I seemed to have finished the great dining room project just in time for our favorite summer veggies to hit the farmer’s market. Which means, it’s time I start getting serious about putting up some food.
Category: local food
About those day lilies.
I recently won this delightful cookbook, “Cooking with Flowers” (through a giveaway on Phickle). A recipe for roasted daylily buds caught my eye – not just because we have a yard full of the flower, but because it was said that the roasted buds resemble roasted asparagus in taste. I always feel that the end of asparagus season sneaks up on me – sure, I know it’s coming, but every year I find myself just a little bit saddened by it. I always want more one taste to carry me through until next year. Continue reading
Well I’ll be.
It’s not all fun & games, lazy pool days & popsicles for breakfast while slowly overhauling the dining room here. This morning, I got up, put a second coat on the walls (ain’t nothing left to do but the trim!!), packed some lunches, made a decent breakfast (and got it into her!) before dropping Edie off at her ‘mother’s helper’ gig at The Boar’s Head and then headed out to pick blueberries.
Down at Market.
I totally meant to write this post earlier in the week, but one thing after another popped up and next thing you know, it’s a week later and one realizes oh, that never happened. And then, because I’m one of those people who believes that if you do something and you’re going to blog about it, you should do it in a timely manner, ie, just after it happens, I started debating whether to do it at all. Sitting here on a Sunday morning where the sun can’t quite decide if it’s coming out or not, realizing that until this stinking dining room gets done, getting this house clean and decluttered is just not an option and I really should get myself geared up just a little bit more before jumping back into that dining room project, it seemed like I should write about it. Continue reading
As local as it gets.
We have a cherry tree in our front yard. The neighborhood critters tend to get to it before we do, leaving us not more than a handful of cherries, at best.
This spring the tree was loaded. You could see it walking down the street. We had hope there would be enough for all of us. Tuesday I had a bite of a cherry, realized they were not quite ripe yet, and noticed the tree was still loaded – a good sign.
Friday morning, there was much activity at the tree. Every bird & squirrel within a 6 block radius was feasting. I ran out with my basket and picked everything within reach without a ladder. I noticed a good deal of the fruit had some sort of funk, which was a bummer and the remaining fruit wasn’t entirely ripe, but I was going to get a crop off that tree dammit.
Two pounds later, I did.
Since they were mostly underripe, I knew cooking them was the way to go. Having picked 8 pounds of strawberries later that day from our little garden patch, I thought about combining the two.
Yes, you read that right. EIGHT POUNDS of berries from our little strawberry patch in one day. Two pounds the day before that. It’s been a banner year for strawberries.
Where was I? Oh that’s right, cherries. First, I had to pit the cherries. I got this little pitter last summer at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
It pits four cherries at a time, popping the seeds out into a tray underneath. That’s practically doing it in bulk when you think about it AND it keeps clean up to a minimum. 
I love this thing. I strongly recommend it, especially if you are considering doing anything with cherries this summer.
After pitting the cherries, I chopped up an equal amount of strawberries, added sugar and let it macerate overnight. I found this great post on Northwest Edible Life on making pectin free jam without a recipe that I used as a guideline. Because my cherries were not fully ripe, I went with 1/2 cup sugar for each pound of fruit.
The resulting jam is sweeter than I expected it to be, with big chunks of fruit.
I packed it in 4 oz jars, trying to stretch out the yield as much as I could. The result? 8 lovely jars of what we are calling “Greenleaf Cherry Berry”. I’m beyond excited that we grew enough fruit to make jam with this year. Take that squirrels.
Spread on sourdough toast for breakfast, it’s quite lovely if I do say so myself.
Cherry Berry Jam
2 pounds cherries, pitted & chopped
2 pounds strawberries, chopped
Combine the fruit in a non-reactive bowl with 1-2 cups of sugar. Cover and refrigerate overnight (or longer). Simmer on stove top, stirring occasionally. As the fruit starts to fall apart, you can mash it if you’d like. Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice and cook until it is ‘set’. Pack into jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.
Yield – 4 pints.
Adventures of a few different sorts.
Remember how last year it was freakishly warm super early last spring? Strawberry season came & went in the blink of an eye with that heat. This year, the opposite has happened – it’s just not warm enough for strawberries to ripen at many area berry patches, including the one in my own yard. Some of the berry patches have yet to open for the season – including my favorite, Middle River Farms, outside of Grottos. Considering it’s over in the Shenandoah Valley, which is always just a little bit behind us in the harvest, it’s not that much of a surprise. I’ve been chomping at the bit to pick some strawberries this year though. Maybe it’s the result of last week’s canning class, with it’s successful jam that Edie said was “almost as good as Daniel’s“. High Praise indeed. Or maybe it’s that we finished up the last of the freezer strawberries last week. Or maybe, it’s that it’s mid-May and I want fresh strawberries every day, because this is the time of year for them.
Whatever the reason, I decided to check out a new berry patch I’d heard about south of town, Seaman’s Orchard, outside of Roseland. Which is more than a little south of town – it’s south of Lovingston and closer to Lynchburg than it is Charlottesville. Price wise, their pick your own is more expensive than Middle River Farms, but still cheaper than Chile’s. And the view?
An Evening of Culture.
A few weeks ago, my friend Susan called and asked if I would help her put together an evening for her culture club. She explained that the culture club sprung out of her book club – at some point, they realized that they really weren’t reading or discussing the books, but they still enjoyed getting together and doing things. And thus, their culture club began.
Finally.
We had our first dinner from the garden for the season last night.
On Chocolate Caramels.
I was recently asked if I wanted to try some Gearhart’s Chocolates, specifically a Dark Chocolate Caramel. Of all chocolates, Chocolate Caramels are my hands down favorite. I will go through a box of assorted chocolates and poke the bottoms of every last candy until I find the elusive chocolate caramel one and when you discover that someone went through and poked a hole in the bottom of every last candy in the box, I will lie to your face that it was me. So how delightful to not only be spared the work of poking out every bottom, there were no mystery nougats to be endured. Phew.
Enough about me. Let’s talk Chocolate Caramels. Here’s the description I was sent of the chocolates:
Gearharts was approached by several of the local wineries around Charlottesville and asked to create a chocolate that would pair well with red wine. The result was the Dark Chocolate Caramel. Using Gearhart‘s Signature Caramel (with cocoa added to the actual caramel), this chocolate also contains a hint of balsamic vinegar and cracked black pepper, is coated in extra bittersweet dark chocolate and finished with Maldon smoked sea salt flakes.
I’d be curious to see what some of the wine pairings are, because none came with the chocolates, nor could I find them on Gearhart’s website. Not all red wines go well with chocolate – my eloquent friend Megan wrote a wonderful piece last Valentine’s Day for The C-ville Weekly on pairing wine & chocolates in which she explains why that lovely Malbec I had did not pair well with these chocolates. I knew that was going to be the case, but I went ahead and tried it anyway. Not very good. A better match would probably have been a Norton (I highly recommend Horton Winery’s Norton) or any of the other wines she mentioned in her piece but as I don’t make it a habit to keep dessert wines on hand, I can’t talk to you about how the wine paired with the chocolates.
I can however, tell you about these caramels. The dark chocolate and caramel were superb. As for the black pepper, it was only noticeable when nibbling on the salted corner – which is sort of interesting – you don’t think that one flavor, salt, would pull another flavor, black pepper, through so much, but it did here. The touch of balsamic vinegar came through on the finish, providing a nice counterpoint to the sweetness of the caramel that lingered on the palate.
The kind folks over at Gearhart’s also included an 8 piece sampler of their other chocolates with the dark chocolate caramels.
The sampler came with a small brochure that lists all their fine chocolates and includes color pictures, so there’s no need to stab the bottom with your fingernail to see what flavor you are holding. It’s a nice touch if you are inclined to sharing or if you’re like me, only share what you aren’t entirely wild about. Which doesn’t apply when it comes to Gearhart’s. I just like certain ones (The Earl Gray, the Taj and now the Dark Chocolate Caramel) better than others.
Making Mincemeat.
During some conversation with my friend Leni at some point either this past fall or summer, the topic of mincemeat came up. Leni having recently retired this past year as the African-American Historian at Monticello, I knew that our exercise in mincemeat was going to entail historically accurate recipes, at least one of which would probably be from Mary Randolph’s The Virginia Housewife cookbook. First published in 1824, it’s considered one of the first American Southern cookbooks and a fairly decent record of how food at Monticello was probably prepared. The conversation had sprung out of discussions of what she was going to do with the all the various parts of the pigs she was then raising. I was slightly curious to get a pig’s foot or two to try (what else) pickling them while she was more interested in boiling them down and making mincemeat out of them.
Yesterday was mincemeat making day. It seems the Mary Randolph version calls for venison, which Jackson supplied, as well as some bear, which was used to make an 1839 Kentucky Housewife by Lettice Bryan version of mincemeat.
One of the things I like about heading out to gatherings at Leni’s is that you never know who you’re going to meet there. A few years ago, I’d heard of Jackson’s classes in which students learned to hunt, dress and cook their catch. I loved the idea of it, would love to actually take it one day, only it seems (to me) that hunting requires patience (that whole sit in the woods thing – I cannot possibly sit still that long) one of those things I’m convinced is an over-rated virtue, mainly because I lack it. Ideally, I’d rather skip to the butchering and cooking part, getting someone else to do the hunting for me.
The meat Jackson brought technically was roadkill – the car in front of him hit the deer and I missed part of the story on the bear, catching only the tail end of the tale where he actually completed the killing of the bear. So it wasn’t like either animal was sitting by the side of the road for who knows how long. I share this because I really just like bragging that I’ve eaten roadkill. (Although as I typed that, I realized it’s not the first time I’ve had roadkill. Hey, it’s free, grass fed, organic meat.)
In addition to Jackson, there was his girlfriend Helenah, Jenny, Jessica, two of Leni’s sons, her granddaughters, my Edie and lots of cameras. We jumped in, with the venison version of mincemeat on one burner, the bear version on another, Leni’s pork version on a third, with a fourth burner being devoted to creating the filling of pelmeni – a Siberian dumpling made with bear.
As I was heading out yesterday, Pat asked if I even liked mincemeat, reminding me that it had been served at various family gatherings over the years to much avoidance on my part. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure I would like it. I find that cooking meat well is an art, one that many members of my family lack, so I tend to avoid anything they made with meat it in over the years as a self-preservation technique. Trust me, if you had grown up eating some of the meat I was served on a regular basis, you’d avoid it too. I’m always willing to try something though, especially if it’s prepared by someone I know is a good cook. Considering Leni has not only raised, but prepared some of the best pork I’ve ever had, I knew I was in good hands here.
There was much similarity in the recipes Leni had us using. I was surprised (and delighted) to find that each one called for large amounts of fruit, generally in equal amounts or more to the meat and suet, of fruit in the form of apples, raisins and currants. Brandy, cider, sugar and spices were also added, then the mixtures bubbled on the stove top for a few hours.
While they cooked, we feasted on some tasty smoked pork that Leni had prepared and then I learned how to make the pelmeni, which essentially is a pirogi. I’ve always wanted to try making them but have been slightly intimidated. Thanks to Jenny telling me I could just get going on the next batch and not wanting to appear like I had no idea what I was doing, I just did what I was told, grabbing a dough ball, rolling it out and jumping into the process. It certainly helped that the dough was positively dreamy to roll out, which immediately took a huge chunk of intimidation away. (You know I walked out of there with that recipe too. Because that is what I do when I stumble upon something like that.)
The pelmeni filling was finely chopped onions, cabbage and bear meat, which was cooked before being rolled and then boiled in broth for a few minutes before being served with fresh dill and sour cream.
Leni thought that mince tarts would be a better way to serve the mincemeat rather than one large pie. To differentiate between the venison and the bear mince tarts, the venison tarts had a dot of dough on top. As it was a savory filling, she used lard in the crust, making them incredibly flaky and savory themselves. A perfect pairing.
Verdict? I liked the mincemeat. There was so much fruit in the mix that the meat added texture more than anything else. There was a nice savoriness about the tarts. The venison version, which was based on the Mary Randolph recipe was a touch more savory than the bear. I had prepared the bear version, following the Kentucky Housewife recipe, substituting allspice for cloves that were MIA as I was putting it together. By the time the cloves had appeared, I hesitated on adding them to the allspice, so I skipped it. As the pork version needed more time, we did not sample it, although Leni assured us all she’d get a jar to us in the near future. I came home with a pack of pelmini for the freezer, as well as two pint jars of bear mincemeat filling that I look forward to making into tarts over the next few weeks.
Yesterday was a learning experience on several levels – I love cooking with other great cooks because I never fail to learn something new from them. There was history, specifically food history – did you know that historically most wild game was referred to as venison? I did not. There was the typical small town connections made that make me love Charlottesville, where it seems everyone sort of knows everyone else somehow, even if you’ve never actually met before. I listened in on and had some inspirational and informative conversations. As I’m still getting over this nasty upper respiratory bug, I was not entirely my enthusiastic self, but it was a fantastic memorable day nonetheless, one that I shall be mulling over for some time. Thank you Leni for hosting, introducing me to mincemeat as well as everything and everyone else I got to know yesterday. What a treat of a day.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 