After years of saying “this is the summer I learn how to can,” I finally made it happen. I’ve long viewed this mysterious process with trepidation. How can it be possible to hold food indefinitely in suspended animation? How is it possible to protect it from the riot of hungry microorganisms, and the rot and decay they cause, with only a thin layer of glass and a heat-sealed metal cap? With awe I’ve looked upon the strange alchemist’s setup: magnetic wands and special funnels, metal rings and paraffin and vats of boiling water into which jars are lowered on special racks. In my kitchen no project had ever before been undertaken which required anything to be sterilized.

But then, canning is a time-honored practice. I reassured myself that it’s part of many a home cook’s routine. Certainly my Pennsylvania Dutch forebears were ardent practitioners. I knew I needed to give it a try.

And so I did. I decided to can two things: tomatoes, and a corn and poblano salsa inspired by the Perro Poblano, the chili dog I made for last year’s Brooklyn Hot Dog Cookoff.

I did my research. I studied the Ball Blue Book and the classic Putting Food By.  I learned that if you don’t have a pressure-canner, and you’re just using a boiling-water bath, you need to be sure the food inside the jars is sufficiently acidic. You also need to make sure the contents of the jars contain plenty of liquid, so that the heat from the boiling water can fully circulate through to the center of the jar, killing off any last redoubt of bacteria that may be lurking there.

In other words, with canning you can’t just wing it like you can in ordinary cooking. If you’re just starting out it’s a good idea to find a recipe (there are many in the books mentioned above, or on the USDA website), and follow it to a T. Or, better yet, take a class.

I wish I’d followed that advice. Instead, I approached my first canning project like I approach ordinary cooking: I looked over a recipe to get its basic ideas and then incorporated those ideas into a dish of my own. This is fine for making dinner, but in canning it felt nerve-wracking. If I screwed up the result could be more than just an unsatisfying supper. It could be botulism.

But I forged ahead, trying my best to be careful.  The tomatoes were pretty straightforward: I simply blanched them to remove their skins, then heated them up and packed them into hot, sterilized jars. To play it safe (some tomato varieties aren’t all that acidic) I added lemon juice to each jar. The corn  salsa was a little tricker. I made a salsa base from sweet corn (blanched and cut from the cob) chopped white onion, roasted poblano peppers and salt. To can it I referred to a recipe for Amish-style corn relish, using lime juice – and plenty of it – in place of the traditional white vinegar. Lord knows what it will taste like when I open those jars in January.

Another piece of advice: for your first time out, try canning just one thing. Canning requires you to have a large boiling cauldron of water for the jars, a small pan of boiling water to sterilize the lids, and a pot to heat up the food. In my case that meant a pot for the tomatoes and another for the corn. What with managing jar lifters and magnetized lid-lifting wands, while trying to keep everything operating-room clean, I would’ve felt better with one fewer pot on the stove.

I managed though to pack three pints of tomatoes and a pint and four half-pints of corn salsa. When the jars came out of the cauldron and cooled  — wondrous to behold – they all sealed. The lids held tight. Even now, a month later, there’s no oozing, no funny noises, no smells. Everything seems to be ok.

But after all this, do I really know that the food inside is safe?  I’m taking my health and well-being into my hands, and maybe that of my friends and guests, thinking I can safely store food at room temperature for months on end. What will happen when I open those jars? Check back in January for a full report – assuming I survive!

This summer was great for cooking and eating even if it wasn’t so great for blogging on Dave’s Kitchen. (It was, however, great for blogging on Epicurious.)Here are a few highlights from a great foodie summer:

	Mis en place for pea risotto…
	…becomes actual pea risotto…
	…which gets fried into pea risotto suppli that take third place at fourth edition of the Food Obstructions.
	Chef Joe shows off his pizza dough technique during a July pizza party…
	…and makes some amazing pizzas…
	…with toppings taken from his amazing garden.
	I made ice cream for the first time in several years. The first batch was raspberry-swirl.
	And of course, I visited the unforgettable Vermont Cheesemaker’s Festival.

Happy Foodie Autumn everyone!

The food mill I bought this summer from the Brooklyn Kitchen has reclaimed itself. I’d intended for it to become part of my arsenal of tools for making homemade sodas, but I was disappointed to find that none of its three interchangeable strainer plates would strain finely enough to make a good soda syrup. I’d envisioned the sturdy old Foley food mill that my mom used when making applesauce from the fruit that grew in our backyard. My new foodmill was not as sturdy and, well, it just wasn’t the same. I stuffed it into my cupboard and consigned it to a future stoop sale (for you Midwesterners, that’s city-talk for “Garage Sale”).

But I brought the food mill back out today to help me turn a pile of tomatoes into sauce. The plan: roast them until soft and then make a sauce for (what else) spaghetti and meatballs. The food mill, I thought, would separate out the tomato skins and create a coarse puree perfect for a pasta sauce. It did just that.

To prepare the tomatoes I did nothing more than wash them. I lined a roasting pan with a thin layer of olive oil, put the tomatoes inside, and drizzled a little more oil on top. I tossed in some unpeeled garlic cloves, topped it off with salt & pepper, and tossed it into a hot (425°) oven.

There are some that advocate a low-and-slow technique for roasting tomatoes. I’m sure this produces great results and am certain to try it someday. But today I didn’t want concentrated, oven-dried tomatoes – I wanted soft, juicy tomatoes, and
roasting them fast & furious seemed to do the trick. The tomatoes softened up quickly – after less than half an hour, and shed a considerable amount of water into the pan but stayed moist.

Once they were cool enough to handle they went into the food mill a scoop at a time (I pulled out the garlic for another use — they were just to add fragrance). The food mill did a fine job:  it kept back the tomato skins and pushed through a chunky, sweet tomato puree. This went into a big pot with onion, garlic, red wine and oregano where it sat over a low flame on the stove for the next several hours until it attained a nice thick pasta-sauce consistency.

One drawback: the sauce has a lot of seeds. I’ll give that some thought for next time. In the meantime, all it needs now are some meatballs and  spaghetti.

Two awesome-looking kohlrabi came through from the Paisley Farm CSA this week. This was my first time cooking with kohlrabi, so I wanted to try something a little interesting. Also, I wanted to use up some turkey sausage that had been sitting in my freezer. Here is a recipe that I came up with for sausage stuffed kohlrabi.

I know a few people who become almost lyrical when talking about this strange-looking and strangely-named vegetable, so I’m glad to’ve finally indulged my curiosity about it.  Its juicy texture is sometimes compared to that of an apple, though its flavor is vegetable-y and not sweet. It’s related to the cabbage (as is broccoli, cauliflower, kale and Brussels sprouts), and it’s name is German for “turnip cabbage.” The round bulb looks like a root, but is actually part of the kohlrabi plant’s stem.

I made up this recipe as I went along, so I can’t vouch for its reliability, but it did come out pretty tasty. Please suggest any improvements that come to mind.  A better variation might be to stir in some of the chopped kohlrabi pulp after the rice has cooked, so it retains some crunch. Or, stuff the un-cooked kohlrabi, then braise them, like this Epicurious recipe for German-style stuffed kohlrabi says to do. My version, however, seemed simpler for a first-timer like me.

Thanks everyone for coming out to the Borough Hall Greenmarket yesterday and for having a taste of my Sweet Corn and Tomato Risotto. I had a blast! I hope you all were inspired to buy some corn and tomatoes and try this yourself. Here is the recipe.

There’s a lesson every cook learns when he’s first starting out, and maybe re-learns many times thereafter. It is, simply: I can make that! It’s when he realizes that some food he’d always encountered only as an already assembled thing, that seemed to have been created by some mysterious procedure, is something he can create himself at home, in his own kitchen.  In that moment he has taken that food back from the chefs and supermarkets. Whether he chooses from then on to always make this food himself, or whether he goes back to allowing the pros to make it for him, he’s broken its mystique it and gained an understanding of what’s inside it.

It’s a lesson I learned again a couple of weeks ago when I visited my brother Joe in Vermont and he suggested that we make sausage. “Make sausage,” I thought “you can just make sausage?” Somehow, I’d always thought some special machinery or a secret, unobtainable ingredient was required to transform meat into actual sausage.

But  it turns out all that’s really needed is meat, fat, spices, and something to chop them all together with. A chef’s knife might do, but there are some gadgets that help to do the job properly.  A meat grinder or food processor will ensure that the meat, fat and spices are thoroughly mixed and have the even texture you expect in sausage. And if you want to pack your sausage into links (rather than patties), you’ll need sausage casings and some kind of sausage stuffer.  Sausage stuffers come in many shapes and sizes, but perhaps the most common for home use, and the one my brother and I used, is the sausage stuffer / meat grinder attachment to the KitchenAid stand mixer.

As for casings, Joe managed to find them at his local supermarkets. That’s Vermont, though, and people up there expect such things to be on hand. You may need to seek out a butcher shop.

Other than that, you just need a recipe. Sausage recipes are as endless as, well, as endless as there are kinds of sausage. We were after lamb sausage, since Joe had a lamb he’d recently bought all wrapped up neatly in butcher paper parcels in his freezer. Interestingly, all of the the recipes called for pork fat and not lamb fat – lamb fat being, I suppose, a bit harder to come by. This being Vermont, we didn’t have to look far to find pork fat – we got ours from a farm near Middlebury.

The process was slow and labor intensive, but simple. Cut the meat & fat in to cubes, and toss it together with the spices. Run the mixture through a meat grinder. Run the mixture through a meat grinder again. Taste-test your recipe by taking a bit of the mixture and cooking it on a hot skillet. Adjust the spices as necessary.  Attach the sausage stuffer to the meat grinder and thread a sausage casing onto it (the casings will need to’ve been well rinsed & soaked). Pull a little of the casing off of the stuffer and tie a  knot in it. Run the sausage mixture through the meat grinder again, this time feeding the mixture into the casing.

This part definitely works best with two people: one person pushing the meat mixture through the grinder and one person holding the casings as the mixture feeds into it. I found that it helped to force he mixture down into the casing with my hands, since the  stuffer didn’t to push the meat through with enough force to fill out the casings for nice plump sausages. Twist the sausage into links as you go, or wait until you’ve filled entire casing is filled and then twist it into links. Lay it out in a single layer on a baking sheet and freeze. Amazingly, it’s sausage!

This weekend was Grilliardsburg, Karol Lu’s annual BBQ held  in the back courtyard of Redd’s Tavern.  For last year’s event I made a lattice-topped peach pie, and I thought it might be hard to top that this year. Not to mention I had less time to prepare, so I decided instead of a pie I’d make rustic tarts.  They weren’t going to look as fancy, but I’d found some nice-looking fresh blueberries and sour cherries at the farmers’ market, so at least I knew they’d taste good.

I also used the all-purpose flour from Cayuga Farms, who grow and mill their wheat upstate and sell it at the Union Square and McCarren Park Greenmarkets. Their flour is less refined than what you find in the grocery store, so the crust has a darker color and a heartier, nutty flavor. It definitely has a fuller taste than most white flour, but doesn’t taste like whole wheat.

Rustic tarts really are quicker to put together than a full-blown pie: just roll the dough out into something like a circle, spread or pile the filling on its center dot the filling with chunks of butter, and fold the edges of the dough over onto it. There’s no need to make the edges of the crust even, or to flute the edges of the crust, or to weave an lattice on top.

As I was assembling my tart I had a brief, small panic: the crust wasn’t holding together. It was tearing. Since the tart doesn’t bake in a pan, it’s less forgiving when it comes to patching up tears. I was just about ready to give up and turn my tart into a pandowdy, when I remembered I’d forgotten a step: the fraisage.  In the fraisage, which I learned from an old issue of Cooks Illustrated, you lightly smear the dough away from yourself with the ball of your hand. This toughens up the dough slightly, enough to allow it to be assembled and baked without a pan, but not as much as kneading would do. After fraisaging it gently I re-rolled the dough & had a much easier time assembling it.

The look of a rustic tart definitely has a charm of its own. You can leave them entirely rough-edged, like mine, or you can pare the edges of the crust until they’re smooth and even, and layer the edges into uniform folds. This will give your tart an elegant look, like this, but then, that’s not very rustic, is it?

A big project at work has left me little time lately for cooking (or writing). So rather than let this blog go stale for another week, I’ve taken a look into the Dave’s Kitchen Archives for some photos of food I cooked around this time last year but never wrote about. Here’s some of what I found:

Grilled pizzas, with pesto, tomato and mozzerella

Horseradish Greens…

… which got stirred into a pot of risotto

Rhubarb Cobbler

And it was all delicious.

I tend to be an after-work snacker.  This is potentially a bad habit – if I’m too hungry to wait for dinner, I’ll reach for something quick. And quick food, very often, is unhealthy food. So I like to have something on hand that’s both ready to eat not too bad for me.

This ricotta spinach spread fits that bill pretty well. I’m lucky that my neighborhood has a handy supply of excellent, fresh ricotta, made by nearby cheesemakers, and to this simply I add spinach that I’ve destemmed, steamed, squeezed dry, and chopped. I flavor the mixture with freshly grated parmesan, salt & pepper, sometimes basil or oregano, and sometimes a pinch of grated nutmeg. A dab of this spread on a slice of good Italian bread will keep me on my feet until I can have dinner on the table.

To steam the spinach, I simply pack all the leaves into a 2 quart saucepan that has an inch or so of water in the bottom. I cover it and put it on medium heat just until the spinach is wilted – only a minute or two after the water start to boil. When it’s cool I gather it into a ball and squeeze out as much water as I can. This method is very handy, and the resulting ball of spinach is easy to chop and mixes nicely into lots of different preparations. The  problem with it though is the green water that’s left behind. I’m sure It’s full of spinach nutrients, and I feel bad pouring it out, but I can’t quite bring myself to drink it as Michael Pollan admonishes I should do. Is there some recipe I can use it for?

I wanted to begin this post by saying “Rhubarb isn’t just for dessert. In fact, if you google ‘rhubarb isn’t just for dessert’ you get dozens of the most amazing results.” But, unfortunately, you don’t. Just about all of the google results you get are for desserts — rhubarb crisps, rhubarb ice cream, rhubarb pies— though you do get one page entitled “rhubarb, it isn’t just for Yankees anymore!”

Rhubarb really is much too delicious to be relegated to the end of the meal. It makes a great sauce to serve alongside a roast pork loin, for example. And there’s a very interesting looking balsamic rhubarb compote posted recently on Epicurious’ Epi-Log blog.

Its tartness beautifully offsets sweet flavors, in much the same way that lemons do. Since its fresh-tartness is so refreshing, it makes a great drink.  So far this spring I’ve made two versions of it: a rhubarb-ginger lemonade and a rhubarb-strawberry lemonade. Both have been delicious.

The technique couldn’t be simpler: roughly chop the rhubarb and its accompaniments, put them into a saucepan with sugar, water and lemon zest, and boil. Let everything simmer for a while, let it steep together as it cools a bit, then strain it. Add lemon juice. When you’re thirsty, pour some of this syrup in a glass, top with water – preferably the carbonated kind – add ice and stir. Add a garnish of lemon peel or a lemon slice if you’re feeling patient and classy enough.

Last summer I used this method to make a varieties of berry sodas. They were delicious, though as I described, not very refined: the ordinary, medium-mesh strainer I used produced a thick, pulpy syrup. I had no complaints — the drinks I made with it were terrific, but this year I wanted to find a way to make my soda syrups a bit clearer. I went up the street to the Brooklyn Kitchen for some cheesecloth, but a helpful shopkeeper directed me instead to a pack of nylon jam-straining bags. I think they’re supposed to go along with some other equipment in a jam-straining kit, but I found they work very well simply draped around my mesh strainer. They have a big advantage over cheesecloth in that they’re re-useable.

And they produce a beautiful, clear syrup, which in turn made a clear, pulp-free drink.  I’m petty happy with my rhubarb-ades so far, and I hope there’s enough time left in rhubarb season to experiment with more flavors. Rhubarb-orange? Rhubarb-carrot? Rhubarb-vodka?