Saffron Peach Jam

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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 June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

By this time of year, our shelves are well-stocked with jam.  We’ve been making it all summer: Strawberry, raspberry, blueberry.  Rhubarb, cherry, three kinds of plum.  We eat plenty of jam–on yogurt and oatmeal, in sandwiches, with fancy cheese–and still, we will make it through the winter.  We have plenty of jam.

But it’s hard to stop.  And really, can there be too much jam?  Extra jars make welcome gifts, and I never seem to find myself with much left over when summer rolls around again.So I was happy to spend a day in the kitchen with a box of organic peaches last week.  They arrived on my doorstep courtesy of the Washington State Fruit Commission (full dislosure: the peaches were given to me at no charge, but the opinion that peaches are great is entirely my own).  We ate one after another after another.  And then it was time to make more jam.

I asked you for your peach preserving ideas.  I browsed the Sweet Preservation website.  I flipped through Mes Confitures.  I couldn’t decide.  So I made some of everything.  I made a sweet, chunky peach jam with a vanilla bean scraped in.  I made a tangy peach chutney with a lot of grated fresh ginger.  And, at Hannah’s suggestion, I made this Saffron Peach Jam.

It’s based on a recipe from The Preservation Kitchen, but it’s a good deal sweeter than the version in the book.  Some people say that saffron tastes spicy, or purfumey, or that it tastes like the sea.  Here it simply provides an earthy, savory counterpoint to the sweetness of the peaches, subtle enough that my six year old loved the jam but intriguing enough that I have gone about my days plotting uses for it.  I’m going to spoon it onto rice pudding and ricotta-topped toast.  I’m going to layer it into my next frittata sandwich in place of the tomato jam.  I’m going to serve it on a cheese plate.  But meanwhile, it’s just been going straight on toast.

Continue reading →

Peach and Ricotta Crostini with Basil

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Have you entered the Food in Jars Cookbook giveaway yet?  Do it now.  It’s not just for canning enthusiasts, although it might turn you into one.

The entire point of today’s post is to entice you to run out to the farmers market and scoop up a final case of late-September peaches.  Are you convinced?  Because this weekend we are making jam, probably for the last time this summer.  Saffron Peach Jam.  Yes, it’s as intriguing as it sounds.  Yes, you will want to cook along.  And yes, a side benefit of having peaches in the house is that you can eat them on ricotta-slathered toast for breakfast. Continue reading →

Sweet and Spicy Tomato Jam

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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 June, July, and August).  If you like what you see here, you can sign up on the sidebar to receive a daily recipe by email, add the RSS feed to your own reader, or follow Emmy Cooks on Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest.

Are you a condiment person?  Here’s an easy test: is there a shelf of your fridge (or three or four) jammed with little bottles and jars of sauces and oils and pickles and mustards and relishes and jams and chutneys and maybe, way at the back, an unopened jar of truffle butter that came from Italy, ahem, years ago?

Or is that just me?

I love all those delicacies in little jars, so it’s no surprise that I’m a fan of Marisa McClellan’s Food in Jars website.  I bought the Food in Jars cookbook as soon as I saw it appear at Book Larder, and it has been a big part of my summer.  First off, there was that Maple-Roasted Almond Butter we all loved, and then I consulted with Marisa (I mean her book) about jams all summer long–for the record, we see eye to eye.  Marisa (I mean her book) even deserves the thanks for those candied cherries that I couldn’t bear to puree into cherry butter.  See why I like her (I mean her book) so much?And that was before I made this tomato jam.  Continue reading →

What’s Cooking: September 2012, Week 4

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Hello, friends!  I’ve been kicking around a new idea, will you tell me what you think?

At this point there are so many recipes on this site that most of them are simply buried by time.  (I need a recipe index, I know; the sidebar category search is rudimentary.)  And although I’m posting new recipes daily here, I’m also always cooking my old favorites off-screen.  I’m thinking that it might be fun to share more with you about my kitchen and what’s happening there from week to week.

Regular “What’s Cooking” dispatches would give me an opportunity to tell you what recipes I’m loving  as the seasons go by, to tell you about delicious ideas that don’t rise to the level of being “recipes” themselves, and to show you how I fit these many individual recipes together as meals (and then repurpose the leftovers as more meals!).  Hopefully this will give you some menu-planning inspiration and remind you, for example, that this is the week to roast a few pans of tomatoes to freeze for the winter.

I’m thinking that I’ll do these updates mid-week, as I’m regrouping between weekend cooking sprees.  Also, “What’s Cooking Wednesday” is kind of cute, right?  Don’t worry, I’ll try not to give in to the attraction of alluring alliteration.  (Gah!)

Here goes.  Tell me what you think.

What’s Cooking in the Emmy’s Kitchen: Last Week of September 2012

Part 1: In the Kitchen

Menu 1: I filled my 7-quart crockpot with a batch of black beans and froze most of them.  A few cups went into a pot of seasoned black beans, which we ate with quinoa with corn and green onions (no feta this time), tomatillo salsa, and corn tortillas.  Today I had leftovers for lunch with a pile of nearly-charred red peppers and onions; tomorrow we’ll finish the beans off as huevos rancheros.  The leftover quinoa is destined for greens-stuffed quinoa cakes.

Menu 2: A friend who loves me came over and washed and sliced every bunch of greens from my CSA box (ruby chard, rainbow chard, collard greens, and mustard).  We sauteed the greens with an onion and the chard stems, then cooked half of them into a Pound-of-Greens Frittata with gruyere.  We ate the frittata with salad and dollops of sweet and spicy tomato jam (recipe coming this week).  Thin slices of leftover frittata replaced avocado in my favorite tomato sandwich the next day.  (By the way, we also tried some of your favorite tomato sandwiches from the comments on the tomato sandwich post, and especially enjoyed Nicole’s version with Vegemite.)

Menu 3: We had dinner with a few other couples here on Saturday and I made a big dish of baked pasta with roasted vegetables.  I also took advantage of the last opportunity to make a couple of my favorite salads from this summer: a watermelon and feta salad and the grilled kale salad with ricotta and plums.  We had a blackberry cake for dessert (it’s an almond-scented butter cake that also takes quite happily to nectarines, pears, peaches, plums…you get the idea.  Recipe coming someday).

Part 2: Preserving Summer

This week we made and canned the excellent sweet and spicy tomato jam from the Food in Jars Cookbook (watch for a giveaway tomorrow!).  We also did a batch of hot pepper jelly, which I had never made before, and I kept adding more chiles (and then red chile flakes) to taste enough heat.  Later it occurred to me that perhaps the jelly becomes spicier with time?  We’ll have to see how that one turns out!

I bought ten pounds of Roma tomatoes and roasted them to keep in the freezer.  I freeze them in a single layer on a tray and then move them to a freezer bag or jar.  This method ensures that the tomatoes don’t freeze into a solid block, so it’s easy to remove a handful at a time. Continue reading →

Baked Pasta With Roasted Vegetables and Fresh Mozzarella

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Someone taught my baby to say “stop it.”  Life with a seventeen-month-old is undignified enough, I feel, without irate admonitions issuing from the tiny person over every little thing.  Like when I try to change her diaper (“Stop it!”).  Like when I take a ballpoint pen away (“Stop it!).  Like when I insist that her carseat straps be buckled for travel (“No no no no STOP IT!”).

Imagine how she feels, though.  She’s the baby in a family of five.  We tell her to stop every time she innocently tries to tear a page from a book, or color on the table, or suck on the bottom of a delectable shoe.  We may both be saying the same words, but there are days when we’re not exactly speaking the same language.  Luckily, I can’t ever get down about it, because at the first sign of sadness this same baby rushes across the room, arms outstretched, yelling “Hug! Hug!”  Hopefully she learned that from us, too.

At times like these, comfort food is occasionally in order for the whole family.  And is there any comfort food that compares to baked pasta?  I guess roasted vegetables, maybe, so I’ve combined the two here to hedge my bets.  The children can pick out the cheesy pasta parts and I can console myself with all the eggplant that’s left in pan. Continue reading →

Pear Muffins with Cardamom and Vanilla

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The ways of the fruit trees are mysterious to me.  One year it’s a bumper crop of plums, this year just enough for one indulgent afternoon.  The apple trees are staggering under the weight of their fruit, but we only got one apricot.  And the pear tree, espaliered out of the way on our small city lot, produced its customary dozen pears.  Which yielded, after a little bit of cleanup and a lot of simmering down, one and a half cups of chunky pear sauce.

We made the most of it with these muffins.

Let me just admit up front that they’re more cake than breakfast, unless you can see your way to combining the two–in which case, I assure you, you won’t be alone.  The crumb is tender, the tops are crisp with sugar, and the muffins are fragrant with the heady scents of cardamom and vanilla. Continue reading →

15-Minute Pasta e Fagioli

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I want you to know something.  Just now, at 11 pm, I got up off the couch, poured leftover soup into a bowl, and garnished it with parsley to take the photo below.  Because the photo I had planned to use was admittedly drab, and because I want you to want to make this soup.  I’ve never done that before; I usually just snap a photo as I go.  Is that too ridiculous?  Is it better or worse if I tell you?

But here’s the thing: I want to you to put this recipe in your mental recipe file.  It’s an easy fix when dinner needs to be on the table in 15 minutes, and it’s a bowlful of soup when you need it most.  (I, for one, always need soup most when I’m in such a rush that I only have 15 minutes to make dinner.)

This is peasant food, which means it’s all the best things: thrifty, filling, comforting.   The name translates to “Pasta and Beans,” and those are the only essential ingredients.  I never like to pass up the chance to add vegetables to things, though, so I included my beet greens and a couple of tomatoes.  You can certainly select your own vegetables, or skip them all together.  If you’ve already got cooked chickpeas or white beans handy, you’ll be glad; otherwise just open a can and you’re ready to go.

Continue reading →

Frittata with Chevre and Caramelized Onions

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We’ve had backyard chickens in Seattle for more than a decade now.  I kind of like to think that we had city chickens before having city chickens was a thing.  (Now everyone has chickens here; you have to get backyard goats to have any urban farming cred.  J says we’re not getting goats.)  I’m sure Seattle has a home and garden tour somewhere, but I’m also sure that it’s nowhere near as popular as the city’s annual Chicken Coop Tour.

At the moment we have just three hens: Ducky, Feather, and Feather.  Lately one of the Feathers has been acting upon a likely-well-intentioned but completely misguided plan to hatch a nestfull of eggs, except that we kept taking her eggs away and, ahem, with no rooster in flock the eggs had exactly zero chance of hatching anyway.

Feather was petulant about the situation and hunkered down in one of the nesting boxes for weeks.  She would not be stirred, unless I would let her into the garden to eat my tomatoes, in which case she happily abandoned her maternal duties and left the nest for hours at a time.  Luckily Feather has abandoned her dreams of motherhood and we are getting a few eggs again (broody hens don’t lay).

Let us celebrate with a frittata.

You made a big batch of caramelized onions and froze some, right?  If not, just throw a few thinly-sliced onions in your pan over high heat and cook them until they have softened and sweetened and proceed from there.  I also like this recipe with a few leeks in place of the onions. Continue reading →

Grilled Kale Salad with Ricotta and Plums

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I have been having a bit of a love affair with this salad this summer.We met casually, in a friend’s back yard.  I couldn’t stay away from it, and then I couldn’t stop thinking about it.  Our friends came to the Dinner in White and I casually mentioned that they might bring this salad, you know, if they wanted.  They did.  I sat next to it at the table.

It’s been on my mind ever since. Today, by some stroke of luck, J was working from home, the baby was napping, and the older girls weren’t home yet.  We took full advantage of that rare quiet moment together.  By grilling a bunch of curly kale and having this salad for lunch.

I’m sorry I’ve kept it from you for so long, but it’s not too late.  Clear your calendar of any other rendezvous you’ve planned.  You too will fall in love with this salad this weekend. Continue reading →

How to Caramelize Onions

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Or maybe I should have titled this post, “How to Caramelize Onions and Why You Don’t Usually Have To.”  Because nine times out of ten, when you want your onions soft and sweet, you can just cook ’em like crazy over high heat and end up with a sweet, jammy mess that will do the trick nicely.  There, I just saved you hours of standing over a hot stove.  Now you have time to read a good book.  You’re welcome.

But, ok, sometimes you want the real thing.  You want a more refined result, a whisper-soft bowl of yielding allium nectar.  Caramelizing onions is transformative, like grilling broccoli or roasting cauliflower or shaving raw brussels sprouts for a salad.  And once you make your first batch and see how little hands-on time it takes, there will be nothing to stop you from making the occasional batch to add to eggs and soups and fancy little toasts and all manner of things.

Make a big batch while you’re at it, of course, and freeze leftover caramelized onions for an easy flavor boost another day. Continue reading →