Picking and pickling a peck of peppers (or two)

I had to look it up, but a peck of peppers is a quarter of a bushel, or around 10 pounds. The word "frost" has been bandied about in the weather forecast, so I thought it might be a good idea to pick the peppers. The warm September has made up for a coolish summer and the plants were heavy with fruit. 

I picked the jalapeños yesterday (3.5kg) and the sweet peppers today (6.5kg). A grand total of 10kg, or 22 pounds. 

 I sliced all the jalapeños and pickled about half of them using brine and the hot-water canning method...

... and open froze the rest.  Once frozen, I packed them into a single large plastic freezer bag, so I can just remove handfuls as and when I need some.

The sweet peppers were a mix of Antohi, Golden Marconi and Cubanelles.

I* washed them, cut off the tops, halved and deseeded them, then cooked them with the cut side down under the broiler/grill for seven minutes, until the skins were blackened. I found doing around twelve peppers in each batch worked well.

 Then I put them in a covered plastic tub to cool down, before removing the skins and packing them into glass jars. Then I added water with a little salt in it to the jars and pressure canned them for 35 minutes.

 Six kilos of fresh peppers ended up as three one-kilo/quart jars of processed fruit.

*Child#2 took over this job half way through and this speeded up the process dramatically. I definitely recommend getting a friend or family member involved with jobs like this!

Easily pleased

I made some garden-related comment to Mike the other day: it might have been about the first eggplant flower, or perhaps it was about the strawberries that were starting to ripen, I forget. His reply was "You're easily pleased, aren't you?"

Yes, yes I am. I take huge pleasure every year from watching the seedlings grow into food-producing plants, from harvesting the fruit and vegetables, and from serving food from the garden at the table. And in these constrained times, I also take pleasure in knowing that these things can continue. I have a friend whose community garden was closed because of Covid-19 and I honestly can't imagine not having access to growing space.

One of the industries that has done well in the pandemic has been the vendors of seeds. I visited the Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds website back in March to order something I had forgotten (beetroot seeds, I think), only to find this temporary closure notice:

And supermarket shelves were being denuded of flour and yeast. Suddenly it seemed as though the whole world was shifting to live life the way I do. In the midst of all the concern and disruption, there was something strangely validating about that. It will be interesting to see if the shift to home growing and home baking lasts beyond this year.

Peppers (again!)

The hot weather in the last couple of weeks has really been ripening the peppers. I spent a happy ten minutes this morning, picking them.

I roasted the sweet peppers and then pulled the skins off them, once they'd cooled down a bit.

Then I packed them into a jar and pressure canned them for half an hour. This should preserve them over the winter.

I also tried a new trick with the pressure cooker - using it to cook eggs. Fresh eggs are always a pain to peel, but if you cook them in the pressure cooker, they turn out to be extremely easy. I cooked them at the lower pressure setting for six minutes. I think next time I'll do it for four or five, as the yolks were a bit dry for my taste, but this was definitely an experiment that was worth repeating.

Ontario feijoada

I love dishes which combine meat and beans: cassoulet, Boston baked beans, any kind of slow-cooked meat and beans. When I read about the Brazilian national dish, feijoada, in Jamie Oliver's new book Comfort Food, I had to try it, particularly as I had some leftover pork belly slices which I didn't use at Christmas and the remains of a smoked pork picnic shoulder joint. Not to mention a load of the black beans I harvested this year! The end result was lovely: garlicky, rich and definitely worthy of the comfort food label. I had to adapt the recipe to suit my available ingredients and I'm noting them here for future reference, as this is a dish I guarantee I'll be making again.

Ingredients (serves 4)

Stage One
2 cups black beans, soaked for at least 5 hours
1 ham bone, stripped of meat
1lb/450g pork belly slices (with rind)
4 cups water

Stage Two
1 onion, diced
2 tsps smoked paprika
9 inch chorizo sausage, sliced into 1-inch lengths
Any leftover ham, sliced into small pieces
5 cloves garlic, crushed
salt & pepper

I used my pressure cooker for the first stage: slice the pork belly pieces into narrow strips and fry them until golden. Add the beans, water and ham bone and cook at high pressure for 15 minutes. (If using a regular pan, cook for an hour, or until the beans are tender.) Then remove the bone and transfer everything else into an ovenproof dish with a lid, with the remaining ingredients. Cook at 300°F/150°C for four hours (or use a slow cooker if you have one). By the end of the cooking time, most of the liquid should have been absorbed or evaporated, leaving a thick, glossy coating on the beans and meat. Serve over brown rice.

Easter nostalgia

I seem to have more memories of childhood Easters than I do of Christmases, for some reason. Like the time I left an Easter egg on the living room windowsill and it melted into a puddle. Mum put it in the freezer and I remember sitting in the garden the next morning, nibbling on frozen chocolate, thinking it was much nicer than the egg would have been.

Apart from hot cross buns on Good Friday, I don't think we had any particular food every Easter. Except various forms of chocolate, of course - the children at school would brag about how many eggs they'd received. Easter eggs don't seem to be as much of a thing over here, although chocolate certainly is.

My aunt sent us an Easter parcel with some Cadbury's mini eggs in it and they brought back a vivid memory of a cake my mother made one Easter. It had a bird's nest on top, made out of Shredded Wheat coated with chocolate, and a clutch of mini eggs in the middle.

I don't have any Shredded Wheat, but I did have some chow mein noodles which I thought might work just as well. I melted a bar of 85% chocolate with about 50g of butter and a tablespoon or two of honey, then stirred in the noodles, breaking them up a bit. I used my crumpet/egg rings as moulds for the nests (on a baking sheet covered with parchment paper) and piled the chocolate-covered noodles into them. 

I used the handle of a wooden spoon to make a bit of an indentation in the centre of each nest, then refrigerated them for a couple of hours until the chocolate had hardened, Then I removed the rings and put the mini eggs in the centre.

A perfect Easter dessert!

Individual steamed puddings

One of my Christmas presents was this set of silicone tea cups, designed to hold cupcakes. I don't often make cupcakes, but it occurred to me that they'd be good for making individual steamed puddings - and at this time of year I make a lot of those. It's compulsory to eat steamed puddings when it's this cold.

This quantity makes four little cupcake puddings - one is not really enough to make a satisfying dessert, but if you've already had a big main course, it is nice as a 'sweet nothing' afterwards. Two would be perfect (I just have to persuade the children to leave home...).

Ingredients

75g/3oz butter

75g/3oz sugar

1 egg

75g/3oz flour (I used a mixture of wholemeal and white)

1 tsp baking powder

1-2 tbsp milk

4 teaspooons golden syrup or jam

Beat the sugar into the butter until creamy, add the egg and mix well, then stir in the flour and baking powder. If the mixture is very stiff, add milk to loosen it up a bit - it should drop off a spoon if you tap it against the side of the bowl.

Grease the cases with butter or oil and put a teaspoon of syrup or jam in the bottom of each one. Spoon the pudding mixture into the cases (muffin cases would work here, too) and place them in the top of a steamer.

I cut some parchment paper to fit the steamer basket and put that over the cups to stop water dripping into them. You could use foil instead.

Steam the puddings for 40 minutes until cooked through.You can eat them in the cups or turn them out onto plates or saucers and add some cream or ice cream.

Post-storm ruminations

Our power was restored at some point before midnight last night - a total of over 50 hours without mains electricity. We coped fairly well, although there are some things we might have done differently if we'd realised we were going to be without power for quite that long.

We've got a bank of batteries hooked up to the solar panels, so power cuts aren't usually a big deal for us. When the power goes down, there's a short pause, then system switches automatically over to the batteries and our lights come back on. On Saturday and Sunday we still had running water, thanks to that. We turned the geothermal heating off, but initially we still had the hot water heater running, which (in hindsight) we should probably have turned off sooner.

By Sunday evening we were running low on the backup power and there had been no sunshine to top up the batteries (there wasn't any on Monday, either - and a light dusting of snow came down and covered the panels, which wasn't going to help). We ran out of power completely at midnight on Sunday. The woodstoves did a good job of keeping the house warm, but I was worried about the water/sanitation side of things, as we need power to run the water pump. The usual advice is to fill the bath with water before the power goes out, but we hadn't done that and I wished we had - it would have been useful to have that water for flushing toilets. We drained the water that was left in the system into jugs and had plenty for drinking.

The fridge and freezers were without power for 24 hours and when I checked the fridge temperature after the power came back on it was only two degrees above the 'safe' zone on the fridge thermometer. We didn't open the freezers at all, so they should be fine after that period.

I was able to make hot food and drinks with the kitchen woodstove - we had omelettes, soup, quesadillas and a risotto during the outage. I'm really looking forward to being able to use my electric oven again today, though!

During Monday there were signs that people were working to get the power back on - at seven different times the fridge and freezer briefly came to life, raising our hopes, before subsiding back into silence. You realise how dependent you are on electricity when something like this happens. I spent my time reading to entertain myself, but the children both struggled without access to electronic devices (and through them, their social networks) - and we played a lot of card games. When the power came back on, Child#2 promised me that he'd never complain of boredom again.

The living room looked really cosy by candlelight, but I would have enjoyed it more if there hadn't been that nagging worry about when power would be restored and how we would cope for another day without it.

I'm very grateful to the power crews who have been working so hard to get everyone reconnected: I have a feeling that Christmas 2013 will be one to remember!

Ways with cabbage

With the weather due to take a wintry plunge this weekend, I decided that I'd better harvest the remaining cabbages from the barnyard. It made for a daunting pile:

I spent some time on Thursday shredding the heap. Two kilos of it are currently being turned into sauerkraut, I blanched and froze another batch and have been using the remainder fresh in meals: a simple braised cabbage for supper last night and as an ingredient in hash browns for breakfast today. I'm not sure how authentic it is as to have cabbage in hash browns, but it seemed like a good way of using up one of the smaller Savoy cabbages (and it really was small - about the size of a tennis ball!).

I never made hash browns when we lived in England, although I did sometimes eat them in hotel breakfast buffet spreads. Home-made are much nicer and really easy, I discovered quite recently. With the addition of cabbage, they are quite like bubble-and-squeak, so perhaps this recipe should be called squeak browns, or bubble hash. Or something...

Anyway, here is the recipe. This is enough to serve four people:

Squeak Hash Bubble Browns

2 medium-sized potatoes (unpeeled)
1 onion, peeled
1 very small Savoy cabbage, shredded
quarter of a cup of flour
salt/pepper/spices (whatever you fancy - I put some smoked garlic powder in this batch, but I'll often add paprika or maybe some shredded sage)
1 tablespoon butter or oil

If you have a food processor with a grater attachment, the easiest way to make this is to put the potato and onion through that. Or you can use a regular grater. Put a non-stick frying pan on a medium heat and add the butter or oil. Meanwhile, mix the grated and shredded vegetables together and stir in the flour and seasonings. Once the pan is hot, pack the hash brown ingredients into it so that they form a layer about 1cm/half an inch thick. Then leave it to cook for about seven minutes.

After that time, use a plastic spatula to divide the mixture into four (assuming you're feeding four) pieces. Carefully flip each one over and leave it for another seven minutes until the other side is brown and crispy.

My cabbage cornucopia is looking a little less intimidating now:

Plum preserve

When we lived in the UK I used to buy a fruit preserve by Bonne Maman - I think it was plums or peaches (or perhaps both). It was good as a fruit pie or crumble filling or to go with ice cream - it was softer in texture than a jam, but sweet.

I haven't seen the same product over here, but when I saw the plums coming along in the orchard I remembered it and thought I'd aim for something similar if the crop was a good one. The variety we're growing is 'Stanley'.

Mike and I harvested the plums today, fighting the wasps for them. There were over eight pounds in all - not bad for our first harvest - and I've converted all of them into preserve, in two batches. Once they'd been stoned and quartered, each batch weighed about four pounds, to which I added four cups of sugar and a little water. Then I just brought the mixture to a boil until my cooking thermometer read just under 100°C/210°F. As it's not a jam, you don't need to worry about reaching setting point and they don't need long cooking - about 15 minutes at boiling point is plenty.

The skins turn the cooking liquid a deep, ruby red, which looks fabulous with the light behind it.

This quantity of plums made nine one-pint jars of preserve. I processed eight of them in a hot-water canner to make sure they won't spoil in storage and thought we'd have the other one in the next week or two as a dessert. But Child#2 spotted the jar this evening and thought it would be really good to have it in a plum crumble RIGHT NOW. For quality control purposes, naturally.

He knows me too well. Guess what's in the oven...

Blueberry and curd tartlets

I had a pint of blueberries* to use up and this last-minute dessert seemed as good a way of doing that as any.

Ingredients

175g/6oz flour
40g/1.5oz butter
40g/1.5oz lard
8 generous tablespoons lemon or gooseberry curd
500ml/1 pint blueberries

Preheat the oven to 400F/200C/Gas mark 6. Rub the fats into the flour and add enough water to make a dough. Divide the pastry into four and press into individual tart dishes (I've got some oval metal ones, but you could divide the dough into eight and use a muffin tin instead). Spoon the curd into the pastry shells and sprinkle the blueberries over them. Bake for around 15 minutes, until the pastry is golden brown at the edges. Allow to cool in the tins for 5-10 minutes, until the curd sets, then carefully remove and serve with a dollop of cream.

*From North Carolina - Mike did the shopping and he hasn't really got the hang of this local food thing. Despite extensive brainwashing training. Sigh.

Sourdough starter

I've been vaguely aware of a growing fashion for sourdough bread. For a while I've been considering my reliance on commercial yeast for our bread and having a sourdough starter instead seemed to make sense, sustainability-wise. But having to create a starter and spend a few days nurturing it is one of those tasks that you can only commit to if you've got the right conditions: firstly, the temperature needs to be right (winter doesn't seem ideal for development of yeast) and secondly, you need to be present to feed the starter regularly.

With summer finally arriving this week and no out-of-the-house stays in my immediate future, I decided that now was the time to take the plunge. There seem to be a number of ways of making the starter. As I've already got a live yoghurt supply, I decided to go with this version from chef Patrick Ryan, which takes yoghurt and milk as its starting point.

I used a large-ish plastic container with a tight-fitting lid. Here's the milk/yoghurt mixture  (5 tablespoons yoghurt and ¾ cup of milk) after one day at room temperature.

And after adding the cup of flour at day two it looked more like a regular dough mix:

On day three, the dough is left to its own devices. On the morning of day four, a thinnish skin had formed on the starter:

...and underneath it, you can see that bubbles were beginning to form. I added another 1⅓ cups of flour, ⅓ cup of water and 3 tablespoons of milk.

This morning was day five and the starter looked much more alive:

There were quite a few bubbles in the mixture, once I'd stirred it:

At this point the recipe says "Remove half of the starter and discard." What? I've just spent five days making the stuff. I am not about to start throwing it away. So I put the discarded half in the freezer, instead.

I added another cup of flour and half a cup of water this morning and seven hours later, it's looking quite rampantly bubbly. So much so, that I can see why discarding some was a good idea. At this rate my container will soon be full. Maybe my kitchen, too...

Tomorrow, it should be ready to turn into my first attempt at sourdough bread. Looking forward to it. This really is slow food. Slow but satisfying!

UPDATE: The starter was looking so active that I decided to go ahead and make the bread in the evening. It came out well (and tasted great!).

Gooseberry curd

I planted my gooseberry bush in 2008 and this is the first year I've successfully picked a good amount of fruit. In 2009 the bush suffered a lawn-mower-related accident (regular readers may notice a trend here) which reduced it to a single branch, but since then it has been growing well and really I have no excuses for not harvesting a crop in 2010, 2011 and 2012. Except that I think my problem has been the size of the fruit. I found out today that North American gooseberries are smaller than European ones. I think in previous years I've been waiting for them to get as big  as my mental picture of an ideal gooseberry and of course they never have.

Well, no more! I harvested over two pounds of them today:

I read a Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall recipe for gooseberry curd in The Guardian the other day (yes, still in the habit of reading British newspapers) and thought it sounded lovely. Once you start looking around the web for recipes, you soon find that there is very little agreement on the quantities of ingredients for gooseberry curd. I'm hoping that means it doesn't matter too much.

I didn't bother to top-and-tail the fruit (mainly because it would have taken me all day). I just added about half a cup of water to them and stewed them down gently for about 10 minutes until they were soft and disintegrating. Then I dug out my old food mill. I bought this when Child1 was starting solid foods and I don't think I've used it since. I found it didn't actually work that well for making baby food, but it is perfect for taking the stalks off gooseberries. I knew there was a reason I'd kept it...

This process left me with 900ml of purée. I froze half of it to use in something else (HFW also has a recipe for gooseberry ice-cream which sounds tempting) and got to work with the remaining 450ml. Plumping for an average of all the different quantities I'd found online, I added 90g unsalted butter and 330g sugar to the purée in the top half of a double boiler. While the butter melted, I whisked up three eggs and strained them into a jug. Then I mixed the eggs into the gooseberry mixture and patiently stirrred it for 15 minutes or so, until the mixture was good and thick. It got to 74°C according to my sugar thermometer (custards are safely cooked once they get to 71°C or 160°F (I only found this out today!)).

Then I strained the mixture through a fine sieve to remove any lingering pieces of gooseberry flower and transferred it into two sterilised jars. This quantity (annoyingly) made just a little less than two pounds of  curd. I'm pleased with the colour and hope it will taste as good as it smells!

Crossing the line

The line I'm thinking of is the one that divides behaviour that is considered quite normal, and behaviour which is viewed as eccentric. The location of the line varies from person to person, of course, and I'm fairly sure that a lot of things I consider perfectly reasonable activities would definitely be on the other side of the eccentricity line for other people. Growing my own food, raising chickens, baking all my own bread, making granola, refusing to buy processed food - that sort of thing. But I crossed my own version of that line in recent months when I started making my own yog(h)urt. I don't know why that seems more eccentric than baking bread (and the two activities are now closely linked, as I'll explain in a minute), but it does. Somehow making yoghurt seems such a 1970s thing to do.

But it's so easy that I've become completely addicted to the process and always have a batch of home-made yoghurt in the fridge. I've delayed blogging about it because of my reservations about it being an odd sort of thing to do.

The initial stimulus for the activity involves another confession (you can see why I delayed writing this post). I'm really bad at throwing out man-made containers like jam jars and yoghurt pots. I have cupboards full of them and they do come in very handy at times, but I really don't need any more. When I read Mimi Spencer's book 101 Things To Do Before You Diet back in February and she explained how simple it was, I was inspired to give it a go. And now I've been re-using the same yoghurt pot for the last three months. Win!

I started out by ordering a sachet of yoghurt culture online. You can just buy a jar of plain active yoghurt as your starter culture and don't need to do this, but I didn't have any to hand at the time. Then you heat some milk to boiling point (I use 2% fat milk) and let it cool down to about 45°C/115°F (if you don't have a thermometer, I read somewhere that at this temperature you should be able to keep your finger in the milk for 20 seconds). Stir three tablespoons of the yoghurt into the warm milk and then pour it into a vacuum flask (at the start of the process I just fill the flask with milk to measure the quantity - hence the lack of precision in these instructions! [I've now measured the quantity and my flask holds a litre/quart of milk]). After a couple of hours the milk will have curdled and you can strain the yoghurt to remove the liquid whey and thicken it up. I use a sieve lined with a coffee filter paper or kitchen paper for this.

Here's the view from the side. You can see the whey underneath the sieve.

I use the whey as part of the liquid I add to my bread - which means that a yoghurt-making day is usually also a bread-making day. But I've also read that tomato plants really like the calcium in whey, so I might use it for that in the summer.

Tonight I'm planning to use the yoghurt to make naan bread and raita to accompany the curry we're having for supper. My stomach is already growling at the thought.

So, do you do anything that you feel crosses your personal eccentricity line? Or is it just me that worries about these things?

Preparing for Spring, eating like Winter

Friday's ice storm didn't do too much damage here, although the trees were coated with a fairly thick layer of ice for several hours.

I'm wanting to transfer my tomato seedlings to the greenhouse, but the temperature isn't high enough yet. I did mobilise the children to start the process today. We liberated an old table and a cable spool from the big barn and carried/rolled them down to the greenhouse to act as potting tables. Then we spent twenty minutes or so laying out pots and filling them with potting mix. So the pots are now ready for the tomatoes, if the weather should ever decide to co-operate.

Our reward for all the hard work was a new dessert (on the premise that it's still cold enough to be eating hot puddings). It's based on a Bakewell tart, but without the pastry. So just a 'Bakewell', maybe.

Ingredients

150g/¾ cup sugar
150g/1½ cups ground almonds
4 eggs
75g/3oz butter
300g/10oz mixed summer fruit
60g/½ cup flaked almonds

Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C. Melt the butter and mix it with the eggs, 100g/half a cup of the sugar and all of the ground almonds. Mix the summer fruits with the remaining sugar and put into the base of a glass dish. Pour the egg mixture over the top, then sprinkle with the flaked almonds. Bake for 40 minutes.

Gingerbread Pudding

Bread Pudding is one of those names that could trip a British English speaker up, over here. It usually refers to what I think of as Bread and Butter Pudding - sliced bread, spread with butter, layered with dried fruit and sugar and baked in a milk and egg custard and served hot. Bread Pudding in England was similar in that its main ingredients were bread, milk, egg, sugar and fruit, but different in texture and temperature: it is much more dense and is usually eaten cold. In both cases, the dishes seem to have been designed as a way of using up stale bread. And in my current domestic situation, I can't make either, as Child#2 objects to dried fruit.

I've shared my gingerbread recipe on the blog before. Having to use up stale gingerbread is one of those 'never gonna happen' situations, but I needed a dessert in a hurry today and happened to have half a loaf of gingerbread to hand. I turned three large slices of it into a ginger version of bread and butter pudding. But as there was no butter involved, I've had to call it Gingerbread Pudding. Which just perpetuates the confusion, I suppose. But this is definitely a hot pudding, not a cold one.

Ingredients

12 small slices of gingerbread (about 1 by 3 inches)
3 eggs
¼ cup sugar
300ml milk
1 tsp vanilla extract
(If I'd had any preserved ginger, I would have added that to replace the dried fruit in 'classic' B&BP)

Heat your oven to 350°F/180°C. Arrange the slices of gingerbread in a shallow ovenproof dish. Beat the eggs with the sugar, milk and vanilla extract. Pour the mixture over the gingerbread slices and allow to soak in for a few minutes. Then transfer the dish to the oven and bake for 30-40 minutes. Serve with custard or ice cream.

Flat as a...tortilla

I do try to resist getting new kitchen gadgets, but we eat a lot of shop-bought tortilla wraps and I thought it might be better to make them myself. Not least because the ones from the stores contain a long list of 14 ingredients, including carrageenan which is under suspicion of being a carcinogen (although the name suggests to me that it is in fact a species of leprechaun (which I also would be reluctant to eat)).

Therefore my birthday request this year was for a tortilla press, because, enthusiastic though I am, I can't face the effort of rolling tortillas out by hand. As today is pancake day, it seemed like a good opportunity to try it out.

It is a very simple low-tech device, made of extremely heavy cast iron. You make the dough (2 cups of flour (half wholewheat, half white), ¼ cup vegetable oil, pinch of salt (I forgot to add that, actually) and enough warm water to bind everything together - I did all this in the food processor as though I were making pastry), let it rest for half an hour, then it's time to play.

You have to encase the dough with plastic to stop it from sticking to the press. I cut a freezer bag open down the two sides and folded it over the lump of dough. Two cups of flour makes about 12 tortillas this size (6 inches in diameter).

Then you shut the top down, press down with the lever, et voilà!

I cooked them in a non-stick frying pan at a fairly high heat for about a minute each side.

I had a couple for lunch as quesadillas, with cheese and slices of pickled pepper inside.

But the true test was in the evening, when I gave the children the same thing for their tea. "You have to make these again!" was Child1's comment, while Child2, who invariably won't eat the cheeseless 'crusts' of quesadillas made with shop-bought tortillas, said "I would eat these without cheese". The dog, who usually gets to gobble down Child2's leftovers, was the only one destined for disappointment.

Not bad for a foodstuff made with three ingredients! I'd love to try making them with proper corn masa harina - but first I'll have to find a supplier...