amazon_syren

Thinking about a possible "Saint Carmen of the Main" cocktail recipe (again)...

3 tbsp whiskey
1 tbsp cherry moonshine
Splash lime juice
Sparkling white wine?

So I'm having some people over tomorrow afternoon. Funnily enough, the person I was originally doing the event for is off sick with strep throat, so probably won't be joining the rest of us. But fingers crossed.

My plan is to make some kind of sour-milk-based coffee cake (as I am wont to do), and also offer this bean dip with "toasts" - like, sliced of bread cut into strips or quarters, brushed with some oil, and broiled for a couple of minutes.
It'll do.

It's not hummus. If only because hummus at least needs to have chick peas in it. But it's one of those type things. :-)

~*~

BEAN DIP

1 onion, diced and fried in oil
Garlic a-go-go (see above)
1 tin red kidney beans, well-washed and drained
2 beets, peeled, diced, and boiled (or use a bunch of pickled beets, and skip the vinegar)
Red wine vinegar (see above)
Thyme
Coriander
Cloves

Combine everything in a food processor and blend until smooth. Serve with “miniature toasts” (brush with olive oil and put under the broiler for a bit).

~*~

I'm kind of hoping it'll be an amazing shade of magenta. :-)

So, last night I made "Carpathian Onion Soup" (we are now nearly out of onions, plural, which is something I never expected to say, beleive you me) and spent the evening chatting with a lovely couple (one member-of-whom I got to stick needles in at Harvest and the other member-of-whom turns out live just up the street from DA_Gibbs - small world, but no big surprise) and then having tea and cranberry-coconut coffee cake with them plus our friend Moderatrix, which was quite lovely.

I now have about a litre of this soup left over (it has paprika, and I didn't remember that paprika is a bell pepper - one of our guests is alergic - until after I'd added it, so I wound up make a separate pot for her) plus half a tin of coconut milk and a tub of red pepper hummus.

So The Plan for this evening is to take the imersion blender to the remains of the soup, then stir in some of the hummus, the rest of the coconut milk, a little bit of curry powder, then top it up with some water (or actual dairy milk, we'll see) and serve it as a cream/purreed soup with - still - bread with melted cheese added on top. :-) It should be tasty and filling and delicious. Here's hoping! :-)

Here's the recipe I've come up with (as if making it from new and not from leftover Carpathian Onion Soup):

~*~

INGREDIENTS
Sesame oil OR lard OR butter
1 red onion (diced)
3 cloves garlic (raw)
1 carrot (grated)
+
¼ C red lentils
1 C coconut milk (or table cream)
1 C water
+
½ C mashed sweet potatoes (OR unsweetened canned/mashed pumpkin)
½ C red pepper hummus
1 tsp each: soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, apple juice
1 tsp each: ketchup, grainy mustard
½ tsp each: dried basil, dried winter savoury, curry powder
+
1 C white wine
1 C Water OR coconut milk (OR table cream) + extra to desired thickness


DIRECITONS
1. In a deep pot, combine fat, onion, garlic, and carrot and allow to cook on very low heat for 15 minutes (covered)
2. Add the lentils, coconut milk, and water
3. Bring to a boil on high heat
4. Reduce heat to medium and allow to simmer for half an hour, or until lentils are cooked through
5. Remove soup from heat and, using an immersion blender (easiest and safest way to do it), puree the soup (which should be quite thick at this time)
6. Stir in mashed sweet potatoes, hummus, and seasonings
7. Slowly add white wine, then water (or coconut milk) until desired thickness is achieved (this can work as anything from a bisque to a pottage, so as you will)
8. Return to the soup to the stove and heat through
9. Serve as-is, or garnish with (a) pea shoots, (b) sautéed shiitake mushroom slivers, (c) yoghurt/sour cream, (d) sautéed red peppers, OR (e) broiled cheese-on-toast slices, as for Carpathian Onion Soup
10. Serve and enjoy

So. The Kowloon Market, which is the neighbourhood's Big Grocery Store, sells duck at their prepared-food counter. Two pre-cooked, deliciously seasoned duck legs for about $3.50. It's awesome. I've been known to pick up two or three packages at a time and that'll do the protein part of our dinners-for-two for a couple of evenings (plus maybe a lunch or something) for a good portion of the week.
You can (or at least could, immediately after the full moon closest to Autumn Equinox) get a whole, roasting duck for ~$12.00. Which is not that much more expensive than a roasting chicken from Hartmann's or Loblaw's or something.

So, as you can imagine, I've had a fair bit of Duck Bones lying around of late. Consequently, I've been starting to make my own soup stock.
I kind of love having a slow-cooker. The ammount of stuff I make in it is kind of nutty. It wouldn't shock me if I wound up making yoghurt in it (using the "keep warm" setting) in the not-too-distant future.


But. Duck Stock. Basically, you make stock by throwing in whatever bits and pieces you happen to have lying around. Here's what's gone into the version that's just started to simmer in the slow-cooker now:

~*~

1 whole duck-carcass skeleton + the bones from 4-6 duck legs
12 (or so) small nasturtium leaves (from our garden)
10 onion-chives (likewise from our garden)
5 tiny leaves of rainbow chard (likewise fro what's still hanging on in our garden)
1 scarlet-runner bean (likewise from our garden)
2-3 green beans (from Ghost's parents' garden)
1 very tiny red pepper (likewise from Ghost's parents' garden)
1 granny-smith apple that probably froze in the back of the fridge at least once
6 (or so) strips of rutabaga
1/2 C left-over red wine (that might have been on its way to vinegar, though I'm not sure)
4 garlic scapes cut into 1" lengths
3 woody stalks od basil, w/ seed-pods (from our garden)
5 bay leaves
1 tsp dried rosemary
1-2 tsp black pepper
1 pinch of cinnamon
10 very small cherry tomatoes (half of which came from our garden post-frost, and half of which came from a friend of Ghost's NPPP)


I'm inclined to add:
2-3 baby carrots
1-2 collard stalks (the thick ends)

~*~

And that should make for a tasty stock.
I'll give it a sampling in a few hours, to see how the broth is shaping up, and figure out what needs to be added. (I'm guessing a little bit of tamari or marmite, plus some maple syrup or molasses, but that's an early guess and it may be fine without).
I'll probably also break up a few of the bones at that time, so that the marrow can find its way better into the broth.



I've used my other home-made stock (duck + chicken bones, and Whatever Was Lying Around) as a base for (a) beef bourginion (esque), and (b) slightly-French onion soup. That latter involved the additons of sesame oil, molasses, and balsamic vinegar, fyi.

It works.
I tend to make 6-8 C of fairly concentrated stock at a time (size of slow-cooker, but also size of fridge) and assemble the ingredients for the next batch (in the freezer) while I use up the current one. I find that 2C stock (I store it onld pasta sauce jars, typically) plus 2-4 C water makes a suitable base for two people worth of soup.


I'm hoping this particular stock (duck lends itself well to strong flavours, being a fatty, strongly flavoured bird to begin with) will be pleasantly spicy and - thanks to my over-cooking the roasting duck[1] - nicely meaty/rich as well. I find that it, like pork, combines well with "sweet" flavours like apple, maple, and cinnamon. Which is handy. But it also goes really well with earthy flavour like rosemary, mushrooms, and thyme (and, yes, maple).


Next time I roast a duck, I will probably do it a little differently, in order to render as much of the fat out of it as possible. I like to keep some duck fat on hand for cooking, since it's quite a lovely consistency. :-) I will, again, save the bones for stock - but I may also try throwing some pork bones in as well (as we've got some pork chops in the freezer at the moment). We'll see what this does to it in terms of flavour.


Aaaaaaaaaaand, yeah. That's my rambling on making duck-based soup stock. Huzzah! :-)



TTFN,
Amazon. :-)


[1] I cooked it for four hours. That was too long by a good hour, at least. Next time I roast a duck (possibly next week?) I'll have to make sure it's fully thawed when I start the cooking, and then cook it for less time. I mean, yes, the skin was lovely and crispy. But the meat on the wings was pretty-much jerky with bones in it. So they went into the stock pot very nearly whole. O.O

So. Have I mentioned that I kind of love the Kowloon Market? Where else can you get duck-for-two for $5?

Which is, in fact, what I did the other night. I went up the street and picked up a few odds and sods, including milk and butter[1] but also including a whole frozen duck (to be roasted at some point in the future, possibly in early November) and a couple of packages of pre-bbq'd duck legs.

I only saved the bones from one package - more fool me - but I am making soup stock today with those legs being the first ingredient.


My cooking philosophy, such as it is, is that you cook with what you've got on hand and so it's helpful if you're good at combining things on the fly and making good guesses as to what will go with what.
If I weren't nearly so intuitive when it came to flavour combinations, I would probably have a different cooking philosophy. But as it stands, this one is serving me well.


So. My experiment for today:

~*~

The bones of two duck legs, with a little bit of meat still clinging to them around the joints

A well-packed cup of dandelion leaves[2]

A few slices of beet, left over from the dinner where the duck bones came from

Four baby carrots

The remains of an onion (probably about 3 tbsp?), chopped into quarters

1 large clove garlic, diced

About half a tomato (the other half became part of breakfast along with some edamame and the rest of the beets)

The water in-which I cooked the edamame

Three medium-small bay leaves

A teaspoon or so of grainy mustard

A heaping soup spoon full of apple butter

A teaspoon or so of rendered duck fat (I keep it in my fridge and treat it like lard)

Three pieces of kombu (I think...)

A big handful of dried inoke mushrooms (hoping I didn't use too many of these)

A couple of tablespoons of blood sausage, plus the water I used to soften it up

Two pieces of dried red pepper

~*~

I think that's everything. I'm currently at the "second-guessing myself" stage, which is where I wonder if I shouldn't add some rosemary and tamari and black pepper... and I may yet do it.

Right now, the broth is in the slow-cooker on "low" and is smelling VERY tomato-y.

I know tomato-based duck broth works - it works well enough that you can use left-over-duck combined with macaroni noodles and tinned tomato soup (made with water) and make a remarkably delicious soup. So I'm not too worried about it.
But I do think those three ingredients might help things along in the long run.


Anyway. We'll see how it goes.


TTFN,
Amazon.


[1] With the demise, several years ago, of the local western-food grocery store, the Kowloon Market has started carrying dairy. This is me rejoicing! :-D

[2] Which I harvested almost a month and a half ago, and which were still just as good as the day I picked them - which kind of shocked me, but is good to know. Dandelions KEEP in the fridge!

Okay.

So a couple of days ago I made pickled peaches. Om Nom Nom pickled peaches. And I had a little bit of the pickling solution left over.

The pickling solution, in this case, was a mix of maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, raspberry-balsamic vinegar, and a pinch of salt.

So it was basically sweet-and-sour sauce.

So I chopped up three tomatoes and about 1/4 of an onion and a couple of cloves of garlic, and chucked them all into the pot with the pickling solution in it... and then added a little bit of nutritional yeast, four miniature pork sausages (mild Italian) pre-cooked and sliced into rounds, and one sweet-pickled roasted red pepper (that I then mashed up into a pulp).

Stir everything together and let simmer until most of the liquid has boiled off.

Add a cup of cooked pasta (I used fusilli) and serve. Hot, sweet, slightly spicy, and delicious. Although a little extra garlic wouldn't have been amiss and it could have taken on a couple of ice-cube-sized pucks of frozen spinach and not been anything to complain about.



In other news: I have three-and-a-half cups of grape jelly that, I'm rapidly concluding, I'm not likely to actually use.
More fool me for making it in the first place. :-P
If people have suggestions for what to do with grape jelly (other than "eat on bread"), I'd appreciate hearing them.
Particularly if they involve mixing them with savoury foods to make interesting sauces or something. (Like... could I do a mix of 50/50 grape jelly and red wine vinegar, plus garlic, onion, a pinch of salt, and fresh ...rhubarb?... and throw them in a slow-cooker with a bit of beef...? Would that work? Any ideas?)

I tried turning some of it (2C) into sour-cream tarts... and that did not go well. Jam tarts are possible, because jam contains actual pieces of fruit. Jelly tarts basically get you a tart shell full of slightly burnt caramel and rather grape-y water.
:-P
Not so good, I'm afraid. :-\


I'm game for adding it to cakes and similar, but if anyone has ideas for a savoury option, I'm all ears. :-)



TTFN,
Amazon. :-)

Have just tried this recipe for cranberry coffee cake.

Was out of eggs, so it required a fair bit of tweaking.


Recipe went as follows:

3 tbsp granulated sugar
1/3 C margarine
1/3 C sour cream
1/2 C apricot-ginger cranberry sauce
1/2 tsp orange extract

1 C wheat flour
1/2 C ground almonds
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
Pinch of salt


Creamed together the wet ingredients (and the sugar). Whisked together the dry ingredients. Added the wet to the dry and blended until moist and kind of lumpy.

It's now divided between two small dessert-loaf pans, baking at 425F (because my oven is basically broken - normally this would be 375F) until... probably close to 6pm.
My hope is to get a couple of small, airy loaves out of the dough, but we'll see how it goes (I suspect crumbling and, thus, trifle, will ensue. But I'll have to get more eggs, first). :-)



TTFN,
Amazon. :-)

So.

... My Ghost is terrorizing the parrot. This is not actually all that unusual.

Moving right along.


Today I experimented with cookies. Specifically, I made (as in "baking as we speak") a batch of thumb-print butter cookies with cranberry curd


*~*~*~*~*


Cranberry Sunbursts (version 1.0)

2C whole wheat pastry flour
1/2 C potato flour
1/2 C icing sugar
1C butter
2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt


Mix the above into a dough that sticks together easily but doesn't automatically coat your hands with gunk.

Roll the dough into balls.

Put them on an un-greased cookie sheet (should hold about twelve) and flatten them out (to about 1cm thick). Put a thumb-print depression in the middle of each cookie (they should now look a bit like nests).

Into each depression add:

1/2 tsp cranberry curd (or the jam of your choice -- sour cherry is a good one, but peach/apricot or raspberry or strawberry or red currant (we're aiming for sunny/warm colours here) will work nicely as well).

Bake in a 350F oven for 10-15 minutes (or 20 minutes if, like me, your oven only has a "broil" setting due to the bottom element never having worked).

Allow to cool (yes, really, the cranberry curd will be hot and kind of spurty, or so I'm guessing), and then serve with hot apple cider or similar. YAY! :-D


Makes... probably about 18 big (but not enormous) cookies.


*~*~*~*~*


Here's hoping they taste good and don't fall apart. (Note: The tasting good is not really a worry in this instance. It's hard to screw up shortbread. If they fall apart, though, I'll be adding 1 egg, 1 tsp vanilla, and maybe a quarter cup more flour of one sort or another).

In the oven right now is something like a peach-blueberry custard pie.

I say "something like" because, unlike, say, pancakes or cookies, I'm not totally confident in my ability to 100% make things up as I go along when it comes to custard-based pies. I'm a little worried that it'll be an egg-y mess. (Although there's only one egg involved, since I wanted to make sure we had a couple for breakfast tomorrow).

BUT. What it all consists of is:

1) ground-almond-butter-vanilla-flour crumb crust (I used wheat flour and margarine, plus a pinch of salt, but y'know) I'm using a very small pie-pate. Like 6"-8" in diameter and relatively shallow.

2) 4 peaches (ripe enough) peeled <*shrug*> and roughly chopped + 1/2 C sugar + 1/4 flour, mixed together

3) 1 C froze blueberries + 1/2 C sugar

4) 1 egg + up to 1 C milk + a splash of vanilla + 1/2 C sugar + pinch of salt, well-blended


You partially-bake the crust while you deal with the fruit and the egg mixture

Then you layer the peaches and the blueberries in the pie-plate and pour the egg mixture over them. (Hint: If you've got some peach/apricot jam/sauce lying around, you might want to spread/dot a little bit on the crust before adding the layers of fruit).

Bake at ~350F until it looks and smells right. (I don't know what duration that is, but it's probably about half an hour in a fully-functional oven. Me and my single-element oven, however, are probably going to need 40+ minutes).


Serve and, I hope, enjoy. (I'll let you know how it goes).


- TTFN,
- Amazon.



[EDIT to Add (at 8:40pm):
Okay, based on having put the pie in the oven at around 7pm - and possibly because I was using frozen blueberries (thus --> lots of water) - it looks like took a good hour-and-a-half to cook my pie.

Presently, it's cooling on the stove-top while Ghost makes us cream of mushroom soup and a side of cheese-and-tomato sandwiches. The berries are looking very, uh, cooked... but the peaches look good and the custardy stuff looks practically caramelized.

So... it should be sweet as fuck and probably fairly tasty. Time will tell. For a given value of "time" wherein "time" = 20 minutes.
Dinner now (or soon enough to now that it doesn't make a tonne of difference). Will report back on the state of the pie once we've tasted it. :-)
/EDIT]


[EDIT to Add (at 10:00pm):
And the results are in.
I have managed to make what is, more or less, a giant fruity butter tart (involving shockingly little butter, granted, but a HEAP of sugar, so). I think it could have done with something extra - a hint of ginger or lemon or both, most likely - but beyond that? Yum!

I declare this pie to be A Success! :-D
/EDIT]

Today I wrote 1000 words of fiction
2 drafted poems
AND
9 recipes.

Bwah. Writing for hte WIN. :-D