February: Taking Stock

Many people are compelled to clean out their closets, pantries and even attics right after the New Year. I’m always amazed to see the volumes of plastic containers on sale at Target and everywhere else at that time of year. Well, I’ve been procrastinating but now that much of the fresh produce from our fall CSA harvest has been consumed, it’s time once again to take stock and use up what’s left before it deteriorates. I looked at what I posted last February and – no surprise – I was counting my cabbages, roots and winter squash then too.

Tigress wrote a great post recently about being a “chatelaine,” the keeper of the castle whose stewardship over the foodstuffs is an important family role. I agree. This is especially true when you value quality food and have taken the time to grow it, seek it out and preserve it from spring through fall. So while I’m cleaning my refrigerator and inventorying the cellar, I’m also checking the pantry. Yikes, I canned a lot of stuff this year and luckily sent a few portable pantries to families and friends.  This will be a challenge. We accumulated some great, picturesque local dried beans and dried peppers from a fall trip to the San Francisco Farmers’ Market (I want to grow those next year). It’s important to remember that, just because grains and beans and spices are dried, they don’t last forever.  I regard them as seasonal, just like the canned tomatoes, the pickles, the herbed vinegar, the sauerkraut, and the confiture des vieux garçons.

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Ancho Chili Tomato Salsa

This salsa is smokin’ good! With a deep, rich color and an immediate flavor that’s hot but not too hot, it has a kick and a smoky aftertaste from the ancho chilis.  Ancho chilis are dried poblanos and are generally pretty mild. I get mine from our local health food store where they’re stored in a jar. Whether or not they’re actually fresher than the ones packed in cellophane, at least I get to choose the size I want. Since you reconstitute the chilis submerged in hot water for about 15 minutes, you can usually tell from the water how hot they will be and adjust the rest of the recipe accordingly.

I can tomatoes and all kinds of tomato sauce and other concoctions in September when the paste tomatoes are ripe for picking at our CSA farm. In August, we have plenty of slicing tomatoes and they work best when combined with other ingredients. My obsession with tomatoes (notice my new banner!) is a family joke as we end up with rows and rows of ripening tomatoes on every indoor horizontal surface out of the sun but within sight of the kitchen. With ten pounds carted home from the CSA farm last week, bulk canning of salsa for the Tigress Can Jam did the trick.

I couldn’t locate the recipe that I used the last time I canned salsa two years ago (last year was a tomato bust because of late blight) but I had notes that pointed me to a certain recipe in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving that I had ignored last time but decided to try. I used the same proportion of red wine vinegar to tomatoes and added fewer fresh jalapenos than the Ball recipe, so I figured the acid ratio was safe. After I peeled, cored and de-seeded the tomatoes (saving that wonderful juice) I lightly salted them and let them sit in a colander over a bowl to drain for an hour before cooking, adding that liquid to the saved juice. The method removes excess liquid and lets the salsa reduce without overcooking.

Ancho Chili Tomato Salsa adapted from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving

4 medium ancho chilis (dried poblanos)

Boiling water

12 c diced cored and peeled tomatoes in ½-inch dice (about 9 lbs)

3 c diced red onion

7 large garlic cloves, finely chopped

1 large jalapeno pepper, de-seeded and minced (or more to taste, depending on the heat of the dried chili)

1 ½ c finely packed cilantro leaves (lightly chopped or torn if large)

¾ c red wine vinegar

1 tbsp salt

Optional: red pepper flakes

Pour boiling water over the chilis in a bowl just to cover and weight them down so that they stay submerged. Let them sit while you prepare the other ingredients, or at least 15 minutes.

Prepare the tomatoes. Wash ripe, unblemished tomatoes to remove any dust or dirt. Set a large pot of water on the stove to boil. Set a large pot of ice water in the sink. Have ready a cutting board with a trough for capturing the juice, a colander set over a bowl (to capture the juice and not the seeds), a small bowl for the discarded cores and skins and another large bowl for the chopped tomatoes Plunge the tomatoes, two to four at a time, into the boiling water for a few seconds. Remove to the ice water.  Core a slightly chilled tomato with a small paring knife and slip the skin off, discarding into a small bowl. Cut the tomato in half crosswise. Continue until you’ve filled up a good part of the board. Squeeze the halved tomatoes gently over the colander to release the seeds and excess juice. Then chop them into ½ inch pieces. When you’ve skinned, seeded and chopped up all of the tomatoes, salt them lightly and let them drain in a colander over a bowl for about an hour, reserving the liquid to add to the juice collected in the colander with the seeds.

Remove the chili from the water, remove the stems and seeds (leave the seeds for heat if you like your salsa very hot) and puree them in a food processor with half of the soaking liquid.

Combine all of the ingredients in a large stainless steel saucepan, and bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to keep the ingredients from sticking to the bottom of the pan. Turn down the heat and boil gently until thick, 10-15 minutes,

Ladle the salsa into hot jars prepared for canning leaving ½ inch head space. Remove air bubbles. Wipe the rims and cover with lids that have been doused in boiling water. Process in boiling water for 15 minutes (for half-pint, 12-oz and pint jars). Turn off heat, remove canner lid and let sit for 5 minutes before removing to sit undisturbed until cool.

Makes seven 12 oz jars and a little more to taste.

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Root Soup with Preserved Sage from the Pantry

Continuing my mission to use up the roots in my refrigerator, I made a delicious pureed soup of rutabaga, parsnips, potato, sweet potato and leeks.  Just about any combination or variation of proportions would work. I used a homemade light chicken broth from my freezer but vegetable stock or even water would be fine. If you have a leftover cheese rind, you could add it while cooking.

In addition to the soup itself, what I liked about this was the sage garnish. I had two options: harvest what’s left of the sage poking up out of the snow and sautéing it to a crisp; or using the sage that I store in a Weck canning jar full of coarse salt. During the summer when fresh sage is plentiful in my pot garden or at the Farm, I harvest leaves and layer them with an abundance of coarse salt in a large jar with a tight lid.  For many months, they remain leathery, almost fresh. Eventually they become brittle but are still amazingly flavorful.

Root Soup

2 leeks, cleaned and sliced

1 tbsp butter or oil

About 4 cups of cubed root vegetables

1 quart chicken broth or water to cover

Salt and pepper to taste

Sage — dried leaves or fresh

Olive oil for frying the sage leaves if using fresh ones

Sauté the leek in the butter or oil until translucent, add the root vegetables and stick and bring to a boil. Lower the heat and simmer for about 35-40 minutes or until the vegetables and cooked through. Puree the soup, add salt and pepper to taste and garnish with dried sage leaves or with fresh sage sauteed in a little olive oil and sprinkled with salt.

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Pantry Potato Salad with Tomatillo Sauce

A couple of months ago, not long after this blog began, I posted a series on tomatillos. See November. I wish I knew how to link to those stories like other blogs that say “here” and “here,” sending visitors back in time to their own musings or into somebody else’s world. No, here you’ll have to figure it out yourself, if you care. (Can I get some help here?)

Stung by the (still-mourned) dearth of tomatoes last summer, I put my energies into canning their plentiful cousins, which I harvested myself from our CSA farm.  The canned version is tangy, beautiful and great served on its own as dip for tortilla chips or as a sauce for other ingredients. I made lots and everyone who received a jar for Christmas raved.

Here, now, in the dead of winter, I made a spunky potato salad sauced with canned tomatillos and crisped with the addition of celery, cucumbers, scallions and cilantro. It was amazing. And it felt as fine in winter as it does during the season, before the tomatillos hit the pantry.

Potato Salad Dressed with Tomatillo Sauce (2-4 servings)

4 potatoes (I used red waxy ones)

½ cucumber

1 small stalk celery

¼ cup more or less of tomatillo sauce

1 scallion, minced

1 tbsp cilantro leaves

Peel the potatoes, slice them, and steam until tender. Set aside, sprinkle with a little tomatillo sauce (or white wine vinegar and salt) and let cool. Meanwhile, peel the cucumber in stripes, leaving some of the green skin intact, for texture and flavor. String the celery and slice thinly, on the diagonal.  When the potatoes are cool, toss with the tomatillo sauce, cucumber and celery. Garnish with minced scallion and cilantro.

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Meyer Lemon Marmalade with Ginger and Rosemary

One of my daughters, an avowed peripatetic who lives in California when not living in New York, came home at Christmastime with an armload of Meyer lemons from her Bay Area backyard. I couldn’t imagine a better gift! Like a length of interesting fabric or a hank of homespun wool, they just beg for some creative thinking.  Among countless other uses, I made preserved lemons since the last batch was running low, but there were still some left. And then, along came the January Can Jam blog event that I signed up for at Tigress in a Jam. http://www.tigressinajam.blogspot.com Ah ha. Perfect. Meyer Lemon Marmalade!  And I can even consider this “local,” at least vicariously.

Meyer lemons are very pretty, with clear, bright and smooth skin, a pleasant aroma and flesh sweeter than other types of lemons.  That’s because they are supposedly a cross between a mandarin orange and a lemon. Native to China, they were introduced to the U.S. in 1908 by Frank Nicholas Meyer, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, so says a better-than-average Wikipedia entry (better because the citations were thorough) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meyer_lemon.  Mine varied from light yellow to almost orange, showing their relative ripeness.

I had recently put up a batch of orange marmalade so I already had the method in mind. However, the Meyer lemons were pretty seedy so I took a step that I sometimes skip: including the seeds in the cooking process to release their pectin. I thought this would be useful since Meyer lemons have thin skin and little pith, which is where I think some of the fruit’s pectin lives. Well, was I right about the seeds. Just sitting on their own during a boil-and-sit step with the lemons, the seeds had quite a pectin party, and became gluey. (Ah ha, preserved lemons with your seeds intact, I know your secret.) So into a tidy little cheesecloth bag they went to be added to the sugary boil.

Since my mixture looked like it would make 3-4 half-pints, I decided on a taste test.  I added ginger to one jar, rosemary to a second and left the third plain. Since this was a decision made on the fly, I cooked the ginger slices in simple syrup, and dunked the sprig of rosemary in boiling water, before adding them to the jars. This approach basically used the water bath canning process as another level of cooking for flavor. Adding both ginger and rosemary may be overkill but definitely worth a try. If I were making whole batches of the variation, I would add the ginger and/or rosemary during the cooking process as noted in the recipe.

Luckily I didn’t have enough marmalade for a fourth jar, so we had a set of samples to taste with toast for a few days. All three versions were great, but I especially liked the rosemary’s contrast with the sweetness of the citrus. Sweet-toothed Dad liked the ginger, and we both liked the plain one.

Another note: since my lemons came straight from a known tree, they weren’t waxed. Most of the organic lemons I see in the health food store don’t seem waxed, but the pretty ones in the bag from Whole Foods are. I’d either use those only for juice, or wash them first in warm soapy water, rinsing thoroughly. I don’t recall making marmalade from waxed fruit but even the idea feels gummy so I wouldn’t.

Meyer Lemon Marmalade with Ginger and Rosemary Variations

About 10 Meyer lemons (to make 4 cups sliced: see prep steps below)

2 ½ cups of water

Approximately 3 cups sugar

Optional: sprig of rosemary, slices of ginger

Prepare the lemons. Wash them and split them in half lengthwise. Slice a V-groove to remove the center core, and set aside the seeds. Slice the lemons crosswise into thin (1/8”) half moons. Chip the end rind into 3/8” slices. For larger lemons, quarter them before slicing. This yielded 4 cups of sliced lemon.

Combine the lemons and 2 ½ cups of water in a deep pot, and bring to a simmer over medium-high heat. Cook for about 5 minutes, cool, cover and set aside overnight (or for 6-8 hours) in the refrigerator (or outside at this time of year, provided the temperature stays between 30 and 40 degrees).

Return to the stove and simmer until the rind is cooked but not mushy, around 15 minutes. Place a saucer in the freezer for testing doneness later on.

Wrap the reserved seeds in a little cheesecloth tied with a string. Measure the lemon mixture and add sugar in a ratio of 3:4, meaning ¾ cup sugar to 1 cup of fruit. Pour lemon mixture back into the pot, add the pouch of seeds, and cook at a medium boil for about 25 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent a scorched bottom. Remove the seed pouch before the marmalade finishes, so that it doesn’t get too sticky, and discard. The marmalade is done when a candy thermometer reads 222 degrees. Or when a droplet added to the frozen plate doesn’t run. Watch the pot carefully and stir the mix as it seems to go nowhere for a while and then finishes fast.

Optional steps for lemon-ginger marmalade and lemon-rosemary marmalade: Add peeled and sliced ginger (I would do 1 quarter-size thin slice cut into 1/16”-1/8” slivers per jar) to the lemon mixture at the last stage of cooking, or add separately cooked candied ginger slivers to the jar before processing. Add chopped rosemary after about ten minutes of cooking in the last stage, or just add a sprig that’s been dunked in boiling water to the jar before processing.

Spoon the marmalade into hot sterilized jars through a canning funnel. Clean the rims, top with new flat lids that have been dunked in just-boiled water, add the screw lids and process in boiling water in your canner for 10 minutes. Turn off the stove and let sit for 5 minutes, then remove to the counter to cool, undisturbed, for a few hours.

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Tomato Seafood Risotto, the Pantry Version

My pantry is like a revolving door. On a frequent basis, things go in and things come out. This constant stocking and re-stocking have little to do with bulk commodities (flour, sugar, olive oil, rice, dried pasta, etc.) that follow a similar pattern but are based only on what’s on sale. The “real” pantry – going in — is based on what’s in season. Coming out is another story. It’s important to know what’s in the pantry (like the refrigerator) so that you use it before it expires. Nothing irks me more than finding a jar of something wonderful like tomato chutney that dates from years (!) ago when the expected shelf life was around 12 months. Out it goes, wasted.  Obviously, managing the pantry takes some discipline.

Because 2009 was a bountiful and happy canning year, I recently needed to take stock, free up space, empty some jars, and be ready for 2010. So I made an inventory and discovered a few jars of tomato liquid, a by-product of canning tomatoes, which were just over a year old and needed to be consumed.

During the summer and early fall, I typically can tomatoes in several ways, some of which yield a juicy by-product that is either cooked or raw. We drink the raw juice within days, although it could be frozen. The cooked juice is skimmed from tomatoes that are reducing to a thick sauce, and I typically can that in jars. I call it “tomato broth.” It’s a thin liquid, but well flavored based on the sauce ingredients.

Recently, I’ve taken to using the tomato broth as the basis for risotto, either simple tomato risotto or an over-the-top seafood risotto which is augmented by juices from the separately prepared seafood, in this case shrimp broth made quickly from the shells and mussel broth from a standard cooking method. The lovely texture and flavor of just-harvested tomatoes make this special. While regularly canned whole tomatoes, buzzed in the blender, work just fine, I appreciate the doubly cooked skim for its subtle yet deep richness of flavor. And I love the fact that this is something others might have discarded but that I salvaged to bring the bounty of the harvest to our wintry table.

Tomato Seafood Risotto

½ lb shrimp, shelled and deveined, shells rinsed and reserved

1lb fresh mussels, cleaned

½ lb small scallops

Chopped parsley

1 large onion, diced, divided in two parts

3 stalks celery, diced, divided in two parts

Olive oil

½ cup white wine, divided into two parts

2 cups Arborio rice

1 ½ qt tomato broth

Salt and pepper to taste

Prepare the seafood and liquids for the risotto.  Saute the shrimp shells in a little olive oil over medium-high heat until they turn pink and become crispy but not browned. Add water and a little parsley and cook for a few minutes until brothy. Strain, discarding the shells and reserving the liquid. Saute half of the onion and celery in a deep pot with a little olive oil for about two minutes, turn heat to high and add cleaned mussels plus ¼ cup of white wine. Cover and cook until mussels open, discarding any that don’t. Strain liquid and reserve. Shell half the mussels and keep them plus the unshelled half warm. Warm the tomato broth and combine it with the reserved shrimp and mussel broth, setting aside ½ cup for poaching the seafood.

Saute the remaining onion and celery in olive oil until translucent, about 4 minutes. Add rice and stir to coat in the oil, about 1 minute. Add ¼ cup white wine and stir to absorb. Turn the heat to low and gradually add the broth ¼ cup at a time, stirring to combine until the rice is cooked al dente, which takes 25-30 minutes.

Meanwhile, poach the scallops and shrimp in the reserved broth and add to the reserved mussels. Any remaining broth should go into the rice.

When the risotto is cooked, gently add the reserved seafood and additional chopped parsley, season as needed and serve right away in shallow bowls.

Makes about 6 servings.

Tomato Risotto

The simpler version of the above, without the seafood, is made by sautéing onions in a little olive oil, adding rice to coat with oil, then adding a splash of white wine (optional) and small amounts of the tomato liquid incrementally until the rice is cooked.

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