Canning and Ebooks

This is a post ostensibly about canning but it is actually about ebooks (disclosure: making ebooks is my day job).

First, and most importantly, Workman has a special on canning and preserving ebooks for September, with six books on sale for $2.99. (There's also a free vegetable PDF-ebook for the low, low price of your email address.) Feel free to stop reading here.

I wanted Put 'Em Up. You get seven buying choices: Amazon, Apple, B&N, Google, Indiebound, Kobo, and Sony. I was going to read it on my iPad, but that still meant lots of choices. Which behemoth to support?

Apple is the obvious choice on an iPad, and it's the easiest: just open iBooks, find the book in the store, and Apple already knows your credit card information. You're reading within thirty seconds. Here's the sample in Apple's iBooks.

Amazon probably comes to mind first when you think about buying books, and many people use the Kindle iPad app to read Amazon ebooks on the iPad. To buy books from Amazon for my iPad, I have to switch to my laptop, but the book automatically is sent to my iPad.

I have a lot of quibbles with Amazon, including their insistence on their proprietary ebook format over the open EPUB standard. However, if you are intent on saving money at the expense of civilization, I should point out that the book is actually $2.51 at Amazon, a savings of an additional 48 cents. Here's the sample in Amazon's Kindle iPad app.

I buy most of my ebooks from Google, and here's why: through their partnership with Indiebound, you can buy ebooks from your local independent bookstore. So most of my ebook purchases are through the Harvard Book Store or Brookline Booksmith, bricks-and-mortar stores that I heart so, so much, and I consider the many extra clicks required to do that a reasonable tax on having such wonderful places in the world.

Here's the book in Google Play.

But wait, what's this? Google Play also has a "scanned pages" option that shows you how the actual book looks (like a PDF of the book). You can't zoom in or change the text size, but for me, this is the right way to experience a nicely designed cookbook.

Tomato Seconds

The Copley farmer's market had "seconds tomatoes" (at the Atlas Farm booth) at twenty pounds for $12 on Friday, which was too tempting to pass up, even lacking the inclination to process tomatoes all weekend. Fortunately, I could only carry one box.

I got a new canning book (more on that to come), so I checked out the tomato section, with laziness my chief criterion. (Did you know you can just freeze whole tomatoes?) 

I settled on marinara sauce, which allowed food milling out the skins and seeds (no blanching and peeling here). My laziness did, however, extend to refusing to go out to buy the onions the recipe called for, so the "marinara sauce" is plain old tomato juice and pulp. (I'm thinking I can doctor it, Smitten Kitchen three-ingredient sauce style, when we eat it.) The recipe said to cook for one or two hours to thicken the sauce; I'm past three hours and still sadly runny. 

On the bright side, dinner couldn't wait, so we took the discarded skins and seeds, ran them through the food processor with an onion (we had one), garlic, and carrots, and cooked with some water and olive oil for a faster, chunky sauce. Nose-to-tail tomato eating.

P.S. Another personal recipe modification. Smashing partially cooked tomatoes with a wooden spoon? Not very fun. Crushing halved tomatoes with your bare hands? Amazingly satisfying.

Baked Corn Casserole

Here's a riddle: How do you buy corn for an eight-ear recipe, make the recipe, and still have eight ears left?

The Sunday Globe magazine (love the recipe section; hate the paywall) had an article on baked corn casseroles this week, offering variants with parmesan and basil, goat cheese, chorizo and red pepper, mushrooms and bacon, and salmon and leeks.

The recipe takes a little time and focus: you cut the corn off the cobs, then cook it on the stovetop, then cook an onion and garlic, then make a roux, which with milk and cheese becomes a sauce, then pour the corn back in, and then bake it for half an hour. So maybe it is not the smartest side dish to try for the first time when you are also trying to make a whole dinner. Just saying.

Here's a Pioneer Woman version that looks a bit faster and easier (no precooking the corn, no roux, no onions or garlic, made with cream).

I went to the Copley farmer's market to buy corn at lunchtime. The recipe called for eight ears, but I always round up for potluck (you never know who will show up), so I picked out twelve. Went to pay, and the seller pointed out that their baroque pricing scheme (discounts for buying seven ears or fourteen) meant I would actually save money by taking two more ears.

Came home with my fourteen ears, but only six ears worth fit in my skillet (we moved and have very few pans; digression, I am so close to just breaking down and buying this, which, in the smaller size, was Cook's Illustrated's best-value saute pan). So voila, delicious corn casserole, and eight ears left for next time. Might make a chowder.

Foodie Penpals: August

August was my first month trying Foodie Penpals, a blogger food swap organized by The Lean Green Bean. You send a package of foodie treats (spending limit $15) to a food blogger or food blog reader (mine went to Wanderlust Hearts, who wrote about it here), and someone else sends one to you.

The box arrived a day late for August reveal day, when all the recipients blog about what came in their boxes, but was an amazing surprise precisely in the middle of my moving day (which was also the moving day of approximately one billion other people in and around Boston). It was literally the best part of a day of waiting a couple extra hours for the previous tenants to leave the apartment, abandoning a box spring and bed frame that couldn't make it up the stairs, and discovering that we didn't own a shower curtain.

My penpal was The Baking Band Geek (check out her sex cookies), and she sent me an excellent box of mostly South American treats. Mango jam (YUM) and guanabana and papaya juice, two pieces of Panda licorice, two kinds of granola, freshly ground peanut butter, and an intriguing (flan-like?) eggnog-flavored gelatin dessert mix. The box was literally the first food (and at this point, pretty much only real food) to enter our new apartment.

Tomorrow will be our first day of not subsisting solely on takeout, and you can bet that there will be granola and peanut-butter-and-mango-jam-sandwiches. I may or may not have already scarfed the licorice while taking a break from the unpacking chaos in a closet.

Fresh Peach Greek Yogurt Cake

So, last we talked, I had about seven pounds of peeled and pitted peach chunks in the fridge that were too ragged and juicy to freeze.

When I checked on them the next morning, they were also rapidly browning and starting to look pretty unappealing. I used most of them to make another quart of peach jam (this time with brandy), but diverted a few into a peach breakfast cake.

The recipe is based on Boulder Locavore's Fresh Peach Sour Cream Coffee Cake, except that I used Greek yogurt instead of sour cream, omitted the streusel/nut topping, substituted lemon extract for almond (would have used vanilla, but it all went into the jam), and chopped up my unlovely peaches to put inside instead of on top.

It was excellent fuel for a day of putting things in boxes and socializing with friends and strangers who dropped by for our book swap.

Fresh Peach Greek Yogurt Cake

Cream 1/2 cup butter, 1/2 cup sugar, and 1/2 cup brown sugar. Add 1 egg and mix. Add 1/2 cup Greek yogurt and 1/2 teaspoon vanilla or your extract/flavoring of choice.

Add 1/2 teaspoon each baking soda, baking powder, salt, and cinnamon (and/or other spices of choice). Add 1 1/2 cups flour and mix until well combined. Fold in a couple big handfuls of chopped peaches, drained of any juice.

Pour batter into a 9-inch square pan or something similarly sized. (I used a 10.5 x 7-inch Le Crueset baking dish.) Bake at 350 degrees for 45 to 55 minutes, or until a fork comes out clean.

Eat topped with additional Greek yogurt, fresh peaches, or peach jam.

Peach Jam and Peaches in Syrup

Sara brought me twenty-three pounds of peaches from a couple untended trees at her school. (That's nowhere near keeping up with the amazing League of Urban Canners, but it's our humble contribution to harvesting otherwise unwanted fruit.)

We launched a large-scale blanch, pit, and peel operation this morning (yes, after unsuccessfully searching the Internet for "no peel peach jam"), and quickly learned that we had two varieties of peaches (one clingstone and one freestone). To heap insult upon insult, the clingstones also refused to peel neatly.

I used ten pounds of the peaches to make twelve half-pints of jam. I like Punk Domestics for unusual peach recipes (peach vanilla prosecco jelly, spicy peach jalapeno jam), but I went with a pretty straight-up peach-vanilla-ginger recipe (variant of this one) today, hoping for a simple classic to rival last summer's Concord grape jam. Yum!

I was thinking I'd freeze the rest of the peaches for another day, but they were less-neat-wedges and more-soupy-mess and would have frozen into a solid block of peach popsicle.

So thinking of pies and crisps and crumbles, I stumbled on this discussion ("Too many peaches"), and was inspired back into canning action. I canned three quarts of the pieces, covering them with hot simple syrup, tucking in sprigs of fresh rosemary and basil, and boiling ten minutes to seal. Hoping that the fruit and syrup will seem like an inspired dessert served over pound cake this winter.

P.S. Some people use their peach pits and peels to make things like peach pit jelly and peach butter. I got as far as chopping up all the peels in the food processor and cooking the slurry down to butter-like consistency, but I didn't like the texture and didn't feel like cooking them for two more days to see if it improved. Ended up straining the results for a couple cups of spiced peach syrup.

Bread and Butter Pickles

Hello, all! It's been a busy summer here (we got engaged, woo!), which means there hasn't been a lot of blogging, and, much worse, no canning. No pickles, no blueberry jam. No dilly beans. No applesauce.

I opened the last jar of last summer's bread and butter pickles (recipe) a week ago, and was pretty sure that I'd missed my chance to make another batch this year. So when I saw pickling cukes for $1/pound at the Davis Flea today, it wasn't a hard decision to acquire ten pounds and a project for the afternoon.

Fortunately, we had a handful of fresh lids leftover from last year, an endless supply of canning salt (that's just regular salt, right?), a giant jug of vinegar (we've been painting the cabinets to keep down the grain moths), and a recipe-blind willfulness that makes substituting red pepper flakes for mustard seed seem reasonable.

Five pints and five quarts later (and ignoring the fact that we'll have to move 'em all in three weeks), I am happy to report that we are back in the canning swing of things.