what she was up to... at which point Peter leaned over the mezzanine to look at me- and Greta was in his arms.

We were both horrified. We'd left the stairgate open, and she'd gone upstairs. By herself. On the wooden stairs. With her non-non-slip socks. She could have fallen... But she didn't, thank goodness. Still, I think we'll be being even more careful with keeping that closed!

She stayed upstairs with her father, and I went back to juggling the jam's temperature. I'm very glad I got that sugar thermometer- it made this step a whole lot easier for me to understand! As at first it was boiling over at 218, then was OK at 218 but at 218.5 tried again, then the same at 219F, and I really had to stand over it and keep on turning the temperature up and down. Finally it got to 220F and stayed there, even up to 221 briefly, and I started to jar it.



The result is three big jars for Mousecatfish, and four smaller jars for me.



And a two-thirds full jar to go in the fridge and be tasted this weekend!

And I still have about 8 oranges left... I wonder if Greta would like blood orange jelly?

Blood Orange Curd

Assured by my two source recipes (this recipe and this recipe) that cooking this only took about ten minutes, after putting Greta to bed last night, before Masterchef was due to start, I took up my whisk.

I had already got my ingredients ready, zesting my oranges, juicing them and the lemons. As my citrus fruits weren't very big, I had 8 blood oranges, and 2 lemons, coupled with four eggs, 250g butter, and 290g sugar.

I whisked the eggs in the dish, turned the heat on, realised that I had better get the other ingredients in soon or I'd end up with scrambled eggs, and poured in the juices and the sugar. Stirred everything around until it was well mixed, then added my cubed, room temperature butter.

I stirred that in until it had melted, and went on stirring... and stirring... and stirring. All in all, it took about 40 minutes and the use of a cold plate in the freezer to see if it was anywhere near setting, for me to be sure that it was ready to go in my pots.

I wasn't too pleased about that, but, on the other hand, it did ensure regular tasting- and it does taste very good. I've given one pot away to a colleague, and the other two pots are in the fridge. A tasting will be organised on Sunday morning!

It was still pretty liquid when it went in the pots, but this morning, having left it to cool, it had set sufficiently firm for me not to have to open them and cook it up again. It will no doubt thicken some more in the fridge.

Rhubarb and Blood Orange Jam

I took this recipe from my Larousse des confitures. The recipe called for regular oranges, but as I had blood oranges, I figured that it wouldn't make too much of a difference. What it has done is ensured that my jam is a glorious pink, and tastes absolutely delicious. I'm looking forward to putting this on toast on a Sunday morning in the summer!

It has, however, inspired me to make blood orange jam/marmalade some time very soon, whilst they're still cheap in the supermarket... and
the search for recipes for that has me also drooling over a recipe for blood orange curd, which I think I will definitely be making equally soon, if not sooner!

What always gets me about jam recipes is the "cook for 20 minutes, then test for set" line. NONE of the jams I have made so far needed cooked for less than an hour. I really ought to give myself two hours of cooking time each time, because I keep on getting caught out making jam in the evenings, and then getting to bed later than I planned.


Ingredients:
- 2 blood oranges, sliced very finely
- 1.3 kg rhubarb, chopped into 1cm long pieces
- 1 lemon, sliced very finely
- 1.2 kg sugar

Put the oranges, rhubarb and lemon in a bowl. Add the sugar, stir to coat, leave for twenty-four hours.

Put in a saucepan, cook until it sets!

And it really is absolutely delicious...

Apple and Ginger Jam

My Larousse des Confitures has a recipe for Confiture de pomme au gingembre.

About last October, a friend came over with a bunch of apples from a tree in her garden, and we made our own version, basing it on the Larousse recipe, but adapting it a bit as per the fact that I suddenly realised that I didn't actually have any powdered ginger, although I had thought that I did.

Ingredients:
- 2 non-treated lemons
- 70 g (approximately) ginger preserved in syrup
- 1.2 kg apples
- about half the syrup from the jar (well, my jar is 200g, 140g drained weight, so I make that about 30 g of syrup, which is an odd way of measuring it)
- 1 kg sugar
- 30cl water (I remember doubling this, as our apples weren't very juicy)

Remove the zest from the lemons, and chop finely. Juice the lemons. Chop the preserved ginger quite finely.

Peel the apples, slice them, and put them in the pan, with the lemon juice. (The Larousse says to add the seeds of the apples, wrapped in a little muslin packet, to the pan. We did this the first time we made it. We didn't the second time, since we forgot, and it made no discernible difference.) Add the lemon zest and the water.

Cook until the fruit is tender. Add the sugar and the ginger syrup, stirring gently, until it's completely dissolved. Bring to a boil, skim (we didn't bother, again, it didn't seem to make much difference.), and cook until it sets.

The Larousse seems to think the above step will take 10 minutes. It took our jam about an hour.

When the jam is ready, take it off the heat, add the preserved ginger, stir it in, bring it back to the boil. Put it in pots and, according to my friend, stand back and watch your family fight over them! As for me- well, my dad loves it.

Also last autumn, having identified the berries growing down at the bottom of the hill as sloes, I attempted sloe jam. I used this recipe, using about 80% sugar to 100% fruit. Suffice to say that the result is so tannic that its only use could be in a sauce for duck- which is not something I cook very often! I thus have two pots sitting on the window ledge, waiting for the day when I get the strength to open them and tip the contents out. Which will take a while, as I've tried, and just can't get the lids off. A shame, but next year I'll probably make sloe gin instead for a Christmas present for my mother-in-law.

I also made sloe and apple jelly, but since I haven't opened that pot yet, I can't report!

Green Queens

Last night, I made greengage and vanilla bean jam.

I never stick to recipes, normally, but as I'd never made jam before, I thought that it would probably be a good idea to do so this time. Even if that did seem like an awful lot of sugar! However, as the jam has turned out... oooh, lip-puckeringly tangy, it definitely wasn't too much sugar.

It took a long time to cool down last night, so at 21:20 I headed over to start making it... at which point I remembered that I was supposed to macerate the fruit and sugar together for an hour. Botheration. So I chopped and pitted my greengages (which have the lovely name of reine-claude in French, named after the wife of Francois I), put them in my Le Creuset casserole dish, poured the sugar over the top, added the lemon juice, stirred it around, put the lid on, and went off to do other things for an hour.

When I came back, a lot of juice had come out of the fruit. I added the vanilla, having split and seeded the pods, adding both the seeds and the pods in, and then turned the gas on. I'm so glad I had a gas hob-top put in! It's so much easier to control the heat than it was with the electric top I had before.

I cooked, stirring, until the sugar had melted down, then wandered off. I came back to stir a while later, and found there was a thick foam over the top. I know that in some recipes you skim this off, but as it had lifted most of the vanilla seeds with it, I certainly wasn't going to do that, so I stirred it back in instead.

I pretty much left it to its own devices, coming back to stir now and again as it simmered, and discovering that boiling jam, when it spatters on your skin, is indeed rather painful. And when you stir simmering jam, it bubbles up a lot harder than it was, and spits at you. Ouch. Fortunately I only got a couple of very minor splashes on me.

After about an hour, I started to test. I'd read, heavens knows where, it seems that I've always known it, despite never having made jam before, that the best thing to do was to put a plate in the fridge, then drop a teaspoonful of jam on it to see if it was thick enough (the cold plate cools it faster, so it thickens). I tested a couple of times before it was right- which gave Peter and I an opportunity to taste it. Mmmm...

He went to bed before I'd finished. At 23:30 I started putting it into pots, ending up with one large and one small pot... and half a small pot to go into the fridge. Most of which has already been eaten, as even Greta, who is not a fan of being fed anything from a spoon early in the day, had several spoonfuls at breakfast time.



As you can see, from very green fruits, it came out a lovely gold. It rather worried me, at one point! I wonder what colour other fruit jams will turn...

I need to make more of this. It's perfect for Christmas presents... although I do have so many other jam recipes begging for attention! And a friend was telling me earlier via chat that the plums in his garden are almost ripe, and he has a kilo ear-marked for me. He better make it two kilos- one for him, one for us!

Greengage and vanilla jam, courtesy of Chez Pim
- about 1kg Greengages, pitted and chopped
- 500g sugar (in my case, brown, organic, fair-trade sugar- making it Worthy Jam!)
- juice from 1 lemon
- 2 vanilla beans, cut in half, seeded

Peach Chutney, Tomato Chutney, Watermelon Rind Pickles

This evening, I made four pots (two half-litre, two 250 ml) of tomato chutney, having finally managed to find nigella seeds in an organic/diet shop in town. I'd spent the last week trying to find nigella, having identified them variously as onion seed, kalonji, and black cumin. People mainly just looked at me strangely when I asked if they had it- I tried Globus, Manor, Coop... Then on Saturday morning I bumped into my best friend in town, told her what I was looking for, and she suggested an Asian shop up near Placette (sorry- Manor!). So I went there on Monday morning. No luck, but I did find that it has all sorts of things that I had no idea I could find around here- such as tamarind. I've been reading recipes with tamarind in them for a couple of years now, but always assumed that it hadn't made it to Switzerland yet. Serves me right for not poking around more! However, on the way to the shop, I walked past the above-mentioned organic shop, so I stepped in there on the off chance. I found all sorts of other things there too, such as teff (to make injera with- I've only had injera once, but I loved it), and dulse. Will bear the two shops in mind in future!

So that was my final ingredient for the chutney. I've been making chutney on and off for about two weeks now. It started off with a white peach, ginger and chili chutney which I made up due to having too many white peaches that were turning too fast to mold. I put two red chilis in there, making it lethally hot- hence the single pot was handed over to my parents with instructions to let it mature for a few weeks! Since then, I've made it again, with yellow peaches and only one chili.

Ingredients:
- peaches
- mustard seeds
- chili
- red wine vinegar
- onion (I think)
- brown sugar

Chop peaches, without skinning them, put in large enamel casserole dish, simmer until softened, add the other ingredients, simmer until thick. No doubt not at all the right way to make it, but sometimes you just make things up as you go along...

Having made a watermelon and feta salad for a family party, I remembered reading about watermelon rind pickles. I then spent a few days trying to round up what I needed for that- and now have two jars sitting maturing in the cupboard. Not so sure how that's going to go. They look... interesting. Probably more interesting than tasty. But I might be pleasantly surprised. I more or less used this recipe.

The tomato chutney, I had an urge towards making due to the farm around the corner selling some glorious big red tomatoes that looked absolutely yummy. And we've been meaning to start buying fruit and vegetables in the village anyway- can't get less food miles than that! Assuming that it would be "cooler" at about 16h, I waited until then, popped Greta on my back, and walked down the road.

It may have been cooler than earlier... but it was still incredibly hot, about 32C. Thank goodness it was only a 3 minute shuffle, or we would have melted away, leaving nothing but a pile of clothes and a baby carrier on the road.

The farmer's wife (why do we always assume she's the farmer's wife and not the farmer herself?) was having a nap, but a little old lady who turned out to be my neighbour-from-across-the-road hauled herself out of the shade of a parasol under a tree to sell me three kilos of tomatoes for very cheap, and have a chat about who she knew in my building. I'd have loved to stay and be friendly, but we were standing right in the sun, and although I'd smeared Greta with sunblock before coming out, I wasn't happy about it. Besides that I was also slowly wilting!

So we said our goodbyes, Greta waving politely, and walked back home. Of course, I wanted to start up my chutney immediately, as you do when you've finally got all your ingredients together, but Greta got very clingy and didn't want put down when we got back. I managed to measure spices out and tip them into a bowl, ditto the sugar, and I even managed to par-cook and then skin 2 kg of tomatoes (1 kg saved for salads and sandwiches), which was pretty impressive with only one hand. But then, as I've discovered since having Greta- most things can be done with one hand. Including breaking and separating eggs. As long as you don't mind egg white all over your fingers!

After she went to bed, I had a final review of my two source recipes. I'd picked this recipe from Becks and Posh, and another from allrecipes, and had decided to pretty much meld the two.

Ingredients:
- olive oil
- 2 tsp brown mustard seeds
- 2 tsp nigella seeds
- 2 tsp fennel seeds (a leap of faith, this, as I dislike anise flavour intensely!)
- 2 tsp cumin seeds
- 6-8 cloves garlic, chopped finely
- 2 inches ginger root, chopped finely (I put the ginger and the garlic through the mini-chopper together)
- 1 cup golden raisins (which was too many- it should have been about half)
- 4 dried red chilis (not quite dried- I used ones I bought in a pack a few weeks ago when I was making a proper red Thai fish curry, and hadn't used these ones, so they've been sitting out drying)
- 1 tsp piment d'Espelette
- 2 cups organic cane sugar
- 2 1/2 cups apple vinegar
- 2 kg tomatoes

I heated the oil, added the spices and chilis, stirred, left a minute or two, then added the garlic and ginger, stirred that around briefly, then added the vinegar followed by the sugar. Stirred until the sugar had dissolved, then added the tomatoes and the sultanas. I simmered the pot for just under two hours. Becks and Posh said that it should be sloppy, and it was. Much sloppier than I had thought it would be, even with the warning! I spooned out one half litre into a jar, then the two 250ml jars, then did another half litre, and that was it. Inverted the jars, left for a bit, then labelled them with these great labels that dissolve in the dishwater, and left them to cool over night.

I'm now contemplating either plum or greengage jam (or both) with vanilla. Probably based on this recipe from Chez Pim.