racking

I've had a raspberry melomel and a braggot with cranberries going for a few months now, and today I racked them for the second time. Also, a cider racked for its first.

The melomel — just mead with fruit — is raspberry blossom honey, water, some champagne yeast (plus all the wild ones in the honey and on the fruit, since nothing was heated) and a few quarts of raspberries. The raspberries were added a pint at a time throughout the raspberry season at my farm share. Once those seemed spent, I racked the melomel and let that sit for a few months. And here we are. It tastes like — to be honest — a raspberry cough syrup, without sugar. It has a lot of punch, even with less fruit that many formulæ call for. This one will do well with aging. As in maybe a few years. (See bottom left: looks like Kool-Aid.)

The braggot — malted mead — is also raspberry blossom honey (got a bucket from Warm Colors) plus amber malt, some bog myrtle and a little fresh sage. I used some generic wine yeast with it, which has left some sweetness. After that had finished its primary fermentation I racked it into another carboy with some cranberries (frozen and thawed to soften them). That top photo is the spent cranberries flosting on the last bit to be sucked out into a clean carboy. They add some tannins to the braggot. This seemed to be the more far-fetched of the meads but already has a nice flavor. I'm hoping it'll be superb by the fall.

The cider is a basic cider. I added some champagne yeast this time, whereas my last two were all by spontaeous fermentation. I've also relly made cyser in the past, a mead-cider, so this tasted much cleaner. I'm not sure which I'll prefer. My cyser that's coming up on a year of aging is quite nice. I'll bottle and prime this in a month or two. And then we'll see.

smelts two ways

I bought some smelts the other day, not quite knowing what I'd do with them. They're small — like sardines — but white and delicate — unlike sardines. The latter I figured out after making that first meal: fried smelts with roasted potatoes and beets. It appears that smelts and boiled potatoes are traditional... but, I'd argue bland. So I thought I'd roast the potatoes. But the smelts were still bland. Nice, but white. Very delicate.

They needed something.

So I re-interpreted Hiroko Shimbo's recipe for sardines in a sweet sauce. The sauce is 1T honey heated in ¼c. water (recipe called for 2T sugar) to which ¼c. mirin and ¼c. shoyu are added, then simmered. The fileted smelts were tossed in lemon juice and then in brown rice flour (which I use for fish in general). I fried them in sesame oil, drained them and placed them on rice and poured the sauce over. A little sprinkle of black sesame seeds...

And that worked. It was very good.

bûche de Noël

My bûche de Noël!

mushrooms

Meringue mushrooms, nestled on flour sack, glued together and waiting to join the bûche...

more fun than play-doh

I'm back, after quite an absence. (Computer called it quits a few months back, just bought a new one a week ago).

And here it is, the 26th, with my family's Christmas party tomorrow. And making, for the first time, a bûche de Noël. And having way too much fun with the marzipan. This stuff is seriously more fun than Play-Doh. And if you screw up, it's edible.

death of an apple, birth of a melomel

I moved at the end of last month -- not far -- and was without internet for a week, and then... my Mac died. Very dead. So posting might be few and far between and sans photos.

Started raspberry melomel (fruit mead) with raspberry blossom honey and raspberries from my farm share : each week I'll add my share of berries until it's out, then I'll let it sit. For probably a year. I'll rack it after a month or two and strain those berries out. I'm very excited. Last year's mead is coming up I think and it's about time to see how it has matured. (Last year's cyser [cider made with some honey] is bright, sharp and delicious).

soup and cheese

I have proved, once again (to myself at least), that grilled cheese and tomato soup are the ultimate food pairing. And maybe not just an ultimate comfort food, but an ultimate food. Period.

Soup:

• one onion, sliced
• eight smallish carrots, likewise
  
• a few stalks celery, chopped
  
• two leeks, sliced thin
• four or five large orange tomatoes (I used the ones with red near the top, shaped like beefsteaks), chopped into big chunks
• four cloves garlic
  

Sauté the first four ingredients in olive oil and a nob of butter. Season with salt. Cook until onion starts to get some color (twenty minutes on medium-low?). Add the tomatoes and garlic. Add enough water to cover the tomatoes. Cook for half an hour or so until very soft. Pass through a food mill. Add some olive oil into the pan and cook 2tbs flour for a few minutes. Add puréed soup back to the pot and reheat. Add pepper.

Make that grilled cheese while it reheats. This is great with emmenthaler on sourdough. Nasturtiums add a nice green and peppery touch. With these tomatoes there's no need for the baking soda trick: these are a little lower in acidity as it is. So you just get pure tomato goodness. And cheese and bread, fried, make it heaven.

summer grilling.

I had a somewhat rare (excuse the pun, folks) meat craving a few nights back. I had tried some skewered grilled meatball things at a cookout a while back made of some local, mostly grass-fed beef, so I sought that out. I didn't find it, but I found another of the same description. I added chopped onion, herbes de provence, salt and pepper. I found the perfect destination for sauerrüben made almost a year ago — it is perfect for hamburgers. And they were perfect on a ciabatta roll from my bakery, with all the fixins' — all of which, save Belgian beer (Saison Dupont is, I found, incredible with burgers) and French mustard — were local. (And the pickle is from this batch.) That's what makes summer so wonderful.

rain.

From all this rain and these storms, my CSA has lost ten acres of crops since July! (Today the roma tomatoes were all crushed, wooden spikes and all, as if run over by a tractor...)

It seems like a waste of a whole lot of work planting, weeding, etc. for acres to be lost. I suppose that's part of the gamble of these things. Whereas my minute garden is between two houses and protected from high winds, these storms have swept across open fields and the water has drowned multiple crops.

cantaloupe sorbet

Melon sorbet with borage flowers.

Another experiment with the ice cream maker (some friends who had one and got another as a gift passed the gift on to me).

I had two watermelons and a cantaloupe from the CSA last week. This was inspired by Jane Grigson's recipe for watermelon sorbet as her melon sherbet has egg whites and all sorts of things in it.

• one cantaloupe, seeded and puréed
• one star anise (maybe two next time?)
  
• 1½ c. water
• one cup sugar (I might use a bit less next time)
• juice of one lemon
  

Make a syrup of the last three ingredients. Boil for ten or twenty minutes. Cool and strain out the star anise. Add to purée, cool and freeze. (This ice cream maker either moves too fact or doesn't get cool enough so I put in back in the freezer for half an hour and then turned it back on).

It's a bit sweet, but not overly. Very melony. As with the lemon kefir ice cream, I think a bit of alcohol would keep it from freezing solid. Something neutral like vodka, two tablespoons, might be good. I didn't have any either way.

Lemon Kefir Ice Cream (for Marcy)

My friend Marcy sent me this recently:

Lemon Kefir Ice Cream

• 400 ml (1 2/3 cups) kefir
• the zest from a large organic lemon
• 60 ml (1/4 cup) lemon juice
• 130 grams (1/3 cup plus 2 tablespoons) agave syrup (I used sugar)
• a good splash of limoncello (or rum, or cachaça) (optional) (I used a bit of rum)

Makes about 1/2 liter (1/2 quart).

Combine all the ingredients in a mixing bowl and whisk until blended. Cover, refrigerate for an hour until well chilled, and churn in your ice cream maker according to the manufacturer's instructions. Serve with thin butter cookies, a handful of berries, and/or candied violets.

I'd be good with buttermilk as well. I added maybe 1 - 2 Tbs rum and it keeps the ice cream from freezing too hard. It's super simple, and really good. Considering the kefir was "low-fat," this didn't have that disappointing flavor and texture that most frozen yogurt has. It's very rich, and smooth, and has that nice tang of the kefir.

Garnished with miniature edible marigolds called "Lemon Gem."

kimchi!

In my last post I started making kimchi.

Here it is:

Eating a decent amount feels quite good. It's tart, quite spicy and just wonderful. The eggplant in the kimchi keeps its texture and form, as if raw, but it looses all color, taking on the pink of the pepper and the flavor of the brine. Straight-up delicious.

And here is David, a few days ago, trying it as a condiment for sautéed cucumber, zucchini and Japanese eggplant with rice: