Calamansi marmalade

Recently, a coworker brought in a bounty of calamansi for the library staff.  These are small but incredibly juicy citrus fruits, and you can eat the peel and everything.  By the end of the second day that these were available on the break room tables, I had amassed 4 sandwich-sized Ziploc bags full of calamansi.  Everyone else who had wanted some had claimed theirs, and hey, I didn't want these to go to waste.

I took this photo AFTER I had taken out what I needed for the marmalade.  It's a 2.5-qt Pyrex bowl full of citrus!

Citrus comparison: that's a regular lime on the left and a calamansi fruit on the right.  Sort of Key lime-sized.

Of course, the next step for us was to figure out what, exactly, to do with all this citrus; we couldn't possibly make enough salad dressing before the end of their shelf life.  Dom did a little research and found that one could make calamansi marmalade.  Not being a fan of orange marmalade, I didn't think much of this, but after remembering that I really like another citrus marmalade (yuzu), and discovering that these marmalade recipes only needed citrus, sugar, and water, I figured we should try it.  I ended up using this recipe that yielded a manageable result: 1 jar, rather than something like 12 jars.

Our notes:

• I figured this recipe wouldn't take much active time, but I hadn't counted on having to seed, juice, and slice 15 citrus fruits that averaged about 1" diameter.  That took a while right there, but the rest of it was pretty hands-off: boil the fruits, juice, and water together; put it in the fridge overnight; and then boil it with sugar the following day.  The actual cooking part could not have been easier.
• I cut each fruit in half along its equator and then extracted the seeds.  Then I'd cut each half in half longitudinally, then slice those quarters.  Basically, this produced smaller segments of peel, which I thought would be nicer in the final product than long-ish ribbons of peel.  This also made the slicing part easier; the quarters were easier to slice than the halves, somehow.
• The recipe calls for ¾ cup of sugar, and even more if one has a sweet tooth.  You know us: we used a little less than ½ cup, and the marmalade came out delicious.
• For the second boiling (with the sugar), I thought the mixture was having issues jelling, as I simmered it for longer than the 15-20 minutes called for, and I wondered if this had to do with drastically reducing the sugar as I tend to do.  But after I'd put the finished marmalade in the fridge, it started to set.  Success!
• The original recipe was written with canning in mind; not having any equipment for this, we had just planned to use the marmalade within a few days of making it.  If we make a larger batch, my plan is to put the fresh marmalade into our silicone muffin pan, put that in the freezer, and then wrap each 'muffin' of marmalade to store in the freezer and defrost as needed.  That way I won't tie up all of our 1-cup Pyrex containers at one time!

The marmalade is delicious on yogurt.

This result has caused us to idly wonder where calamansi has been all our lives.

Writeup background music: The Beatles, Help! (1965); we just watched the movie and were pleasantly surprised at how entertaining it was.  The trick for me was to make absolutely no comparisons with A Hard Day's Night, which is one of my favorites.

Leftover Poke Breakfast

Note:  for those who do not know, poke, pronounced poh-kay, is cubed seafood, usually raw yellowfin tuna (ahi), salmon, or cooked octopus (tako) that is mixed with seasonings, sauces, and/or toppings like chopped onion or seaweed.  Poke in Hawaiian simply means "to slice or cut".

Recently Caroline's cousins Vi and Val were visiting the Big Island with their families, so we popped over for a couple of days.  After Val and her husband Rob picked us up from the airport, Rob offered to make us some quick breakfast with some leftover poke.  He had picked up this easy recipe when buying some poke (which he does every day when he visits the islands) and asked what to do with any leftovers.  He was told to cook in a frying pan for breakfast his leftover poke, leftover rice, and some eggs.  The combination was brilliant.

Shortly afterwards, we were in need of a quick dinner because I had an early hockey game, and so Caroline picked up some poke.  She intentionally got more than we needed, so the next morning we made the dish.  It took all of 5 minutes to cook in the pan, and all I did was toss in the poke and rice, then crack the eggs over the mixture.  While it was cooking, I was mixing the eggs in to make them scrambled.  Even though this is so simple, it is tasty as you mix the eggs and rice with the fish, and the spices and flavorings of the poke mean that you don't need to add anything more.

Close-up of final product.  The ahi did not get over cooked, helping the fantastic taste.

Quiche Lorraine

I wanted to make something new for dinner, and since we actually had eggs, butter, and (2%!) milk in our fridge, I decided on a quiche.  We also had some bacon and a LOT of onion, for some reason.  In short, we had almost everything we needed to make a quiche, and I'll take any opportunity to use my mini Cuisinart food processor.

I used my now-standard pie crust recipe, scaled for a 9" pie plate:

• 1¼ c. flour
• ½ c. butter [cubed and tossed in the freezer for as long as possible]
• ½ tsp. salt
• 3-4 Tbsp. ice water [I tend to use a couple more Tbsp. than recipes call for, but maybe that's just me being a pie crust beginner.]
• ½ tsp. sugar [omitted for the quiche]

The crust came together fairly quickly, and I chilled it for maybe 10 minutes before rolling it out into the pie plate.  This worked better than letting the dough chill for a couple hours, then taking it back out and letting it come up to room temperature for several minutes before rolling.  Most likely a product of the local climate on average being much warmer than most places where American cookbooks are written.

The crust needed to be baked before filling.  I have a handy tool to weight pie crust while baking, which worked very well, but the crust recipe said to bake 20 minutes with weights, then to remove the weights, poke holes in the bottom of the crust, and bake for about 10 minutes longer.  For whatever reason, the crust still puffed up quite a bit during the last 10 minutes of baking, even though I took especial care to actually poke the crust all the way through to the plate.  Next time I have to pre-bake a crust like this I might try baking the entire 30 minutes with the pie weight on.  This might also help bake the crust more thoroughly than the process of baking, then cooling slightly, then baking some more.

Joy of Cooking's quiche recipe calls for 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs.  Perhaps we should have used whole milk instead of 2% that we had, but the custard turned out to be quite soft and I had to bake the quiche for 50 minutes altogether, rather than the "35 to 40 minutes" that the cookbook said.  Even at 40 minutes, the quiche was nowhere near a solid.  Looking at my other recent posts, maybe I should get an oven thermometer to see how accurate our oven is, because there seems to be a theme of "had to bake for way longer than called for" in some of the other writeups.  Perhaps a correct oven temperature would have helped set the custard; or perhaps we should have used an additional egg or two.

Not bad, not great, and sadly not worth several hours' prep time.

The verdict on this one, though, was that I would NOT make a quiche again, or if I did, I would not do my own pie crust.  I spent an entire afternoon in our windowless kitchen making and baking a pie crust, then slicing and cooking onions and bacon, and finally preparing the filling (admittedly the easiest part of it all).  The finished product was not astounding, and the worst part was, it was not even a satisfying dinner: I could have used another slice or two but held off since I knew exactly how much butter and bacon had gone into that quiche.  So, unfortunately, this is probably not going to be a repeat recipe.

Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 108-109

Maple granola

My standard breakfast is Greek yogurt (FAGE Total 2%) with either honey or jam on top, and a carb on the side.  The yogurt is non-negotiable, but the carb can be almost anything that isn't too super sweet: biscuits, muffins, a slice of bread, leftover French toast, leftover tortilla, leftover slice of pizza (no joke).  I tend not to combine the carb with the yogurt, but I recently saw an intriguing granola recipe in The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook for which we already had most of the ingredients and which called for mixing everything with a beaten egg white before baking to get nice big granola clusters.  Plus, in the interest of being frugal, I thought I might be able to get several breakfasts' worth of carb out of a recipe that makes 7 cups of granola.

Recipe notes

• I used sweetened shredded coconut as we did not have any unsweetened.  Illegal substitution, 5 yard penalty?  No, it seemed to come out just fine; the final product wasn't ridiculously sweet or anything, though there wasn't a very pronounced coconut taste.  Maybe next time I should get those big shavings of unsweetened flaked coconut.
• Instead of 1 cup of walnuts, I used 1/2 cup walnuts + 1/2 cup of sliced almonds, partly because that combination was less expensive at Foodland than buying walnuts only.  I got "walnut halves" instead of "shelled walnuts" in the hope that the manufacturer had packaged by volume and that I'd get more actual walnuts.  They probably packaged by weight to cover for that.
• For me, sliced almonds are too insubstantial for a recipe called "big cluster maple granola"; they get sort of lost in the shuffle.  Next time, I'd go with whole almonds: raw, if possible, since they get 45-55 minutes of baking for the granola.
• The walnuts became sort of brittle and lost their crunch after being baked for 50 minutes.  I'm not sure what I would do next time: maybe bake the granola with the almonds, then add the walnuts after baking?  Bake for less time overall?
• I omitted the toasted wheat germ because I didn't feel up to walking all around Foodland and/or Whole Foods trying to find that.
• I added the dry ingredients to the bowl first, including the salt and cinnamon (1/2 tsp. each), then added the olive oil and maple syrup and mixed everything together.  By adding the salt and cinnamon (especially the salt) before the liquids though, the grains tended to get filtered down to the bottom of the bowl, which then ended up remaining in the bowl rather than getting dumped out onto the baking sheet.  I don't know if this made a huge difference in the end, but next time, I'll add the liquids, mix together, then add the salt and cinnamon.
• The single beaten egg white did not seem to be enough for the entire mixture; there was still a lot of very crumbly granola after baking.  Maybe next time I should use 2 egg whites?  More maple syrup?  Honey?
• In a happy coincidence, I had purchased a nicely large bag of dried Montmorency cherries at Costco earlier this week before finding this recipe.  While I love me some dried cherries, I would experiment with using other dried fruit next time as the star of this recipe seems to be the maple flavor of the oats.  For me, if I'm using dried cherries in a recipe, I want that to be the predominant flavor; here they seemed to be simply part of the mixture.

Because of the maple syrup and the cinnamon, this definitely had that autumnal aroma going on when it was baking.  But since it's still over 80°F here every day, there's some cognitive dissonance going on there.

The granola went pretty well with the yogurt.  Not what I might call "ridiculously awesome", perhaps, but I'll work on that, and as it was, it was good enough for a breakfast change.

This was a very easy recipe to make, but the fantastic thing is, next time I can modify the recipe to taste.  Walnuts, pecans, hazelnuts, or almonds?  Sunflower seeds?  Pignoli?  Dried cherries, dried apricots, raisins, or dried mango?  Cinnamon, plus cardamom?  The possibilities are endless!




The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012): pages unknown as I was using an unpaginated ebook version.
Writeup background noise: coverage of the ND-Clemson game (21-3 Clemson right now!).

Peach ginger scones

After having apparently had a Hawaii theme to our last post, we have now packed up wholesale and moved to the islands.  At a farmers' market we went to recently, a vendor was selling locally-grown ginger.  While I didn't get any at the market (I waffled on it, and settled for the fresh ginger at Don Quijote), it did inspire me to try making one of the pastries I'd often get at a farmers' market out east: peach ginger scones.

I adapted a recipe from King Arthur Flour.  As you can imagine, Gold Medal flour works just fine.  I omitted the nutmeg they called for and used a bit of vanilla extract in place of the almond extract.  To get my ginger, I initially wanted chunks like the scones I'd had back east.  Unfortunately, I somehow never learned that ginger can be nigh impossible to cut.  For me, it was like the single time I tried to peel a butternut squash.  I ended up using a Microplane zester to grate something like 1 tablespoon of the ginger into the mix, but I must not have grated enough for it to be a really noticeable flavour in the finished product.

This recipe called for yogurt or sour cream and not something like buttermilk, which was fantastic since I always have Greek yogurt for breakfast.  I ended up using the 1/3 cup called for (I used Fage 2%), plus a bit of milk since the dough was mixing up exceptionally dry.

We could have done a lot better with the peaches we bought; these had been sort of dry and not very flavorful, though they had smelled great at the store.  I think that's more on us knowing when the ripest peaches might show up at the store or farmers' market.

To shape the scones, I used the "create a large disk and divide it like a pie" method (using a bench scraper to make the cuts before baking).  I had to bake these for a full 28 minutes before they got any kind of tan, rather than the 15-to-20-minute range called for in the recipe.  Fortunately, one of the recipe reviews had noted this sort of thing as well, so I didn't get too concerned as I'm usually pretty apt to do.

Perhaps it was because I hadn't actually split the scones apart that I had to bake them for so much longer?  Regardless, they didn't end up as doorstops, for which we can all be thankful.

Despite my changes and adaptations to the recipe, the scones turned out remarkably well; I may have consumed....a few....before Dom even got home that day.  These were not dry, dense, or rock-hard; they almost had a biscuit or shortcake consistency.  Unfortunately, because they were so moist, and because our apartment doesn't have air conditioning, the last scone from the batch went bad.  The solution, it would appear, would be to eat these quicker.  Or simply to wrap individual scones and freeze them until wanted.

Only one of [multiple] that were consumed on baking day.

When Dom saw the remaining [x]/8 of the disk when he got home, he asked if it was pineapple.  I had to admit it was made with a less-than-perfect peach, but next time, I might have to try using fresh pineapple chunks along with way more ginger!




Writeup background music: New Super Mario Bros. soundtrack.  We just picked up a copy of the game from a shop inside one of our local department stores.

Various varieties of carbohydrates.

A busy several days as you get not one, not two, but three different foods with this one post.  The value!

First, Dom made a batch of fresh pasta using our pasta maker, a snazzy drying rack that we'd gotten as a wedding present, and the Joy of Cooking recipe.  (I was busy being all professional with Adobe Illustrator which is why I wasn't helping at all.)  We'd only made fresh pasta once before, but just comparing the drying rack to having sheets and sheets of waxed paper with pasta all over the countertops and dining table, I'd say the drying rack wins by a lot.  The pasta was dry after 24 hours, though that may also be influenced by making pasta on a dry winter evening versus making pasta on a humid May evening.

The pasta turned out delicious, but much lighter than we had expected it to be.  Perhaps something to do with the drying process, or the use of the new stand mixer to mix the ingredients together...it looks like we need a larger sample size and a more rigorous experimental design.

Direct from Italy.

Second, we made pancakes using Greek yogurt because the carton of Chobani I'd picked up at the store had a recipe on the side (and, perhaps more importantly, a photo of a stack of pancakes).  The batter was intensely think and made pancakes roughly 3/8" high.  Flavor was good especially with the addition of a few blueberries, but as both of us prefer thinner pancakes made with milk rather than thicker pancakes made with buttermilk or yogurt, we will most likely not be using this recipe in the future.  Not to mention that these leftovers were not as delicious for subsequent breakfasts as compared to those made with milk-only recipes.

The griddle was an excellent registry item.

Lastly, and representing the largest time commitment of all three of these projects, I decided to make sakura mochi: red bean paste, sticky rice, an association (in my mind, at least) with cherries, and a lovely pink colour?  Sold.

No Japanese ancestry?  No problem for Google.  I loosely adapted a recipe I'd found after multiple searches and ended up using one that required making your own bean paste.  I found that, while soaking beans for 18 hours is less than ideal (see the red beans and rice experiment below), soaking them for 5 hours is also less than ideal; I ended up cooking with a ratio of 1 cup of beans to 3 1/2 cups of water (about 1 1/2 cups more water than called for in the recipe), and the paste turned out fine.

The rice traditionally has no actual cherry flavouring in it, though it can be coloured pink.  Because I wanted both, I cooked the rice with half a cup of tart cherry juice along with the sugar and water.  It worked like a charm.  I used plastic wrap to shape these so that the rice wouldn't just end up on me and managed to make nine more-or-less rounded sakura mochi, minus the pickled cherry leaf.

Red bean paste on the left and pink, cherry-flavoured rice on the right.  I'm so Asian.

The lovely pink colour seems to have come out best in this photo.  That's probably too much red bean paste for the amount of rice, at least for how I had been making them, but I think this was the first one I assembled.

They were delicious fresh, but they were even better after a day in a Ziploc container (no joke).

So, while these were not what you'd get if you were in Japan for Hinamatsuri, it was still a fun experiment.  Oddly, these seem to have gotten better with a few days' age; peak awesomeness was reached the second day after making these, after which the rice finally became a little dried out (though still edible).  Packing these four to a Ziploc container separated with waxed paper may have helped keep them moist for the few days after making them.  Definitely a keeper of a recipe.


Pasta recipe: Joy of Cooking (2006), p. 324