Category Archives: DIY

Fig Jam

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My summer kitchen is bursting at the seams.  Of course I found more lurking zucchini after dispatching yesterday’s, we had barely gotten through last week’s vegetables when this week’s CSA box arrived, the tomatoes are finally going in the garden, and the pears and plums are ready to pick.  On top of all that, we have a lovely friend who always calls us when her figs are ripe, and J came home one recent evening with a brimming box of perfect green figs.  fig jam from emmycooks.com

So today was a jam day.  Continue reading →

Easy Oven Fries

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are May, June, and July).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Think of these as a convenience food.

I know you can buy frozen french fries, but honestly, a potato is pretty convenient all by itself.  Chop a pound or two into batons, toss them with oil and salt, and roast them in a hot oven while you make the rest of dinner.   You’ll have to hurry, though, because they’ll be ready inside half an hour and you’ll want to eat them hot. Continue reading →

Blue Cheese and Crackers with Candied Cherry Preserves

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This is the story of two recipes that didn’t turn out at all the way I planned.

I was going to make you pink strawberry waffles today.  My baby–my first baby–turned six and, not to be outdone by her sister’s chocolate waffle birthday coup, requested strawberry waffles for breakfast.  Pink, please.They were delicious.  I used my regular yeast-raised batter (which works beautifully for both waffles and pancakes), adding a few generous spoonfuls of strawberry preserves in place of the sugar.  And then, in a stroke of genius suggested by a reader-friend, I tinted the batter as pink as can be with a sprinkle of that beet powder I thought I’d never use again.  Of course, the baked waffles were mostly waffle-colored, which was a bit of a disappointment to us all (mostly me).  Continue reading →

Blueberry Jam

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I’m afraid I can’t write a post for you tonight because I am too absorbed with Pinterest, which I never really explored before today.  Ooh, pretty!  Very distracting.  I see the attraction now.  Come visit me at pinterest.com/emmycooks/, wouldja?But here’s the nice thing about jam, I guess: it can happen in the background in fits and starts while you’re doing other things.  (Cooking an elaborate Senegalese feast, for example, or fooling around on the internet.)  Continue reading →

Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops

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I made jam to use up fruit recently and now I’m making popsicles to use up jam.  It’s one big happy circle, really.

So my version of these popsicles are made with my recent batch of chunky cherry jam.  All you do, really, is mix jam with yogurt and freeze it.  The artistry is in choosing the jam flavor, I guess?  No, not even that, because I can’t think of a single flavor that wouldn’t be perfect here.  Plum?  Strawberry?  Peach?  Divine.

If you don’t feel like making your own jam (not even one single jar?) and you can’t be bothered to run to the store (and that I can understand, truly), I have another suggestion for you.  Visit A Raisin and A Porpoise, where Janet is giving away a jar of her homemade blackberry jam to a lucky reader.  You’ll be doubly enriched if you win the drawing, both by the blackberry jam and by making the acquaintance of a well-written blog full of little insights about life and great ideas about what to cook.

And blackberry jam would be just the thing in these popsicles. Continue reading Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops (click for recipe)

One Jar of Cherry Jam

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Am I right in suspecting that people who aren’t canners don’t make their own jam?  More’s the pity if that’s true.  Everyone should make jam occasionally, I think.  It’s a grandmother’s trick, preserving fruit with sugar and a few minutes of boiling on the stove, but it’s a trick worth keeping around.

I know canning sounds intimidating, all magic and mumbo jumbo, but that’s only until you see it in action just one time.  And then it’s no big deal.  This week a friend told me that she was inspired to can her first batch of jam after a recent visit where J and I were canning raspberry jam in the background when she arrived.  That was a proud moment for me.  But I’m not really here to talk about canning today.  (If you’re interested, Marisa‘s your girl.)

You can freeze jam too, you know.  Or better yet, mix it with yogurt and freeze it into Frozen Yogurt Jam Pops.

And here’s another thing you can do with jam: make just one jar, and eat it all up.  Or two, and give one away.  It’s an elegant little indulgence, and a smart way to give new life to days-old fruit.

Since you’re not canning this jam, you can take any liberties you like with the recipe.  (Canned foods require a certain minimum level of acidity for safe storage, so always use a modern canning recipe if you’re going that route.)  I started with three kinds of cherries, sugar, and half a lemon, then added a splash of almond extract at the end.  Cinnamon or vanilla would also be excellent additions to this jam. Continue reading One Jar of Cherry Jam (click for recipe)

Beet Chips

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Welcome to Emmy Cooks!  You can see some of my favorite recent recipes by clicking the “My Favorite Recipes” category on the sidebar (here are April, May, and June).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email and to follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook or Twitter.

During my first pregnancy, I had an occasional craving for citrus.  Grapefruit, oranges, pomelos, lemons, limes, anything.  During my second pregnancy, nothing.  And during my third pregnancy, I had no cravings, but one aversion: beets.

Other vegetables were okay: I would happily have eaten butternut squash tacos with chipotle and feta or a pound-of-greens frittata.  Those risotto-stuffed chard leaves were popular in my kitchen that year, and a simple arugula salad was just my speed (the arugula comes up in the garden by itself on years when I’m neglectful; what could be easier?).

But beets!  Woe!  I used to love beets!  Roasted with walnuts and blue cheese.  Grated beet salads with honey-ginger or lemony dressings.  Beets steamed with their greens and swathed in oil and vinegar.  Goodbye, beets.  Even after my baby was born they seemed a little too…sweet, too meaty.  Too beet-y.  So last year I dutifully piled the beets into my crisper as they arrived from my CSA.  I cooked the greens and packed the roots tighter and tighter into the left-hand drawer.  Finally, in the dead of winter, I cleaned out the drawer and composted them all.  Sorry, beets.

This year I am taking a more reasonable approach.  I’m planning to make all my beets into beet chips.  They’re crispy and salty and, while they’re still sweet, they’re a world away from the roasted beets that I once loved.  They’re a nice change of pace, and they’ll help free up some space in my fridge this summer. Continue reading Beet Chips (click for recipe)

Maple Granola with Almonds and Coconut

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Happy weekend! It’s felt like the weekend here for a few days, honestly, with family in town and a bonus baby in the house (my nephew!) and the kind of lazy schedule that made me feel accomplished the day we all got out on our bikes/scooters/strollers and rode two whole blocks.  (Not impressed?  You try getting out of the house with four kids when the oldest is five.)

And now we get to cap that off with the real weekend.  I, for one, am celebrating with one more foray in my effort to become the web’s preeminent source of granola recipes.  (Ok, not really, but there are a lot of granola recipes on this website: that deliciously sugary olive oil granola, Heidi Swanson’s delicate and buttery granola with orange zest, currants, and walnuts, an oil-free crunchy hippie orange and almond granola, and my old standby with dried cherries).  And now, maybe, my new standby–this weekend, anyway–a nearly equal proportion of oats to seeds and nuts, maple syrup and olive oil for sweet and crunch, and a serious spoonful of salt that makes it all just right.

This recipe roughly follows the Seattle-based Marge Granola formula as it appeared on The Kitchn’s website, so if you lack the time or inclination to make your own granola you can just click that link above to order some seriously tasty granola from Megan (who also, by the way, writes the lovely blog A Sweet Spoonful–see you over there!).  But I imagine that if you are reading this blog you are, or aspire to be, a granola-making type, so let’s do it.  Continue reading Maple Granola with Almonds and Coconut (click for recipe)

Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie

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What?  It’s been four days since I posted the recipe for the Easiest Pie Crust Ever and you still haven’t made a pie?  What are you waiting for?

Ok, ok, here’s a recipe that’s even easier than pie.  I’m calling it an upside-down pie, because it’s a single-crust pie with the crust, get this, on top.  Isn’t that smart?  So you get a scoop of juicy fruit and a crisp, buttery top crust.  That’s it.  The Rustic Fruit Desserts people (I told you you’d be hearing hearing more about them) refer to this dessert by the funny name “pandowdy,” and indeed it was their Gingered Peach and Blackberry Pandowdy that inspired mine.

This dessert was especially sweet because I made it with the last of the peaches we brought home from California and tayberries from our Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA.   (You can substitute raspberries or blackberries or both; tayberries are a cross of the two.)  I personally wouldn’t usually put peaches into a pie–I know, other people do it successfully!–because I think they give up too much juice, resulting in a too-liquid filling and a soggy bottom pie crust.  Both problems are solved by this recipe: the bottom crust has vanished and the filling is thickened to a luscious consistency by macerating the peaches and then simmering the juice to thicken it.

Continue reading Peach and Tayberry Upside-Down Pie (click for recipe)

Raspberry Jam

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Today was a cooking whirlwind.  It was the first day of our Nash’s CSA, and when my sister and I looped through the market to pick up our box I couldn’t resist bringing home a flat of raspberries as well.  So that meant jam-making (and everyone eating countless raspberries off their fingers, of course) in addition to our first CSA salad of the season, followed immediately by a five-hour cooking spree with new and old friends to produce a Senegalese feast.  The dishwasher is now running for the fourth time.

My sister was making gorgeous salads on one counter (greens, strawberries, goat cheese, pistachios, balsamic, thank you!) while I got a habenero chile sauce going on the stove, so J had the bright idea to set up the canner on the barbeque burner outside.  We will certainly be doing that again this summer to keep the kitchen cool.

Here are a few things you should know about making jam.  First, you don’t have to can it.  You can always make just a bowl or a couple of jars; keep them in the fridge and use them within a week or two (depending on the sugar content).  Alternatively, you can make a larger batch and freeze your jam instead of canning it.  Finally, if you use pectin, I recommend Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require a high percentage of sugar to work.  So you can sweeten your jam to taste and it will still set nicely. Continue reading Raspberry Jam (click for recipe)