Pickled Beet Sandwich – Cleaning the Larder

June 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

It was a busy weekend and we were looking for a quick bite.

This is a time of year I try to use up as much of our surplus canned goods as possible (and there are a lot!) in order to prepare for the bounty of summer and to rotate the contents of our preserve shelf.  We know that the market will soon be swelling with an abundance of fresh fruit and vegetables and we’ll be less inclined to eat our preserves so this is a guilt-free time to open as many jars as possible.

Late spring/ early summer is a busy time around our house.  I tend to travel a lot for work, we’re a lot more social (like bears coming out of hibernation), farmers market season kicks into another gear and projects in the garden tend to take a lot of time.  Meals like this one are ready in minutes (the longest step was making toast)and can easily fuel you through the day.

Pickled Beet Sandwich Cleaning the Larder Goat Cheese Chevre Beet [Read more...]

Filed Under: Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients, Sandwiches Tagged With: , ,

Quince Jelly Gastrique Salad Dressing Recipe

February 2, 2013 by 2 Comments

Winter salads are often more bitter or hardy than their summer counterparts.  We lack the natural sweetness of berries, a lot of sweet fruit, tomatoes, light greens and other bright summer flavors.  We’re left with dense offerings such as carrots, onions, kale, mache, and other bitter greens.  This is a simple technique that combines vinegar, sugar and fruit preserves to create a sweet-and-sour dressing that is also fat-free (though I’m a proponent of fat).  We used part of a jar of preserves that were recently given to us to make the quince jelly gastrique.

Quince Jelly Gastrique Salad Dressing Recipe Vinegar Quince Jelly [Read more...]

Filed Under: Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients, Sides and Salads Tagged With: , ,

Salad Dressing Recipe: Vinaigrette with Jam

January 31, 2013 by 8 Comments

Over the last few years we’ve found that a key to enjoying our pantry is to find diverse ways to use the flavors it provides.  We’ve used jam to glaze meats, make cocktails, sweeten smoothies and played with various salad dressing recipes (including a very standard strawberry jam vinaigrette).

We used strawberry jam for this recipe but any jam could be used in its place as the other ingredients are fairly neutral.

Last nights winder salad incorporates tahini to emulsify it.  Emulsifying simply means to incorporate the oil and vinegar into one sauce as opposed to a separated dressing.  Here is a picture of our salad (it used plenty of winter ingredients yet brought the flavours of summer into our dreary winter evening):

Salad Dressing Recipe: Vinaigrette with Jam Vinegar Jam [Read more...]

Filed Under: Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients, Sides and Salads Tagged With: ,

Recipe: Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuits with Fermented Jalapenos

December 16, 2012 by Leave a Comment

It’s been a cold, grey weekend.  You know the kind of weather – gloomy enough that you never fully feel warm yet warm enough that it isn’t quite cozy weather.  It’s just kind of dank, dark and droopy.  It’s that kind of weather.

Last night we decided to watch movies, curl up with a blanket and make a big pot of chili.  I’m a giant fan of having some form of bread to dip into chili and last night we made these awesome biscuits:

Recipe: Buttermilk Cheddar Biscuits with Fermented Jalapenos Pepper (Hot) Hot Pepper Cheese [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bread, Flatbreads and Pizza, Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients Tagged With: , ,

Sugar Cookies with Bourbon and Fermented Jalapenos (Recipe)

December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment

When I was a child, my ‘specialty’ was baking oatmeal cookies.  I was a real ‘pro’ when it came to cookie dough.  But that was a long time ago – I haven’t baked a single cookie in 20 or 25 years.  I’m not sure what I was thinking when we decided a Holiday Cookie Swap (tonight!) would be a good time to return to my original roots in the kitchen; but I’m glad we did as I’m thrilled with how these worked out:

Sugar Cookies with Bourbon and Fermented Jalapenos (Recipe) Pepper (Hot) Hot Pepper Bourbon

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Desserts, Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients Tagged With: , ,

Too Much Strawberry Jam? Make Salad Dressing

November 29, 2012 by 4 Comments

Over the last few years, many farmers in the Toronto area have learned to extend summer and fall crops into the fall through planting different crops, cold frames, natural greenhouses, different storage techniques, trenches dug under the frost line and more.

We’re still finding arugula, carrots, and tomatoes (they’ve been ripened in storage).  Looking for a bigger taste of summer, we made a great dressing with strawberry jam tonight.

Too Much Strawberry Jam? Make Salad Dressing Strawberry Jam [Read more...]

Filed Under: Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients, Sides and Salads Tagged With: ,

WellPreserved On-Demand: What to do with Pickles

October 17, 2012 by 6 Comments

Our latest question asked us for cooking ideas for pickles (of all kinds).  I love to use them in imaginative ways (and sometimes the ideas are so obvious we missed them for years). 

 Here’s 10 ideas:

  1. Make relish on-demand.  Chop up the pickled veg to create a ‘custom’ relish to go with your meal.  Bonus tip: add mayo and make tartar sauce.
  2. Add pieces to a salad (I forget this often).
  3. Use the brine in your salad dressings.
  4. Use the brine/ pickles in a stir fry (the acid is a great touch)
  5. A small bit of brine can be added to spaghetti sauce (I wouldn’t use dill pickle brine for this but a brine from spicy carrots or pickled onions is awesome).
  6. Pickled veg or brine can be added to soups.
  7. Augment salsa with chopped bits of pickles (i.e. pickled onions or garlic).
  8. Add to sandwiches
  9. If your pickle was fermented (i.e. sauer kraut), you can drink the brine (its extremeley healthy) and many cultures use it as a health elixir.
  10. Pickles make great accessories to alcohol.

What would you add to the list?

The on-demand series of articles came from topics that users have suggested. We love your questions/ ideas/ requests and will do our best to answer them in this series of posts – feel free to add your ideas in the comments below!

Filed Under: Fundamentals, Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients

WellPreserved On-Demand: How To Use Jam in Cooking

October 16, 2012 by 8 Comments

Looking for ideas on using jam for things other than toast?  Here’s a few ways we do just that:

  1. Sweet jams are great with savory items (especially cheese).
  2. Jam is a great winter addition to salad dressing.  Mix oil, vinegar and jam to your liking (add mustard if you want an ‘incorporated’ sauce).
  3. Mix it with chocolate and reduce.  Serve with red meat (this is often done with red fruit such as raspberries and paired with game).
  4. Warm a small pot of maple syrup and add jam to it to serve on pancakes.
  5. Add a few spoonfuls to a small jar, cover in booze and let it infuse for a few days.
  6. Add to smoothies.
  7. Mix with balsamic and glaze roasted veggies or meat with it.
  8. Add a bit to a seasonal pie (i.e. an apple pie).
  9. Top cheesecake with it.
  10. Add jelly to hot tea to sweeten.

What else do you use jam for?

 

The on-demand series of articles came from topics that users have suggested. We love your questions/ ideas/ requests and will do our best to answer them in this series of posts – feel free to add your ideas in the comments below!

Filed Under: Fundamentals, Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients

How to cook with dehydrated whole hot peppers

October 25, 2010 by 4 Comments

We have recently dehydrated a lot of full (i.e. in-tact) hot peppers.  Cut the ends off the lovelies and dried them crispy.  There were about 15-20 pounds of them in total.  I adore the look of the final product , here`s a sample:

How to cook with dehydrated whole hot peppers

Working with these can appear to be a challenge.  They don`t chop easily as they tend to shatter and launch fragments of pepper powder across your kitchen and it`s a lot of work to fire up the blender each and every time you want to use them.  You could blend a bunch at once but the flavor of unused pepper will disappear quicker from powder than it will from the whole beast.

Another option is to rehydrate them in boiling water.  We do this by putting the peppers in a coffee mug and pouring hot water over them.  I usually cover the works with a small plate to retain the heat and have something mailable in 15-20 minutes.  This disadvantage is that some of the heat and flavor is transferred into the water that most discard (in the case of smoked peppers like chipotles, I tend to reserve it to use as liquid smoke).

My preference, when cooking soups or sauces (we were cooking chilli yesterday) is to add the peppers whole to your dish as it cooks.  The peppers will rehydrate with the liquid of your dish and the flavors of the peppers will transfer to what they are cooking within (much like tea does to the water it sits in).  This also gives you an option to reduce your heat by removing the peppers use them for something else.  We love spicy thins so we pull them out and slice them up like they were whole and add them back to what we are cooking – they`re not quite as plump as they were before dehydration but are very easy to slice and are visible within our chilli:

How to cook with dehydrated whole hot peppers

This may seem startlingly obvious to many but was a valuable lesson a few years back that would have saved me many bouts of frustration as hot peppers exploded across my kitchen!

Filed Under: Hot Stuff, Incorporating Preserves as Ingredients