Food things

[magid]

I went to the Butcherie for the first time in ages, and had decided I wanted to splurge on something. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting things were still too spendy for me to allow myself to get them (manchego cheese! but at lots of dollars per pound, not happening; similarly for lots of meat cuts, etc.). In looking around, however, I found some single deckel beef that was affordable, so I asked one of the meat guys there what to do with it. He said to boil it at a slow simmer for some hours, which made me think of traditional boiled dinners that I'd never had. So I bought it.

Once I was home, I started heating a pot of water with cracked black pepper, pink peppercorns, and some mustard seeds. I put the meat in, and once the water boiled, turned it down to low for a couple of hours. Then I put in veggies: onions, diced potatoes, half a bag of lacinato kale, chunks of carrots, some red sauerkraut, and a diced sweet potato that was starting to become sad.

I had my boiled meal for Shabbat dinner (and cold for lunch, and hot through the rest of the weekend :-), and it made me super happy, the saltiness of corned beef mixing with the hints of heat in the pepper to make a lovely broth, the veggies tasty, and the meat tender and satisfying my meat-hunger. I've never made a boiled dinner before, but will have to do it again.

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This year I remembered in time that I don't care for the commercially-available dried cranberries because they're so sweetened, so I got some bags of cranberries to dry at home. Chef Google showed me a couple of recipes, mostly permutations of each other. I ended up picking over the berries, then blanching the good ones until their skins cracked. I put them on wax paper layered over paper towels, and put them in the freezer for a couple of hours to help break down the cell walls, then put them in the oven on the lowest-possible setting (since I don't have a dehydrator). I left them in for hours, and they weren't done, so the next day there was another hours-long session of drying. Of course, it ended up being far longer than the online estimates, but I expected that. I found that the berries I hadn't made sure had breaches in hull integrity were the ones that didn't dry out enough. In the end, I had four snack-sized Ziploc bags of dried cranberries from four now-standard 12-ounce bags of cranberries (I remember when it was a pound!). I'm storing them in the freezer because I'm not sure they're all dry enough to keep at room temperature until whenever I want them.

I've also made a couple of batches of cranberry jam. One used some other fruit I had around the house (an apple, an orange, perhaps something one other thing?), while the other is just cranberry, water, sugar... and a bunch of ginger. The little bit I have left uncanned is pretty strongly ginger; I'm hoping the four pints I canned will mellow over the next couple of months so other people might like it too.

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I haven't made much liqueur since the batch hrafn requested (Scotch bonnet; it's super spicy), and I've found myself thinking about tea. Not the herbal ones (I'd use the actual herbs, not dried), but tea leaves with whichever fruits. I've made a lot of varieties with orange (orange-coffee, orange-coffee cherry, orange-vanilla, etc.), so that might work, though the question then is what sort of tea would match best. Oolong, perhaps? Suggestions?
And I'm still intrigued by the idea of putting a tobacco leaf or two in a (different) batch.

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Since the gluten-free, dairy-free peanut-butter-hummus cookiesbars came out well, I think I might try using hummus in chocolate-chip cookies, replacing some of the butter. I've been too lazy to actually make them yet, though perhaps I can back-justify it to myself that I don't have anywhere to bring cookies, and it would be better if I didn't eat a whole batch myself :-).