One of the many awesome things about the place I worked for the summer in Switzerland was the airport right next to my lab building. And one of the many awesome things about that airport is that on the road just after it, there are dozens of wild blackberry bushes that nobody touches. I had so many fresh, sun-ripened blackberries from those bushes this summer, and this is the first of three posts where I’ll explain just some of what I ended up doing with all of them!
This jam was delicious the way I first made it, which was exactly according to the instructions here, but it contained a bit more sugar than I usually like. Next time, I’ll replace a large portion of it with honey or some other natural sweetener, and skip the Splenda recommended in the no-sugar version. For a first attempt at jam, though, this stuff jelled beautifully with no trouble at all, thanks to the pectin we put in, and tasted absolutely marvelous. For any attempt at jam, it was delicious, but especially for a first attempt!
Wild Blackberry Jam
(Recipe from the much, much more thorough article at Pickyourown.org)
1.5 L blackberries, washed under cold water
4.25 cups granulated sugar, divided
1 packet fruit pectin (can be bought at supermarkets)
Clean the canning jars with very hot water or in a dishwasher; if you’ll be storing them on the shelf, use brand-new lids. Set the jars upside down on a rack over a pot of boiling water for about ten minutes to sterilize them.
Rinse your berries clean.
If you’ve got a Foley mill, use it to crush the berries, or if you haven’t, then use a potato masher, upside-down drinking glass, your child’s fists, whatever.
Mix the pectin with 1/4 c of the sugar, and stir that mixture into the berries. Heat over medium to high heat, stirring constantly, until the mix reaches a full, rolling boil.
If you’re planning to store the jam on the shelf, heat the lids right now, in a pan of hot-but-not-boiling water for a few minutes; this softens the gummed surface so it can seal to the jar.
Add the remaining four cups of sugar, bring the mix slowly back to a boil, and boil hard for one minute.
Remove from heat and test for doneness, using a cold metal tablespoon: take a half spoon of the hot mixture, let it cool on the spoon, and if it thickens to the consistency you like, move on to the next step; if not, add more pectin, bring it to a boil for one more minute, and test again. Repeat until the jam reaches the desired consistency.
Fill the jars to 1/4 in. (6 mm) with hot jam, put the lids (and rings?) on; if you’re keeping them in the refrigerator or freezer, you can be done with them right now. If you want to keep them on the shelf, then completely submerge the jars in boiling water for 5 minutes, or longer if you’re at higher altitude. I skipped the last step myself, and am keeping my jam in the fridge.
You’re done! Jam stores for about a year, but tastes weird after 5-6 months, I’ve heard. But I’ve never been able to keep mine around for that long, so, of course, I don’t know. . . enjoy!
Another more-than-two-week-old post for you! Anyway, back when Misha was in Thun, he made an interesting discovery in the supermarket, of something I think most Russians wouldn’t expect to find in the store: chanterelles. It’s not that they’ve never seen a chanterelle before–on the contrary, fried chanterelles and potatoes comprise one of the most delicious traditional Russian dishes–it’s just that in Russia, chanterelles are almost too pedestrian to appear in stores. Yes, believe it. You’re supposed to go to the woods and find them yourself, since they’re everywhere, or buy them in buckets from sweet old grandmothers with hands and clothes still dirty from finding them to sell. It’s so wonderful how a food that Europeans and Americans deem fancy is just another workday dinner for the Russians.
Needless to say, when Misha found chanterelles in the supermarket in Thun for the sale price of 7 Fr./500g, he was shocked by the price, but nevertheless, he wanted to show me some traditional Russian food in the middle of Switzerland. He was on vacation, after all. Fried potatoes and chanterelles it would be.
Since the baskets of mushrooms were so large and we had enough for two dinners, we decided to make a contest of it. His mother’s recipe of traditional Russian lisichki s kartoshkoi (chanterelles with potatoes) and no spices, cheeses, or anything except mushrooms, potatoes, and a half an onion–vs. my improvised version, where I threw in any spices we had in the refrigerator along with pepper, garlic and a bit more onion.
The results: Misha’s version was classic comfort food, with soft potatoes and nothing overpowering the chanterelles’ texture and flavor, which even seemed nicely to appear in the potatoes: simple and wonderful. Mine was a little different, where you could taste the garlic, onions, rosemary, thyme, and other fresh herbs in everything, but the chanterelles’ flavor came out only when you bit directly into one. Misha agrees with my evaluation: both are good, but they’re for completely different functions. Try both!
Misha’s Traditional Fried Potatoes and Chanterelles
200 g chanterelles, washed and chopped roughly
500 g potatoes, not too starchy, chopped into sticks
1 small or 1/2 medium onion, chopped coarsely
2 tbsp sunflower oil
On an oiled skillet over medium heat, sweat the onion for a few minutes until it becomes fragrant. Add the mushrooms:
Cook until the water is gone from the mushrooms, then add the potatoes:
Cover and cook until the potatoes are soft, stirring intermittently (burned stuff on the surface of the pan is very tasty, so scrape it up and keep trying to create more) :
Then enjoy!
Erin’s Non-Traditional Chanterelles and Potatoes
To make it vegan, skip the butter and cheese, and don’t serve with beef or anything.
200 g chanterelles, washed and roughly chopped
500 g potatoes, not too starchy, chopped into disks
2 tbsp sunflower oil
1 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, chopped coarsely
2 small cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp fresh rosemary, chopped
1 tsp fresh thyme leaves, chopped
2-3 leaves fresh basil, chopped
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
crushed red pepper to taste
grated hard cheese (Sbrinz!) to taste
Melt the butter in the oil, and saute the onion over low heat until it becomes fragrant; add the garlic, and cook for about 5 minutes before adding the potatoes and chanterelles together. Cover and cook about 30 minutes, scraping burned potato from the pan every 5-7 minutes.
Add the herbs, salt, and black pepper about five minutes before serving; stir and keep covered over the heat until done!
Serve with grated hard cheese and crushed red pepper.
Want to know the thing I love about stir fries?
OH MAN, before you could finish asking I whipped some up from what was in the fridge, plated it with rice and sprinkled with some sesame seeds and soy sauce, and it’s now ready for us to devour as fast as we can make our chopsticks go! Sorry about that; what were you saying?
Yeah. It’s that damned fast, and it’s dead-simple* too.
Stir-fried vegetables and tofu
Go ahead and make this with whatever you’ve got in the fridge and on the shelf.
1 tsp cooking oil
1 red, orange, or yellow bell pepper, chopped
1 white onion, chopped
1 red onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
200 g broccoli, chopped
200 g eggplant, chopped
1 red chili pepper, minced
200 g tofu, cut into bite-sized cubes
400 g dry aromatic rice, cooked
soy sauce to taste
sesame seeds to taste
Put everything but the rice, sesame seeds, and soy sauce in a pan over high heat, and keep stirring until the onions are cooked and the tofu has browned, around five to seven minutes. Serve on aromatic rice, sprinkled with sesame seeds and soy sauce.
*Unfortunately for me, taking photographs in the dark is less dead-simple, so you get this sorry excuse for a picture. I promise it tastes better than it looks.
Well, it’s getting about time to update this thing. To be completely honest, I was working myself sick and being ultra-productive before Misha got here so that I could spend some guilt-free time with him, and then after he came two weeks ago, we were so busy running around and having fun that I left all of my food photos and recipes to write commentary on and post, batch-style, after he left. He’s now back in Russia, which means that I get to share here some of the wonderful food we made in a small community kitchen in his hotel.
The first food (really, a drink) that sticks out in my mind was conjured up on a bicycle trip we took from Thun to Spiez, another small city on the Thunersee about 15 km from here. The trail went through the woods, and about five minutes after hitting gravel I heard a bicycle peeling out behind me and a happy exclamation of “Smotri! Kostyanika!” (“Look! Stone bramble berries!”) from Misha.
Now, I should tell you the thing about Russians: they go crazy about picking things out of the woods and eating them. Berries, mushrooms, stinging nettles (a recipe I really want to try), you name it. And to me, they all seem to be experts on what’s edible, and what just might contain lethal nerve toxins on certain days of its life cycle but not others.
And I agree with the philosophy: there’s probably nothing cooler than spending time in the woods, collecting things to bring home and then making delicious food out of them. It, like Linux (yeah, got that in there), is free, in both the senses of “free beer” and “free spirit”, and (unlike Linux) it’s a great opportunity to get out of your house and learn about the wonderful local wildlife around you. So I, of course, jumped all over these stone brambles when Misha mentioned them, despite the fact that I’d never seen one in my life, nor did I even know the English term for them (hello, Wikipedia). . . all I knew was that I trusted Misha’s judgment, they tasted okay off of the bush (and didn’t immediately kill me), and had huge pits in them.
When we got home with a liter of them in an inside-out plastic shopping bag (now I know why Russians always carry at least one), we started brainstorming, with the help of this website (in Russian).
Now, I’ll tell you the other thing about Russians: they love their kvas, and rightly so, in my opinion. It’s basically made by fermenting juice or rye bread with yeast for a few days and is served cold. It’s not boozy like beer, but it’s not sweet either. It’s genuinely refreshing when sold in the summer from big yellow barrels on street corners–but it’s doubly refreshing when you make it yourself out of berries you picked with your own hands, and drink it during a tough bike ride in the mountains on a hot summer day in Switzerland. Which, I can only assume, is why Misha immediately suggested making kvas out of our new stone bramble berries.
Here’s how it’s done.
Stone Bramble Berry Kvas
To make it vegan, use some other sweetener instead of the sugar (it’s mainly there for the yeast to eat, so choose something suitable).
4 cups stone bramble berries
1 cup granulated sugar
5-10 grams dry yeast
3 liters water
Take your berries, and crush them using either an inverted drinking glass:
or a Foley mill (why there was a Foley mill in our hotel’s community kitchen, yet not a decent spatula, I’ll never know):
Put the crushed berries and with their stones and pulp in a pan over medium heat, and boil them for five minutes.
Strain them using a cheesecloth (or a washcloth, either way)
in order to remove the seeds
Stir in the sugar, and then cool the mixture completely so it doesn’t kill the yeast. Stir in the yeast, pour into a bottle, and wait for two days. We kept ours on the bottom shelf of a closet, but I guess you could keep it anywhere warm but out of direct sunlight. Don’t close the lid entirely.
After those two days are up, you might see some sediment at the bottom. Pour the liquid into another bottle to avoid drinking the sediment–and then you’re done! Enjoy!
I haven’t really had much time to cook lately, since I changed jobs (and countries!) about a week and a half ago, and now that I’m in Thun, Switzerland, a small ancient city at the foot of the Bernese Alps, and working in a materials science research facility, I’m really busy all of a sudden. I’ve had to drastically cut back my hours in the kitchen, and so have been surviving on the delicious mountain bread that’s ubiquitous here and can be bought fresh, along with local cheese, chocolate, and birchermüesli. The range of fresh foods available here that I’m used to cooking with is much wider than that in Russia (herbs!), so I’m happy about that, but it’s a bitter irony that I don’t have the time to make the most it. And although I love my work, that aforementioned ironical situation, combined with a few other things, have left me positively bummed lately.
So I decided today, after having screwed up in the laundry room of my new building and locking my soapy clothes in a washing machine for three hours while my flatmate was asleep this morning and I was supposed to be at work, that what I needed was a good, homemade banana bread, just like my mom used to make. Mom worked full-time in addition to holding a position in local government the entire time we were growing up–and she could whip up this banana bread batter in about five minutes, then pop it in the oven and get back to whatever she was doing for an hour while it was baking. It’s excellent for very busy people, or very bummed-out people, and especially for people who are both.
This bread has never, ever failed me, even when I go into mathematician mode and become so inept at regular household things that I shouldn’t be allowed out of my bedroom. . . like this morning. Or like about three years ago, when I was living in an apartment with a nice little oven whose controls I didn’t understand in the slightest. In particular, for the first two months I was there I, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish between ‘broil’ and ‘bake’–and so it was a mystery why my banana bread would cook so fast on the top, and still be uncooked on the pan-side. Having had two bread pans, though, I had a solution: I’d tip the bread-in-progress upside-down into the other pan about halfway through baking, or when I sensed that the bread would burn if I didn’t. In retrospect, I’m surprised that this worked as well as it did (and it really did work well; the bread cooked in about 2/3 the time, and the top (well, either top, I guess) didn’t burn), but I’m also glad that I found my oven’s bake setting after a while–and I think that the whole thing is a testament to how flexible and wonderful this banana bread is.
The photo’s 100% awful, since I didn’t have time to take photos in daylight and so used the overhead lighting in our dining room. . . but the bread–believe me–is wonderful.
Banana Bread
The recipe is actually my grandmother’s, and it’s something I came to not directly, but by way of my mother. It’s also delicious with chopped walnuts added to it, and if you want to experiment with spices like nutmeg and cloves, that’d probably also taste good, but I prefer to make it simple and plain, and have a slice of it with vanilla ice cream or vanilla sauce. Cures all the household woes you’ll ever have, and travels to work very easily, serving the purpose of making your labmates very jealous.
To make it vegan, replace the sugar if you’re concerned about bone char, use margarine instead of butter, and use an extra banana and an extra teaspoon of baking powder to replace the egg.
3 bananas, can be overripe
1 cup butter or margarine, left on the counter to soften for a few minutes
1 egg
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp salt
1 cup sugar
2 cups all-purpose baking flour
Peel and mash the bananas using a potato masher, and mash well with the butter and egg. Add the powder, soda, and salt, and mix thoroughly (my grandmother would probably sift all three of these in with the flour, but I’m too lazy). Add the sugar and mix thoroughly, then add the flour and mix thoroughly. Put the batter in a greased and floured bread pan, and bake in a 350F (175C) oven for about an hour, or until a knife stuck through the top comes out clean.
Since the first time I visited Russia, I’ve been blown away by what I’ve seen as the customary Russian notion of salad. In contast to the American version, which more often than not features large intact leaves of iceberg lettuce and a small selection of coarsely-chopped or whole peeled vegetables, a Russian salad as I’ve come to know it, traditionally features anything you can imagine, including herbs, eggs, meat, and vegetables–most often cucumbers, carrots, beets, tomatoes–chopped up finely and mixed thoroughly with mayonnaise or sour cream. Notice the lack of lettuce. One of my favorite ‘Russian’ salads is this one, although when I make it, I usually leave the vegetables more coarsely chopped than I’ve seen most Russians do. Either way, I consider it a perfect and simple summer salad.
Simple Summer Salad
To make it vegan, nix the mayonnaise and replace with oil and vinegar or your favorite other vegan dressing.
2 small cucumbers, washed and diced finely
4-5 medium tomatoes, washed and diced
500 g radishes, washed and sliced thinly
1 bunch dill, chopped along with the stems
2 bunches parsley, chopped along with the stems
1 bunch green onions, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/2 cup, more or less to taste, of mayonnaise
Mix all of it in a bowl, with or without the mayonnaise, and serve!
Serves 2-4 people, depending on how hungry those people are.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Misha and I went out for beers last week, and stumbled upon a wonderful-sounding menu item: cheese balls. At the first bite, Misha asked whether we could recreate them at home, and the perfect occasion for this arose on Saturday, a friend’s birthday–we arrived at the party with a bucket of cheese balls in hand, leaving us with an empty bucket within a half-hour. To say that they were a big hit would be an understatement. And they’re so easy to make!
Fried Cheese Balls
Fried cheese balls, like most fried foods, are best just after they’ve been drained, when the cheese is still melty and the crust still crispy. I found them much less appetizing after an hour-long ride to a friend’s party, but the fact that I considered them soggy, tepid, and too greasy compared to the delicious morsels I plucked from hot oil earlier that day nevertheless didn’t seem to make them any less popular among the guests.
I like to imagine that the same kind of heated debate I’ve heard my Swiss hosts having about the proper mixture of cheese to be used in fondue also takes place among cheese ball enthusiasts. But, as my circle of cheese-ball-expert acquaintances is somewhat small (equal to zero), I’ll have to wait to find out whether I’m right. Anyway, for this recipe I just randomly selected different neat-sounding and inexpensive wedges of cheese from the local supermarket–really, just whatever my hands decided to reach for. And it came out delicious. Don’t tell the Swiss.
1 kg medium-hard cheese
1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper
1/2 teaspoon salt, to taste
6 egg whites, beaten until stiff peaks form
1 cup, more or less, bread crumbs
3 cups, more or less, oil for frying (we used sunflower)
Grate the cheese into a large bowl, and mix with flour, salt, and pepper. Fold the egg whites in with your hands, and squeeze until mixed thoroughly. Form the mixture into bite-sized balls, and roll each ball in the bread crumbs to coat.
Heat the oil in a tall-sided frypan (or, in our case, a saucepan) until water jumps up and sizzles upon being dropped in. Drop the breaded cheese balls and fry a few at a time, for about one minute, or until they are a golden brown color. Drain to towels, and serve immediately.
I was in the mood to make broccoli soup last week. It’s tasty and healthy and wonderful in general. Here:
Cream of Broccoli Soup
This soup is very similar recipe to the Creamy Cauliflower Leaf and Potato Soup I made a while ago, and I think that a lot of different vegetables could work really well in this form–stuck on top of a soffrito of onions and garlic, boiled with potatoes, blended, and with milk or cream added.
To make it vegan, nix the butter, sugar, cheese rind, and sour cream garnish, check the wine label for animal-derived finings, and replace the cream with your favorite non-dairy milk.
2 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, diced
1 teaspoon sugar
3 large cloves garlic, minced
rind from 1 medium wedge of hard cheese
2 cups dry white wine
1 cup (more or less) vegetable stock
3 medium potatoes, peeled or scrubbed and diced
1 large carrot, peeled or scrubbed and diced
500 g broccoli, fresh or frozen
1 cup milk or heavy cream
juice from 1/2 lemon
1/2 cup parsley, chopped coarsely
1/4 cup sour cream
Melt the butter in the olive oil in a saucepan over low heat. Saute the onion with the sugar until caramelized. Add the garlic, and saute until fragrant. Add the cheese rind, wine, and stock, and stir over medium heat until simmering. Add the potatoes, carrot, and broccoli, and simmer 20-30 minutes or until potatoes can be crushed with a fork against the side of the saucepan. Liquefy the mixture with a stick blender, and stir in the milk or cream. Just before serving, stir in the lemon juice, and garnish with parsley and sour cream.
I don’t know how it happened (or how it happens so often), but time yesterday kept quietly creeping by until 30 minutes before supper time, at which point I realized that I hadn’t even begun to think about what to make. Then, as usual, it immediately stopped creeping, got into the starting blocks, and took off like a shot.
Again as usual at times like those, my mind turned to pasta, but this time without the usual thoughts of homemade tomato sauce (after the pizza adventure last weekend, there’s none to be found in this kitchen). No: this time, I paid more attention to the bottle of milk in the refrigerator. I ran out to the corner vegetable kiosk and bought a yellow pepper, cherry tomatoes, and some fresh herbs, the things I’d need for pasta primavera with homemade besciamella. On the time-efficiency to boyfriend-satisfaction curve, this is one of the most successful suppers I’ve ever made, ranking right up there with drunken pasta.
The photo is, of course, from the morning after, when I was getting another batch for lunch ready from the leftover pasta, sauce, and vegetables. Unfortunately, there was no yellow pepper leftover, but I, as an ardent bell pepper-hater, think it looks just as appetizing without it.
Pasta primavera
Pasta primavera is traditionally made with no cream sauce except a soffritto of olive oil, onion, garlic, and Parmesan cheese at the beginning–and although I base it, as I do most things, on a soffritto of butter (or oil, if you like), onions, and garlic, I’ve chosen to use the besciamella instead of just Parmesan (and to add it at the end), because I love taking a relatively unhealthy dish and somehow making it even more unhealthy. Along the same lines, feel free to garnish with grated hard cheese, if it’ll make you happy.
To make it vegan, replace the butter with margarine or oil, replace the besciamella with your favorite not-cream sauce or just leave it out entirely, nix the sugar if you’re concerned about bone char, and check your wine to be sure it wasn’t filtered with animal-derived finings.
2 tbsp butter
1 medium onion, chopped
1 tsp sugar
3 cloves garlic, chopped
1 yellow pepper, chopped
250 g (frozen) broccoli, stems removed and chopped
1 cup dry white wine
500 g dry pasta, your choice of geometry, cooked until just tender
250 g fresh cherry tomatoes, washed and each chopped in half
1/2 c chives, chopped
1/4 c fresh dill, chopped
1/4 c fresh parsley, chopped
5-6 springs fresh thyme, with the leaves stripped from the stems
1 tsp dried oregano
1 tsp dried basil
2-3 cups besciamella sauce
juice from 1/2 lemon
freshly ground black pepper, to taste
hot red pepper, to taste
Melt the butter over very low heat, and cook the onions with the sugar until translucent. Add the garlic and yellow pepper, and cook until fragrant. Add the broccoli, and cook until tender if you’re using fresh, or until thawed if you’re using frozen. Add the pasta, wine, cherry tomatoes, and spices, and cook until the liquid is gone. Add the remaining ingredients, give it a few healthy stirs until all’s combined, and serve hot with chilly white wine.
Besciamella
Besciamella is something like the French béchamel. Actually, it’s exactly like it. Wikipedia tells me that:
Auguste Escoffier’s recipe for béchamel consists of white roux, milk, optional veal, onions, thyme, butter, pepper, nutmeg, and salt.
Many chefs would now regard as authoritative the recipe of Auguste Escoffier presented in Saulnier’s Répertoire: “White roux moistened with milk, salt, onion stuck with clove, cook for 20 minutes”.
Well, I’ve never had the patience to make real roux in the oven, so I go with a butter-and-flour stovetop variant, and in the sauce, I hold the veal, onions, and thyme. There are no tricks here, just very low heat and frequent stirring and scraping.
1/4 cup butter
3 tbsp flour
500 mL milk
pinch nutmeg
pinch salt
pinch pepper
1/4 cup grated hard cheese
Melt the butter in a saucepan over low heat, and add the flour. Stir until you get a thickish yellow paste, and add the milk very slowly. Stir until thickened (about ten minutes), and add the remaining ingredients.
With all of that creme anglaise left over from last time, and with three boxes of merlot left over from Sunday’s epic birthday party, I decided that it was the time to poach some pears. They came out lovely-ly.
Poached Pears
These poached pears were great with the leftover creme anglaise, but they’re also great with almost anything else–ice cream, chocolate sauce, custards, puddings–and especially with the sauce that results when you reduce the wine mixture in which you’ve poached the pears. Just reduce that mixture over low heat for a few hours, and you’re in business. I think that no matter what you’re serving them with, poached pears are always prettier garnished with mint, but I had none on hand. . . so I picked a couple of leaves off of the nearest houseplant for this photo, hoping that would lead its viewers to ignore the lumps in the vanilla sauce that resulted from microwaving it. Don’t try that at home, please.
To make sure these are vegan, choose your wine carefully. Some have trace amounts of animals left in them, believe it or not, and it depends on the filtering process used. And definitely don’t serve the pears with creme anglaise, your vegan friends will probably hate you for that.
750 mL bottle of red wine
1 cup sugar
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise -or- 1 tsp vanilla extract
4 whole dried cloves
zest from one orange
juice from one orange
4 firm ripe pears, peeled and with the stems left on
Combine the wine, sugar, vanilla, and cloves in a saucepan that will hold all of the pears, put on low heat, and stir until the sugar is dissolved. While the mixture is heating, zest and juice the orange, and add the zest and juice to the saucepan. Heat until mixture simmers. Add all four pears, and simmer uncovered for 30-40 minutes. Remove pears from sauce. Serve warm.
And, my favorite new mixer stand:
