The January Tipping Point

Because I've been in a constant state of coming and going this past month, I've been feeling a little out of touch with my kitchen. While I normally spend a fair amount of my free time in the kitchen, I find it surprisingly easy to break the home cooking habit. If I spend several nights eating out of the home, I often find the thought of actually having to cook my own dinner a little horrifying when I return home.

But after returning from my latest out of town jaunt, it was clear that I couldn't ignore the calls of the kitchen any longer. When I made a lazy dinner of spaghetti on Sunday night, I realized we were down to a single container of marinara sauce in the freezer. We'd been limping along without any bread since sometime shortly after Christmas. It was time to replenish.

So yesterday, while the wind whistled past the cabin windows, I got a batch of marinara burbling in the crockpot, prepared some make-ahead pizza dough, and baked three loaves of "our daily bread." This morning I pulled a loaf of crusty bread (Andy's favorite) out of the oven. Not only do these kitchen projects make the cabin smell great, they also help me re-ground myself in home life and reclaim my kitchen mojo.     
 

I always notice an interesting shift in my kitchen mentality each January. I don't mind really putzing in the kitchen this time of year and during deep winter days, I'm most likely to try out new recipes - probably a mixed result stemming from Christmas gifted cookbooks, the new year, and dark evenings. It's also the time of year when I decide all of that food I worked to preserve over the past summer and autumn, really ought to be eaten up. Although the gardens provide us with plenty of instant-ish gratification during the summer, now is when I'm most grateful for the hard work we put in to growing our own food the summer before.

And so we start slowly eating our way through the pantry and freezer, enjoying the tastes of far-off seasons. Oatmeal with a dollop of blueberry butter or breakfast bars that use a jar of jam to start off blustery January mornings. A pot of green bean soup burbling on the stove top. Blueberry pie or apple crisp hot out of the oven. Cabbage thrown in with a venison roast. Snacks of peach salsa on a tortilla chip, applesauce straight out of the jar, or bread and butter pickles paired with a grilled cheese sandwich. There's such abundance in our pantry this year; so many flavors to play with. What to do with all of those pickled jalapenos? Or all of those pickled cranberries for that matter . . . .

Every season is a pretty tasty one around these parts, but there's something about January that makes the homemade flavors of the kitchen even more satisfying and reassuring. The jars I pop open while the snow blows and drifts outside remind me that the seasons do change and the abundant goodness of this life.

What do you cook this time of year?
 

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The Poke Cake of Glory

I've always been a proponent of homemade food. I deeply believe that homemade food tastes better than anything pre-made or pre-mixed that you can buy. My pantry shelves are free of cake and brownie mixes. There's no tube of cookie dough in the fridge. And heaven's forbid that a can of frosting cross over the cabin threshold. That stuff'll kill you.

But we all have our weaknesses. There's almost always a can of cherry pie filling in my pantry, in case I have to whip up one of my nearly-famous cherry cranberry pies. And I try to have some "emergency" Jell-O on hand because honestly, when I have the stomach flu, all I want is a bowl of Jell-O and a glass of flat ginger ale. (Andy does not get this, but that's what I was given during my annual bout of stomach flu as a child.)

And Poke Cake. I have a weakness for poke cakes.  

You know the recipe, right? You take a white cake mix, bake it up in two layer pans, then poke the cake all over with forks and pour a Jell-O mixture over the cake. Once the Jell-O's set, you slap the cake together with a heavy layer of Cool-Whip. It's corporate recipe writing at its finest. In fact, besides the Rice Krispy Bar, I'm not sure any other corporate recipe has taken such a hold on America's kitchens.

My brother loved poke cake so much that for many years during his adolescence, he requested it for his birthday. Not just any poke cake (which you can make with any combination of Jell-O flavors, like orange and lemon or berry blue and raspberry, or . . ..), but the Christmas poke cake, where one layer is lime flavored and the other is raspberry flavored. His birthday is in July. 

I don't know why, but my mother and I were talking about the merits of poke cake the other day. (I would argue that the pure trashiness of poke cake is one of its virtues.) "What's poke cake?" the ever curious Andy asked. My mother and I stared at each other in horror. I wasn't sure that you could call yourself a Midwesterner if you'd never consumed a slice or two poke cake.

So Andy requested a poke cake for his birthday last week. Strawberry, if you please.

"Oh, but I want a homemade cake," he said.

Well, okay. 

While I was somewhat suspicious that a homemade cake would be sacrilege when it came to poke cake, I decided to try out this funfetti cake recipe which I pinned a while back. Except I left out the funfetti - what with Jell-O and Cool-Whip being key ingredients, I figured that the last thing the cake need was sprinkles. (Feel free to argue this point, but I actually don't like sprinkles much. Sure they're adorable, but they taste terrible and are texturally unpleasing on top of . . . brownies, cupcakes, ice cream, whipped cream, anything.)

My mother also suggested I try frosting it with actual whipped cream, but I poo-pooed that as "too rich." (And trust me, I never poo-poo whipped cream.)

Here's the final result in all of its (mostly) artificial glory:

What I learned:

I may not actually like strawberry jello that much.

I do however like this recipe for homemade cake quite a bit. I will make it again, complete with the 3/4 cup of multi-colored sprinkles.

When you pair strawberry jello with a lemony flavored cake, you get a cake that kind of tastes like strawberry lemonade and that is by no means a bad thing.

A homemade cake does not compromise the integrity of a poke cake, but it will dry out faster than a box mix cake. 

Cool-Whip may disgust me as a substance (Whipped vegetable oil! Whipped corn syrup!) but it is a tasty, tasty, easy-peasy frosting.

Have you ever had poke cake?

 

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Can You Can It? Yes, You Can!

I'm pretty lousy at phone conversations. When people pose the inevitable questions of, "So, what's new with you?" I always clam up. "Work, make dinner, sleep, repeat" is all that ever pops into my mind as an answer. Luckily, when I was chatting with my friend Betsy, she helped me flush out my usual lame answer. "I notice that you've been canning all the food," she said.

Why yes, I did can all the food this summer. The proof is in the pudding . . .err, in the mason jars really. Here's a run down of everything that made a trip through my hot water bath canner in the last three months or so:

Peach Salsa

 8 pints. Recipe from yours truly, but with some pointers from Ball's Blue Book of Preserving to help ensure that it's safe for the hot water bath canner. I sure hope we don't get botulism. So far so good.

Applesauce

8 pints. No real recipe here- just a splash of water to get the apples cooking (and not sticking), then sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg to taste. Applesauce has to be one of the simpler pleasures in life. So good when stirred into oatmeal, or eaten straight out of the jar.

Barbeque Sauce

6 pints. A double batch of the "Best Barbecue Sauce" from Mel's Kitchen Cafe. We use a fair amount of it during the summer grilling season and one pint jar is just the right amount for a batch of pulled pork sandwiches.

Blueberry Butter

8 half pints. Recipe from Food in Jars. I wanted to get some of the berry harvest into jars but I'm not a huge fan of just plain blueberry jam. (I mean, I'll eat it but . . . ) so this seems like a good, less sugary alternative. It really does taste like blueberry pie on toast. 

Blueberry Pie Filling

4+ quarts. Or you could just can some blueberry pie filling. This recipe merges my pie filling recipe and a recipe specially for canned blueberry pie filling.  Because I'm a cranky old lady before my time, I will not share the recipe, but will tell you that it involves sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, and vanilla.

Bread and Butter Pickles

5 pints. We had a bumper crop of cucumbers this year and I wanted to make pickles for the first time. This is my coworker's mother's recipe and it is delicious. I was especially pleased that the cucumbers retained most of their crispness. Not sure if that's because I added "pickle crunch" (calcium chloride) while they soaked, or if homemade bread and butter pickles just have less problems with getting "soggy." 

Dilly Beans

4 pints. We were also up to our ears with green beans in September, so when I could not chop, blanch, or freeze another green bean, I made a batch of dilly beans. (Recipe from Food in Jars.) I would have liked for the beans not to have floated, but oh well. Next year, I will definitely make more because Andy and I opened up a jar earlier this month basically inhaled the contents in about 10 minutes. I'm not proud.

Pickled Jalapenos

3 pints. Recipe from Food in Jars. A very simple recipe to preserve jalapenos for chilis, tacos, enchiladas and more all year. We actually don't use that many of these. I just feel bad letting jalapenos go to waste.

Dill Pickle Relish 

7 half pints. Another happy result of the cucumber bumper crop. Recipe from Tasty Kitchen. I did cut the amount of celery seed in the recipe in half because I don't much care for celery seed. It's definitely more like the sweet relish you buy in stores as opposed to store bought dill relish, but it is still darn tasting on a bratwurst. Which is a relief, considering that we have 7 jars of it.

Peach Jam

4 pints. Very basic peach jam, recipe straight from the Sure-Jell package. I love peach jam, but I'm feeling a need to shake things up a little next year and maybe try one of those bourbon vanilla peach jam recipes I see floating around the blogosphere. Funny, I was gifted with a couple jars of peach jam from other canners this summer, so we've got plenty of peach jam for the winter. (We still had some leftover from last year when I made this batch.) Quick, give me all your baking recipes that call for a jar of peach jam!

Raspberry Jam

4 pints. Oh beautiful, lovely raspberry jam. I love raspberry jam and yes, children of the 90s, I would marry it. This is another recipe straight from the Sure-Jell packet and I feel absolutely no desire to attempt to "improve" upon it. Raspberries, sugar, and a bit of pectin are all you need to make me very happy. Every summer I swap blueberries with my mom to get enough of her homegrown raspberries for a batch of jam. And then I don't share it.

Apple Cider Syrup 

6 half pints. I was hoping to find some "real" apple cider this fall so I could try out a batch of Marisa McCellan's Apple Cider Syrup. We made an impromptu trip to the big city last week and I got to stock up on cider. I'm not much of a coffee drinker and my favorite drink at Caribou is actually the Hot Apple Blast. This syrup can be used as a base for a hot apple cider drink - just add water for Hot Apple Blasts all winter long! The syrup is also very good drizzled over ice cream and I imagine would be pretty yummy on waffles or french toast too.


Pear Vanilla Jam 

4 pints. Final canning project of the year until marmalade season next January. Recipe from Food in Jars. It's a lovely gentle jam, which works just fine in a PB&J sandwich. However, I think this jam's true destiny is on the appetizer plate next to some baked brie.

Now all the jars are filled up (whew!) and I get to see back and nosh on the fruits of my labors. It's a very delicious feeling indeed.

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Reaping What You Sew

In a happy twist of timing, our garden produce started to come in just as berry season was ending, so I've been able to work at a slow but steady pace when it comes to putting up this year's harvest. (Thankfully, it appears that the love/hate relationship with zucchinis will hold off for another week or two.) I've spent much of my free time in the last few weeks whipping up batches of jam, chopping and blanching vegetables, and rearranging the freezer to hold our new onslaught of berries and produce. To date, this year's "putting up" has involved:

• 2 gallons of frozen blueberries 
• 1 batch of blueberry butter (8 cups)
• 2 batches of infused blueberry vinegar 
• 1 batch of blueberry pie filling (4 quarts)
• 2 pounds of frozen green beans 
• 1 batch of peach salsa (8 pints)  
• 1 batch of raspberry jam (4 pints) 

And that's just the beginning. The tomatoes are beginning to ripen, in a month+ there will be potatoes to harvest (see below!) and soon, very soon, there will be a big batch of pole beans to content with. Not to mention ubiquitous cucumbers which are currently yielding a never-ending batch of fridge pickles.

It's no secret that I'm a rather large proponent of the homemade lifestyle, but the truth is, I've never put much thought in why I prefer "from scratch" living as opposed to a store-bought lifestyle. I always assumed part of my infinity for DIY in the kitchen was merely an appeal to tradition.

Growing up, my mother feed my brother and me homemade bread, homemade jam, and homemade cookies, etc. If you could make it from scratch, then we weren't buying the store version. While I'm sure when I set off on my own as a young adult, I really did have a choice to leave the homemade lifestyle behind me, but instead I fell right into making things from scratch because, really, it was the only way I knew.

I mean, one simply does not buy a lug of peaches for preserving when they come on sale in August unless the idea that peaches and August preserving are as much a pair as peaches n' cream has been instilled in you at a very early age. 

Ah, look at those pints of peach salsa all lined up. Aren't they pretty? They're the result of about 2.5 hours of peeling, seeding, chopping, boiling, and canning. Whew!

After the marathon session of peach salsa making on Monday, I decided to look at my homemade tendencies from a purely economic viewpoint. (Because, you guys, 2.5 hours is quite a lot of time to invest in something, you know.)

After some rudimentary calculations, not factoring in the worth of my time, I figured out that each jar of salsa had cost me approximately $2.30. Yes, when you figure that the cheapest I can buy a 16 oz. jar of a salsa in town is about $2.99, there are slight savings involved with going the homemade route, but as soon as you factor in the assumed monetary value of my time, the store-bought version suddenly triumphs as the better value. Granted, if I'd had homemade tomatoes on hand (our first red tomatoes are just about ready for picking) and if we're actually capable of growing garlic and onions, the cost of each jar would have dropped drastically, although if I factored in the time I spent growing all of the ingredients . . . you get where I'm going.

So why bother with the homemade lifestyle, other than the fact that I know no other way?

1. Money can't buy you love . . . or homegrown tomatoes. I found this quote on Diane's Crave Cute blog recently, and while technically, I suppose you could buy homegrown tomatoes, nothing quite matches the feeling of transforming something raw and unfinished into something delicious and/or beautiful.
2. Control. I've always had control issues. When it comes to homemade stuff, I have total control over how the finished product turns out, which I love. Don't like an ingredient in a recipe? I don't have to use it. This consequently means that the finished product tastes better to me than the store version.
3. When I make it myself, I can avoid preservatives and other less desirable ingredients in pre-made food products. 
4. Reduce, reuse, recycle. When you buy products from the store, you buy a new jar every time. By canning things myself, I can reuse my Mason jars for years. 
5. It's fun. I was shocked last year when Andy implied that my canning obsession was really just a hobby. "But," I stammered. "I'm just trying to feed us through the winter." That and, well, I just wouldn't spend that much time slaving over a steamy stove top in August if it was satisfying and fun.

In other news, look what we found in the potato patch:

Yep, a real, live potato.

I have a feeling there are more of them down there too. This one got bumped off the root when Andy and I went snooping in the straw for potatoes on Tuesday, so we scrubbed it off and threw it into a pot of lamb stew (probably the most delicious and least economical stew to ever grace the inside of a crockpot.) And let me say, the potato and the stew were both delicious.

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Happy Little Miss Homemaker

Last week, Andy and I devoted a large portion of our evenings to watching all of Mad Men Season 1. (Behind the times, I know.) Despite the affinity I felt for Peggy throughout the first season, I spent today much more like Betty than Peggy.

Well, no, I didn't spend my day chain-smoking or start consuming wine at or around 1 p.m. But I did spend my day off engaged in decidedly homemaker-esque tasks. And what a happy little homemaker I was . . . which I guess makes me less like Betty than I previously thought.  ;)

I'm what Suzy Guese calls a "nomadic homebody." As much as I love travel and a good adventure, I need an equal, if not greater amount of time spent puttering around my home to really feel balanced. After a long, busy work week, the cabin and I were overdue for some quality time together.

When I woke up this morning, a mountain of dishes waited by the sink, "past its prime" produce rattled around in the fridge's crisper drawers, the recycling spilled out of its bin and across the floor, and the bathroom was smelling less than fresh.

So today, I vacuumed the entire cabin, finally blocked an afghan for my mother, cleaned the bathroom, did two batches of dishes, did some ironing, took out the recycling and trash, and managed to prepare a balanced supper from a nearly bare fridge. Mundane tasks, yes, but each one was a major accomplishment both for the cabin's appearance and my well-being.  

I performed fridge triage, the happy results of which were a batch of crockpot marinara sauce -using some bruised and otherwise unattractive tomatoes - and these Asian inspired fridge pickles from a cucumber no longer in a state for salad and some garlic scapes from the garden.

I've been chomping at the bit to try these nutty granola bars ever since Marisa posted about them over at Food in Jars.  I have a tried and true granola bar recipe that both Andy and I like, but the chief binder in that recipe is marshmallows and I've been looking for a slightly more wholesome recipe. I finally got a batch made this evening. I'm pretty sure I overbaked them, but they're still darn nommy and *very* calorie rich. One change I would make if I were to make them again would be to use all butter instead of a mixture of coconut oil and butter. (Or I wouldn't use coconut oil that's been in the pantry for an unknown amount of time. . . ahem.)  Besides, who has two thumbs and likes butter? That's right . . . this guy.

I also fertilized the vast majority of vegetables. One patch of veggies that didn't get any fertilizer was the potato patch. These guys already got a goodly amount of Tomato-tone last week and they're looking quite content in their straw-y abode. Maybe, just maybe, this crazy "let's grow potatoes in straw" experiment is going to work. 

It was a good day.

Are you a happy homemaker or do you find chores to dull to be truly pleasurable? 

 

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Summer Stockpiling - Plus Making Dried Beans in a Crockpot Tutorial

When I moved away from home, I realized there are a few of basic grocery items that I'm not used to buying. My family has a definite "homemade" mentality, and when I was growing up, pizzas and lasagnas weren't pulled out of the freezer or ordered; they were made from scratch. Store-bought bread was an oddity in our house and we never, ever bought jarred spaghetti sauce. It was a sad day indeed if we ran out of homemade jam and had to buy a jar of strawberry preserves, or heavens help us, grape jelly. To this day, grape jelly still tastes like sadness to me.

Now that I'm on my own, I find I also lean towards making things from scratch. It's cheaper. It tastes better. It's more satisfying. And let's be honest, when I work from home like I do the majority of the year, it's pretty easy for me to live a "made from scratch" life.

When I'm home all day, I just don't find it very time consuming to make things from scratch. Homemade bread may require 3+ hours of time, but it doesn't require my undivided attention that whole time. It's easy enough to mix up the dough and leave it to rise to rise while I go do something else, then return to shape loaves, leave again to do whatever, pop the bread in the oven and go do something else while the bread bakes. If I'm smart about it, I can get a good 2 hours of work done during the whole bread baking process. I make my marinara sauce by throwing all the ingredients in a crockpot and let it burble away for 4-5 hours for a total hands-on time of 30 minutes. In fact, I use the crockpot as shortcut for lots of "made from scratch" stuff.

If I'm making this all sound like a snap, let me assure you that it all goes to hell in a hand basket when summer comes around. By mid-August, between working full time and berry picking, I pretty much give up on making things from scratch and I'm buying bread and spaghetti sauce along with everyone else. So every spring I come up with this great idea that I'm actually going stockpile the ingredients I like to make myself in the freezer and have enough to last through the busy summer season.  Honestly, I've never managed to pull this off, but I persist in thinking it's a really good idea.

One ingredient I prefer to prepare at home are beans. It's about half as expensive to make your own cooked beans from dried beans, rather buying cooked and canned beans. You can also better control how much sodium's in your bean recipes by making your own beans. And you can cook up large batches, which saves me the trouble of having to buy canned beans nearly every week. (We eat a lot of beans.)

The other day we were running low on frozen beans, so I cooked up a batch each of kidney, pinto, and garbanzo beans over the course of three days. Here's a pictorial guide to the last batch, the garbanzos.

Take your bag of approximately 3-4 pounds of garbanzos (I purchase my dried beans at the local co-op), dump into a colander and rinse with cold water. Pick through the beans and discard any rocks or broken beans. Dump the beans into your crockpot and cover with about four inches of cold water. Cover and place in the fridge overnight. 

The next morning your beans will have doubled in size. Dump them into a colander, than back into the crockpot and cover with fresh cold water. I usually have the water covering the beans by about an inch at this point.

 

Turn your crockpot on high and walk away. I put an old towel around the base of the crockpot to soak up the water that will inevitably boil over. Be warned, bean water does not smell great, so you'll want to wash that towel that in timely manner. (Lesson learned.)

Check on your beans after about 4 hours. I find it takes most beans between 4-5 hours to reach desired tenderness using this method. It's okay to turn off the crockpot a little before the beans are as tender as you'd like. Like pasta, the beans will cook as they cool in the colander.

Pour into a colander (or two) and cool. Divvy up into 1 3/4 cup portions in freezer bags. Throw in the freezer. Now you have bagged and frozen equivalents of canned beans for half the price!

You can thaw out the beans in the fridge before you use them, but honestly, I'm never that organized and usually just throw them in frozen into whatever recipe I'm making and increase the cooking time a bit. Remember, these aren't salted, so you may have to add extra salt to your recipe.

Now I've got a good summer stockpile of beans, but there's plenty of bread baking and sauce making if I'm really going to make it through the summer . . .

 

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