Canning Recipes

Best ever butter pie crust:

2 ¼ cups flour

2 sticks butter – cold cut into cubes

¼ tsp salt

2 tbsp sugar

4 tbsp ice water

Mix flour, sugar, butter, and salt in food processor – use pulse setting and check every few seconds – mixture is good when the entire thing looks like sand – add the water and pulse until the crust forms a ball.  Split crust into 2 balls, flatten, cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 30 minutes, mixture will keep for a few days in the fridge if you want to make ahead.

Canning

Well my dear little girls, this weekend officially marked the beginning of summer and for us our annual trek out to Brentwood for Cherry picking. I hope this is something we continue with your children when that day comes – way, way, way down the road.  What a wonderful time we spend with the family – Grandma Cookie, Grandpa Bob, Becky, Larry, Grandma Maude, and this year we even managed to convince your dad to get up early and go with us as well.  I think his reaction to the whole thing was the best, even if he doesn’t like eating raw cherries or blackberries, he was out there with gusto thinking of all of the things I could make for him from the fruit we were picking.  Pies, Jams, cobblers, anything with sugar and a crust would be perfect as far as he was concerned, the more he thought, the more he picked and we ended up coming home with almost 20 pounds of fresh Cherries and 10 pounds of blackberries.

Which lead me to my first dilemma, what to do with all of this fresh fruit that wasn’t going to last longer than the weekend if even that long.   With all of my gardening endeavors I realized that I wanted to learn how to preserve our crops in case we couldn’t eat it all before it went bad, so, I did what most people in their right mind would do, right?  I got on the phone  called my mother and asked if she still had all of her old canning equipment, once I got that squared away it was off to the hardware store to by jars and lids and pectin, and onto the internet to find recipes. 

Sunday started with Blackberry Jam – I now know why blackberry jam is so expensive – by the time you get through picking, cleaning and processing it takes a lot of work for a small amount of end result.  But oh my goodness does it taste good through the entire process.  With the left over berries I had just enough to make a cobbler, much to the happiness of you girls and your dad.

Sunday evening we pitted all of the cherries, mental note for next year – we need to invest in a better cherry pitter. And Monday (Memorial Day) I set to work on Cherry Pie Filling and maraschino cherries for Stevie.  By the end of this weekend, all told I have 9 jars of Jam, 2 jars of blackberry pie filling and 6 jars of cherry pie filling – canned and waiting to go into the garage for rainy days.  Hopefully this afternoon I’ll have another few jars of the cherries and we’ll see if that recipe is a keeper.

Things we learned this weekend:

-          Canning is a blast, but it is a lot of work, worth it though in the long run

-          Make sure you wear clothing that you don’t care about when working with berries, I think I washed 3 different shirts and a few pairs of pants this weekend from getting cherry and blackberry juice all over them

-          As always the best recipes are the most simple and food is always better when made and shared with the ones you love.

Fried Chicken and Mashed Potato recipes

Fried Chicken

1lb boneless skinless chicken breast cubed

1 egg

½ cup milk

1 cup flour

Salt and pepper to taste

1-2 cups oil
cooling rack

Paper towels

Fill a skillet with oil 1-2 inches deep depending on height, heat the oil in the skillet until the oil looks wavy, Wisk the egg and milk together in a shallow bowl, combine salt, pepper, and flour in a second bowl.  Dip the chicken in the milk mixture, then dredge through the flour and place gently in the oil (gently because the oil is hot and it’ll get you good if you burn yourself).  Cook on each side for at least 5 minutes flipping occasionally so as not to burn it.  Place on cooling rack with paper towels to drain the excess oil.

Surefire Mashed Potatoes:

Who can have fried chicken without mashed potatoes and they’re the easiest things to make from scratch.

1 potato for each person plus one for the pot so for a family of 4 – 5 potatoes pealed and diced

Salt

Water

Butter

¼- ½ cup of Milk

Salt and pepper to season

Place the pealed and diced potatoes in a pot and fill with water – potatoes should be covered by at least an inch of water, add a pinch of salt for flavor, bring to a boil and cook until when tested the potatoes are smash able with a fork (about 20 minutes).  Once cooked drain and place back in the pot with about a ½ stick of butter – you can use more or less depending on how buttery you like your potatoes, once the butter melts add the milk – again depending on how much butter you use will depend on how much milk you’ll want to add.  Use a fork or pastry mixer to mash everything together – I like my potatoes a little lumpy, if you want them smooth, use a stick blender instead, salt and pepper to taste and enjoy.

Sunday Dinner

I’ve realized recently that the Sunday Dinner Meal either late afternoon or early evening is an important tradition that I like keeping in my family.  Although I do have to say to my loving daughters this week it was missed for more “interesting” endeavors, but, as soon as you got home there were plates made and food reheated to partake in the more thoughtful meal.  And by thoughtful I mean time consuming, Sunday dinners tend to be more intricate just because I have the time to make them.  A roasted chicken dinner with all the fixings is almost unheard of during the week, with the short hours returning from work and before going to bed, but Sundays, all bets are off, we get home from church and after a short rest there’s a long afternoon to slow cook my way into food ecstasy.

This last Sunday was no different, there’s something about hitting the farmers market on Saturday morning, or the weekly romp down to Trader Joe’s with their fresh produce that get my creative juices flowing for fresh light meals, incorporating the veggies and fruits of the spring and summer, and when I have a little extra time to put some love into the dish the really great flavors of the food stand out better than I expect. Now I know that Fried Chicken is not at the top of the list of healthy meals, but,  I think there has to be a balance between healthy and tasty and sometimes they fall into the same category, sometimes not, and when I feel like having fried chicken I want it fried, not in an oven, not with a little oil and some flavorless covering, really coated, battered and fried in a skillet, the fact that it usually takes at least an hour for that process to occur on it’s on, not including the accoutrements makes it a meal less often had and every once in a while a good old fatty main dish meal is a good thing.  Remember that dear girls, in this era of light and low fat pre-packaged fast food grayness, a home cooked meal either healthy or not has to be better for you than some processed meat by-product you pick up anywhere else. 

So to make a long story longer, Sunday dinner – Fried food and all is still a good thing to have with your family sitting around the table that we had to clear off from the weekly clutter and weekend projects, make sure when you forage out on your own to make that a tradition of your own, either coming home like we used to do going to grandma and grandpas, or have your family over – Lord that I live to see the day!  Just remember that food made with love always tastes better when shared with the ones you love.

Toasting to Germany

With all of the events we having going on in our lives I’m surprised we eat at all sometimes. This week Frannie you had a report due on Germany, and to my surprise you blindsided me with having to cook a German dish for about 100 people. After trolling through a few recipe books and the internet AND convincing you that although black forest cake is a wonderful treat, it’s not the best thing to make if the cherries are not in season. Moreover, since beer was definitely off the menu for grade school kids, you and I decided on a very lovely German apple cake recipe. 

I think this might be the first time I’ve had you try to cook anything on your own from scratch – aside from peeling the apples, but don’t worry that will come in time or you can always get one of those really fun peeler/slicers we see on the cooking shows. I thought you did a great job getting the ingredients together and even the calculations for doubling the recipe, and if our oven would ever cook things in the time it’s supposed to it would be a miracle but even that didn’t slow us down. It was nice to have an afternoon with you in the kitchen, talking about life and teaching you how to read a recipe, and the smell of the apples and cinnamon as they were baking, was to die for. I only hope it tastes as good as it smelled coming out of the oven.

So what did we learn this week? Well, you and your sister still need to work on communicating things to me a little sooner than you normally do. You learned that depending on the dish, the tartness of the apples makes a huge difference in the flavor of the dish – Granny smiths for this cake definitely. In addition, I think I learned that spending an afternoon in the kitchen – planned or not – with my daughters has got to be one of my favorite things to do. I need to be reminded of that from time to time.

Tips for making this cake:

-          Use tart apples and slice them small

-          I think I might try to add nuts next time – maybe pecans

-          This is definitely more of a coffee cake than a dessert cake and it did call for a cream cheese frosting that neither one of us is fond of so don’t worry about topping it unless you want to

Next week we are going south of the border, I will be planning for the Coaches dinner and figuring out how to make Carne Asada and Fajita Chicken for 200+ people.

Radioactive Garlic

Last week was not one of my finest, we spent a lot of time not eating regularly or picking up meat and cheese and bread to snack on over the course of the evening.  I guess there is something to say for having you girls around, it keeps us on a regular eating schedule.  So this week I though I’d give you a story of your grandpa Chuck.

By the time you girls came around Grandpa was a really good cook, but, when we first starting eating his food he spent a lot of time learning and experimenting on ways to cook things differently.  Needless to say we had a number of meals that were barely edible at best.  I remember an evening when I was 10 when after dinner grandpa pulled out the cook book and dived into a section on bruschetta , there were beautiful recipes of toasted breads, photos with tomatoes of all colors, paired with green basil and pine nuts, some with meat others without,  all drizzled with oil and topped with garlic and cheese.  After stewing over the book for a little while he pulled out large elephant garlic from the basket next to the stove and lobbed off the top, put it on a plate and poured a large helping of oil all over the top.  He then sprinkled it with salt and instead of turning on the oven decided that it could be roasted in the microwave, with the same results in far less time. 

Now I have to tell you that microwaves in the 80’s are nothing like we have today, the one we owned had a dial for time, that also started the contraption and a button to open the door – That’s it, no convection setting, no timed thaw or popcorn button, it was the bottom of the line and was probably a throw back from the 70’s when Grandma and Grandpa were starting out.  He tosses the garlic into the microwave – turns the dial to 15 minutes and walks upstairs to watch TV and wait. 

In our old duplex, we had the bedrooms on the top floor and the living room, bathroom and kitchen on the ground floor, when you walked out of my bedroom to go down the stairs you could see the kitchen from the top of the stairs, and the microwave on the far wall.  I’m not sure why I was going downstairs at that precise moment, maybe because I wanted an after dinner snack, maybe because I needed to brush my teeth before bed, I’m really can not tell you, but as I started down the stairs, I looked into the darkened kitchen and saw something odd, a glowing light coming from the microwave – now I know a microwave glows when it’s cooking but this looked a little funny to me.  Then I realized that not only was the light glowing weirdly it was also pulsing, keeping time with the sound the microwave made when it was cooking things.  As I got closer, the box dinged to say it was done cooking but the window still showed a glowing pulsing light, Grandpa came strolling down the stairs to see how his garlic was cooking and stopped short at the bottom of the stairs, just staring at the pulsing glowing garlic in the window, as we stood there a ribbon of liquid started to ooze from the roof of the inside of the microwave on top of the garlic, suddenly we heard a loud bang  and speckles against the glass as the entire thing exploded inside the box.  Grandpa and I turned and looked at each other with surprise; he slowly hung his head and sighed, patted me on the shoulder and turned to the top of the stairs.  “Maude, we’re going to need to get a new microwave.”  Grandma replied “OK? Why?” – “Oh, no reason.” He slowly turned back to the kitchen, walked to the defunct microwave; un plugged it, and carried it out to the back yard, a stench of charred toxic waste and garlic wafting back in the house behind him. 

Even though there have been many “incidents” since, like the infamous roasting of the chestnuts or the setting fire to the sink fiasco.  The radioactive garlic is still one of my favorites and it teaches everyone a lesson about what you can and can not cook in the microwave. 

Recipes for Easter week

Chicken Fried Steak – serves 4 (if you’re lucky)

1 lb cube steak

1 egg

½ cup milk

Saltine crackers

½ cup flour

Pepper to taste

Vegetable oil

Cast iron skilled – 12.5 inch

Flatten out the cube steak – we use plastic wrap to cove the meat top and bottom and a small heavy skillet to beat it.  Cut the flattened pieces into manageable servings.  Crush up the saltine crackers to cornmeal consistency.  Coat the bottom of the skillet with about ½ inch of oil and place on med/high heat.  Pull out 3 wide bowls, place flour in one, mix the egg and milk in one and add the crackers and pepper to the last.  Once the oil starts to shimmer start coating the meat – One dip through the flour, one dip through the mild and last dip through the crackers.  Cook about 3 minutes on each side – paying attention not to burn the coating.   Drain on paper towels and serve immediately.

Fried Pickles – serves about 20

1 cup buttermilk

2 cups cornmeal

1 qt pickles

¼ tsp salt

¼ tsp pepper

½ tsp chili pepper

¼ tsp cayenne pepper

Oil

Purchase sliced pickles or slice whole ones to ½ inch thickness, add buttermilk to a bowl, mix cornmeal and spices to another bowl.  Heat the oil to 350, dip pickles into buttermilk then coat with cornmeal/spice mixture, fry until coating is browned, let drain on paper towels and serve hot. (Make sure to pre-warn the eaters that the center is really really hot)

Tri-tip marinade – for 4 lbs

1 cup lemon juice

1 cup vegetable oil

½ cup dried onion

3 tbsp fresh diced garlic

1/4 cup salt

3 tbsp fresh pepper

½ cup white vinegar

½ cup soy sauce

Mix all of the ingredients together in a large container, trim the meat and let sit in the fridge at least overnight.  Grill and enjoy

If all else fails ham –

½ cup brown sugar

1/3 cup white vinegar

3 tbsp grainy mustard (Dijon)

Cloves

Mix brown sugar with white vinegar, and Dijon.  Score the outside of the ham to make a diamond pattern, add cloves to the outside, coat with brown sugar mixture and cook at 350 for 1-2 hours or until the internal temp of the ham reaches 145 degrees.