Featured Project : Pickles and Preserves
Tomato Jam
August 20, 2010
Ever since I went to the tomato restaurant in Tokyo, I have been thinking about making tomato jam when the right season returned. Now the tomato season is here and the local farmer's market was selling a box of tomatoes for $12. I canned and freezed most of the fresh tomatoes for the winter but I saved some to make some salsa and jam.
You can find many tomato jam recipes and many of them are savory jams which you can use as a condiment for meat dishes. I'll try that next time, but this time, I made jam with only three ingredients: a traditional sweet jam for a morning toast.
Tomato Jam
Yield 1 small jar
Ingredients
1.5 lb tomatoes
5 oz sugar
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
Method
[Pealing the tomatoes]
1. Boil water in a medium sauce pan. Prepare a large bowl of ice water. With a sharp knife, cut an X on the bottom of each tomato.
2. Put two to three tomatoes in boiling water for 10 to 15 seconds. Boiling more than 15 seconds makes tomato mushy. Fish the tomato out of the boiling water with a slotted spoon and put them in the ice water. As soon as it has cooled down, immediately take out and start pealing from where you cut an X.
3. Remove the stem and cut the tomato in half. Then dice into small pieces.
[Making the jam]
4. In a small sauce pan, cook the tomatoes over medium-low heat until almost all the juice has evaporated. Make sure to stir occasionally and clean the side as you cook them.
5. Add sugar and lemon juice and cook for another 10 minutes until it's thick.
6. Put the jam in a sterilized jar. Keep it refrigerated.
* The output is only a very small portion because it is meant to be eaten as soon as possible. It can be kept refrigerated only for a few weeks at most.
Sunday Challenge
Part 7 : Photo Inspired Food
August 19, 2010
The challenge : Photo inspired food
This Sunday Challenge, I was given the assignment to come up with a meal inspired by a photo. Here is the photo that my husband chose.
What I Made : Pan seared lamb chops with pea puree, ricotta cheese souffle and parmesan chip
My thought: I loved this challenge. How I interpret the photo and selection of the ingreditents are all up to me and you can be really creative. I usually trust my very first instinct or idea that comes to mind. In this case, the beautiful green at the bottom would be represented by a dark pea puree, and the clouds by a light and fluffy souffle. For the lightning I first imagined using a spun sugar stick, but since I wanted to make something savory that would go well with the other items that I was thinking to make, I decided to use parmesan cheese chips that I made several times before. I still needed to decide the main protein but after my decision of all the sides, it was almost automatic - lamb. And since the photo was from Australia, the lamb was an especially appropriate choice. Because of the lamb, I made the pea puree with lots of mint and basil for color and taste. I really had fun with this.
Judge's verdict: I was really impressed by this dish visually. It depicted each of the main components of the photo in such a creative way, and yet they all went together both visually and culinarily. I really was seeing and tasting a photo of an Australian thunderstorm. Not only did the colors match, but the dish managed to capture in three dimensions what the photo could only represent in two. Then there was the taste. Lamb is one of my favorites and this was cooked perfectly, as was the savory, rich and fluffy (as a cloud!) souffle. The parmesan added the texture and the pea puree had a surprising kick from the mint. This probably wins the prize for the best Sunday challenge so far.
Featured Project
Sausage Stuffed Beets
August 17, 2010
After thinking about this for a while, I decided that one way to ease the flavor of beets was to infuse some other flavor into the beets. And the way I came up with to do that is to stuff some kind of meat in the beets and braise them slowly so that the juice from meat will infuse the beets. I think any kind of ground meat would work but I used Italian sausage this time because it has such a distinctive flavor and aroma. I mixed the meat with other flavors, vegetables like shallots and garlic, and stuffed them into the prepared beets.
The result was exactly what I was looking for. The flavor of the beets was more subtle, hidden just behind the umami that bursted from the sausage juice. The sweetness of the beets also tempered the sausage and their marriage was successful.
My husband who is a long-time beet-hater ate them and said he actually liked them. Not merely edible, but actually a new taste he actually liked.
I am very pleased with the result.
Here is the recipe.
Sausage Stuffed Beets
Yield 4 as an appetizer, 2 as a main course
Ingredients
2 links mild Italian sausage ..... remove the meat from the casing
1 clove of garlic ..... minced
1 shallot ..... minced
1/8 red pepper ..... diced
1 egg yolk
1/4 cup panko or bread crumb
salt and pepper
4 medium beets ..... pealed
2-3 cups chicken stock
Heavy cream
Chives
Method
1. Cut the stem and bottom of the beets. Use a melon baller to remove the stem and core to make a cup.
2. Mix all other ingredients except the heavy cream and chives in a bowl.
3. Stuff the sausage mixture into each beet cup and pile more on the top.
4. Make small meat balls with the leftover sausage mixture.
5. Put the stuffed beets and sausage balls in a small sauce pan and pour chicken stock until it just covers the beets but not the sausage on the top.
6. Bring to a boil on medium heat then turn the heat to low and simmer with a cover for 50-60 minutes until the beets are tender. Pour the stock over the beets 2 or 3 times while they are cooking.
7. Plate the stuffed beets and meat balls in a shallow bowl and gently pour some of the soup around it. Drop a small amount of heavy cream in the soup. Sprinkle the chives on top of the beets as a garnish.
Featured Project
New Featured Project - Beets
August 16, 2010
Poor beets, they are so often on the top of people's "I hate ...." lists. Since beets are not very typical in Japan, my first beet experience was when I had a wonderful Borscht at a fancy Russian restaurant in Tokyo a long time ago. When I came to the U.S., I realized so many people hate beets (my husband is one of them) and I was wondering why. Then when I went to an old style cafeteria which was my grandmother in-law's favorite, I found out why. The beets were boiled down until very mushy and piled in a heated buffet bowl inside a red sea. Even I would become a beets-hater.
It is hard to get rid of the child food memories. But I want to create a wonderful beet dish to make a beet-hater rethink the value of beets. In short - I am determined to make my husband love beets.
