Category Archives: preserving

Beyond Canning: Gochugaru Preserved Lemons

24 March 2016 by local kitchen

Well, hellllllllllllloooooooooooooo there! It has been quite a while, hasn’t it? It seems I took an unintentional blog hiatus over the winter: life and work (and more life) and not quite having a lot to say all played their part. But breaks are good things, I think; and I’m feeling refreshed and ready to tackle new cooking projects, and more importantly, talk about them here! And what better reason to come out of bloggy hibernation than to celebrate the launch […]

Categories: citrus, fermenting, fruit, preserving, quick & easy, winter • Tags: canning, citrus, cooking, food, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

Apple Bourbon Chipotle BBQ Sauce

6 October 2015 by local kitchen

Apples, apples, everywhere. I’m not sure there has been such an apple season in the Northeast in my lifetime. Maine was swimming in them: trees everywhere dotted with hundreds of red, green, or golden orbs; apples piling in drifts on the side of the road; apple trees you never even knew you had producing large, juicy, blemish-and-worm-free fruit; the air redolent with spicy, slightly fermenting, apples. The story’s no different in my own front yard: we have several 100-year-old, tall, […]

Categories: apples, canning, condiments, fall, preserving, sauces • Tags: apples, canning, condiments, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

Strawberry Habanero Margarita Mix

2 July 2015 by local kitchen

Are you looking for a spicy, seasonally-appropriate, festaholic cocktail to kick off your holiday weekend? One that quickly & easily dispatches five of the 28 pounds of celebratory strawberries you picked at the farm last week? One that is so aggressively spicy that your husband takes one sip, carefully slides the glass out of his reach and coughs, “It’s very… um… you.” Of course you are! This preserve started out as a jam, but as the mixture of strawberries, sugar, […]

Categories: berries, canning, drink, preserving, wine, beer & liquor • Tags: berries, canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

Simple Strawberry Skillet Jam

29 June 2015 by local kitchen

It’s that time of year again: the time when I’m buying an armful of rhubarb, or a flat of berries, or pound after pound of peaches, and some innocent, unsuspecting stranger asks brightly, “What are you going to make?” The reactions I get when I tell people that I make jam run the full gamut from Stewie to serious side eye to the Patrick Stewart quadruple take. At the farmer’s market last summer, one woman even told me, “Girl, ain’t nobody […]

Categories: berries, preserving, summer • Tags: berries, food, local, recipes, summer

Ramp Powder

5 June 2015 by local kitchen

A couple of weeks ago, I took a sunny drive out to Holbrook Farm and picked up what had to be the last ramps of the season: they were huge, with big, fat bulbs, and the slightly yellow-green leaves that say the end of ramp season is nigh. It’s been a busy Spring, and my visits to the farm have been few and far between, so it’s just possible that I picked up everything else in the store as well. […]

Categories: 100% local, drying, leek, preserving, spring • Tags: cooking, food, local, preserving, quick & easy, ramps, recipes

What To Do with Preserved Lemon

1 December 2014 by local kitchen

Did you know that our good friend Sean of Punk Domestics fame is now the Food Preservation Expert over at About.com? It’s a really nice resource for All Things Preserve-y, and he’s been steadily adding new content. You should go check it out. And while you’re over there, you can take a look at the little guest post I put together discussing a bunch of different ways to use up preserved lemon, including links to various favorite recipes around the […]

Categories: citrus, preserving • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, winter

Mirepoix, Sofrito, & Soup Base for the Freezer

16 October 2014 by local kitchen

Have you ever noticed how each season’s preserving takes on a life of its own? Sure, you have the standards that you put up every year: canned tomatoes, your husband’s favorite pickle, ears and ears of frozen grilled corn. But each season it seems a certain method of preservation wins the day. Either the canning pot is bubbling away non-stop, or you have six different crocks fermenting on the counter, or everything in sight gets spread out in the dehydrator. […]

Categories: 100% local, freezing, preserving, soup, spring, summer • Tags: cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes

Nectarine Plum Butter

16 September 2014 by local kitchen

I have a confession to make: this fruit butter sat on my stove, in the Staub, for three days before I managed to cook it fully down and get it into jars. My friend Tanya had pointed me to a recent article on the Kitchn about when a health inspector visited Faith’s kitchen, and I had to laugh: I had a sponge near the sink, half an apple that had been sitting on my cutting board for hours, and a […]

Categories: canning, fall, peaches, plums, preserving, spreads, summer • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving

Roasted Heirloom Tomato Sauce

10 September 2014 by local kitchen

And the tomato recipes go rolling, rolling, rolling on. Last week I picked up a bushel of organic paste tomatoes from Fishkill Farms; at the same time, I got 20 lbs of heirloom paste tomatoes, a gorgeous red-and-yellow-stripey varietal with a deep magenta flesh, few seeds, and fantastic flavor. (I also grabbed some orchard nectarines, heirloom baby orange sweet peppers, NY maple syrup, and Flying Pigs‘ hot Italian sausage. Fishkill has a great year-round farm market, full of all sorts […]

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

Garden-Busting Roasted Tomato Sauce

24 August 2014 by local kitchen

Is the garden erupting with end-of-summer bounty? Are the piles of CSA vegetables taking over your fridge and kitchen counters? Are you feeling as lazy about canning as I am this summer? Well then, you’re in luck! This easy-peasy roasted vegetable tomato sauce solves all those problems and more, in addition to the perennial question, “What’s for dinner?” While I am slowly (oh-so-slowly) surfacing from my post-World Cup funk (two loonnnnggg years before qualifying for 2018 starts), I can’t quite […]

Categories: 100% local, preserving, sauces, summer, tomatoes • Tags: cooking, local, preserving, recipes, summer, tomatoes

Lazy Citrus Salt

20 February 2014 by local kitchen

For the past few weeks, I’ve had a series of small bowls living at the end of my counter. They each contain a different citrus salt: grapefruit, blood orange, Meyer lemon, Kaffir lime. The levels of each go up and down as I juice a lemon, or eat a grapefruit, and add zest and salt to the pile, or pull out a pinch of the fragrant zest to add to a soup, curry or batch of scones. It may seem […]

Categories: citrus, preserving, winter • Tags: citrus, cooking, food, preserving, quick & easy

Kumquat Habanero Marmalade

11 February 2014 by local kitchen

It appears that it is Kumquat Preserve Week on ye olde interwebs: not only my own modest contribution, but a straight-up kumquat marmalade from David Lebovitz, slow-cooked and with less sugar, and this rhubarb(!) and kumquat jam from Yossy via Blue Chair Fruit (who are teaching marmalade classes this month as well, if you live in the Bay Area and want to learn). Well, I have one more to add to the pile of kumquat love: kumquat habanero marmalade, originally made & […]

Categories: canning, citrus, preserves, preserving, winter • Tags: canning, cooking, food, marmalade, preserving

Kumquat & Meyer Lemon Marmalade with Chile & Kaffir Lime

7 February 2014 by local kitchen

It’s been all marm, all the time around here for the last week or two, what with Meyer lemons, Rio Red grapefruit, and blood oranges, kumquats and Kaffir limes all rolling around my counter tops. And trust me, there are worse things than having 40 lbs of California and Texas citrus perfuming the kitchen in the midst of a snowy, snowy Polar Vortex New York winter. I’ve been enjoying a lot of citrus fresh: grapefruit for breakfast, blood orange as an afternoon […]

Categories: canning, citrus, preserves, preserving • Tags: canning, cooking, food, preserving, winter

Candied Fennel Stalks + Fennel Frond Salt

17 January 2014 by local kitchen

I’ve been on a bit of a fennel kick lately: not that I would ever consider the dreaded “D” word, but it’s nice to have something crisp and fresh and sweet yet mildly grassy after the excesses of the holidays. Fennel is pretty amazing in that every part of the plant is edible: bulb, stalks, fronds, seeds and pollen; and while they all have that distinctive licorice-y flavor, each part of the plant tastes subtly different, and the overall flavor is […]

Categories: fennel, preserving, quick & easy, spring, winter • Tags: cooking, food, local, preserving, quick & easy, recipes

Plum Jam with Preserved Lemon

6 October 2013 by local kitchen

Plums always remind me of my dad. He would eat them by bucketful in summer: if I think of him in summertime, I see a plum in his hand, one missing a great big Dad-sized bite. I sometimes wonder what he would think of this wacky preserving-canning creature I’ve become. He died many years ago, when I was just out of college and still finding my way in the world. I started cooking as a teenager, so I’m sure I […]

Categories: canning, fall, jams, plums, preserving, summer • Tags: canning, cooking, food, local, preserving, recipes