Thursday, 17 November 2011
Our bush-like satsuma tree had so many fruit on it that the branches were threatening to break. “Time to thin down.” The prospect of throwing out, even into the compost, nearly half of the satsumas made me feel guilty. That is, until I realized I could treat the underripe fruit like lemons, and preserved them.
What follows below isn’t so much a recipe as Rather Vague Guidelines, mind you. My first and current batch are curing, so I’ll need to update this post as to how the preserved satsumas actually turned out. But it’s a start.
Update, 8 January 2012: These go nicely stuffed inside a roasted chicken, as well minced and cooked with roasted vegetables. Also provides nice seasoning in stews like vegetable tagine.
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We didn’t manage to make any preserves this summer. Both the apricot and tomato harvest were, well, were not. However, on the first day of autumn, Simon got a load of Betty Anne plums from the farmers’ market, and we made jam. The resulting flavor, with ginger and cinnamon, brings stars of chilly air tang to my tongue. It’s also great on toast.
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Thursday, 29 September 2011
Packages of hominy grits always seem too large. So, having heard that some cakes are made with polenta, I tried something similar with grits. My recipe resulted a moist yet pleasantly crunchy cake, with a thin sugary crust and pine nuts to add to the crunchiness.
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Friday, 16 September 2011
Last year was unusual in the reading department. I read fewer fiction books in paper form and a lot more non-fiction than I typically do; well, easy since they were mostly cookbooks 
. Moreover, I listened to a lot more podcast fiction — a habit I began in 2009 (or 2008?), but really got into last year, as a good way to pass the time during usually tedious aerobic exercise.
Which podcasts do I listen to?
I also started reading e-books last year, thanks to iBooks (iTunes link) on the iPad, which has enough screen real estate for comfort, and the iPhone 4′s Retina Display, which has enough resolution for that can even read without script correction. And both have backlighting, something that really allows me to read on an electric device.
Note: I haven’t provided comments for every item I read or listened to, as just the list of short stories would take too long to write up! But if there’s a particular book or story for which you want to know more, let me know — I might get around (not to be snarky; more due to time constraints!) to summarizing my thoughts. Once again, the 
denotes my recommendations.
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Elderflower has the aroma of spring, and brings respite from the heat of summer. (Even though, admittedly, we’re not having much of summer. But still.) Combining elderflower cordial with lime or lemon juice in a cake has yielded one of my favorite cakes for this and the last season.
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Oh, sure, passion fruit sorbet is yummy and popular. But what if you, I or any one of our friends want some creaminess to counter passion fruit’s extraordinary tartness? Here I present passion fruit ice cream.
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I can’t believe I haven’t posted a recipe for cream scones!
My version is somewhere between the classic and cream scone recipes from The Joy of Cooking, wherein I use cream, eggs and butter. This yields a very tender and very rich scone, as one could imagine.
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I’ve been searching for years for a sponge cake recipe. A cake that’s less dense in texture than the typical American butter cakes, that’s not necessarily made by the creaming method, which is to say, by beating soft butter and sugar until creamy and somewhat fluffy, then adding the other ingredients (eggs, flour, etc.). So, I’ve been learning about the foaming method which yields sponge cakes. I had always thought that meant beating egg yolks and whites separately, folding in other ingredients appropriately…and I always felt just a bit too lazy to whip egg parts separately, and not a small amount intimidated at the prospect of folding, which I tend to overdue in the spirit of trying to incorporate every last bit thoroughly.
A couple things helped me along. First, I found a couple encouraging recipes that — THANK THE ALMIGHTY FSM — included weight measurements for flour. Second, I discovered the balloon whisk.
Oh, I still need practice using the balloon whisk, like learning to judge when to stop with the folding motions and not deflate all of those lovely egg and sugar bubbles (i.e., do the bare minimum, don’t obsess over batter appearance thoroughness). And I still cheat (with not much guilt) a bit by adding some baking powder. Yet I still love the realization that I can make a nearly meringue-like structure with whole eggs and sugar.
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It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded images to my (food) gallery, so allow me to say that a few more have trickled in. O:-) I should also mention with the latest version of Zenphoto, the RSS feed —if you view my photos that way— has been changed. The new RSS feed URL is now http://zenphoto.iwaruna.com/index.php?rss&lang=en_US.
You might need to rename (or delete) the previous RSS URL you had for the gallery to slurp up the feed again.
There was a head of cauliflower sitting in the vegetable box in the refrigerator. I didn’t feel like steaming it, or making a gratin, but wanted a dish that was flavorful yet on the lighter side. Jeremy F. had mused about cooking this veg with anchovies and garlic, and I thought, “Hey, that does sound good!” And it turned out that it did. 
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