August | 2010 |

Red Raspberry & Dark Chocolate Refrigerator Jam

5 August 2010 by local kitchen

“So what convinced you to sacrifice good chocolate to a jam?” Nadine said. I had to laugh. My friend Nadine is a certifed chocoholic, as am I, and like most chocoholics, tends to like her chocolate in its purest form: chocolate. Whether it be melted into a cake center, heated as a drink, or a sweet square morsel after dinner, good quality chocolate is so purely indulgent, in and of itself, that it seems the ultimate in lily gilding to gussy […]

Categories: berries, chocolate, dessert, jams, preserving, summer, year round • Tags: berries, chocolate, cooking, dessert, food, local, preserving, recipes

Volunteer Tomatoes

4 August 2010 by local kitchen

Do you see this? This is a picture of the rock wall that borders my driveway (with stairs in the background, that lead up to our cozy little cottage). The wall is actually quite pretty (I’m just a lousy photographer); one of those old-timey New England stone walls that you find all over the place in our neck of the woods. The wall gets fun sun, Western exposure, and as you can see, I haven’t been very diligent about weeding […]

Categories: gardening • Tags: gardening

Jamaican Jerk Sauce

3 August 2010 by local kitchen

Last week, when I whined about discussed my scallion overload with y’all (you know I’ve been reading The Bloggess too much when I bust out the y’alls), my friend Weber King suggested that I make jerk sauce, as it uses up a lot of scallions. (Y’all should go visit his blog; maybe that would convince him to update it more than once every 3 months). Hands up if you knew that jerk sauce was made primarily of scallions: I had no […]

Categories: condiments, grill, hot chile peppers, preserving, sauces, scallions, summer, thyme, year round • Tags: condiments, cooking, food, grilling, local, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

Cultured Butter

2 August 2010 by local kitchen

In the midst of all the peak-of-season preserving, I haven’t forgotten my mission to review The Lost Art of Real Cooking, by Ken Albala and Rosanna Nafziger (A Perigee Book, published by the Penguin Group). You may remember my experiment with Swazi Sauce; I was more than a little frustrated with the lack of detail in the recipe, but since then, author Ken Albala not only stopped by to offer a comment on the post, but made the original recipe again and discussed […]

Categories: 100% local, condiments, fermenting, milk, preserving, techniques, year round • Tags: cooking, food, homesteading, local, preserving, recipes

Tomato Purée for Sauce or Canning

1 August 2010 by local kitchen

It’s that time of year again: today is August 1st (can you believe it?) and August in the Northeast means one thing in local food circles: tomatoes. Last year was such a dismal tomato crop, what with all the rain creating ideal conditions for late blight, and with so many local farms losing hundreds if not thousands of tomato plants. As such, last year saw very little in the way of tomato preserving, and I am hoping for a bumper crop […]

Categories: canning, preserving, summer, tomatoes • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes, tomatoes