You know when you’re in a fancy food shop and you find the most precious, gorgeous little bottle of something which would add such a magical finishing touch to your recipes?
Then you turn the bottle over and have a little heart attack from the price tag. And you think “$15 for sugar?!? I could make that!”
One of the best things about learning to make stuff yourself is that most of the time – you CAN make that.
I have not left the kitchen for the past two weekends. Ok I understand that this is not everyone’s cup of tea – but for me, they were the perfect unscheduled weekends. Free time to create, play and use up all of the late summer produce.
I started off making plums in brandy and plum jam. I’ve also been making kimchi, chicken stock, zucchini bread, mango chutney, apple pear butter and some amazing face cleanser … recipes all to come soon!
While I love zucchini bread, there’s only so much room in our freezer to store extra loaves. [Note: if you are British, zucchini means courgette. And yes, zucchini bread is delicious. I even taste-tested it on some skeptical Brits and got a typically reserved British response that it was "quite nice", which in American means "that's awesome!"] So I started looking for zucchini recipes and came across this recipe for zucchini pickles.
Pickles. Yum. I would love to make big kosher dill pickles and delicate French cornichons. But I don’t have cucumbers, I have zucchini. So zucchini pickles I made.
I can’t improve on this recipe so I’ll just provide you with the link to Judy’s Zucchini Pickles so you can make them yourself. I started eating them after 1 week and the flavor keeps improving. If you’ve never made pickles before this is an easy starting recipe – just pour the finished pickles into a sterilized jar and store in the refrigerator. I think you’ll find them “quite nice.”
Sumac by damozeljane on flickr
What do you think of when you hear ‘sumac’? I think: “Isn’t that similar to poison ivy?”
But clearly I’m mistaken.
Always on the lookout for great recipes for foraged food, I came across the website First Ways which is all about ”urban foraging and other wilderness adventures”. FirstWays’ creator Rebecca Lerner recently found her neighbor cutting down sumac plants and decided to save them for cooking. Apparently the berries can be dried and ground like black pepper – this I have to try!
With Rebecca’s permission I have reposted her article here. If you’d like more urban foraging, check out her experiments making Blackberry Mead.
Also, for more foraging, check out my nettle pesto, elderberry cordial, and daisy salve.
Want to try making your own vanilla extract?
It’s super simple and the results are just as good as store-bought – maybe even better!
Earlier this year I tried turning an unwanted bottle of vodka into vanilla extract. As a baker, I go through a lot of vanilla extract, and it’s not cheap. I was skeptical about making my own though. Would it taste as good? Would it be as strong? Vanilla extract is so expensive, there must be some secret to it, right?
Oh, I just love when handmade projects turn out so much better than their store bought counterparts!
My recent weekend visit to Toulouse reminded me of how the French have got it right with food.
In my experience living in France, the French seem to eat better, and have a healthier relationship with food than we do in the US or the UK. There are lots of reasons for this, and most of it is cultural. In France, everyone cooks. It’s normal to cook. It’s not a fancy, specialist skill, or something you save for the weekends. I’ve written before about why you should learn to cook, and I really believe this is one of the biggest things you can do to improve your health. [Read more...]
Awwww. Homemade plum jam. Isn’t it pretty? If my mother lived closer I’m sure she’d proudly display a jar on her shelf for everyone to see.
I’ve been wanting to try canning & preserving for awhile now, but was always afraid I’d give myself botulism. (And if we’re being honest, I did try making sweet chili jam last year, but that didn’t go so well.)
But my projects in the past year have given me courage – leaving warm milk out for 8 hours to make yogurt? Using that bubbly jar of sourdough starter? And some other projects I haven’t written about yet (saurekraut! kombucha! Prepare yourselves.)
You may remember I recently received some fresh-picked plums from a coworker and made plums in brandy. The next week he was back in the office again, this time with an entire tote bag full of produce for me! I was in heaven.
I recently spent a long weekend in Toulouse, in southwest France visiting a good friend. Besides making stuff, creativity, traveling and cooking, one of my obsessions is France. I used to live in Paris and have never gotten enough of the French lifestyle – especially it’s emphasis on real, whole, good foods.
I love the availability of markets throughout France, even in small villages. Markets where you buy seasonal, local produce, just because that’s how it’s done, not because you’re posh or fancy or a hippie. It’s just what people do. It’s normal. [Read more...]
As word spreads among my coworkers and friends that I make stuff, I’m increasingly getting gifts of excess produce and specialty food items.
I’m not complaining. I’m always up for a culinary challenge. And everyone else seems to be willing taste-testers, so it works out quite well.
Recently a coworker brought in a big bag of wild plums collected from his property.
Normally I would make a fruit crisp or muffins with extra fruit. But I’d just made biscotti and cookies, so we didn’t really need another dessert.
At this point, my mind always says: what do we need to use up? And then I try to get creative.
This was a project inspired by a momentary freak out about having too much stuff.
You know when you walk into a room and you just think – argh – where did this all come from?!
I had one of those moments today trying to finish unpacking our kitchen. I have a big box of baking supplies that doesn’t fit into any of our kitchen cabinets. So in a moment of frustration (procrastination?) while trying to find a home for it all, I decided to sort through my baking box to see what it actually contains. And the answer is: tons of cookie cutters, fancy cupcake papers, assorted specialty sugars and mix-ins (cocoa nibs? cinnamon bits?), cake decorating set, several types of baking chocolate and this lovely container of candied citrus peel.
You may remember this ingredient from Chocolate Orange Hot Cross Buns at Easter.
Well since April it’s been sitting, unloved, in my baking box just waiting for another citrusy baking project. Normally you use candied peel in Christmas cakes, but I was on a mission to declutter my kitchen this morning and wanted to use it up NOW.
All this bread baking has filled my kitchen cabinets with various bags of flour: strong white, malted wheat, whole wheat, buckwheat and spelt to name a few.
I like the idea of baking with grains other than white flour for two reasons: I prefer to eat less-processed foods and white flour is very refined and sometimes bleached! And second, when trying vintage recipes, I think the less-refined flours are probably more realistic to what people used to use.
Plus, let’s be honest, I’ve got bags of this stuff sitting in my kitchen cabinets!
I’ve always been hesitant to bake with ‘healthier’ flours though, because I think desserts are a treat and I don’t want to sacrifice taste. But recently I read that my friend Alissa had great results with her Whole Grain Chocolate Chip Cookies, and I got curious to experiment.
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