7 7 7 Marmalade

Last Winter, I made marmalade and wrote about it. The marmalade was great, the recipe acceptable, and the writing kinda bad. 

Last week, I made another batch, because Cara Cara oranges were on sale for 88 cents a pound. A lucky double-eight smiles on fate in many cultures, so I took it as a sign that I should fill a couple bags and get to cooking. Even without mystical callings to make jam, cheapskates like me know that 88 cents is about half the usual sale price, and that it's a good bet the citrus is dead ripe and they're in a hurry to move it. Deal lapse and fruit rots, but every once in a whole fate smiles and if you're alert you can capture it in jars, preserving it til you need it.

With enough for a couple of batches, I had opportunity to improve on last year's operation. So here I am again, reporting, but this time not burdened with writerly pretensions.

It's called 7 7 7 Marmalade because there are 7 pounds of oranges, 7 cups of sugar, and it makes 7 pints. The amount of water isn't 7, but I'm gonna ignore that. Here's the recipe.

7 7 7 Marmalade

Get 7 pounds of oranges, (Cara Cara is what I use, but the main thing is to get something with an aromatic skin.)

Peel the zest from 3 oranges, and then halve and slice the whole batch. Make the first cut from naval to where the stem was, and the slices should be a half centimeter thick. (That's a skinny quarter inch, Americans.) Cut up the zest however you want. I go for a random chop that yields everything from slivers to uncut pinky-sized pieces (That's over 5 cm, everyone else in the world; in the US, "pinky" is your small finger, and is an acceptable unit of measure.) Put the zest aside.

If you're smart, lazy, or both, you'll be sliding the orange slices directly into a 12 quart stock pot, which will be about full when you finish.

Pour 4 cups of water into the pot and start cooking.

I start at the low end of Medium High on the stove, and once the boil begins, start to inch it up to high Medium High. (That's, uh, nobody really knows what temperature stove knob units correlate to. Sorry, citizens of earth.) Let some of the water evaporate, but the goal is not to boil off the liquid; go for a long low boil that dissolves the pulp and a lot of the pith. The end result will remain liquidy and most un-jamlike.

After the first boil.

Now, let it sit til the next day. It gives you a break, and I think it helps maximize the natural pectin. Yeah, that's right, don't add pectin to marmalade. It makes its own. 

When it's time, get your canning set-up in order, and be sure you're ready to stand at the stove and stir for a while. Put on "Blowout Comb" by Digable Planets, or some other hour-long album, and then put the pot back on a low Medium High stove. 

Add 7 cups of sugar and the zest and stir them in well. I also experimented by grating half a nutmeg into one batch at this point, and about an inch of ginger root into the other; not sure if I really taste it.  Watch and adjust the temp as necessary until you have a hearty simmer. No lid this time, because you do want to cook it down. At first, no need to stir constantly, but by about Track 7 (titled "Dial 7," see why this CD fits this recipe?), you should see the marmalade beginning to emerge. I've been using a large metal spatula for the stirring, because it's long handle keeps my hands away from the sugary lava, and it's good for scraping the bottom so nothing sticks. 

There are all sorts of recipes that say the jam must reach specific temperatures, or recommend tests like dropping some jam on a cold plate to see if it is thick enough. But the risk of burning yourself to get thermometer readings or the hassle of another dish to wash are not necessary. Here's how you know it's ready:

• You see the jam getting darker, and that more of it is sticking to the side of the pot.
• You hear the boil change from simmer to thick ploppy bubbles, and finally to a rumble bubble that explodes each time you stir.
• You feel your arm muscles burning as you stir through thickening glop.

Cut the heat and get the jars ready. Make sure your canner water is boiling before you put anything in the jars. I usually start that at the same time as the marmalade boil, dialing down once it reaches its own boil, and then crank it up again along with a smaller pot of water to sterilize the lids when the marmalade is ready.

Leave a centimeter or a skinny half inch of headspace as you fill half or whole pint jars. (I put a spoonful of bourbon in the bottom of two pints, but will wait a while to sample those.) Screw on the lids loosely and process for, you guess it, 7 minutes. 

For those of you who cannot abide stream-of-consciousness recipe format, here's the listy version:

Ingredients

• 7 pounds oranges, sliced thin after removing the zest of three oranges.
• 4 cups water
• 7 cups sugar

Directions
 
Boil 1: oranges and water until pulp dissolves and skins soften
Wait overnight
Boil 2: and sugar and zest to the mix and slowly return to a boil, stirring increasinly often
Use your sense and the done-ness list above to know when to stop.
Boil 3: process half or one-pint jars in boiling water canner for 7 minutes.  

Yields 7 pints.

That's It? (DIY Butter)

Shake it!

Yep. Get a jar o milk and shake it for a while. 20 minutes? I dunno, you just gotta commit that once you start, you don't quit until there's butter. It'll appear when it's good and ready, but when it does, it's pretty obvious (once the foam settles), like this:

Mmmm...rich creamery cowagulant.

Simplicity may just be deviousness, though, and of course there are a few guaranteed ways to fail (and infinite opportunities to elaborate, but that's somebody else's blog). I shouldn't have to say so, but  since this is the internet, "No skim milk." Not even 2%. You need whole milk or else all the butter embryos have been stripped out and sold to the highest bidder. Better yet, get that old-school glass jug from a local organic dairy, the one that's already got cream adhereing to the head-space. 

Do this after they put the stuff on sale, because the stuff is expensive. Maybe you can snag them on cheap at the expiration date, which most milkologists will agree amounts to a discounted head start on buttermilk and sour cream. (Maybe I jest. Please to not consume what could be spoiled food on the basis of a  blog post. Let us now return to the proper focus of the internet, which is money:) But don't make butter to save money, because it's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy it than do this, unless you have a friend with a cow.

Which brings us to the matter of yield. A half pint turned into less than what a pancake restaurant plops on your flapjack stack. Which can still be a lot, but if you're planning to slather it on bread or melt it in a mountain of griddlecakes, you're gonna eat this butter in less time than it took to make it. 

You still have the de-buttered milk, though. Not being a calf, I don't drink milk, but cooking with it is fine. It's still got enough body to cream up a soup or a sauce. Seems like it would be good for baking, but again, don't take web-based musings as valid kitchen guidance. 

In fact, I've done this just twice. Some fluke may rank this page higher than some poor butter-churner who has labored for years. Based on my meager experience, I would say only that you should not go nuts with vigorous shaking, which actually leaves you with lots of small curds instead of the one big ball you get if you start to just swirl the liquid once they start appearing.

DIY Butter Recipe

• Put less than a jar full of whole milk in a jar, and screw the lid on tight
• Shake it until there is butter
• Take the butter from the milk

Strawberry Jam. So simple you should learn some Hawaiian while you make it.

Mmmm...splattery goodness. Maika'i

Back by the Chesapeake where I grew up, strawberries have long since been picked or baked by the unrelenting sun, but here in the Northwest, they're going strong. This year, I was lucky enough to get enough from the home garden to make a batch of jam without curtailing my daughters' grazing. Like most foods I really love, jam is pretty simple to make. So simple, that maybe you can learn some Hawaiian while you do it. Here's a dictionary to help you.

Dump the following into a big steel stock pot:

• 11 cups  of  berries (hap-hazardly & half-heartedly smash 'em down prior to measuring, but whole-heartedly ku'i da buggas with a potato masher once they’re into the kettle)
• 4.5 cups of sugar

I brought this up to a low boil while distracted by other tasks, so it coulda been done faster, but longer only means more time for everything to come all miko (your dictionaries tend to speak of salt with this word, but I've heard it used to convey the idea of something marinating, sitting together while flavors blend and soak through), which I think for jam means a better chance of it coming pa’a, and not all he’e.

Speaking of which, it was around this time that I added 

• Pectin (powder kind) - 1 regular and 1 of supposedly no-sugar-needed [given my results, maybe you should add another]

Then I let it boil quietly for a little while longer, until one time when I took out the spoon, the sugar-red clung well enough, and I began putting out the jars.
Did I mention that I was sterilizing jars in the canner this whole time? No? Well I was, but not to turn around and plop them back in the boiling bath for processing. My grandmothers sealed strawberry jam with molten paraffin, using a can with a bent-rim spout to pour the wax onto the jarred jam; the can sits in a small pot of hot water, so that drips won’t burst into flame.

The yield is 7 pints, maybe a little less. There was not all that much foam to scrape off the post-pectin boil, and some jam managed to find its way onto the kettle, the jam-pouring big measuring cup, the spoon, the counter, my sweatshirt, and some other place that I will only discover weeks from today. So the yield would be a solid 7 pints to a cook whose frugality extends to actually being neat.

Now, 7 pints of jam is a pretty small amount, but it came from a 3rd-year patch of my own planting, so I’m pretty happy. A day’s easy picking from 27 square feet, give or take, mellowing and softening in the fridge for a couple of days, working toward miko, and now it’s jam. Not a bad small side project for a weekend.

How was this jam? A little he'e, to be honest, but I couldn’t be bothered to do more than throw in whatever pectin was at hand, and it didn’t end up as syrup, at least. A day in the fridge before serving helps, and it’s possible to make a sandwich with it, which satisfies the kids’ main criterion. If your own requirement is to have a thicker jam, the  find another recipe, or throw in another pack o pectin, and maybe more sugar,...whatever works.

The flavor, on the other hand, is ono. I have no idea what variety the berries are, but they are medium sized, and red to the core, no pulp, all juicy. Mmmm. If you’ve been comparing recipes, you’ve noticed that I don’t use as much sugar as some people, because my tongue likes a tang, but it’s plenty sweet.

A Nice Slice

Has the quality of Hass improved, or is it the shipping time, or could it have just been so long since I've lived in Kona that my avocado aficionado qualifications have expired? Regardlessly, happy am I over the state of grocery store avocados in the northwest in this year of faux-Mayan doom, 2012. Is the Thriftway avo as fine as a mayan? Mebbe not, but it's a slippery treat of a slice, that tastes mighty nice.


Say you're a working person. It's the pen-penultimate day to Cinco de Julio, and you forgot to put the puerco in the crock-pot this morning. You've jammed at work to make your holiday free of worries, and you come home later than usual to no supper. You could steam some rice, saute something to go with it, or maybe go the noodle route...Or, you could skip carbs and remember that jumbo avo sitting behind the onions in the bread bowl, further obscured by tomatoes and a half of a demi-baguette. 


Your thumb flips the stem-nub off with just enough resistance to tell you that this alligator pear is  nott en-rotten, the  your other hand sinks knife through skin and down-to the ridiculous testiculous seed of this most cyclopian scrotumly of fruit-packets. Cut the Greenwich and it's opposite longitude, pull half the fruit off and swack the blade into said seed, then twisting to remove it from remaining half. Fling it wherever suits you.


Then you cut slices onto a plate. Splash some hot sauce (Ingredients: water, chiles, salt, vinegar--anything more is an abomination), and squeeze some lime (from a fruit, dammit! Not an abominalous plastic thingy). Yumm. Hot-tangy slipperyous goodness. Healthier than pork-fat, and nearly as tasty.

 

Rhubarb Poppyseed Bread

I'm headed toward bringing in the next batch of rhubarb, which reminds me that it's been a few weeks since the bake sale, when I MoGyvered up that rhubarb recipe. Maybe you just searched for "poppy seed rhubarb," and found yourself here, faced with this monstrosity. Scroll down if it's just the recipe you want, otherwise I return you not to a digression already in progress:

What the hell is that thing in the picture? Face like a pugnacious ninja kitty, or a morbidly obese viper,...whatever the case, it's got hair like Moe Stooge. 

But it's delicious. The photo is of the runt of the batter, the leftovers baked in the tiniest corningware. The better ones looked like this:

What? Another cartoony bake-face?

The challenge of baking in bulk led me to this recipe. I'd been planning on lemon poppy bars, but health regs (yes, there are rules for even bake sales, so we don't all die horrible deaths, poisoned by amateurs) don't like custardy stuff and demand a level of packaging that would be inconvenient or wasteful for something so delicate.

A quick bread would solve this dilemma, or maybe a lemon poundcake. But as it turned out, there weren't all that many lemons left in the house. But there was a ton of rhubarb ready to pull, and those red stems are tart, so lemon poppy bars became rhubarb poppy bread. Poppies? Yeah. I grew breadseed poppies last year, and had about 4 cups of seed. I'd been seeing a cars with small hubcaps parking nearby, two guys in dark glasses sitting in it pretending to read newspapers, and I knew it was only a matter of time before the dragnet closed around me and the raw uncut kugelach with a street value of dozens of dollars, maybe.

Not kugelach, actually, but another type of European poppy treat bastardized by an American. Something like Mohnkuchen, to use the Deutsch, a bread topped with a mixture of farina, poppyseed, sugar and vanilla. The bread I treated like I did banana bread when I grew them in Hawai'i: put way more fruit than any recipe calls for, and get something as close to bread pudding as to bread, dense instead of crumbly. So I substituted a bunch of rhubarb (cooked down to applesauce consistency) for the eggs and some of the milk, and put just enough sugar to take the edge off. The bread lacked the tart zing I'd been going for,  but it worked out fine.

And here it is:

Mohnkuchen(isch)

First, mix up the bread, which requires:   

• Flour         3 cups
• Sugar        2/3 cups
• Baking powder      1 1/4 tsp   
• Baking soda    1/3 tsp
• Salt         1/2 tsp

Mix all this in a big bowl, and then stir in:

• Rhubarb sauce    1 1/2 cups
• Milk       3/4 cup

Go ahead an plop it into a big greased loaf pan, and get going with the topping, which means you have to make cream of wheat with poppyseed in it (or, vice versa). So bring 2 cups of milk to a near boil and stir in:

• Poppyseed     1 cup
• Farina        1/3 cup
• Sugar         1/2 cup
• Vanilla       1 1/3 tsp
• Butter       1 Tbs

This will thicken up quickly, and you need to make sure that you keep stirring so it does not get too lumpy. But there will be lumps. It is the essence of farina. Be at peace with it, and think about the egg. Because you need an egg. But if you dump it into this mix it will cook immediately, and what you want is to blend it evenly. 

So get a spoonful of the poppy farina and sit it on the counter. Now crack the egg in a bowl, beat it, and if the spoon has cooled off, stir it in. Keep adding small amounts of the poppy mix until you have a cup or two of the stuff, which you can now stir back into the main pot o poppy mix. 

Then pour this on top of the bread batter in the pans. I found that a slit down the middle of the bread batter seems to keep the poppy on top, unlike in the experimental first batch pictured in cross section above. 

Slide your fake mohnkucken into a 360 degree oven. I cooked for a while, but don't recall exactly how long, and I was doing a half dozen loaves at once, so it won't be the same for you anyway. A nice mahogany color on top seems to be about the stage where you should get it the heck out of the oven.

Spring Garlic

Garlic pokes up through colder ground and shorter days than a lot of its garden compadres. Even in my yard's procrastinating Spring, only a day after Equinox, the vee-creased shoots are ankle high. This is in a new bed enriched with fireplace ash, maybe a hundred or so plants. There are a few odd rows here and there in the yard, and of course a few heads I missed last fall sprouting green tonsures.


Contrary to the Fall-planting orthodoxy, I pulled up and split up some of the volunteer knobs, replanting willy nilly just a couple of weeks ago. Others I let be until a hankering for scallions or scapes, maybe an autumnal bulbil, brings me back. Freebies for the rest of the year, with the extra spice only disorthodoxy can summon.


Meanwhile, inside the house, the cloves awaken. As soon as the mature heads are pulled from the soil, garlicians struggle to make them last as long as possible. A cool dry garage and some jars of olive oil did the trick this year. At least until the Solstice, when even under roof and Winter's cloudy grey, the cloves hear the call of the lengthening days and begin their six-month stretch. Either I've selected better keepers or I was lucky this time around, because by this time in previous years, all the dry stuff had long since decided to be a new plant.

The last of the dried cloves, just now sprouting, don't inspire foodies. They're yellowing and getting a little soft; the only crisp part is a green shoot through the heart of each one, reaching out the top for light. Meanwhile, at the other end, octopodic roots begin to reach out, hoping to get their tentacles into some soil. Some people would plant them, others (under the thrall of Autumnist dogma?) would waste them, or at best relegate them to the compost. 


But being frugal, I use them up. Sliced, each piece is an eye with a green pupil, a look I like. Then again, doing nothing more than peeling them (easy, at this late stage) and tossing them in whatever happens to be in the works works as well. A recent desire to cut out the chemicals and other afflictions of canned beans, I've been buying them dried, and cooking them in a crock pot. A head of past-prime garlick cloves added to this gestation is a fine and nearly effortless addition. I will end this entry with proof, in the form of another of my so-simple-it's-not-even-a-recipe recipes:

Crocked Garlic and Beans

• Clean and rinse 1 pound of dried beans
• Peel however much garlic you want
• Put it all in a crock-pot with water
• Turn it on
• Wait

While you are waiting, decide whether you want to add anything else. You'll have hours to think of extra ingredients, such as: beer, salt, schmaltz, celery,... You should probably stop obsessing about bean cuisine right about now. It's unbecoming of simple staples, which have humble souls that are put off by high-falutingness (but tolerant of flatusness). Just let 'em cook until you are satisfied with their mushiness. And turn whatever epicurean inspiration that might strike toward something to go with your crock o beans. 

 

Scrap Mustard

Now and then, the plague of near-empty jars and their litters of ziplocks rattling with yet un-et dry goods just gets out of hand. Before they lure in some hungrier critter, it's time to clean out.


But not throw out, if you can help it. So it was that I assembled assorted packets of mustard and poppy seed, two jugs' last glugs of vinegar, and a bottle of beer into a big-ass jar of mustard. It's the same 'run what ya got' spirit that gets credit or blame for  lot of my efforts, and which animated stock car racing back when it was with stock cars. And like racing's bootlegging roots, this recipe sneaks in some alcohol.

 Saying that I 'made mustard' is incredibly pretentious. The fact is that I poured liquid on seeds and later smashed it up. It being late and me being lazy (Lord, when will the hillbilly stereotypes end?), instead of a mortar and pestle I used a wee food processor, which is also more practical for small batch production that doesn't merit a stompin' party (which is like with grapes, but wearing pointy cowboy boots). 

 Not rocket science. Give it a day to soak, and then mush it up. Add a little salt if you want. I have enough of the basic mustard and experiment with other flavors, maybe puree or pound some to a finer texture, maybe do something completely different. Then feed it to people. So I guess it is some kind of science. 


 There is also faith, that some permutation of this concoction will taste pretty good. If I were a proper food blogger, I'd have gotten fancy vinegar, maybe some wine, and definitely not have used that photo with the plastic jugs. But I'm just a son of a scientist and an Appalachian, a squatter in epicurean territory: no exquisite photography, no mustard lore, not even a great how-to or recipe. Even my blog layout is inexpertly tweaked prefabbery.


 But the mustard is good, and cheap, and will take up space in the fridge til it's gone. The recipe's right after one last photo, illustrating the finished product in all it's baby poopish glory.

 

Scrap Mustard
 Get a jar, and fill it a third of the way up with:

• Mustard Seeds - as many colors as you have, living in harmony
• Poppy Seeds - a couple of good fistfuls of the ones I grew a couple years ago

 Then, mix up some type of liquid, enough to pour into the jar til it's 2.3 full. For instance:

• One  12 bottle of stout 
• Several ounces of the leftovers from bottles of apple cider vinegar and white vinegar.

 You can probably do better than that last ingredient, and maybe you like some other kind of beer better. Pour it in the jar and let it sit for 24 hours. Check it in the meantime and add liquid if the seeds aren't covered. When the time is up (or, a day or two later when you pull it out of the fridge where you put it when you realized you weren't gonna get around to it), mush it until its reached your ideal smoothness. I like the way the whole seeds pop whe  you bite them, and even held some aside during the food processing, but the machine is small and weak, and I didn't have to worry about it ending up too homogenous.  


 

Lord Marmelade

[What follows is a post originally from Mojourner Truth, but it's about marmelade time again in the Mocavore kitchen, so I am in a recycling mood.]

The title here is a twisting of Lady Marmalade, whose gichy gichy yaya is one of the few riffs guaranteed to get me dancing, but which has nothing to do with this entry. That weren't no lady, and marmalade seems so un-funky, more old-fashioned and British. Ergo the "Lord." 

Paddington Bear and old women take their tea with marmalade at the ready, it's medicinal power soothing the harm done to one's palate by the clinkery toast favoured on that side of the pond. My grandparents liked it, and I do too, but few devotees are young. Not sweet enough, too full of the peel that Americans have cast off for generations.

This concoction's etymology trails back to classical times, alluding to the Greek "honey apple," an apple grafted to the quince. For a long time, it has meant a jam or preserve including citrus, the acidity probably important before sanitary canning, preservatives, and pasteurization. 

Now it's a nostalgic taste to some, to me. I made some batches this year, both to practice the science of canning which was nearly lost by my generation, as well as to savor something grandma made. The first time I used blood oranges, which I'm guessing would have been unimaginably exotic in central Ohio during the Depression, when as a young mother she began canning in earnest. I followed her lead, and made a portion into "hot jam" by inserting a cinnamon stick into each jar as it was filled. I also experimented with some, adding some local cranberries to the mix to redden it further and add a bit of bite.

Equally exotic may have been the preternaturally orange navels of the modern supermarket, bred for looks, tasting like water. The blood oranges had the allure of aroma, more flavor packed into a tennis ball sized fruit than in the softballs lobbed out of Florida by the trainload. Even better, they were on sale.

Same goes for the variety in the next batch. The local grocery had a sale on "Cara Cara" oranges, which were dead ripe and redolent of heaven as I walked in. I immediately filled a couple of bags with the fruit, same size as the bloods, similarly ugly on the outside with patches of green, some blemishes, and even a soft spot or two (all of which told me the "organic" label was not fake, and that they'd been picked ripe). This time, I went for straight marmalade, no experimental or family-inspired additives.

I don't have grandma's recipe, and had to go looking on the internet, my approach to which is to triangulate, to look at plenty and attempt to discern a logic. The first task is always to weed out the bullshit: the people repeating some untested recipe because they like to post stuff, the "easy" versions maximizing prepared stuffs and minimizing cooking, and the just plain mistaken. Eventually, I zero in on the essentials, and get an idea of the leeway in ingredients and proportions that won't result in failure. The rest is reconciling units (cups versus pounds of sugar, pounds versus numbers of oranges), and trying to figure out what my palate wants compared to typicality, which in this case was less sugar.

In the end, it was this:

• 10 pounds of oranges (32 or so of the size  favor) - Peel the zest off of about 1/4 of them, quarter and thinly slice everything else.
• 6 cups of water - Add this and the oranges to a large steel or enamel pot, and gradually bring to a boil. Keep cooking til the only identifiable pieces are the rinds, which should be quite soft.
• Now, turn it off and do something else til tomorrow. You may want to cover it to keep the varmints out
• Start again by gradually returning your orange slurry to a boil. 
• 10 cups of sugar (You have pretty wide latitude here, I think. Add less to begin, and keep adding til it seems right to you.) - Add the zest and stir. And stir! If you don't it'll start to stick and burn on the bottom of the pot. 
• The mixture is sneaky and vindictive at this point--it will look calm, lulling you into not stirring. Then when you start again you release a sudden violent boiling, a volcanic eruption of orange lava hotter than boiling that will stick to your skin and burn like hell. Sweet hell, but painful nonetheless.
• A lot of recipes carry on about how you need to bring the stuff to 220 or 222 degrees, or the jam won't set. I've never managed to get it past about 215, and it has set fine. The key things seem to be: it gets darker, you begin to have trouble keeping it from sticking and burning, and it gets thick enough that after a while you cannot stand to stir any more. It's done, so you can it.

This last batch went into some old squat jars I got at a yard sale. Some proudly proclaimed their modernity with embossed patent dates from over a century ago (the same wide-mouth lids of today work just fine, and it's good to know that some things don't change). 

I dipped into one of these pots of marmalade--talking in a Paddington accent of course--and was rewarded with the colour and flavour of liquid sunshine. Nostalgic in name and appearance, perhaps, but as bright and fresh a taste as I could imagine. 

Yum.

Spiced Apples

About a year ago, on the last day of the farmers' market, I picked up 40 pounds of apples. Got a pretty good deal (36 bucks), but still not good enough to make cider that wouldn't have a hint of regret on my cheapskate palate. Most of them are just my winter supply of fresh fruit.

Fresh-ish, anyway. They're winesaps, so they age well.

I'm aging OK myself, I think, and part of the process has been a nostalgia. In this case, for a flavor, for those spiced apple rings that used to be served in steak houses. So a dozen pounds underwent the knife, guinea pigs in my attempt to retrieve a flavor that I may not even remember correctly.

Turns out, you can buy spiced apples, and they look like what I recall, but where's the fun in that?

Nowhere. The fun is in the ridiculous frivolous project. A couple of hours surfing, searching, sorting until deciding on a recipe that matches none of the listed ones exactly. Slicing and coring, trying to find enough containers to keep the growing pile of rings soaked in limey water to keep them from oxidizing. Stirring syrup and steeping the apples. Ladling and canning the results, trusting that a bath in boiling water would absolve the jars of my earthy earthly sins.

Research showed two paths to becoming lord of the spiced apple rings. Normally, I'd go for the more natural, but this being nostalgia for a time before I'd ever heard of granola, when space-age syntheticality ruled, and when I was a wee candy-loving kid, I went for the other, in which a key ingredient is red hots. Yep, those little cinnamony hearts. Anyway, a lot of people taking the 'natural route' advised using red food color, and I'd rather just go whole spam and avail myself of modern convenience in the form of red hots, combining the best in fake color and flavor.

I still used real cloves, because they are redolent of exotic islands. I was a big National Geographic fan back then. (Post-modernists popped the bubble of that particular joy, and I am down to a small collection of issues that are either very old or feature Polynesia. Oh, and a box o maps, just so I can prove that NG once knew about latitude and longitude.)

But I digress (to resort to what must be one of the most common blog phrases). You just wanna know if it worked.

Color-wise, not so much. Ergo the wildly exaggerated colors in these photos (thanks Mac). That's OK, since I am pretty sure the 'real' color depends on carcinogenic dye, and true nostalgia does not demand authenticity, maybe cannot even survive too much fidelity to reality. So I have pink rings. I sampled the not-worth-using-another-jar few, and the texture seems right (somewhere in that limbo between raw crunch and cooked mush). The flavor snapped a synapse back to life (causing the dust to flare briefly), and I think the red hots did the trick in that regard. But this being a quest for something I tasted so long ago, the wait must be prolonged a bit more. Let them soak, stand, and wait for my bite. I'll report back later. (Right. More likely, I'll forget I ever wrote this.)

Recipes? We don't Need Recipes! (Usually)

"Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!" is not only the most famous (mis)quote from Blazing Saddles, it is a guiding principle for many of us, and this holds true in the realm of food, from its growing (I'll never be a certified Master Gardener) to it's consumption (I enjoy what I like with a blissful ignorance that appalls true foodies). So it should come as no surprise that my cooking is only loosely guided by recipes. I am no baker or devotee of Spanish molecular cuisine, so it usually doesn't much matter. 


Last year, Mom gave be a little booklet of photocopies of recipes written in her hand and those of my grandmothers and some other relatives. I've referred to it once or twice with re-creation of a family favorite in mind, but mostly it is a talisman, a link to childhood and my ancestors. Mom herself had a wooden box full of index cards, clippings, and various scraps of paper with instructions for construction of all sorts of concoctions, some of which she actually made, and others of which were more aspirational in nature. When the computer age dawned (maybe 'mid-morninged' would be more accurate), she saw the devices as an exciting new form of wooden box, and began a process of entering recipes that continues to this day.

I'll cop to following a few recipes. When canning, for instance, I'm still too new to be automatic and I have a healthy wariness of botulism, so I follow the guidance of people who know better. And for some reason, I still look up the proportion of water to oats every time I make oatmeal. 

But what about when making something new? On occasions when I'm trying to replicate something particular, I'll use a recipe. But it's usually a matter of looking up a bunch of them, discerning the commonalities, and distilling an essence that suits me. Then, adding back on ingredients geared to my own taste, maybe changing a technique to something I'm more likely to pull off without burning myself or the meal. I triangulate, augment, omit, and alter at will. Then, often as not, enough time passes that I have to do the whole process over because I didn't write anything down (so I'm not claiming to be too smart for recipes...just cantankerous).


Some people have trouble operating this way, because they feel like the person who wrote the recipe knows better. Seems mutton-headed to me, since most recipes now come from free-lance writers and amateurs whose main qualification is that they can post to the internet. The same people who bring you fluff and porn, neither of which is all that satisfying, and one of which leads to a funky aftertaste. Sometimes, they're flat out wrong about something, and if you follow their directions, you end up with your meal tasting like someone recipeed on it.


Taste matters, if only to yourself and the people at your table, so that's where I leave the recipe track fairly often. I like grinding pepper into just about everything, whether the recipeer thought of it or not, and go heavy on the garlic. An epidemic flaw affecting many recipes is the under-use of a signature ingredient: one banana banana bread (try as many as you can fit in the pan), a fractional teaspoon of anything. I sure as hell remedy that. Oh, and if it calls for something I don't like, it ain't going in.


Practicality trumps fidelity. I substitute all the time. Like, my cupboard may or may not contain shortening (honestly, I don't know or care) because I use whatever else works, and it only sees use when a grandma appears and wants to make pie crust. Speaking of which, I skip the crust often as not. Gimme the inside, where all the good stuff is. I do not now and never have had saffron (queen of under-used signatures) or a host of other ingredients that are expensive or only good for one dish. Food on hand must sometimes transmogrify: yogurt to cream, pumpkin to sweet potato, nettles to spinach. And as far as cooking method, if it cannot happen with the utensils and cookware I have, then it ain't happening, or it's going to be McGyvered. 

One thing I've never been able to understand about recipes is that they seem to have no sense of reality when it comes to quantity. "Yields a dozen" rarely proves true, unless you are one of those people who likes tiny food, and especially when a recipeer wants to be healthy or lo-cal, they tend to create portions that bear no resemblance to reality in the U S of A.  Another quantitative delusion is that the Recipe is so paramount that cooks should do things like use half a can of something, or a fractional fruit. No, you base your pie on the pumpkin you have, and if there's more than enough filling, you dump the rest in a casserole dish for some creamy crustless extra. Having unused food fragments at the end usually leads to waste, and basing your dish on units such as the amount of tomatoes you picked one day or a 24-ounce can makes life easier.


Quantities expressed not in tablespoons or ounces (or the dullest of all, grams), but in friendly fuzzy terms appeal to me, partly just because they sound cool: shake, smattering, smidgeon, sprinkling,...and that's just the S's. I guess people have tried to quantify dollops and dashes, but I'd rather retain the mystery. Units like these leave room for individuality, they respect autonomy. Handfuls and pinches remind us that the basic scale of cooking is human. 

The variability and vagueness to these also says something about how we've passed on culinary culture over thousands of generations. I've asked old women about how much of an ingredient to put in, and plenty of times gotten answers like "Enough," or "It depends..." They're saying that you cannot reduce a good dish to a list, they're testing to see if you really want to do it right, they're wondering whether you are worthy of receiving their knowledge. Or they're just foggy, maybe cantankerous, or just having fun messing with you. But they have ancient knowledge sometimes, and it's better to learn their way with all its seeming imprecision and archaic measurements. You'll end up with something deeply tasty. 


The tasty things I manage to serve up eventually repeat themselves enough that I suppose I settle in on a recipe, at least in my head. In the past year, as I can and make jam more, I've taken to writing down what I did. Sometimes, anyway. At some point, I may park some of those on this blog, more so I can find them again then to encourage any of you to try them. You may, and it's possible that you'll even like it, in which case I encourage you to write it on a card, put it in a box, and pretend you made it up. But really, you don't need my stinking recipes.