This month’s ingredient for the Can Jam is…

Citrus!

Despite my fervent prayers to whoever is in charge of Fruit Ripening, my very locally grown oranges are not quite ready for picking (as you can see above).  I was really hoping citrus would be the February Flavor of the Month because, by then, my tree might look more like this:

And I can’t get too much more “local” than 12 inches to the right of my computer. On to Plan B – off to the store.

I was thinking about concocting some sort of sweet and sour sauce to use on chicken or duck anyway, so I decided I’d make Citrus Marmalade with Apricots from a recipe out of Madelaine Bullwinkel’s book, Gourmet Preserves Chez Madelaine.  It’s a traditional “two-day” marmalade, and I liked the idea of adding the apricots. The ingredients are pretty simple:

• 6 ounces dried apricots
• 1 thin-skinned pink grapefruit (1 pound)
• 1 lemon (1/4 pound)
• 1 medium navel orange (1/2 pound)
• Water
• 5 cups sugar

Day One:  Coarsely chop the apricots and reserve.

Scrub the citrus fruit and strip 15 pieces of peel from the grapefruit and lemon with a citrus stripper tool (I used a peeler and guess-timated at what 15 strips would look like).  Remove the rest of the peel (you don’t need it for this recipe) and thinly slice the fruit.

Cut the orange, peel and all,  into 8 pieces and finely chop in a food processor (I chopped mine by hand – I like marmalade a bit chunkier than most people).

Combine and measure the fruit slices, citrus peel strips, orange pieces and the apricots.  Add an equal amount of water (I had a quart of fruit, so I added a quart of water).  Place in a heavy non-reactive pan, cover and bring to a boil.

Uncover and simmer for 15 minutes.  Smells heavenly so far.

Cool the mixture to room temperature, cover and let stand overnight at room temperature.

Day Two:  Measure the marmalade mixture and reduce to five cups.  I had six, so I simmered the mixture for about 15 minutes.  Measure out (and have handy) the five cups of sugar.

Begin adding sugar, 1/2 cup at a time, bringing the mixture back to a boil after each addition.

Continue cooking until it reaches the jell point (8 degrees above boiling – I’m at 500′ elevation, so my jell point is 212° + 8° = 220°.)  This took about 10 minutes.  It always seems to get “stuck” at 218°, but it finally got to 220°.

Pour the marmalade into a 2 quart measure and let stand for 5-10 minutes.  Stir down the fruit pieces to suspend them in the marmalade.  That helps the “floating fruit syndrome”.

Pour into hot jars, leaving 1/4″ of headspace.  Apply lids, rings and process in a BWB for 10 minutes.  I got six half-pint jars and a wee bit extra in a 4 oz. jar.  I had a feeling I should have simmered it for just a few more minutes.

Sometimes marmalade takes a long time to set up, so I’m not too worried (yet).  If it doesn’t, I can always make more marmalade bread.  I’ll post that recipe later this week for all the jammers that now have a surplus of marmalade.

As a reward for reading through this very long post, I’m giving away one new copy of Gourmet Preserves Chez Madelaine (not the one in the photo, which has a number of fruit stained/splattered pages).  Leave a comment on this post telling me how many jars of citrusy goodness have been added to YOUR pantry this month!  Deadline is 11:59 pm (Eastern Time) on Friday, January 29.

And da winner is…

Daisy Mae!  Congratulations – enjoy the book.

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It’s cold.  I want comfort food.

In this house, comfort food doesn’t have to be pretty.  This isn’t.  But it does have to be warm, stick-to-your-ribs style delicious.  Sauerbraten fits that description.

Sauerbraten is definitely not a last-minute meal.  The meat has to marinate at least 2 or 3 days (mine went almost a week with no problem).  You can use beef for this, but we like venison better.  Lots better.

We’re going to prepare a roast from the front shoulder.  Since this muscle group gets a lot of use, it can be pretty tough.  It’s the perfect cut for sauerbraten.  If you don’t have venison, use a beef chuck or rump roast.

We’re going to tenderize this one.  It’s a thick cut, and that will help get the marinade down into the meat.  If you don’t have one of these fancy gizmos, you can use a metal skewer or a thin knife blade.

Here’s the ingredients for the marinade.  Our roast is a little over 3 pounds, so I’m going to make a bit more than I usually do.

• 1 large sweet onion, chopped (or sliced)
• 2 stalks of celery, sliced
• 2 small carrots, chopped
• 4 sprigs fresh Italian parsley, chopped
• 1-1/2 cups red wine vinegar
• 2-1/2 cups red wine (I used a pretty inexpensive Cabernet)
• 2 teaspoons celery salt
• 1 tablespoon kosher salt
• 2 teaspoons black peppercorns, cracked
• 1 tablespoon mustard seeds
• 4 whole cloves (or more)
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg, freshly grated
• 1 bay leaf

Combine all the marinade ingredients in a bowl and mix well. In case you think it’s a typo, I’ve started leaving out the garlic from the marinade.  We decided the garlic gets a bit overpowering (we’re using fresh garlic from our garden, so that’s probably why).  If you want to add garlic, I’d use about 2-3 cloves.  Feel free to add or subtract whatever vegetables or seasonings you like (or don’t like).

Pour the marinade over the meat and put some vegetables under the meat, too.  Cover and refrigerate.  Use a non-reactive bowl (glass, stainless, etc.)  Some people like to use a large plastic bag.  That works fine, but put the bag into a bowl.  Trust me, you don’t want to clean bright purple marinade from every nook and cranny and vegetable drawer of your refrigerator.

If the meat is not quite submerged, that’s OK – it gets turned over every day.  This may look like a lot of liquid, but it ends up being made into the gravy.  And BarBBQ Bill loves LOTS of gravy.

Drain the meat and reserve the marinade.  Yep, the meat is purple.

Dredge in seasoned flour.

Use a large pot or casserole that can be used both on the stove and in the oven.  Fry a few strips of bacon. Remove the bacon and reserve.

Brown the meat in the bacon fat.

Once the meat is browned, add the reserved marinade and the bacon (or use the bacon for braised red cabbage as a side dish).  Cover and bake low and slow (about 3 hours at 250-300°).

It’s falling-off-the-bone tender.  Remove the meat and thicken the gravy.

Serve over spaetzle or noodles or mashed potatoes with a simple braised red cabbage on the side.

Comfort food at its finest.

Printable Recipe

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BarBBQ Bill requested cinnamon raisin bread.

Well, OK…but I don’t buy raisins because he says he doesn’t like them.  Now he wants them in his bread.  Go figure.

But I do have these.  Dried Balaton cherries from Cherry Republic (they claim they are the world headquarters for all things cherry, and I’m not going to argue).

Now I need a bread recipe – as always, my go-to site for bread recipes is King Arthur Flour.  I found a cinnamon raisin bread that sounded interesting, so I’m going to start with that.  I’m also going to cut their recipe in half to make just one loaf – I’ve learned to “try it and see if he likes it”.

In a saucepan or microwaveable bowl, heat 3/4 cup of milk and 2 tablespoons of butter until just hot (about 120° F).  Add a generous 1/2 cup of dried cherries (I chopped them), 1/2 cup of rolled oats (hey, this might be almost health food!), 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of cinnamon.  Stir it all together and let it cool.

In another bowl, mix 1/4 cup of warm water and 1/2 tablespoon of brown sugar.  Add 1/2 tablespoon active dry yeast, and let it stand until you start to see bubbles forming (about 5 minutes).

When the milk/oat/cherry mixture has cooled down to about 80° F (lukewarm), combine it into the yeast mixture.  Start adding flour one cup at a time.  Here’s one cup of all-purpose flour mixed in.

Cup number two of flour is in there.  I used a cup of KAF’s white whole wheat flour (now it’s really healthy food

I measured out the last cup of all-purpose flour and added about a third of it.  Since the original recipe gave a “range” of flour amounts, that’s usually what I do.  I’ll take the rest of the cup and use as much as I need to add while I’m kneading the bread.

About eight minutes later and with an extra 1/3 cup of flour kneaded in, the dough is smooth and elastic.

Put the dough into a greased bowl (I used butter), flip it over so both sides are greased, cover with plastic, and let rise for about 1-1/2 to 2 hours until the dough is doubled.  These large measuring bowls are handy for that.  Just note the original amount and wait for it to double.  My kitchen was pretty cool today, so I let it rise a little bit more than two hours.

When it has doubled, punch the dough down and knead it a little bit on a lightly floured board.  Shape into a loaf and try to push any cherry bits back into the dough.  I hate burned fruit in the crust of my bread.  Place in a greased 8-1/2 x 4-1/2 inch loaf pan, cover it with plastic and let rise until doubled (another hour or so).

Again, my kitchen was cool, so I let it rise until the dome was above the rim of the pan.  It was more like 2 hours instead of a hour (and it should have gone longer – I think the whole loaf should have been above the pan rim.  How come hindsight is always 20/20?)

Pop the pan into a preheated 375° F oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes.  I lowered the temperature by 25° because of the glass loaf pan.

I brushed mine with some melted butter and sprinkled on some demerara sugar.  It was too healthy – I had to add more sugar and butter.  We’re about halfway through baking here.  The top’s getting a bit brown, so I’m going to tent it with a bit of aluminum foil.

Mine took about 38 minutes to bake.  Tastes great toasted.  BarBBQ Bill was pleased!

Things to remember next time:

• Let the dough rise longer.  It’s a slow rise loaf so plan for the extra time.
• Could have used a bit more of the cherries.
• Don’t do the butter and sugar (and add some cinnamon to the top) until it’s partially baked.  I think that’s why it browned a bit too much.
• Keep experimenting.

Printable Recipe

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The challenge:  make a homemade barbecue sauce that’s not too sweet, that’s tangy-mustardy like a Memphis-style sauce, and can be put up using a boiling water bath.

I’m almost there.

I despise finding huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup in food, especially as the number one ingredient.  Before our preferred brand of store-bought barbecue sauce became “Now Better Tasting”, it used to contain “Concentrated tomato juice (water, tomato paste), high fructose corn syrup, vinegar, molasses, salt, modified food starch, contains less than 2% of spice, natural flavor, paprika, mustard flour, caramel color, guar gum, red 40.”  Well, at least tomatoes were the major ingredient.  Not so anymore.  The “New and Improved” version is…um…pretty bad tasting stuff.

The solution?  Make our own.

As usual, I turned to the NCHFP for a barbecue sauce recipe that could be processed in a boiling water bath (I’m too lazy to get the pressure canner out of the upstairs storage room) and found this:

• 4 quarts (16 cups) peeled, cored, chopped red ripe tomatoes (about 24 large tomatoes)
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1-1/2 cups chopped sweet red or green peppers (about 3 medium peppers)
• 2 hot red peppers, cored, and chopped
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (e.g., Tabasco®)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar

Yield: About 4 pint jars

*Caution: Wear plastic or rubber gloves and do not touch your face while handling or cutting hot peppers. If you do not wear gloves, wash hands thoroughly with soap and water before touching your face or eyes.

Please read Using Boiling Water Canners before beginning. If this is your first time canning, it is recommended that you read Principles of Home Canning.

1. Wash and rinse canning jars; keep hot until ready to use. Prepare lids according to manufacturer’s directions.
2. Combine prepared tomatoes, celery, onions, and peppers. Cook until vegetables are soft (about 30 minutes). Puree using a fine sieve, food mill, food processor or blender. Cook until mixture is reduced to about one half, (about 45 minutes).
3. Tie peppercorns in a cheesecloth bag; add with remaining ingredients and cook slowly until mixture is the consistency of catsup, about 1½ to 2 hours. As mixture thickens, stir frequently to prevent sticking. Remove bag of peppercorns.
4. Fill hot sauce into clean, hot jars, leaving ½ inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace if needed. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened clean paper towel; apply two-piece metal canning lids.
5. Process half-pint or pint jars in a boiling water canner for 20 minutes (at altitudes of 0-1000 feet). Let cool, undisturbed, 12 to 24 hours and check for seals.

Note: There are many types of barbecue sauce recipes and the acidity will vary among recipes. This canning process is intended for this recipe and procedure.

Well, it’s not exactly what we want as far as flavors go, so we’ll start editing:

• 4 quarts (16 cups) peeled, cored, chopped red ripe tomatoes (about 24 large tomatoes)
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1-1/2 cups chopped sweet red or green peppers (about 3 medium peppers)
• 2 hot red peppers, cored, and chopped
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (e.g., Tabasco®)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar

The celery and peppers are low acid (high pH) vegetables, so there’s no problem leaving them out.  It’s only when you ADD low acid vegetables to recipes that safety becomes an issue.  Foods that are processed in a boiling water bath must have a minimum pH of 4.6 – any higher than that and the food must be processed in a pressure canner.  Sugar (in this case) is for taste only, so that can safely be reduced or left out entirely.

We don’t have fresh tomatoes this time of year, but we do have frozen pureed tomatoes in the freezer.  During tomato season, we have a stockpot going to cook down extra tomatoes to freeze for use in sauces and soups.  These have nothing added – no salt, no sugar, nothing but tomatoes.

The easiest way we’ve found to store them is pack the tomato puree in 3-cup “disposable” containers (like Gladware, etc.)  Freeze them until solid.  Turn them out of the container and repack the “bricks” into 2 gallon resealable freezer bags.  Eight of them fit perfectly.

Our recipe now looks like this:

• 3 “bricks” frozen pureed tomatoes (9 cups) Note: The Ball Produce Guide shows 3 cups of fresh chopped tomatoes = 1-1/2 cups pureed tomatoes, so the original 16 cups should equal 8 cups of our puree (OK, so I have an extra cup in there – are the canning police going to come and get me?)
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns (we’re going to use ground pepper for ours)
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard (we’re out of dry mustard at the moment, so we’ll use prepared mustard)
• 1 tablespoon paprika (we used 1/2 tablespoon sweet and 1/2 tablespoon hot)
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (we used Louisiana Hot Sauce)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar (we used 1 cup apple cider vinegar and 1/2 cup white vinegar)
• 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice, bottled

Important note here:  This recipe calls for canning salt.  It’s much finer than kosher salt.  Just to see how much of a difference it made, I weighed a tablespoon of kosher salt (9 grams) and a tablespoon of canning salt (17 grams).

So if you use kosher salt, you may want to increase the salt to 2 tablespoons (or thereabouts) to achieve the same level of saltiness.

One trick we’ve learned (the hard way) is any recipe that requires a long period of “cooking down” (like fruit butters) works great in a crock pot.  That’s how we’re doing this sauce.  Pretty much “set it and forget it”.

After some initial tasting, we decided it needed a little bit of spice and a little bit of sweet.  For the spice, we added 2 teaspoons of Worcestershire Sauce and a tablespoon of malt vinegar (ours is 6% acidity).  For the sweet, we added 3 tablespoons of tomato paste.  (Hint: when you open a can of tomato paste and don’t use the whole thing, freeze the rest in tablespoon size “dollops” on a cookie sheet and put in a container when they’re frozen.  Just pull out what you need without having to open another whole can.)

This looks cooked down to the “consistency of catsup”.  This took about four hours in our crockpot (on high).

By the way, don’t you just hate those “reduce in half” type directions?  Here’s an easy way to figure it out.  Stick the handle of the spoon into the sauce before you start cooking it, and mark the original depth with a piece of masking tape.  Keep checking the depth until it’s halfway between your mark and the end of the spoon.

The sauce is done and canned – we got 2 pint jars, one 12-oz. jar, one half-pint jar and a 4 oz. jelly jar from this recipe – a total of 3-1/2 pints.

Tasting it after processing, we decided it actually came out too thick (it’s like catsup, which is a bit thick for our use), it could use more mustard flavor (dry mustard is now on the shopping list) and we should reduce or leave out the tomato paste (a little too tomato-y sweet and it added to the thickness).  But it’s close.  Very close.  And there’s still a bunch of tomato bricks in the freezer.  The experiment continues…

BarBBQ Bill and I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year and a bountiful harvest in 2010!

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I need a break from cranberries and apples and cinnamon and chocolate and peppermint and winter/Christmas baking smells.

I need a smell and taste of summer.  I need to celebrate that the days are now going to get longer and the growing season will be here again before I know it.

I was down in the Little Cellar (where I keep our home-canned stuff) gathering things for holiday gift-giving and spied some quarts of peaches and a few jars of really yucky overly-sweet peach jam I made.

Peaches remind me of summer.  Hmmm, how about some Peach Cobbler?  And this one is so easy to make that I forgot to take pictures along the way.

Take 1/2 cup butter (1 stick) and put it in an ovenproof dish (mine is a 2-1/2 quart oval baker, but I think it works in a 13″ x 9″ pan, too) and put in the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

While the butter is melting, mix up a batter of:
1 cup flour
1-8 oz. (1/2 pint) jar of way-too-sweet peach jam – or use 1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

For the peaches, you can use:

a bag and a half of frozen unsweetened sliced peaches (I think mine come in a 12 oz. bag?), or
a quart jar of home-canned peaches (I can mine in light syrup which adds about 1/4 cup of sugar – I figure I’ll burn that off shoveling snow), or
in the summer, 3 cups peeled and sliced fresh peaches, with the juice (about 3 or 4 peaches).
Note: Once, in total desperation, I tried this with canned peaches in heavy syrup from the grocery store.  Didn’t work very well…

When the butter is completely melted, take the pan out of the oven and pour the batter into the melted butter. Spoon the peaches evenly over the batter (in the summer, add the juice from the peaches, too). Put the pan back in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.  As the cobbler cooks, the batter rises up and around and over the peaches.

It smells so summery, I might even have some ice cream on it.

Thanks to Liss at Frills in the Hills for including us in this week’s Make It From Scratch! Blog Carnival.

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