BarBBQ Bill requested cinnamon raisin bread.

Well, OK…but I don’t buy raisins because he says he doesn’t like them.  Now he wants them in his bread.  Go figure.

But I do have these.  Dried Balaton cherries from Cherry Republic (they claim they are the world headquarters for all things cherry, and I’m not going to argue).

Now I need a bread recipe – as always, my go-to site for bread recipes is King Arthur Flour.  I found a cinnamon raisin bread that sounded interesting, so I’m going to start with that.  I’m also going to cut their recipe in half to make just one loaf – I’ve learned to “try it and see if he likes it”.

In a saucepan or microwaveable bowl, heat 3/4 cup of milk and 2 tablespoons of butter until just hot (about 120° F).  Add a generous 1/2 cup of dried cherries (I chopped them), 1/2 cup of rolled oats (hey, this might be almost health food!), 1/4 cup of brown sugar, 1 teaspoon of salt and 1 tablespoon of cinnamon.  Stir it all together and let it cool.

In another bowl, mix 1/4 cup of warm water and 1/2 tablespoon of brown sugar.  Add 1/2 tablespoon active dry yeast, and let it stand until you start to see bubbles forming (about 5 minutes).

When the milk/oat/cherry mixture has cooled down to about 80° F (lukewarm), combine it into the yeast mixture.  Start adding flour one cup at a time.  Here’s one cup of all-purpose flour mixed in.

Cup number two of flour is in there.  I used a cup of KAF’s white whole wheat flour (now it’s really healthy food

I measured out the last cup of all-purpose flour and added about a third of it.  Since the original recipe gave a “range” of flour amounts, that’s usually what I do.  I’ll take the rest of the cup and use as much as I need to add while I’m kneading the bread.

About eight minutes later and with an extra 1/3 cup of flour kneaded in, the dough is smooth and elastic.

Put the dough into a greased bowl (I used butter), flip it over so both sides are greased, cover with plastic, and let rise for about 1-1/2 to 2 hours until the dough is doubled.  These large measuring bowls are handy for that.  Just note the original amount and wait for it to double.  My kitchen was pretty cool today, so I let it rise a little bit more than two hours.

When it has doubled, punch the dough down and knead it a little bit on a lightly floured board.  Shape into a loaf and try to push any cherry bits back into the dough.  I hate burned fruit in the crust of my bread.  Place in a greased 8-1/2 x 4-1/2 inch loaf pan, cover it with plastic and let rise until doubled (another hour or so).

Again, my kitchen was cool, so I let it rise until the dome was above the rim of the pan.  It was more like 2 hours instead of a hour (and it should have gone longer – I think the whole loaf should have been above the pan rim.  How come hindsight is always 20/20?)

Pop the pan into a preheated 375° F oven and bake for 30 to 35 minutes.  I lowered the temperature by 25° because of the glass loaf pan.

I brushed mine with some melted butter and sprinkled on some demerara sugar.  It was too healthy – I had to add more sugar and butter.  We’re about halfway through baking here.  The top’s getting a bit brown, so I’m going to tent it with a bit of aluminum foil.

Mine took about 38 minutes to bake.  Tastes great toasted.  BarBBQ Bill was pleased!

Things to remember next time:

• Let the dough rise longer.  It’s a slow rise loaf so plan for the extra time.
• Could have used a bit more of the cherries.
• Don’t do the butter and sugar (and add some cinnamon to the top) until it’s partially baked.  I think that’s why it browned a bit too much.
• Keep experimenting.

Printable Recipe

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The challenge:  make a homemade barbecue sauce that’s not too sweet, that’s tangy-mustardy like a Memphis-style sauce, and can be put up using a boiling water bath.

I’m almost there.

I despise finding huge amounts of high fructose corn syrup in food, especially as the number one ingredient.  Before our preferred brand of store-bought barbecue sauce became “Now Better Tasting”, it used to contain “Concentrated tomato juice (water, tomato paste), high fructose corn syrup, vinegar, molasses, salt, modified food starch, contains less than 2% of spice, natural flavor, paprika, mustard flour, caramel color, guar gum, red 40.”  Well, at least tomatoes were the major ingredient.  Not so anymore.  The “New and Improved” version is…um…pretty bad tasting stuff.

The solution?  Make our own.

As usual, I turned to the NCHFP for a barbecue sauce recipe that could be processed in a boiling water bath (I’m too lazy to get the pressure canner out of the upstairs storage room) and found this:

• 4 quarts (16 cups) peeled, cored, chopped red ripe tomatoes (about 24 large tomatoes)
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1-1/2 cups chopped sweet red or green peppers (about 3 medium peppers)
• 2 hot red peppers, cored, and chopped
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (e.g., Tabasco®)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar

Yield: About 4 pint jars

*Caution: Wear plastic or rubber gloves and do not touch your face while handling or cutting hot peppers. If you do not wear gloves, wash hands thoroughly with soap and water before touching your face or eyes.

Please read Using Boiling Water Canners before beginning. If this is your first time canning, it is recommended that you read Principles of Home Canning.

1. Wash and rinse canning jars; keep hot until ready to use. Prepare lids according to manufacturer’s directions.
2. Combine prepared tomatoes, celery, onions, and peppers. Cook until vegetables are soft (about 30 minutes). Puree using a fine sieve, food mill, food processor or blender. Cook until mixture is reduced to about one half, (about 45 minutes).
3. Tie peppercorns in a cheesecloth bag; add with remaining ingredients and cook slowly until mixture is the consistency of catsup, about 1½ to 2 hours. As mixture thickens, stir frequently to prevent sticking. Remove bag of peppercorns.
4. Fill hot sauce into clean, hot jars, leaving ½ inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace if needed. Wipe rims of jars with a dampened clean paper towel; apply two-piece metal canning lids.
5. Process half-pint or pint jars in a boiling water canner for 20 minutes (at altitudes of 0-1000 feet). Let cool, undisturbed, 12 to 24 hours and check for seals.

Note: There are many types of barbecue sauce recipes and the acidity will vary among recipes. This canning process is intended for this recipe and procedure.

Well, it’s not exactly what we want as far as flavors go, so we’ll start editing:

• 4 quarts (16 cups) peeled, cored, chopped red ripe tomatoes (about 24 large tomatoes)
• 2 cups chopped celery
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1-1/2 cups chopped sweet red or green peppers (about 3 medium peppers)
• 2 hot red peppers, cored, and chopped
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard
• 1 tablespoon paprika
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (e.g., Tabasco®)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar

The celery and peppers are low acid (high pH) vegetables, so there’s no problem leaving them out.  It’s only when you ADD low acid vegetables to recipes that safety becomes an issue.  Foods that are processed in a boiling water bath must have a minimum pH of 4.6 – any higher than that and the food must be processed in a pressure canner.  Sugar (in this case) is for taste only, so that can safely be reduced or left out entirely.

We don’t have fresh tomatoes this time of year, but we do have frozen pureed tomatoes in the freezer.  During tomato season, we have a stockpot going to cook down extra tomatoes to freeze for use in sauces and soups.  These have nothing added – no salt, no sugar, nothing but tomatoes.

The easiest way we’ve found to store them is pack the tomato puree in 3-cup “disposable” containers (like Gladware, etc.)  Freeze them until solid.  Turn them out of the container and repack the “bricks” into 2 gallon resealable freezer bags.  Eight of them fit perfectly.

Our recipe now looks like this:

• 3 “bricks” frozen pureed tomatoes (9 cups) Note: The Ball Produce Guide shows 3 cups of fresh chopped tomatoes = 1-1/2 cups pureed tomatoes, so the original 16 cups should equal 8 cups of our puree (OK, so I have an extra cup in there – are the canning police going to come and get me?)
• 2 cups chopped onions
• 1 teaspoon black peppercorns (we’re going to use ground pepper for ours)
• 2 cloves garlic, crushed
• 1 tablespoon dry mustard (we’re out of dry mustard at the moment, so we’ll use prepared mustard)
• 1 tablespoon paprika (we used 1/2 tablespoon sweet and 1/2 tablespoon hot)
• 1 tablespoon canning salt
• 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce (we used Louisiana Hot Sauce)
• 1/8 teaspoon cayenne pepper
• 1-1/2 cups of (5%) vinegar (we used 1 cup apple cider vinegar and 1/2 cup white vinegar)
• 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice, bottled

Important note here:  This recipe calls for canning salt.  It’s much finer than kosher salt.  Just to see how much of a difference it made, I weighed a tablespoon of kosher salt (9 grams) and a tablespoon of canning salt (17 grams).

So if you use kosher salt, you may want to increase the salt to 2 tablespoons (or thereabouts) to achieve the same level of saltiness.

One trick we’ve learned (the hard way) is any recipe that requires a long period of “cooking down” (like fruit butters) works great in a crock pot.  That’s how we’re doing this sauce.  Pretty much “set it and forget it”.

After some initial tasting, we decided it needed a little bit of spice and a little bit of sweet.  For the spice, we added 2 teaspoons of Worcestershire Sauce and a tablespoon of malt vinegar (ours is 6% acidity).  For the sweet, we added 3 tablespoons of tomato paste.  (Hint: when you open a can of tomato paste and don’t use the whole thing, freeze the rest in tablespoon size “dollops” on a cookie sheet and put in a container when they’re frozen.  Just pull out what you need without having to open another whole can.)

This looks cooked down to the “consistency of catsup”.  This took about four hours in our crockpot (on high).

By the way, don’t you just hate those “reduce in half” type directions?  Here’s an easy way to figure it out.  Stick the handle of the spoon into the sauce before you start cooking it, and mark the original depth with a piece of masking tape.  Keep checking the depth until it’s halfway between your mark and the end of the spoon.

The sauce is done and canned – we got 2 pint jars, one 12-oz. jar, one half-pint jar and a 4 oz. jelly jar from this recipe – a total of 3-1/2 pints.

Tasting it after processing, we decided it actually came out too thick (it’s like catsup, which is a bit thick for our use), it could use more mustard flavor (dry mustard is now on the shopping list) and we should reduce or leave out the tomato paste (a little too tomato-y sweet and it added to the thickness).  But it’s close.  Very close.  And there’s still a bunch of tomato bricks in the freezer.  The experiment continues…

BarBBQ Bill and I wish everyone a Happy and Healthy New Year and a bountiful harvest in 2010!

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I need a break from cranberries and apples and cinnamon and chocolate and peppermint and winter/Christmas baking smells.

I need a smell and taste of summer.  I need to celebrate that the days are now going to get longer and the growing season will be here again before I know it.

I was down in the Little Cellar (where I keep our home-canned stuff) gathering things for holiday gift-giving and spied some quarts of peaches and a few jars of really yucky overly-sweet peach jam I made.

Peaches remind me of summer.  Hmmm, how about some Peach Cobbler?  And this one is so easy to make that I forgot to take pictures along the way.

Take 1/2 cup butter (1 stick) and put it in an ovenproof dish (mine is a 2-1/2 quart oval baker, but I think it works in a 13″ x 9″ pan, too) and put in the oven. Preheat the oven to 350°F.

While the butter is melting, mix up a batter of:
1 cup flour
1-8 oz. (1/2 pint) jar of way-too-sweet peach jam – or use 1 cup sugar
1 cup milk
1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt

For the peaches, you can use:

a bag and a half of frozen unsweetened sliced peaches (I think mine come in a 12 oz. bag?), or
a quart jar of home-canned peaches (I can mine in light syrup which adds about 1/4 cup of sugar – I figure I’ll burn that off shoveling snow), or
in the summer, 3 cups peeled and sliced fresh peaches, with the juice (about 3 or 4 peaches).
Note: Once, in total desperation, I tried this with canned peaches in heavy syrup from the grocery store.  Didn’t work very well…

When the butter is completely melted, take the pan out of the oven and pour the batter into the melted butter. Spoon the peaches evenly over the batter (in the summer, add the juice from the peaches, too). Put the pan back in the oven and bake for 30 minutes.  As the cobbler cooks, the batter rises up and around and over the peaches.

It smells so summery, I might even have some ice cream on it.

Thanks to Liss at Frills in the Hills for including us in this week’s Make It From Scratch! Blog Carnival.

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Not these.

These.

I always wonder which type of egg carton is more environmentally friendly, so I decided to do a little research:

1. I can compost or recycle the paper ones.  The polystyrene foam ones are not recyclable here in Podunk Junction – they have to be thrown in the trash.
   • One vote for paper.
2. According to Eggland’s Best, it takes one-third less material to make plastic egg cartons than the paper/pulp ones, and the recycling process from paper to pulp uses a lot of energy, water and chemicals.
   • I think plastic wins this round.
3. According to a study done in 1998 by the Department of Food Science at Clemson University, eggs packed in paper cartons (what they call MPP or molded paper pulp) had less breakage compared to foam cartons when transported in plastic crates. If they were shipped in cardboard boxes, there was no significant difference. When I check the cartons in the store, my perception is I find more broken eggs in the paper cartons than in the foam cartons.
   • I call that one a tie.

After all that, I still can’t decide which is “better”.  Do you choose one type of packaging over the other?

While standing in front of the dairy case pondering the “green” aspects of egg cartons, I automatically scanned all the prices and picked up jumbo eggs.  Why?  ‘Cause Mom always said that if the sizes are 20¢ or less different in price, buy the biggest ones.

Not having a calculator with me, I wrote down the prices of all four sizes and checked when I got home.  You know what?  Mom was right.

The jumbo eggs were cheaper per pound than the other sizes.

However, buying jumbo eggs sometimes presents a problem – occasionally my recipes don’t turn out quite right.  I discovered that recipes are written using large eggs as a standard.  I’ve been using too many eggs in certain recipes, according to this handy conversion chart from large eggs to other sizes:

As an added benefit, the three eggs called for in my casserole recipe would cost $.6225 using 3 large eggs ($2.49 ÷ 12 = $.2075 each), but only $.465 ($2.79 ÷ 12 = $.2325 each) now that I know I can/should use only 2 jumbo eggs.  It doesn’t sound like much, but I’ll bet those “pennies saved” will start to add up.

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Our favorite way to cook our venison tenderloin filets is to crust them with pepper, sear and serve with a tart, fruity sauce.

First, mellow out the pepper.  Put some olive oil in a small heavy saute pan and add coarsely ground black peppercorns (or smashed with a hammer if you don’t have a grinder – you need it kinda chunky, so don’t use the ground pepper you buy in tins in the grocery store).

Simmer the pepper in the oil for about 10 minutes.  You just want to heat it until the pepper becomes very fragrant – be careful not to burn it.

Coat the filets with the pepper and oil.

If necessary, spoon the pepper out of the pan if they’re not coated enough.

Cover the meat with plastic wrap and refrigerate until you’re ready to cook them (at least an hour is good).

Get a heavy saute pan nice and hot.  We like to use safflower oil, which doesn’t burn over high heat.

Yeah, it does get smoky.  Sear the filets on one side for about a minute or two – or until the meat releases from the pan.  It should be nice and brown.  Flip and sear the other side.  Sear the sides as well.

These look just about done.  Tender cuts like this should be rare to medium rare.  If you like your meat well done, you probably won’t enjoy this cut.

These can go into a 350°F oven until the internal temperature is about 130-135° (for rare, which is how we like them).

Make a quick sauce by combining a tablespoon or two of elderberry jam and a dash of port wine and beef stock.  Heat and season to taste (you won’t need pepper).

You probably don’t have elderberry jam, but you could use red currant or sour cherry.  Red wine works instead of port or, if you don’t want to use wine, cranberry juice is a good substitute.  Or make a traditional bordelaise sauce.

Serve with a roasted potato and fresh brussel sprouts (we finally picked them from the garden) and you’ve got a gourmet meal at home.  This dinner cost us about 50¢ per plate (the strip of bacon was the most expensive item)!

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