Welcome to a double helping of updates from my holiday kitchen.
The list of items I check before leaving home grows longer in December. To the essentials - car keys, credit cards, phone – I add a jar of preserves. Whomever I’m going to meet will receive a small treat from my kitchen. The fact that my friend doesn’t expect a gift makes the moment all the more pleasurable. Homemade gifts have the power to overcome social distancing.
I have made it a calling to streamline fruit preserving techniques to their utmost efficiency. If sales of my cookbook, Artisanal Preserves, are any indication, the desire to make preserves has boomed this past year while we were all at home. Amazon deserves a shout-out for continuing to save us time for making gifts at home. Vacuum sealable glass jars in the half-cup gift size are now in stock at supermarkets, hardware stores and, naturally, Amazon. There are even more reasons to try your hand at fruit preserving this year.
My recipes are scaled produce four or more jars of gift-size preserves. Winter fruits like oranges and cranberries contain copious amounts of pectin that allows them to gel quickly when sufficient sugar is added. These fruits also encourage the creation of delicious new flavor combinations when mixed with low pectin fruits. We’ll get into that another time.
A spoonful of homemade preserves calls for a slice of homemade bread (although some friends have confessed consuming the contents right out of the jar). Challah and brioche are the usual choices during the holidays. I recently discovered that the dense texture and whole grain flavor of Brown Soda Bread makes an addictive pairing with winter fruit preserves, and it’s easy to bake. What took me so long?
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Last month I reported hanging several pounds of unripened tomatoes from twine in my basement when frost threatened in October. I wasn’t kidding. These tomatoes have slowly ripened in the cool, semi-darkness, the little ones wrinkling a bit with age. I picked over the past two months them as they turned red and added them to sandwiches, salads and sauces. Picking tomatoes in the basement felt strange, but it worked.
Yesterday was harvest day for the remaining pound or so of slow ripeners. I culled those that were more red than green, cooked them in water and passed them through a food mill to remove their skin and seeds before I tasting the results. The flavor was, unsurprisingly, that of an unripe tomato.
But I’d come too far to give up on my summer dream of growing tomatoes. I summoned my inner Julia and created a soup modeled after her Potage Magali ( Mastering the Art, vol. 2) without chicken stock, her Cordon Bleu staple, and with a fair amount of tomato paste and sugar. The resulting soup was thick with the satisfying taste of tomatoes Mission accomplished.
Best wishes to all for a relaxed and satisfying holiday season!
We will return with new cooking classes and travel destinations in 2022,
