FoodNerd!

Got a big batch of hen of the woods ‘shrooms from the farmer’s market this weekend. Sauteed them with garlic, lots of olive oil & plenty of salt, and a good shot of sherry. Put them over a very small amount of pasta, and at last a decent mushroomy flavor. Whew.

A good thing to do with the last of the red garden tomatoes that are about to rot, and a diced green pepper someone brought over for a salad and no one ate (of course not, because green peppers are gross). It’s an old-skool yankee new england thing — my mom and grandma would make this when I was a kid, and I thought it was the most revolting thing this side of raw green peppers, but somehow in my 30s I figured out that it’s delicious: tangy, sweet, savory. Great with roast meats, on sandwiches, with cheese & crackers. And also great mixed into sweet boston-style baked beans.
6 ripe tomatoes (2.5 lbs, or 2 pint cans)
2 peppers (1 will do)
1 onion
1/2 cup cider vinegar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
scant 1/2 tbsp salt
1/2 cup sugar (you may want to use 2/3 cup)
Peel the tomatoes if you are industrious, or do what I do and put them in the saucepan in really big chunks and when they’ve cooked a little, fish the chunks out and pull off the skins. Chop the peppers and onion into a fairly fine dice, or to your liking for a condiment. Add them to tomatoes, along with the vinegar, salt & sugar. Let it cook down over a slow heat. Break up the tomatoes as they soften. If you think it needs more vinegar or sugar after it’s cooked down enough to blend flavors, add a bit more so you’re using the 2/3 cup quantity. Keep boiling it down, stirring as needed to prevent burning, until it’s as thick a sauce as you want. Mine cooked slowly for most of the afternoon, and is still a bit loose. If you really get it thick, it’ll be quite sweet, like a tangy jam, or you can leave it looser and it’ll be more vegetal and saucy. I give mine a couple of zaps with the immersion blender to even out the texture a bit, though it’s still chunky. Pour it into a clean jar and keep in the fridge. This recipe makes about 1.5 pints. If you like canning, you can do a batch of 5 pints (7.5 lbs tomato, 1.5 lb peppers, .75 lb onion, 2.5 c vinegar, 1 tbsp salt, 2 c sugar) and put them up the proper way… but as previously stated on this blog, I am lazy, so I skip the canning part and rely on the fridge.

My mom gave me a bunch of concord grapes this weekend, a few red ones from the backyard and a bigger pile of black ones from somewhere in the woods. You can’t eat ’em, because they’re pretty tart and have a very weird texture, kind of like a juicy eyeball inside a tough leather shell. But you can most definitely make jelly out of ’em. We did it last year (with moderate success) and were all fired up to do it this year.
One thing I have learned is that the black concords are WAY better than the red. The reds are good, but the black have that intense ur-grape flavor we know from Welch’s fine products, and they also have the most gorgeous purple color when cooked, while the red ones get kind of drab, as you can see in the picture below. (Watch out — the gorgeous purple stains in a flash, so don’t get any on the counter or porous surfaces.)
I use the jelly recipe in the old (1975) edition of The Joy of Cooking. Annoyingly, the new edition has jettisoned the jam & jelly section entirely, which i find extra-bizarre given the popularity of Martha-type activities these days. Anyway, you crush or slice the fruit and cook it down with a tiny bit of water till it releases juice and gets all soft. The house will be permeated with the most intoxicatingly wonderful grape smell, like walking past a ripe grapevine in the woods, only ten times better. Then you strain it through a cheesecloth, just letting it sit there and drip, resisting the intense urge to squeeze the cloth to get the last precious bits of juice, because if you do, the jelly will be (*gasp* the horror!) cloudy.

Of course this makes me insane, because A) i am impatient, and B) i am greedy, and I hate the idea of wasting that lovely fruit pulp. I had the additional excuse of having only a wisp of cheesecloth left in the house the night I cooked up the fruit, so I decided to try making grape JAM instead of jelly. I scraped the pulp through a fine sieve, getting all the juice & pulp out and leaving just a pasty mess of skin & seeds. Kind of looked like I’d been mistreating a poor defenseless pomegranate.
Then back to the jelly-making procedure: I cooked the goo with a cup of sugar (uh, not enough, but also the only sugar left in the house — i plan ahead good, eh?) until it got thickish, like jam would be if you melted it over heat. This is an improvement over last year, where I couldn’t get that concept through my head and I kept waiting for it to get thicker, and in the end had jelly that was completely solid, like stiff grape jello. (I had to cut it into chunks and mix it into plain yogurt, which was actually really delicious.)
It came out pretty nice, the texture of a thick apple butter. It’s got a bit of a bitterish undertaste, which I suppose is because of all the solids I forced into it. Sigh. Those old timers knew what they were doing, as usual. But it still tastes *good*, with that musky concord grapey goodness, and is certainly less sweet than most preserves, which is quite to my liking. And I’m going to make granita out of that little pool of red grape juice tomorrow.

Have you ever wondered how they get baked potatoes in restaurants to be so deliciously simple, and to have that magically sturdy crust that you can scrape every last starchy morsel out of? I have. And now I know.
I was baking some russets (good ones from the farmer’s market, bonus) and I forgot to really time them, so I was paranoid about raw innards, so I left them in there for like 80 minutes at 400F. I went to poke one & test it, and the skewer was rebuffed — for a second I thought it was raw. But no, just sturdy: when cut open, they were just as fluffy and gorgeous as the ones in a steakhouse. And crust, my god, there is crust. Which is perfect for what I was going to use them for: Baltic Stuffed Potatoes, from what has to be the Funnest Cookbook Ever.
Bake big potatoes as above, cut open in such a way as to leave nice potato cups, scrape out insides. Saute finely diced onion and wild mushroom (dried, fresh, whatever) in butter. Smash a can of smoked sprats (usually available in Russian or Slavic markets, and sometimes regular supermarkets) to smithereens with a fork. Mix all of this together with some chopped dill (or whatever herb, i had no dill so used parsley & thyme), ground pepper, salt, a couple tablespoons fresh lemon juice, and enough sour cream to get the party started right.
You’re supposed to stuff that back into the potato shells and put a little parmesan and bake at 375F till nice & golden, but I couldn’t handle it and just macked it down out of a bowl. I’ll put a picture up later on, though it’s not very photogenic. Yum! Seriously — even if you don’t really like canned fish, you’ll like this: sprats have a nicer flavor than sardines, and that flavor goes *really* well with mushrooms and butter and sour cream and potato. Not kidding. Try it.

We grew long beans in the garden this year, because tallasiandude likes them (i do too, but duh). The first few batches I cooked in nonstandard ways, like with chopped walnuts and walnut oil — which were yummy, but not scratching tallasiandude’s itch. So I started cooking them chinese-style, but the first couple of attempts failed: they weren’t the flavors he was looking for. We saw a plateful in a restaurant that looked right, so I used that as the basis, and I’ve finally come up with a recipe that we both like a lot. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I don’t have fresh long beans in my backyard anymore. Oy.
It’s a pretty adaptable recipe, as it turns out, and can handle substitutions & variable quantities pretty well:
Take some chinese long beans, cut into bite size pieces (or you can use regular green beans) and fry them over fairly high heat in a very little bit of oil. When they’ve started to blister and soften, add some ground pork and break it up as it fries. You can also substitute finely diced ham, like I did tonight because I didn’t have any more pork in the freezer. The proportions don’t matter — be guided strictly by your preference or what you happen to have. Sprinkle with black pepper. Once the pork is cooked, sprinkle with about a teaspoon of sugar. Take about half a 3.5 oz packet of pickled turnip/salted spicy radish, or however much you like, cut it into small bits, and add it. (Not sure how to specifically describe this stuff, except that it is the stuff you get in pork & pickled turnip noodle soup. Use whatever salty pickly chinese turnip stuff you like.) Add about a tablespoonful of spicy bean paste, and stir to blend. (There’s a whole other post to be written about spicy bean paste, which I’m sure we’ll get to eventually.) Add about a teaspoon of chinese black vinegar, and stir it around to distribute it before it evaporates. When it’s dry and looking ready, serve it. Add salt if it needs salt (probably will if you used pork, and won’t if you used ham), and chili oil if it needs more spiciness. You definitely want white rice with this, as it’s pretty savory stuff.
This has become my favorite companion dish for Pei Mei’s beef & broccoli, which is very rewarding to cook because it makes tallasiandude so happy. *grin*