Can[‘t] fight this feeling anymore

I can’t hide it any longer. I’ve broken through a culinary barrier that I thought would wait at least until I had a gigantic non-city kitchen. I’ve started canning. You know, putting things into jars (not cans, which we’ve had a lot of confusion over in my house), putting the jars in boiling water for a certain period of time, so that the lids eventually seal once removed from the water, and then you can keep the jars unopened on your shelf like store-bought goods.

It was only a matter of time really. My love of all things pickled had already filled our fridge beyond its capacity with assorted jars at various stages of pickling. We would give some away, but the problem remained. We had just too many jars in the fridge at once. Sometimes several of the same thing, depending on how big the batch I made was. I really needed to find a way to make the second and third jars of a batch shelf stable, so they wouldn’t stay in the fridge while we ate through them, getting more and more fermented as time went on.

I also couldn’t help but envy the beautiful standardized jars that I kept seeing in certain Flickr pools. Those Ball/Mason/Kerr jars are just so pretty when they’ve been filled with colorful tasty things, lined up in a row. I also liked the idea of having smaller jars of various pickles and preserves so we could switch them out for some variety and not be stuck with a huge open jar of something we eat sparingly.

I avoided this hobby for as long as I could – thinking that it might be too complicated, or involve to many tools that would sit around my small apartment, taking up space and collecting dust. But when my mom called me to say she saw a good price on wide-mouthed pint jars, I decided that I couldn’t wait any longer. Into the canner I went.

I was eased into the idea of canning for the last year or so, following Marisa at Food in Jars, and a slew of other blogs that occasionally mentioned lids and rings and jar lifters. Food in Jars taught me that I could can small amounts (3 pints) and explained all the ways I could set up my own canning rig without much specialized equipment. I’m using a big stock pot, a great little trivet that Marisa mentioned to keep the jars off the bottom, a jar lifter (specialized tongs), and kitchen towels.

I’m not sure how much more I’ll be talking about canning here, because I’m still new to it and there are “experts” out there that I’d rather you trust on the subject instead of me in this case. Following recipes is very important in order to keep food safe to consume after it has been on a shelf for weeks/months. But if this is something you’re interested in, here are some of the recipes and resources I started with:

Food Safety

• National Center for Home Food Preservation’s Canning section
• Preserving with reusable lids 

Recipes

I have tried the following recipes. They are good bases, though not always the most exciting in flavor. I am planning on adjusting the spices, while leaving the amounts of acid the same to keep them safe.

• Dilly Beans
• Pickled Okra
• Pepper Jam (I used this as a base for my hot pepper jam, though I didn’t process it in a water bath)
• Bread and Butter pickles, different from the one posted on Get Cooking

Equipment

Please note that I have bought the following linked items myself, and am recommending their use because I have found them to be useful. The links are affiliate links.

• Ball Utensil Set
• Spice Ratchet Blossom Multi-Use Silicone Trivet
• Tattler Reusable Wide Mouth Canning Lids & Rubber Rings
• Ball Wide-Mouth Plastic Storage Caps

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Shiitake Mushroom “Bacon” Crumbles

Last year, Jen and I decided to increase the vegetarianism in our diets. We didn’t cut out animal products entirely, but we stopped buying meat and most of our meals were vegetarian or vegan. Among many other reasons for making this change, we really want to shake our cooking up. While we have gone back to eating meat this year, the time we spent without it taught us a lot about what sates our appetites.

I don’t find meat to be an essential part of a meal, in general. But if you are used to cooking with it regularly, it can be a challenge creating balanced meals without it. That’s probably why so many “meat” substitutes exist. Don’t get me wrong, protein is an important nutritional element, and many touted meat substitutes such as tofu (soy), seitan (made of wheat gluten) or tempeh (another soy product) provide that nutrient in abundance. But I do find that some people (mostly non-vegetarians) get much more worked up over getting enough than the average person really needs to worry about. Grains, legumes, and many vegetables can provide just as much protein when included regularly in a diet.

Meat substitutes can be great, and I plan on talking more about them in future weeks. If you’ve read much of this blog, you have probably gathered that I prefer food to be processed as little as possible when I begin cooking with it. So I knew that no matter what we were going to be eating we would be making much of it ourselves. And that points out another problem with relying on most meat substitutes for the bulk of a vegetarian diet – they are often heavily processed and expensive.

In my new diet, I wanted to focus on fresh food, that I knew as much about as possible, and that would keep me interested and coming back for more. I also had to combat with no longer having some of my favorite foods, which was less about nutrition or cost cutting and more about giving my taste buds what they wanted. After going without bacon for some time, I did begin to crave it quite a bit. That’s when I remembered this recipe that I had come across when following a recipe for seitan bourguignon (also amazing, but we’ll get to that later).

Fresh (undried) shiitake mushrooms are used here, roasted with a bit of oil and salt, until they are crispy. It’s not just the crisping that makes them wonderful – though the texture is quite addictive. The musky, sulfuric flavor of shiitake mushrooms turns into magic when they are cooked. They take on a remarkable similarity to the meaty, salty, umami of bacon. It’s not an exact match, for sure, but it’s so close, I’d wager that someone might be fooled in a blind taste test.

I couldn’t believe how good they turned out, I made them over and over again. This is a recipe any person who avoids bacon, or meat, should have in their repertoire. The only downside is that a pound of mushrooms, once the stems are removed, and the caps are cooked, turn into maybe a cup of crunchies. At the lowest price I’ve found for fresh shiitake, that’s much steeper than the price of even good bacon.

Recipe: Roasted Shiitake Bacon

Recipe originally found on WholeLiving.com

• 1/2 to 1lb fresh shiitake mushroom caps, sliced
• 1 tbs olive oil
• light sprinkle of course salt

1. Preheat oven to 350 degress. 
2. Spread mushroom slices on an oiled pan. A glass or pyrex pan cooks more slowly, a metal pan cooks more quickly. I found I liked the way they came out better on the glass pan, but they took a lot more time to crisp. 
3. Allow to roast uncovered, tossing every 10 minutes, until dry, crisp, and not burnt. The first few times you check on them, they may not seem like they will ever become crispy, but have patience. The process can take anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour depending on the amount of mushrooms, and the kind of pan. 
4. Once removed from the oven, allow to cool. 

Enjoy anywhere you might include bacon. And even more places. Since these were more like crumbles than slices, we put them on salads, wraps, on pizza, in macaroni and cheese, and crunched as a snack. The only place they didn’t really work was as a soup topping, as they became soggy pretty quickly.

Hey! When you’re chopping up the mushrooms, don’t throw away the stems! They are full of flavor, even if the texture is unpleasant. Clean them off and use them to make a mushroom or vegetable stock. I just save them in a large zip-top bag in the freezer until I have enough to make a large pot.

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Thanksgiving

Last year our Thanksgiving dinner went off without a hitch. I’d like to say it was five years of practice that made it so, but I can’t take all the credit for how things came together. My whole family all worked together to make our Thanksgiving a feast that we could enjoy, but not keel over from. Below are some of the things we did that enabled me to enjoy the leftovers for days afterward without feeling Thanksgiving’d out.

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Pantry tips for greater freedom in the kitchen, part 1

I’ve written before about how having a well stocked pantry makes it easy for me to choose to cook every night instead of eating out. A well stocked pantry means different things to different people. For me, it means having versatile ingredients around that are as ready as possible to use at a moment’s notice. It also means having items around that won’t spoil, and knowing how best to store items that will.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dried Beans and Grains

I’ve written a lot about keeping dried beans around, and Jen’s last post about red beans and rice is a great way to put them to use. But how best to store dried beans so that they are always on hand? I like to keep them in glass jars. They are pretty that way, and generally protected from insects that might be attracted to them. An airtight container also helps to keep them generally free from too much moisture. Usually I save jars any time I buy something that comes in one, clean them thoroughly and take off the labels by soaking in hot soapy water. This gives me jars of all shapes and sizes to use for storing any manner of dried good. I think I may have developed a bit of a love for jars, especially since I’ve started following Food in Jars.

I do the same thing with grains, though usually in bigger plastic containers, since I tend to keep around much greater quantities of each grain.

Aromatics and Spices

I always have a few fresh aromatics around, such as garlic, onions, and ginger. Garlic goes in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator, still attached until I’m ready to use it. Onions go in a bin on a pantry shelf (though in the summer heat, I’m considering finding a darker, cooler place to put them).

Ginger gets a different treatment, however. I used to keep it in the vegetable bin with the garlic, but I often found that it would get a little moldy or dried out before I was able to finish it all. And then I tried freezing it. That was the best trick I’ve ever found for storing ginger. Just pop a few fingers of ginger into an airtight freezer bag and put them in the freezer. Take out pieces as you need them.

Freezing causes many raw aromatics to get mushy, but since I usually pulverize ginger with a microplane when I use it, I don’t really care about maintaining its natural texture. Even better, frozen ginger is ridiculously easy to peel, and even easier to grate because the ice crystals that form during freezing have already broken down the tough fibers of the rhizome. So there are two wins – the ginger can be kept for longer (meaning that it is always on hand for making my favorite dish), and it is even easier and faster to break down when I do wish to use it.

We always keep a good amount of our favorite spices around. My favorite trick with spices has been to make a mix of the spices we use the most frequently so that they are always on hand and easy to throw into any dish. We’ve done this with our own blend of taco seasoning (a mix of cumin, granulated garlic, cayenne, bouillon) and gyro seasoning.

Getting things out of those jars

It’s all well and good to keep a well stocked pantry, but what happens when you’ve stored something too well? In our house, there always seems to be a sneaky little gnome or something that goes around tightening jars. No problem, though, because Jen came up with my favorite trick to get just about any jar open, no matter why is it sticking. Put a big rubber band on it, and just twist off the cap! For those repeat offenders, just leave the rubber band there.

Stay tuned – next time I’ll talk about how I freeze just about everything for later use.

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A Simple Turkey, a retrospective

If you’ve never bought a turkey before, it can be overwhelming to try to understand all the differences between them. There are plenty of guides, but there are so many of those too, it’s hard to know what will be best. In my family we have always chosen frozen kosher turkeys, but even if you don’t keep kosher there are plenty of good reasons to choose a kosher turkey. This cuts down the options a bit, which in this case, is a good thing.

My favorite reason is that kosher turkeys, like all koshered meat, have already been brined. This results in saltier meat that is more likely to retain its moisture during cooking. Sure, you could brine any turkey yourself, but if you live in a tiny New York apartment like I do, you probably don’t have room for the equipment to do it right. And besides, I have enough other dishes to worry about on Thanksgiving, I’ll take the occasional shortcuts where I can find them. If you start with a kosher turkey, then you’ve got all the flavor you need inside the meat before you even start.

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Getting into the Thanksgiving mood

Last year I thought of all kinds of things to say to all of you about my favorite holiday, but I thought of it all too late. I mean, really, who needs Thanksgiving tips a week after you’ve passed out from feasting? This year, I’m going to get my Thanksgiving started early. I have so many things to be thankful for this year, and I want to share the great resources I have with you early enough to be useful.

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Making the most out of what you’ve got

Because it’s been so beautiful out, we’ve changed some of our usual eating and cooking habits for the summer. We’ve been eating out a bit more and have been sharing more meals with friends. To counteract the cost of eating out more often, we’ve slowed down our grocery shopping routine (Incidentally that is not very hard to do considering you don’t need to cook as often if you eat out more).

Despite the fact that we haven’t really shopped in the last month, we’ve still been eating about as well as we usually do (one disclaimer: I’ve had a ton of fresh greens and herbs from our local community garden that I wrote about last time). That’s why you haven’t seen much of me here, I’m cooking some old favorites over and over again. It’s times like these where I’m really proud of my home cooking experience and the ability to keep a well stocked pantry and freezer.

Not writing blog posts (sorry about that, really), has also given me time to read some other great posts. These two say it all better than I ever could, and also came at the perfect time:

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Soul Food Success: Fried Chicken, Sweet Potato Wedges, Corn Pudding

As promised, following up from last weekend, here are the results of the Mother’s Day soul food feast. I think the pictures practically speak for themselves. The food was a triumph! The only problem now is that since I know how very easy it is to make perfect fried chicken at home, I’ll want it all the time. I made a few adjustments to the recipes that were new to me (I can never resist). Keep reading for notes on how I made the perfectly fried chicken, sweet potato wedges and corn pudding.

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Roasted Red Pepper Risotto, or The Importance of Being Creative in the Kitchen

I know you probably think I’ve posted the same dish twice in a row. And honestly, considering the month I’ve had, I wouldn’t be surprised if I had done that. But no, I’m not that absent-minded (yet). This risotto has an even more winding origin than the last one I posted. If you are actually craving something like Roasted Red Pepper Risotto, I assure you there are far easier ways to come by it. One day I’ll probably try to figure one out. That day was not today.

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Freezable bean burritos with a zing!

What do you do when you become to busy to cook consistently? Hopefully, you have the foresight to stock your freezer with reheatable home cooked items. Happily I did manage to have a sense that things were going to get hectic around here and I was able to pack the freezer with these tasty little packages. I only wish I had thought to do the same with some larger meals, but well, hindsight is always twenty/twenty.

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