Category Archives: seasons

Locavirgin: Spicy Garlic Sandwich Spears

13 August 2010 by local kitchen

We interrupt the onslaught of peach preserving recipes to bring you something completely different: pickles! OK, so not completely different. Beef tartare au gratin would be completely different (not to mention hilarious). But I don’t eat beef (Sorry, Julia) and what I have is a kitchen overflowing with summer produce. So: pickles it is. The first time I made pickles was two summers ago, which was also the first time I grew a garden. I had a very prolific cucumber vine, […]

Categories: 100% local, canning, cucumber, garlic, Locavirgin, pickles, preserving, quick & easy, summer • Tags: canning, condiments, cooking, food, local, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

Procrastinaty Peach Butter

12 August 2010 by local kitchen

I’ve noticed a bizarre phenomenon with peaches this year: although my peaches were quite firm, some rock hard, when I picked them (as I mentioned in the last post), they began to brown and rot very quickly, many of them in less than 24 hours. Wondering if this could be specific to the peaches at Fishkill Farm, I tweeted about it and instantly heard back from several tweeps in the Northeast saying the same exact thing: rock to rot in a […]

Categories: breakfast, canning, dessert, peaches, preserving, spreads, summer • Tags: breakfast, canning, cooking, dessert, food, local, preserving, recipes

Peach Chocolate Dessert Sauce

10 August 2010 by local kitchen

Peach chocolate sauce, the first of many peach preserves to come, rolled out of the canner this morning at far-too-early o’clock. In case you missed the discussion on Twitter, Tai, Alison & I went peach picking at Fishkill Farms on Sunday. It was hot & sunny, then it rained, then it was hot & sunny again. We picked, and picked, and then picked some more: 40 lbs of peaches later (and 2 quarts of nectarines, and 3 quarts of Italian plums, […]

Categories: canning, chocolate, dessert, peaches, preserving, sauces, summer, wine, beer & liquor • Tags: canning, cooking, dessert, food, local, preserving, recipes

Roasted Golden Plums with Honey & Sage

9 August 2010 by local kitchen

Did you feel it? Last weekend, that nip in the air that signals autumn is on the way? It’s a distant memory now, as I contemplate preserving 40 lbs of peaches in my humid, 88-degree kitchen, but over the weekend there was a definite autumnal crispness to the night air, and temps dipped into the 50’s for the first time in a long while. I love all the seasons, but I’ve always loved Fall the best (and not just because I’m […]

Categories: 100% local, canning, condiments, plums, preserves, preserving, roasting, sage, summer • Tags: canning, condiments, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

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

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

Salt Potatoes

30 July 2010 by local kitchen

I went to college in Syracuse, NY (yes, I am an Orangewoman) and spent a couple of lazy hard-working, class-attending summers there, making up classes that I blew off during the semester earning extra credit towards my degree. In addition to that wacky glowing yellow ball in the sky, lazy afternoons at Green Lakes and no lines at Chuck’s, summer brings a fabulous bounty to Central New York: the salt potato. Salt potatoes have a mystique all their own, especially […]

Categories: 100% local, appetizer, potato, side dish, summer • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, recipes, summer, vegetarian

Chipotle Bacon Caramels

29 July 2010 by local kitchen

With all these zucchini, eggplant, scallions and cukes to deal with, it seems more than a little ludricrous to be making candy right now. Not to mention that standing over a pot of boiling sugar in the height of summer is not what everyone would choose to do. Then again, I’m known for my less-than-conventional decisions, not to mention my ludicrousness (ludicrosity?). And sometimes a girl just needs bacon. And candy. Or bacon candy. I know what you’re thinking; bacon […]

Categories: candy, dessert, pork, year round • Tags: bacon, caramel, chipotle, cooking, dessert, food, homemade candy, local, pork, recipes

Baba Ganoush

27 July 2010 by local kitchen

Can it possibly be Tuesday again already?? Why yes, yes it can. So, in an effort to use up the three teeny, tiny, baby Japanese eggplants languishing in the fridge, in anticipation of getting three more teeny, tiny, baby Japanese eggplants in the CSA tomorrow, I give you: baba ganoush. There are lots of recipes for baba ganoush out there in Ye Olde Internets: most of them are pretty much the same, consisting mainly of roasted eggplant, tahini, and lemon juice. […]

Categories: appetizer, cilantro, eggplant, spreads, summer, vegetarian • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, recipes, vegetarian

Scallion Hummus

26 July 2010 by local kitchen

I don’t know about you, but ’round these parts we are literally drowning in scallions; we are getting 7 or 8 huge scallions each week in our CSA, and when I say huge, I mean huge. These puppies are close to 3 feet long and the bulbs are the diameter of a quarter. It must be The Summer of the Scallion and nobody told me. In addition to all the scallion love from my own CSA, our neighbors (and landlords) were […]

Categories: appetizer, beans, chickpeas, fall, parsley, quick & easy, scallions, side dish, spring, summer, vegetarian • Tags: cooking, food, local, quick & easy, recipes, vegetarian

Blueberry, Lemon & Chile Jam

25 July 2010 by local kitchen

Run, don’t walk to your nearest blueberry patch and make this jam while blues are still in season. This one is classic Nischan: pure blueberry flavor, accented with the tang of lemon, and just enough sweetness to off-set the surprise heat of jalapeno and habanero peppers. So good that this is my second batch in as many weeks and I’m contemplating a third. Worth firing up the canner on a 90-degree, 99% humidity July Sunday – it’s that good. Adapted […]

Categories: berries, breakfast, canning, cilantro, citrus, hot chile peppers, jams, preserving, summer, year round • Tags: berries, blueberry, canning, chile, cooking, food, lemon, local, preserving, recipes

Can Jam: Pattypan Pickles

23 July 2010 by local kitchen

CanJam July #2: a quick mini-batch of pickles, or an attempt to deal with the metric tons of summer squash currently taking over my refirgerator. Do you know Patty? She’s round & bumpy, bright yellow (or sometimes green), looks like a flying saucer? Yes, that one. She and her entire extended family have moved into my fridge, lock, stock and two smoking 8-balls. When a house guest over stays her welcome, I say, pickle ’em! Brine propotions taken from Marisa’s […]

Categories: Can Jam, canning, pickles, preserving, summer, zucchini • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

CSA-Busting Vegetable Soup

21 July 2010 by local kitchen

It’s Wednesday, which means CSA day for many of you. On Tuesday nights at this time of year, I often get “CSA panic syndrome,” wherein I look in the fridge, see it overflowing with vegetables from the last week or two, and start frantically pulling things out and whipping up a recipe in an effort to make some room for tomorrow’s box. The weather has been good to area farmers this year (so far – knocking on wood!) and despite the lack […]

Categories: 100% local, cabbage, carrot, cilantro, garlic, green beans, main course, parsley, scallions, soup, summer, tomatoes, vegetarian, zucchini • Tags: cooking, CSA, food, local, recipes, soup, vegetarian