Sour Oranges

It's feast or famine over here! Sometimes I have a lot to say, and sometimes I don't, so I don't say anything. To be very honest, I haven't had anything to say because I had a lot of disasters in the kitchen last week. This is normal, I have to remind myself. Sometimes you just get on a roll of badness, and that's when you slowly step away from the kitchen, eat at a few diners, and take solace in the kitchen being clean for a few days. Which is exactly what I've been doing.

I looked at my gallery on Instagram the other day (@whatjuliate) and realized it was all gray and white. It's full on winter over here, and the temperatures just dropped drastically. So, I was really glad to get three boxes of Florida sour oranges in the mail the other day from my mother. She picks them from a neighbor whose tree is full and under appreciated. This has been happening for a few years now, and at first I was unsure of the worth of these guys. Now I know better. I look forward to their arrival. This year I had to remind my mother! Organic citrus is expensive, and some backyard fruit from Florida is always appreciated.

In the past, I have made these goodies from my sour orange haul:

Triple Sec
Sour Orange Cocktail Mix
Candied Peels (not a recipe, just a quiet rant)


I think this year I will make some sour orange syrup, and save the peels for more candying, of course! I've really enjoyed my candied peels this year. I can't wait until January is over so I can start eating them again!

Aside from the exciting delivery of sour oranges, I also received good news about my company, Half-Pint Preserves: my apple plum jelly was a winner at the Good Food Awards! It's a real honor for my little tiny company (I just sell to a few local markets) to be a part of such fine company. Check out this list of wonderful food producers, see if there are any near you and support them!

Small-Batch Pink Sauerkraut

Sauerkraut and oranges: no scurvy in our house!

My sauerkraut is running out, and I am proud to say I started a new batch before I ran out.  That's usually not the case. Sauerkraut takes around two to four weeks to ferment depending on the temperature.  I only had two pounds of cabbage, and usually the rule of thumb for sauerkraut is five pounds of cabbage to three tablespoons of salt. Instead of doing my math, I wondered if there was a small-batch sauerkraut recipe on the internet, and of course there was, and it was by one of my favorite preservers, Marisa from Food in Jars. It was from a series on pickles on Serious Eats that Marisa was writing. If you want to make sauerkraut, but are put off by the large quantities that you usually see in recipes, check it out. Marisa is always keeping things real and new, and I appreciate that. And I just heard via Twitter that she's working on a new book, this one's about small-batch preserving, and it will come out in Spring of 2014. I can't wait!

Do you wonder how to eat all that sauerkraut once you've made it? I love sauerkraut and crave it's tangy crunch. I'll have it on a sandwich with greek yogurt and a drizzle of olive oil, and if I have it I'll add some avocado. You can't believe how good it is. Of course, it's good with some pork chops or a pork loin. Or on a grilled cheese sandwich. I really love it on top of rice and sprinkled with sesame seeds. It's a pretty special treat. And it comes in handy when you are craving sweets. I learned this tip from a book I always turn to when I'm trying to cleanse my system, The Self-Healing Cookbook.  For some reason, the salty sourness---eating the opposite of what you crave---stops you from craving sweets. Yet another reason to have amazingly healthy, real sauerkraut in your fridge.

Quick Coffee Cake (with no added sugar)

The other day I had a friend over for coffee. She has three kids, the youngest only an infant, so I wanted to bake a nice treat, but something I could eat as well. (I can't figure out if that's wrong of me or not.) I hit upon this coffee cake sweetened with a minimal bit of honey, and adorned with dates and almonds with a hint of maple syrup. I'm in love with it. 

I recently decided to mainly not include recipes in my blog, but sometimes there are recipes that I just have to share. This is one of them. My friend liked it, too, but I wonder if she was just being kind. If you make this, please let me know how it goes!

Quick Coffee Cake (sweetened with honey, dates and maple sugar)

1.5 cups of all purpose flour

2 teaspoons of baking powder

1/2 teaspoon of baking soda

pinch of salt

1 cup of créme frâiche (you may use sour cream instead, or Greek yogurt)

2 eggs

1/4 cup honey

Streusel Topping:

6 - 8 Medjool dates

1/2 cup chopped almonds

1/4 cup oat bran

1 tablespoon of maple syrup

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 10-inch spring form pan.

Mix the dry ingredients. In a separate large bowl beat the créme frâiche with the eggs. Then add the honey and whisk well. Add the dry mixture to the wet and incorporate well. To make the streusel topping, just add all ingredients in the food processor and whiz it up until it's a crumbly mixture. Pour the batter in the pan, smooth it out, and crumble the streusel over the top. Bake for about 30 minutes until the batter peeking through is golden, and a toothpick comes out clean.

You can see that this is a light and bubbly cake. It does not keep well, so eat it quickly!

Turkey Pot Pie

Roasting a turkey is always a treat. We don't tire of it in the winter time. After we eat what we can for dinner, it gets dismantled: the meat pulled off all the bones, everything else in the stock pot. Last week we had turkey noodle soup, and there's still two quarts of stock for another round of soup. We had turkey enchiladas, turkey sandwiches (hot open with gravy, and cold with mayo and capers), and turkey pot pie. When I roast off the turkey, I used the neck and gizzards for a quick two cups of stock to make gravy. I make a LOT of gravy. That way turkey pot pie is halfway made. This time I put together a quick suet pastry, and filled the pies with a mixture of turkey meat, gravy, corn (summertime corn!), mushrooms and onions chopped super fine, and a good bit of chopped dill and parsley. It was incredibly delicious! Of course, you can use regular pastry dough made with butter, but the suet is a pretty tasty secret.

Pot pies are rustic fare that really aren't that hard to make. And they are so much better than the stuff you get in the frozen food aisle that usually have five billion calories. It's not that my version is lo-cal, far from it I'll bet, but it's such real food. The suet pastry recipe linked to above will make enough pastry for two small pies. Don't roll the dough out too thin, so it can puff up!

Strawberry Mango Fruit Leather

This is the perfect time of year to start taking some of the things I stashed in the freezer over the summer when fruit was abundant. I had about a pound of strawberries, and a pint of mango puree (from mangoes my mother sent me from Florida---it was so hard to save some and not eat them all!). After defrosting them, I pureed them in the Vitamix so they were smooth, which saves you the step of straining to get the strawberry seeds out. The yield was four cups. I cooked the puree for about ten minutes to remove excess water and concentrate the flavors. A tablespoon of honey and a pinch of citric acid was all that was needed before pouring the thick liquid into my leather tray in the dehydrator. Ten hours later I had an amazing treat for sugar-free January. I probably didn't even need to add the honey. I love fruit leather!

I love these leathery posts:

From Kate at Hip Girl's Guide to Homemaking, watermelon leather!

How can you not want this Blue Leather from Kaela at Local Kitchen?

And Laura from Glutton For Life is a queen of leather. If you are local, maybe you saw her write up on fruit leather in the Edible Hudson Valley?

Bonus nerd out photo: I just got this stack of books at a thrift shop for a few bucks. Finding old preserving books is a rarity! And this bread book looks amazing. Best part? This was obviously the collection of one woman; her name is inscribed on each one. There are hand-written notes of hers scattered throughout the books, some a quick "Delicious!" and some more involved notes about the what was served with the dish or the memories it brought her. I love little details like that.