Yum....pierogies

I grew up in a household with a mother of Polish descent, and so she made pierogies all of the time. She would spend all day making them and leave them on a big plate on the kitchen table until she was ready to sautee them for dinner. My brother and I would sneak in and grab a few here and there.

Over the weekened a local church had a pierogi sale. Since my mother has some health problems and
can't make them now, we headed out to buy some They had cheese, sauerkraut, mushroom and sauerkraut, potato, meat and blueberry. My mother mostly made cheese but I got some of the sauerkraut it try for myself.

I have my mother's pierogi recipe, which is vegetarian so I make it once  in awhile. They freeze well and they are a good meal or snack on a winter evening.

This article "An Introduction to Polish Pierogi" will tell you just about everything you need to know and  the second part of the article will tell you how to make pierogi.

Granola Bars

Every once in awhile I go through my cupboards and refrigerator looking for odds and ends that I want to use up and get rid of. Sometimes this challenges my creativity as I come across things that I would never put together, only to find an online recipe for that very combination. Other times I find that I'm sick of an ingredient and want to get rid of it, only to find a great recipe that makes me keep buying it. Rarely, I find exactly everything that I want to make a recipe of my choice. This weekend I realized that I bought most of the ingredients for Healthy 5-Ingrediant Granola bars by the Minimalist Baker.

I didn't have almonds for this recipe but I had pumpkin seeds, which worked great. My little food processor is on the blink so I chopped the dates finely instead of processing them into a paste. I also forgot to heat the honey and peanut butter but it just made for a little more effort mixing things together. These were quick to make and turned out to be quite tasty. They were a little loose to hold together but I guess it is because the dates were only chopped. I would make these again.

Psychadelic Cook-In

I got a kick out of this cover for the cookook called Cook-In by Kathleen Dunning Fisher, published in 1969. These Peter Max inspired twins look like they should be mixing up those "special" brownies. Though, even with all the cool art this book is simply a basic how to cook book that seems aimed at teenagers.

Pickled Banana Peppers

I love pickled banana peppers, but I don't actually use that many, for some reason. I throw them all over salads and stick them on an occasional sandwich during the summer, but otherwise I forget about them. Things that I don't use often (like ketchup, for instance) seem to be good things to can because I can then make a year's supply of it and then forget about it.

I had it in the back of my mind to get some banana peppers and try this, but I didn't see any when I was looking for them. But, when I was picking up some more tasty discount tomatoes from my favorite farm stand, I picked up a small box of banana peppers. I thought about using them in salsa, but then I realized when I got home that duh, I should pickle them on their own instead.

I searched about for a small batch recipe and found this banana pepper ring recipe from The Virtuous Housewife. I had about a dozen large banana peppers, not quite the 15-20 the recipe called for, but I used her amounts anyway. I guess my peppers were quite large because I used most of the liquid and ended up with four 8oz jars.

In the comments to The Housewife's post, several people mentioned the peppers got soft after canning and to try to "hot pack" it. Well, this means keep the jars and liquid hot. I did that for 3 of my jars but life intervened and I did not do that for the 4th. Coincidentally that jar did not seal so I stuck it in the fridge. Those, indeed, were soft after about a week in the fridge but I haven't opened any of the others yet so I can't tell if this jar is an anomaly.

The recipe also said to add turmeric. I wondered why, and wasn't looking forward to it because when I made corn relish the turmeric turned my plastic kitchen tools yellow. I later realized that this is to keep the canned goods looking pretty. In this photo the bottom left jar doesn't have liquid in it yet and it just isn't as pretty as the other ones.

How to freeze herbs

After all of that salsa canning a couple of weeks ago I had some fresh cilantro left over. Well, I hate to waste it and I knew that there was some way to freeze fresh herbs using ice cube trays. I googled it and it is surprisingly simple. All I had ti do was chop up the herbs, pack about a tablespoon of them into ice cube trays and then pour water over each cube until the cilantro was lightly covered. This worked well. I ended up using the frozen cilantro about a week later and it still tasted pretty good. Of course, it wasn't in the freezer long to begin with.

Busy Canning Day

Over the past 24 hours I've canned 30 things. Pictured here is today's efforts: salsa, chutney, hot sauce, and pickles. More about all of this once I get a rest.

Chopping, chopping, chopping

This morning I went to the Asian supermarket so I could get supplies for making salsa. Produce is always best and cheapest there. I still have many tomatoes and I'm making colorful salsa from yellow and orange bell peppers and green hot peppers so it is all pretty. I intend to use this as Christmas gifts.

Meanwhile, my fingers hurt and they are even wrinkled from chopping all of the fresh vegetables. I also got some apricots with the intent of making jam, but I'm, not happy with them so I'm going to see how they do in chutney.

I also got a ton of pickling cucumbers for 99 cents a pound. My favorite farm stand hasn't been having them and so I was afraid of not having enough pickles all winter.

Tomato sauce and chutney

Right now my kitchen stove is splattered with everything you can think of and my kitchen has been continuously a mess.I've done a lot of caning in the past week. Today I'm working on tomato sauce and chutney from all of those tomatoes I chopped yesterday.

The sauce (top pot in photo) is just a vegetarian spaghetti sauce, which will get frozen in meal sized portions. The bottom pot is tomato chutney. I made a very successful peach chutney over the weekend and I thought I'd try it with tomatoes. Well, it isn't done yet, but so far, so good. Both of these look a little watery in this photo but that was soon remedied by plenty of cooking down.

Peaches and tomatos

Well, another weekend, another 1/2 bushel of tomatoes. I also have peaches. Needless to say, I spent a good many hours blanching, peeling, slicing and chopping.

Fresh Peaches

It seems that everyone in the world has fresh peaches this week. I got a ton and I spent the day making peach jam, spiced peaches, and simply cutting them up and preparing them for the freezer.

The spiced peaches came out delicious, but I'm not happy enough with the packing to give them as gifts. I used the spiced peaches recipe from pickyourown.org. I ended up with a ton of leftover syrup, but I'm not sure what I want to do with it since I'm not going to use it for spiced peaches.

Russian Black Bread

This morning I went with my Dad to the Russian food stores near here. I got an assortment of Russian candies (which I didn't eat yet because they are so pretty) and some of this black bread. He said his parents only ate butter on it. I found that this was just right. Later, I did put some of my tomato jam on it, which I made the other day. That was good. I also added a few slices of Jarlsburg cheese on the side.

Tomato Jam

I've had a craving to make tomato jam for about a month ago. It all started when I read a blog entry by the Amateur Gourmet where he casually mentioned eating tomato jam on a sandwich. I wondered what this would taste like-- I envisioned some sort of savory tomato spread. I began researching this and today I decided to try this recipe from Food in Jars.

I have to say, it is not bad, but then it is not so good that I want to eat it all. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with the 5 or 6 jars I ended up with, except palm some off to adventurous eaters. It is terribly sweet and tastes more like a sweet and spicy ketchup. I just labeled it "ketchup" and stuck it on my shelf until I can figure out what to do with it.

Tomatoes!!

Over the weekend picked up a 1/2 a bushel of #2 grade tomatoes from a local farm stand. There was nothing wrong with them except that they were cracked from growing too quickly. I decided that they should all go into the freezer for soup and chili. I spent a good part of the day peeling, dicing and packing them into freezer bags in recipe sized quantities. I'm happy because these have no salt, unlike canned tomatoes.

Church garden harvest

I volunteer with a garden at my church and this is what I picked this morning. The harvest goes to our food pantry.

Corn Relish

This morning I made my first batch of corn relish. I don't know why I wanted to make this, except the corn at the farm stand looked delicious and it was inexpensive. I had  a recipe from a Ball canning booklet, but it included cabbage, which I didn't want to use. Instead I used the recipe from Foy Update's article "Blue Ribbon Corn Relish: Preserving the Harvest".  This was easy and delicious, so the next time I get corn I'm going to make another batch. I'm not sure what to do with it, but eating it straight out of the jar has been good.

Peach Preserves

Tonight's effort was peach preserves. I'm pretty happy with the way they came out and all of my lids sealed. I used 6 cups of peaches, 4 cups of sugar and 2 tablespoons of lemon juice. I can't remember where I got this recipe, but I prefer low sugar jams so I picked it and it worked out great.

Back porch breakfast

I just thought I'd show off my breakfast for these hot July mornings. I usually make scrambled egg whites with mushrooms and sharp cheese and eat that with homemade cornbread. Since it is too hot to cook or bake, I'm instead making toast with homemade wineberry jam, some fruit salad and deviled eggs. I don't actually like egg yolks, but I can tolerate them if I devil them with some Veganaise and Mister Mustard. I bought the fancy plate from Goodwill so I could arrange my goodies on it, grab a book and an iced coffee and then head out to the back porch to do some breakfast reading.

Simple Fruit Salad with Pineapple Mint

Easy fruit salad

When I am cleaning out my refrigerator, everything that I pull out seems to reconfigure itself into a salad. Tonight I had to unload a peach, a plum and a few tired strawberries, so cutting them all up and mixing them together seemed to be a good idea--and it was. I decided to be fancy and add some pineapple mint.

I've had the pineapple mint growing in my garden for a couple of months but never did anything with it. Tonight, while I was reading on the porch, I decided to pinch off some and add it to my iced tea. It is fantastic-- a bit citrissy and more sweet than other mints I've grown. I made a whole pot of iced tea with this mint and have plans to use it as much as possible this summer.

Pickle Testing Part 1

When I first learned to can a couple of months ago I thought, "Finally! My own homemade pickles." I thought I would begin churning out jars of pickles right away, but curiously, I did not. You see, I am quite finicky when it comes to pickles. I don't like them too sweet, but I do like a good quantity of garlic and  a spicy (but not mouth burning) kick to them. My current favorite commercial brand is Bubbies Pickles.

Because of this, looking at pickle recipes for home canning confused me. I didn't want to make a ton of

pickles only to find out that I didn't like them. So, I began my pickling experiments by Googling "small batch refrigerator pickles" figuring that I could probably later find a home canning recipe that was similar to one I might like.

I came up with Garlic Dill Refrigerator Pickles from theKitchn. These looked like they had the right combination of flavors, including hot pepper, garlic and peppercorns. I made a small batch, tucked them into an old Bubbies jar and stuck them in the refrigerator.

After a couple of days they mostly tasted of vinegar. It took a couple of weeks to bring out the other flavors, most strongly the garlic, though I could also taste the peppercorns. The hot pepper may as well not have been there, so next time I will add more. This was not quite recipe I'm looking for but I will continue to use it until I can find time to experiment with another one.

Chocolate Wineberry Preserves

While I was researching wineberry preserves I knew I should test them with something basic, but then I came across a recipe for chocolate wineberry preserves. I thought that this might be a gimicky thing, but as I worked with my plain test batch I could imagine how good chocolate would be if that were included in the mix. I kept coming back to that idea all day, imagining how well the fruit and chocolate might taste together. I measured out how many berries I still had and was relieved to find out that there was more than enough left to make this recipe.

Chocolate wineberry preserves

I followed the directions as outlined by GrammaGreenjeans on her blog Better Gardens than Home. Gramma's post is laid out well, with simple photos and I didn't have any trouble. In "If you can't beat 'em, eat em" she details how she adapted her recipe from Christine Ferber’s raspberries with chocolate recipe, included in the book Mes Confitures.  I didn't have a fresh lemon so I used the equivalent of bottled lemon juice, which was about 3 tablespoons. I didn't see why the mixture needed to be refrigerated overnight, but I did it anyway.

The next morning I was already canning another small batch of plain wineberry from the remains of the big
picking, so  my boiling water ect. was ready to go when I pulled the chocolate wineberry mixture out of the fridge. I began heating it and it came to a boil, but it seemed to take awhile to jell. In fact, I was worried for a bit but then it all came together.

Later, when I tasted the cooled chocolate wineberry preserves they were so good I wanted to take them into the basement and eat the entire batch all by myself right then and there. It tastes like berry/chocolate fudge in a jar. I can only think of a few uses for a spread containing chocolate, but this would be great as an emergency chocolate stash. I might experiment with the same recipe, only using strawberries and chocolate. I think it would make an impressive gift.

The Wineberry Jam Experiment

Cooking the wineberry and sugar mixture.

When I first got my foraged wineberries home yesterday I wasn't sure how to proceed. I decided to test them out by making my favorite small batch berry preserve recipe. That recipe uses 4 cups of fruit, 2 cups of sugar and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. It usually makes about 4-5 4oz jars of preserves.

Since I knew I was going berry picking, I did a little research on making wineberry preserves. I didn't come across too many people with problems using this fruit, but one blog writer said that they didn't jell easily because they were too juicy. This seemed odd to me because it is the pectin in the fruit that makes it jell, not if it is juicy or not. However, I do have a bit of a phobia about preserves not jelling as this happened the very first time someone showed me how to make jam. I crossed my fingers and began preparing the preserves, even though I knew I didn't have any pectin in case I needed a backup.

Another recipe recommended removing the seeds from the berries by pureeing them and then running them through a food mill or a sieve. I thought this was a good idea, as I hoped to give some of this jam as gifts. The only thing I had on hand was a flour sifter, which worked quite well for my small batch.

It helped that I liquified the berries in a blender first. I probably got almost 3/4 cup of seeds from 5 cups of

wineberries. I'm glad I did this because on another blog someone showed off their wineberry jelly, and it seemed like half the jar was seeds. Even so, I only got 3 1/4 jars of preserves from a berry jam recipe that normally yields 4-5 jars.

The finished preserves are a rich, dark red with just a few seeds sprinkled in here and there. It cooked up nicely and jelled in good time.  I guess that was due to the fact that they had been picked only hours earlier and had so much pectin. In fact, I overcooked it a bit and the jelly was so thick that it was almost like gummy candy. But, it is delicious and does spread easily over warm things like toast.

Picking Wineberries

When I was a kid, there were what I thought were raspberries growing in the woods behind the house and I used to eat them every summer. They were delicious-- tart and wild tasting. As an adult I could never figure out why the raspberries in the store didn't taste like the ones in the woods. Store bought raspberries always seem to be too sweet and perfumey for me. Well, recently I rediscovered the berries of my childhood and learned that they weren't raspberries, but wineberries.

Wineberries on the bush.

Wineberries are actually a relative of the raspberry, but they are originally from Asia. I read that they were imported and used as ornamental plants, among other things. Now they are considered a non-native invasive species. The even have their tasty mugs on a Plant Conservation Alliance Least Wanted poster.

A couple of weeks ago I found a patch at Elk Neck State Park and made my honey jump into the bushes with me to pick them. We got almost a cup and a half. Since the I was determined to hunt them down closer to home.Unfortunately the nearest patch I found was near a stream that had a sewage spill in it during the last year, and so I didn't want to eat anything from there. And so, my dreams of wineberry jam were dashed...or were they?

This week I spotted some while biking along a path in a nearby woods. Even though it was a bit of a walk from my house, I planned to come back without my bike because it looked like the berries were scattered and there was no safe place to lock up my bike. Through internet research I learned that this spot was one of those "top secret" places that everybody seems to know about, so I know the berries are safe to eat.

My delicious haul of foraged wineberries.

I put on jeans, tennis shoes and a long sleeved shirt and grabbed my backpack and as many medium sized plastic containers as I had available. (I didn't want the containers to be too big because I thought the berries might crush each other under the weight.) I spent about 3 or 4 hours picking but I filled all of my containers and ended up with about 12 cups of berries.

The berries look a little pale here in the picture, but they were ripe enough when I picked them.

If you need more info, "Wildman" Steve Brill has a practical article on Foraging for Brambles. Also, Mary Ann Piccard's article for Mother Earth News tells us all about Picking and Preserving the Wineberry.

Learning to Preserve

I decided that I needed a blog to talk about what I am doing in my kitchen. I like to cook a lot and am always experimenting. Sometimes I share these exploits on Facebook but not everyone is interested in my cooking spam. Not only do I need a spot for real time updates, but I also want to reflect on how things went.

Canning strawberry preserves

For example, in May I learned to can. This is a skill I've always wanted to pick up and the Baltimore Orchard Project offered a free workshop on preserving and canning. Well, the teacher, who I believe was Beth Gill from Sweetness Follows, was excellent and I learned a lot. She was also very open to questions and had a hands on teaching approach, so I could ask her all about those little details that you don't think about unless you are actually doing it.

This photo shows my first batch of jam. I bought some strawberries from the farmer's market and Beth's recipe worked well. I now use it for all small batch berry jams. Now that I have some more experience with preserve making I appreciate the fact that she taught us to can without pectin, only adding it if the fruit doesn't jell. So many recipes automatically call for a box of pectin and I found that it isn't needed if the fruit is fresh enough.

Now I'm working on wineberry jam, with berries picked from the woods near where I live.