Cooking « Amy Pollien

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Pre-game

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

The menu for Thanksgiving Dinner 2010 stands as follows:

Martha Stewart’s Gruyere Thyme refrigerator crackers, made with Seal Cove mixed milk aged cheese “Olga” instead of Gruyere. Thank you for the delicious sample, Betsy! The crackers are incredibly simple to make but do need to chill overnight, so I’m making them in between blog posts. They will be our appetizer, with. . .

Fruit: Forelle pears (here on Peanut Butter Etoufee – welcome, pull up a fork!), Red Globe grapes and Courtland apple slices.

We will have turkey. R received a beautiful-but-deadly Wusthof 4″ boning knife for his birthday, so we’ll have a rolled, boneless turkey a la Julia Child – pan roasted in butter, and then finished in the oven in a remarkably short period of time. It will share oven space with sweet potatoes in maple syrup and turnips, par-boiled and then roasted with sea salt. Oh, and stuffing! This year the Morning Glory Bakery in the village provided 15 cup bags of their assorted breads cubed and baked – both savory and efficient. I added butter (duh), chopped onions, shallots and celery, vegetable stock, Black Mission figs and Northern Spy apples. R. will roll some up with the turkey and we’ll serve the rest on the side for the vegetarians in the audience.

We’ll have Savoy cabbage, carrot and apple slaw in the big wooden bowl with Susan’s favorite dressing for which I promise I will find and record the recipe (sorry, Susan!). There may be rolls.There will be cranberry sauce with local berries, sweetened with pomegranate molasses, which makes the sauce explosively tart and gives it a wonderful dark color.

Then there will be pie! Just two this year: Fannie Farmer pumpkin made with the New England pie pumpkins we grew over the incredibly balmy summer of 2010, and Martha Stewart’s (again) Maple Bourbon Pecan Pie, because it is just so good.

Recipes for what makes the grade to follow over the weekend. Keep warm, everybody.

Tags: autumn, dessert, family, harvest, heritage, kitchen, rememberance
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Pumpkin Pie II, the crust

Monday, October 18th, 2010

We had a discussion about pie crust on the ride home today. My grandmother’s pie crust was perfect, every time, and she used to say the ability skipped a generation to explain my mother’s total failure at pie making. Sorry mom.

Personally, I think it’s all chemistry. Here’s the rather weird recipe that always works for me. If you don’t have a food processor handy, use two sharp knives to cut in the butter.

In a food processor: 3 C flour, 1 Tbs sugar (optional), 2 tsp salt, 1/8 tsp baking powder (non-aluminum). Pulse once to mix. Add 1 C (2 sticks) of cold, unsalted butter cut into 1″ chunks. Pulse until the chunks disappear. Add 1/2 C cold water mixed with 2 tsp apple cider vinegar. Pulse just until most of it holds together. Add a little more water if needed.

Dump the contents of the bowl out on to a large sheet of waxed paper. Fold the paper up around the lump of pastry and force it all together. Then cut the lump in half and layer one half over the other, press down. Do that again. Then wrap the (hopefully more cohesive) loaf of pastry in the waxed paper, then a plastic bag, and let it sit in the refrigerator for at least an hour (or overnight) to let the gluten relax.

Take it out, hit it flat a few times with the rolling pin, and use half to make the bottom crust of a pie. If you’re not using a top crust, you can make a pie tail with the other half. Your children will be sooooooooo happy.

Roll out a rectangle, spread with 2 Tbs of softened butter, 1/4 C sugar and 2 tsp cinnamon. Sprinkle with a handful of raisins, currants or blueberries.

Starting from the bottom long edge, roll the pastry up. Press the edges together and bring both ends around to touch. Place in a foil lined pie plate and bake with the pie until browned.

Tags: dessert, family, kitchen, pie, recipe
Posted in Cooking, main dish, recipe | 1 Comment »

Pumpkin pie

Sunday, October 17th, 2010

First, get a pumpkin. What you really want is a New England Pie Pumpkin: dark orange, sweet and beautifully sized – one pumpkin, one pie. Those prize-winning giants at the fair are actually gourds and their watery flesh doesn’t cook well, but those big ones from the grocery store that you’re going to carve into Jack O’Lanterns make a decent pie.

Split the pumpkin in half between the stem and blossom end. If it’s very hard, put a sharp knife in all the way to the hilt repeatedly all around and then use a blunt edge (small crowbar, a screwdriver – but not your knife) to lever it open. Scoop out the fibrous insides and separate the seeds to roast with your pie in the oven. Run some water into the scooped halves and then dump it out. Put the halves cut side down on a foil lined baking sheet and roast at 375 for 45 minutes to an hour. The time will vary widely on the size and freshness of the pumpkin. You should be able to puncture the skin easily with a fork when done.

Scoop the flesh out of the skin. A NE Pie pumpkin will make about 1 1/2 C of pulp. Whisk together 3/4 C sugar, 2 eggs* and 1 can of evaporated milk and add to the pumpkin with 1 tsp ginger, 1 tsp cinnamon and 1/2 tsp salt. Whisk gently till blended and pour into an unbaked pie shell. Bake at 375 for 10 minutes, then 345 for 45 minutes or until the middle of the pie is set. Any extra filling mix can be ladled into small pyrex dishes as custard.

*Preferrably fresh, local eggs. Thank you, Carrie’s chickens!

Tags: autumn, dessert, garden, harvest, pie, recipe
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At the altar of the Harvest Moon

Thursday, September 23rd, 2010

Time to inventory the Summer:

2 Gal grape juice (4 quart jars and assorted pints – most of this is in pints)

2 Gal tomato sauce (plain)

3 pints catsup (tomatoes, honey,peaches, onions, tamari, sea salt)

6 pints peach jam

10 pints brandied peaches (Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!)

6 pints grape jelly/jam, assorted

4 pints raspberry jam

4 pints elderberry tonic

Plus green beans, sliced peaches in syrup, blueberries and pumpkin puree in the freezer. The seckel pears will be in soon with pear butter. Oh, and some quart bags of frozen tomato sauce from when it was 98 degrees and I couldn’t bear to use the steam canner. I’m still a lousy farmer, because we couldn’t make it through the winter on this amount of food, but it will feel good when the potatoes come in, and there will be a big box of carrots and canvas bags of onions stored carefully at the other end of the cellar.There are canning jars of seeds, too: pumpkin, beans, sweet peas and hubbard squash.

This year was easy. Pretty soon (in gardening time) we’ll see what 2011 will bring.

Tags: autumn, garden, harvest, orchard fruit
Posted in Cooking, gardening | 1 Comment »

After Apple Picking

Monday, September 20th, 2010

My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it’s like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human dream.

Robert Frost

Tags: autumn, dessert, harvest, orchard fruit, poem
Posted in Cooking, gardening, horticulture, orchard | 2 Comments »

Equipment post – Victorio food mill

Friday, September 10th, 2010

Tonight I made 10 pints of tomato sauce. I started with two full stew pots of plum tomatoes (one after the other because who has two pots that size?), cooked down to pulp and drained. Tonight I put the cooled mess through the food strainer. I like the Victorio mill – the hopper is big enough to accommodate half the pot at once and the mechanism is smooth and easy to turn. It’s a little messy but I think that’s the nature of the process – turning fruit into puree – rather than the machine.

The clamp is narrow and won’t fit on just any surface. You need a sturdy table or, in this case, the tin edge of the Hoosier cabinet. I put a section of newspaper on the floor and clear everything out of the sink in preparation. The parts fit together and come apart easily – which is nice when you’re processing peaches and find you’ve missed a pit and everything grinds (literally) to a halt until you fish it out.

Now the steam canner is full of pints of bright red tomato sauce, and the kitchen table is crowded with last night’s crop of grape juice and food mill parts. There’s no better way to spend the first cool nights of September.

Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, summer
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The stove is a mess,

Saturday, August 28th, 2010

but the steam canner is full of brandied peaches. Guess that’s a win.

Tags: dessert, garden, harvest, kitchen, orchard fruit, summer
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Quick post

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

For quick tomato sauce. There is no stopping the inflow of harvest right now – the baskets practically fill themselves.

Working Girl’s Homemade Tomato Sauce*

Get out your largest stockpot and add enough olive oil to cover the bottom. Wash the tomatoes, pull off stems, cut away any blemishes and fill the pot. Add a Tbsp of sea salt. Cover and cook on medium low for about 30 minutes. Stir occasionally if you’re around. The tomatoes should be softened and shedding liquid. Turn off the heat, keep covered and let stand overnight.

In the morning, pour off the liquid and heat to boiling for a few minutes – say, while you make your yoghurt fruit shake and get ready for work. Turn off the heat, keep covered and leave for at least 4 hours, or until you get home. Pour off the liquid. Season to taste with salt, sugar, garlic and spices and put it through a food mill to remove seeds and skins and presto – wonderful, very fresh-tasting tomato sauce.

* Don’t blame me for the name. I learned this recipe from a woman I met on the steps of the Good Day Market in Portland. It was a radical idea for me, and I never stood over a steaming pot of tomatoes in the summer heat again.

I’ve never figured out what to do with the clear fluid that rises to the top (tomato water?) to be poured off. It doesn’t taste bad, exactly, but it needs something. Someday I’ll distill a batch and see what type of brandy could be made from tomatoes, but that’s for a day when I’m not working.

Now, back to peaches. . .

Tags: garden, harvest, neighbors, recipe, summer
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Peaches, peaches, peaches, PEACHES

Monday, August 23rd, 2010

While we were away for a week in Canada, our peach trees were busy ripening their fruit. The weather has been hot and dry, so I lost about 1/2 a bushel to the ground and the red squirrels. That leaves about 2 bushels for canned pie filling, Peach Brown Veronica, peach puree (canned for Daiquiris and ice cream this winter), frozen peach slices and mmmmmmmm, oven jam.

Peach Oven Jam

Wash and then dunk the peaches, 5 or 6 at a time, in a large pot of boiling water for about 45 seconds. Scoop them out with a slotted spoon and let them sit in a bowl of cold water until cool enough to handle. The skins should slip off easily. Slice the peeled peaches into a bowl and add 1 tsp of lemon juice and 1 Tbsp of sugar for each batch of 5, and stir.I sliced up almost a bushel of peaches for this batch, but any amount is fine.

If you like, save the pits. They haven’t been processed and should sprout. I’m planning to plant a row in a distant part of the garden to see what comes up.

Next break the fruit into a uniform consistency in the wide setting of a food mill or a food processor. It shouldn’t be mushy. Add one C white sugar and 1 Tbs of lemon juice for every four cups of peaches (this is easy to do in the bowl of a food processor). Pour the mixture into a buttered large, heavy oven proof pan or several (I use two Crueset casseroles) and bake in a 300 degree oven for 1 1/2 – 3 hours, depending on the depth of the pan and water content of the peaches. Stir every half hour or so, more toward the end of the cooking time. The jam should darken in color and become almost translucent at the edges – like pie filling. My Blue Book says the mixture should “round on a spoon”.

Fill sterilized jars with the hot mixture and process 10 minutes in a steam canner. You could reference the Blue Book for regular kettle processing time. This recipe makes a wonderful, full bodied jam for toast or biscuits, but it’s also great on ice cream, as a cake or pie filling or drink mix. And a full stock kettle of peach pieces will net about 5 pints of jam – a fairly efficient way to store a lot of peaches.

Next, we’ll have to do something about the tomato situation.

Tags: garden, harvest, kitchen, orchard fruit, recipe, summer
Posted in condiment, Cooking, gardening, horticulture, recipe, vegetable garden | No Comments »

Hospitality

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Five people for risotto, green bean salad, herbed bread and peach ice cream – it must be August. Somehow, this puts me in the mood for the “Song of the Open Road”. Somehow the last lines have been with me all day today. Apologies, for the excerpting, to Walt Whitman.

Allons! whoever you are come travel with me!

Traveling with me you find what never tires.

The earth never tires,

The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first, Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first,

Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop’d,

I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell.

Allons! we must not stop here,

However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling we cannot remain here,

However shelter’d this port and however calm these waters we must not anchor here,

However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted to receive it but a little while.

Allons! the road is before us!

It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well—be not detain’d!

Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!

Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!

Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher!

Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.

Camerado, I give you my hand!

I give you my love more precious than money,

I give you myself before preaching or law;

Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?

Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

Tags: family, house, neighbors, rememberance
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Amy Pollien