I love cooking for my family, but it’s nice to have an occasional break everything, even things I love. Like maybe once a year, when we go to family camp, stay in rustic cabins, and let the nice people there cook and clean up for us.
This is literally the only thing I made all week. It was a good week.
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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)
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)
We are fortunate enough to live in a walkable neighborhood of a walkable city, and sometimes days go by between car trips. I made up for all those blissful carless days in one fell swoop today, though. President Obama was visiting Seattle and I got stuck in traffic for almost two hours with five little girls in the back of that darn minivan.
Luckily, we were well-stocked with snacks, and the girls were full of songs and laughter. My four-year-old told a detailed and breathlessly-enunciated story to anyone who would listen featuring characters named Macinnanin, Skingerque, Banana Peel, and Spoon Guy. (The spellings of those first two names are approximate at best.) The baby practiced her shrieks of joy at top volume. Other drivers stared at the ruckus my passengers were making and then laughed.
Did you think this was going to be a post about how I came home hours late and cooked a nice dinner? Heavens, no. I collapsed on the couch with a beer and let J hustle the kids off to bed. (Thanks, honey!) We ate leftovers: this soup, that salad, those beans. Leftovers are a cook’s reward, I say.
But if you don’t have a fridge full of good leftovers, make migas at the end of a frazzled day. There’s a reason I mostly cooked scrambled eggs for all those months when life was so hectic: they’re fast, filling, and delicious. The kids call these migas “cheesy chippy eggs” and eat their plain version (no salsa, no green flecks) without complaining.
Migas take various forms in various countries, but this surely-Americanized version is basically scrambled eggs with lightly crushed tortilla chips, green onions, tomato, cilantro, cheese, and salsa, maybe with a warm tortilla on the side. Dinner will be served in ten minutes.
Continue reading Migas (click for recipe)
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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)
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)
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)
We picked up our first box from Tonnemaker’s fruit CSA this week and–I’m almost sorry to say, for those of you where cherries are already over or not happening at all this summer–I have remembered how good a cherry can be. We got three varieties this week, each better than the last, each cherry firm and impossibly sweet and dripping juice. The kids’ hands have been purple since Tuesday.
It was J’s stroke of genius to slice some of the cherries into pancakes, which he did with the girls on the 4th of July. It’s a weekend and holiday tradition of theirs, making pancakes or waffles for breakfast. J seems to have inherited this sweet habit from his own pancake-making dad, which makes it doubly sweet. The cherry on top, so to speak, is that I usually wake up just in time for breakfast (or just leftovers, if I’m really lucky). 
This recipe is J’s standard buttermilk pancake recipe (from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone), which he made on this occasion with 2/3 whole wheat flour, those outstanding cherries, and some rosemary candied pecans we had lying around. The result was so good that we ate them plain; the cherries were like built-in jam. You could also serve them with butter and maple syrup, of course. You won’t be sorry either way.
Continue reading Whole Wheat Pancakes with Sweet Cherries and Pecans (click for recipe)
Oh, friends. You rightly clamored for the chocolate pancake recipe to accompany that Summer Berry Sauce, but I have a confession: not only did I not make those pancakes, but I was probably still asleep when my mom made them. (Thanks, Mom!)
But today was the Real Birthday. I think was a good day on the four-year-old-birthday scale, as evidenced by the fact that the house is covered in glitter. And that the day started, as requested, with chocolate waffles (and ended with chocolate cake).
I have had my eye on the “waffle brownies” from Tea and Cookies for a while, but in the end I decided that they seemed too decadent. For breakfast. For a four-year-old. Instead I went with the first recipe that came up in my Google search, an Alton Brown recipe that seemed a little more like your standard buttermilk waffles but with some cocoa powder and chocolate chips mixed in. Ok, a lot of cocoa powder and chocolate chips, and the chocolate chips melted and the waffle edges were crisp and it was a pretty great combination. And then we served them with whipped cream and strawberries.
Obviously my healthier-waffles logic was not crystal clear here, but the resulting dessert-for-breakfast was just delicious. I think you’ll forgive me about the pancakes.
Continue reading Chocolate Waffles (click for recipe)
Why yes, those are chocolate pancakes you see pictured below. A certain three-year-old daughter of mine is about to turn four, and she requested them for the birthday pre-party we had today. (Last year it was chocolate waffles.) We like to draw birthdays out as long as possible in our family.
While chocolate pancakes might be unconventional, they were topped with the most natural pancake topping I know for this time of year: a berry sauce. My parents grow blueberries, raspberries, and multiple varieties of blackberries that bear fruit throughout the summer. My kids’ hands and shirts have been stained with berry juice since the day we arrived, and every day there are fresh baskets of berries waiting after my dad makes his morning rounds. This berry sauce, one of my mom’s specialties, was inevitable.
And yes, of course you can also make summer berry sauce all winter using frozen berries. I usually make it with blackberries, but today’s version was raspberry. The only real requirement here is that you whisk the cornstarch into cold water until smooth; if you add the cornstarch after the sauce is warm, it will clump. Weird, huh? Other than that, feel free to play around, you really can’t go wrong. 
Continue reading Summer Berry Sauce (click for recipe)
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