Preserved lemons

I've finally been convinced by all the gorgeous pictures of preserved lemons that have been floating around Punk Domestics these days. I found myself in the grocery store staring at the organic lemons and went for it.

Preserving lemons is ridiculously easy. Basically you just wash and cut up the lemons, pack them with sea salt and stuff them in a jar. After a month or so, you are ready to throw them in anything Moroccan tangines to salads, vegetable dishes and marinades. These lemons are preserved whole, and the result is a tangy, intensely lemony ingredient that goes well in a range of dishes.

You'll need:

Organic lemons
Sea salt
A clean mason jar

Step one. Buy organic lemons, and wash them really well. You'll want organic because you'll be eating the skins.

Step two. Cut the ends off the lemons - just enough to get to the fruit inside. Squeeze about a tablespoon of juice from each lemon into your jar.

                        this requires more effort then one might imagine


Step three. Cut a cross in the top of each lemons, leaving about an inch at the bottom of the lemon intact.

Step four. Pack the lemon with sea salt. Use a lot - about one and a half tablespoons per lemon.

Step five. Pack the lemons into the mason jar. No need to sterilize the mason jar first, but do make sure its clean. Pack the lemons in as tight as you can - I used ten lemons and one large mason jar. Don't be afraid to really pack them down. When all the lemons are in the jar, fill up any remaining space with fresh lemon juice.

Step six. Leave the lemons at room temperature for about a month, or until they are soft. After that you can store them in the refrigerator.

If you're wondering what on earth to do with preserved lemons, I've made a list of promising recipes. They turn up a lot in Moroccan cooking, and especially in Moroccan tangine dishes, although I've also seen a range of different uses for them.

Chickpea tangine with preserved lemon
Chicken with olives, preserved lemon and coriander
Preserved lemon semifreddo with basil syrup (scroll down to the third recipe - although the other two look great too)
Preserved lemon with spring vegetable risotto 

Waiting a month is going to be the hard part.

Saving Seeds

Last weekend, Agata and I spent a day putting the garden to bed for the winter. It was a gorgeous fall day (the first one without rain in almost a week), and we spent the day harvesting, planting garlic, saving seeds and getting the beds ready for the spring.

Agata has been saving seeds for a few years now, but like so many tasks in the garden this was my first time. It was a remarkably simple process really - by this point in the summer most of the plants had gone to seed, and in most cases, it was just a matter of snapping off the seed pods, and carefully shaking out the seeds into a bag and labeling them. If the seed pods weren't ripe yet we brought the plant home to hang dry.

(bachelor's buttons, also known as cornflower)

For tomatoes and cucumbers, the seeds need to ferment in their own juices to mature. We saved some of the tomatoes and cucumbers that were too far gone for eating (which is what you want - huge, orangey-yellow cucumbers and overripe tomatoes), separated out the guts and seeds and left them to rot in small dishes on the balcony, keeping each variety separate. After a few days, we separated out the seeds from the fermented juice and mold by rinsing them off with water.

The seeds that are good quality are heavier and fall to the bottom, and the ones that are not mature enough or bad in some way float to the top. We spread the good seeds out on some paper towel to let them dry, and then packed them away for next year. Not pretty, but effective.

Beans and peas were easier. We made sure to save some of the beans on the vine, letting them get thick and woody and dry out. Saving the seeds just involved collecting the varieties we liked, shaking out the beans at home and spreading them out to dry and cure.

(rattlesnake pole beans and cranberry pole beans)

We tried lots of different varieties of tomatoes in the garden last year, and made sure to plant each variety far enough away from the rest that they wouldn't cross pollinate, so the seeds would breed true the next year. Of course we can't know for sure if it worked, but I wouldn't mind trying some made-in-our-garden hybrids, either.

We saved seeds from the plants that had worked well in our garden this year. I like the idea of saving the same strains of plants, year to year, as well as trying out new ones. One of the things I'm really loving about community gardening is that the garden itself will stay the same, even if we move in the spring. Planting the garlic felt like a promise - after the snow, spring will come and we can do it all over again. I'm jazzed.

(some decorative cabbage. Not edible, but pretty.)

As a side note, we're still in the market for a black tomato variety we love: any suggestions?

Strawberry Balsamic Shrub

Ok, I know I'm not the first person to say this - but I've fallen in love with shrubs.

I was a bit slow to catch on. When friends started raving about drinking fruit vinegars, I'll admit, I was doubtful. Because you know, I clean with vinegar. Drinking it seems a bit strange, right?

Let me be the first to admit that I was wrong. Shrubs are the singular most delicious thing to happen to my face in a long time. It's like drinking summer. The taste is fruity and dry, and just a tiny bit tart, and so good.

Shrubs might be the newest internet stars, but they're hardly new players. They have a long history in Europe, waaay back before summer fruits were available year 'round, before refrigerators, when people were doing everything they could to preserve the tastes of summer for the long winter ahead. 

There seem to be an endless variation of shrub recipes, using any number of fruit, vinegar, and spice combinations. Our favorite so far is a strawberry balsamic vinegar shrub, which is super easy to make and pretty much caused a revolution in my mouth. Really, its that good.

Strawberry-Balsamic Shrub

2 cups strawberries (I think we caught the very last Farmers Market strawberries. hurry!)
2 cups sugar
1 cup apple cider vinager
1 cup balsamic vinager

1. Remove the stems from the strawberries and cut them in quarters.
2. Combine the strawberries and sugar, and mash them together with a potato masher to release some of the juice from the strawberries.
3. Store the mixture in the fridge overnight.
4. Add the vinegars, and give it a stir. Leave this mixture in a sealed mason jar on your counter for a few days.
5. Strain out the fruit, and voila! Shrub.
6. Combine the shrub syrup with soda water (vodka is nice too) to taste. Serve over ice.
(I would guess that I like a 5:1 ratio of shrub to soda water, personally - but play with it and see what you like.)

 (here is our strawberry balsamic shrub, posing with a raspberry shrub - which was also delicious)

Enjoy! 

Apple Cider

So recently, it came to light that a co-garden member had made his own apple cider press, and (having pressed all the apples he could) was willing to lend it out. Apple cider is awesome - especially with cinnamon and spiced rum - and so we quickly put our name on the list, and a plan was born.


Now, someone back in Peterborough's history clearly loved apples, and to this day there are apple trees growing all over the place, if you know where to look. No one I know here buys apples in the fall. Its wonderful.

We picked up lots of apples from the ground (which traditionally, are the apples you would use for cider), but couldn't resist doing some tree climbing. The apples were smaller then the ones you would buy from the store, but they were sweet, and awesome, and free. I think we filled every bucket and pot in the house with apples - and barely made a dent in the tree. We did a quick wash of all the apples in the bathtub, and then moved into serious apple cider production.

I cannot underscore how badass this cider press is. It had two main parts, a garborator, which is used to munch up the apples into a fine pulp, and a bin, where the actual pressing happens in a few stages: a) wrap the pulp in muslin bags, maybe 5 of them. b) sandwich those bags between plexiglass sheets (cutting boards, it turns out, works too). c) put your pulp/plexiglass many layered sandwich in your large bin, and d) stand on top of the sandwich and watch the apple cider pour out. There was originally a tire jack for this purpose, but no one could figure out how to use it, so we substituted human body weight instead.

Aaand it was that easy! Apple cider = apples, mushed up and squeezed. Presto.

Ok, so it wasn't pretty. It was actually a total disaster (the awesome kind). I could barely take this photo because my hands were so sticky (and the floors, and the walls..) and there was pulp flying everywhere. Unfortunately, non of the photos I took of the pressing process even remotely turned out. It might have been the pulp, the laughing, or the copious amounts of beer we were drinking at the time. It was a pretty glorious mess. But isn't that what the best projects are all about?

In the end, we made about ten gallons of apple cider. I'm not sure why, but our cider turned out strangely velvety - much more so then the apple cider you buy in stores. It could be because we were drinking it unpasturized, or maybe it was because of our somewhat unconventional pressing techniques. Either way, I like it!

About half of the cider headed home with friends of ours to become hard apple cider, and we made some of ours into apple cider molasses (post to come!), the rest we canned in a hot water bath for about ten minutes, with two tablespoons of lemon juice - so that even in the darkest days of winter, there will be hot apple cider and rum.

Kimchi

Kimchi is one of those foods that I find most people have a strong opinion about. My father, for instance, wont be in the same room as an open container of kimchi if he can help it. I couldn't disagree more. I love kimchi.

While its easy enough to buy kimchi in Peterborough, most of the store bought kimchi I've found has fish oil in it - and I cook for enough vegans that this can be a real pain. Besides, this recipe is so good, and SO easy, there's really no reason to buy it.

You'll need:

Head of napa cabbage - about one pound
Sea salt
Water
Red chili flakes
1 tablespoon minced garlic
1 tablespoon minced ginger
3-4 green onions, sliced
1/2 yellow onion
1/2 ripe apple
1/2 ripe pear

1. First,  separate the cabbage leaves and chop them up, into roughly bite sized pieces.

2. Dissolve a quarter cup of sea salt in a big bowl half full of warm water, then pour salt water over cabbage leaves. Give cabbage a gentle toss to distribute salt water. Allow salted cabbage to sit for at least four hours, or overnight. The cabbage doesn't need to be covered in water - just tossed in it.

3. Give the cabbage a good rinse to remove excess salt, then transfer cabbage to a large bowl.

4. Combine a quarter cup of fine red chili flakes with warm water, stir gently with a spoon to create a red chili paste, then transfer chili paste to cabbage.

5. Add minced garlic, minced ginger, and the green onions.

6. Blend yellow onion, apple, and pear with one cup of water, then add this natural sweetener to the cabbage.

7. Put on a pair of plastic gloves and give everything a thorough toss and rubdown. You want to evenly distribute all ingredients, especially the red chili paste.

8. Transfer seasoned cabbage leaves into glass jars. Be sure to use firm pressure with your hands to push down on cabbage leaves as they stack up inside the bottle.

Transfer any liquid that accumulated during the mixing process into the bottle as well - this liquid will become kimchi brine. Some liquid will also come out of the cabbage leaves as you press down on them as they are stacked in the bottle.

Be sure to leave at least an inch of room at the top of the bottle before capping it loosely* with a lid, and allow the kimchi to ferment at least 24 hours before you eat it. Some sights recommend refrigerating the kimchi at this point to slow down the fermentation process, but we usually leave it out to keep fermenting, and eat it over the course of a month or so.

* Although its never happened to me, a reader commented that she had jar explode on her after capping a lid too tight! So I've changed the original instructions - cap loosely my friends!!

Ed: If you're wondering what to do with your kimchi, check out this recipe for kimchi fried rice!

Ketchup!

Remember that time I was talking about how my house has been completely inundated with tomatoes, and they're filling up all the bowls in the house and more just keep coming? Talk about champagne problems, right?

I only seem to be complaining though, because its forced us to think of all kinds of creative things to do with tomatoes. We canned them. We dried them. We made them into paste. We made them into salsa, and shakshuka sauce, and canned those. Last week I made tomato jam, which I forgot to document for the blog but which I not cannot stop eating. Now, there's ketchup.

I don't usually eat ketchup. (Unless, like, we're camping and then all bets are off). But this ketchup is a revelation. Its sweet and a bit spicy, and tastes like cinnamon and cloves and a million other things you can't quite place. It tastes like the ketchup I am familiar with but is infinitely better. There is way more going on in this ketchup then in your traditional Heinz 57.

And really, if you'll forgive me a rant, when you start cooking things yourself this keeps happening. You try your creation, say for example, ketchup. You pause for a moment to appreciate. Then you look back at the crap they pass off at ketchup in the grocery stores (which is all corn syrup and color) and you're like, what the hell? Maybe you feel like you've been lied to, all this time.. But I digress.

Most of the ketchup recipes we found online contained Worcestershire sauce, which as it turns out, contains anchovies and thus, isn't vegetarian. We feed a lot of vegetarians around here, so we had to stray somewhat off the beaten path.

You need:
1 tsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 large onion, chopped
10 cups chopped tomatoes
1/3 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbsp fresh lemon juice
2-3 tbsp molasses
2-3 tbsp maple syrup
2 tbsp brown sugar
1 whole head of garlic, roasted
2 hot chili peppers, chopped
1 tbsp soy sauce
1 tsp paprika
1/2 tsp cinnamon
1/2 tsp allspice
2 cloves, whole
2 tbsp tamarind paste
olive oil (to fry onions/toast spices - maybe 2 tbsp?)
2 lovage sprigs (optional, or use celery)
1 bay leaf
1/2 tsp black pepper
2 tsp salt

1. Fry mustard seeds until they stop popping, add crushed cloves, coriander, cumin - remove from heat.
2. Put all the spices in a coffee grinder/food mill and grind to a powder.
3. Fry onion until lightly browned, add hot peppers.
4. Put the onions and peppers in a pot with the tomatoes, then add all of the other ingredients except for the lovage and the bay leaf.
5. Cook for 10 minutes, then blend with an immersion blender.
6. Add bay leaf and lovage/celery stalks, cook for 1/2 an hour. Remove lovage leaf/celery stalk.
7. Cook for another 90 minutes, or until it looks sufficiently ketchupy.

If you plan to can the ketchup, add it to sterilized mason jars and immerse in a hot water bath for 35 minutes (for pint jars). 

Elderberry Syrup / Foraging is Awesome

Recently, friends of ours tipped us off to a local spot to harvest elderberries just outside town. Today, Agata and her mom (cute!) went out together to see if they could find them- and, the huge bowls of berries on the kitchen table are any evidence, they managed just fine.

Not pictured above is the 5 gallons of elderberries that went home with Agata's mom, destined to become elderberry wine. We kept a big bowl for ourselves through, and decided (mostly because we're running low on jars) to boil it down into syrup.

Taking the elderberries off their stems was a pretty fiddly business, but once they were off the process was simple. We boiled the elderberries with just enough water to keep them from burning, and then ran them through a food mill to get out the bulk of the seeds. Then we returned the juice to the pot and boiled it down until we decided it was 'syrupy' enough, and added just enough sugar to balance out the tartness of the berries.

As a side note, elderberries were being sold at our local farmers market for $7 a quart last week. At that rate, we were probably boiling down the equivalent $50 worth of elderberries or something. Foraging = awesome.

Shakshuka - bigger and better

Late the other night, Agata had a stroke of pure genius. We had a table full of tomatoes threatening to go bad, and we were running out of ideas. We've made canned tomatoes, dried tomatoes, salsa, tomato paste... we were feeling pretty much set for tomatoes.

It had been a long night, and we were drinking wine and doing our best to ignore the tomatoes calling to us from across the room. Someone (probably me) got hungry and we decided to make a quick pot of shakshuka, a favorite for cold, rainy fall nights.

For those of you who haven't yet discovered the joys of shakshuka, it's time. Shakshuka is an Arabic dish made with eggs poached in a spicy tomato sauce, flavored with lots of jalapenos, garlic, onions, paprika and cumin. The whole thing is served topped with feta cheese, cilantro, parsley and chives (or any of those things you happen to have in the fridge at the moment) and eaten with a big chunk of warmed pita bread. I was introduced to this recipe through Smitten Kitchen, and I will be forever in their debt.

So here comes the brilliance. As we were cutting up tomatoes for the sauce, Agata had a brainwave. Couldn't we just put ALL the tomatoes into the pot, (along with pretty much all the onions, hot peppers and cumin in the house), stew it up, and can it? The brilliance here is that, with the sauce pre-made and ready to go, our favorite comfort food just turned into the easiest meal ever.

The less brilliant part was the timing (notice the stovetop clock?).

We (or to be honest, Agata. I was more or less passed out on the table by this point) canned the shakshuka in quart jars for 45 minutes at a rolling boil, and added two tablespoons of lemon juice per quart to raise the acidity a bit. It worked a charm. Some cold winter day, we are going to love ourselves for this.

Next time, we'll just start the whole process about eight hours earlier.

Canning is for lovers

I had always associated home canning with, I don’t know, kitting and reading books and hot toddies and general coziness. This is not the case at all.

Agata and I are both city kids and when we had a big plot of bare earth we got really excited about tomatoes. Now we have a so. many. tomatoes.

 Canning feels like being in a submarine, or maybe a tank, and you’re at war. The air gets thick and hot and wet, and everyone has to yell to be heard over the huge pots of boiling water. There’s a lot of rushing around and hot water burns and bumping into each other, and it all feels deeply badass.

 For the record, for anyone who hasn’t seen the blog Food In Jars, its pretty hot.