Myself As Another

My Ph.D. exams are over, and now I have a desperate need to ground myself in the experience of my everyday life again. Exams, for instance, require that all attention is paid to the content of study. I have a hard time balancing that impulse while not actually studying. So yesterday, I looked in the fridge to see what I needed to get rid of. Carrots. Hmmm. Alright. I don’t yet have all the missing parts for my pressure cooker, so chicken soup was out. Jam? Yep.

I found a recipe for carrot cake jam in the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. (I’ve included the recipe below.) It’s an absolutely stunning collection of canning recipes and tips-n-tricks about the process.

Taste: It actually tastes a lot like Carrot cake. So far, I’ve only tasted it on saltines, but the taste is really, really strong. Unfortunately, the carrots get a little overpowered by the pineapple, and the overall quality is a little too sweet, but maybe this will change when I spread it over a nice thick slice of homemade whole-grain bread.

Texture: I might have cooked the pectin a little too long, and I might have gone a little heavy on the pineapple, so it’s a tiny bit on the runny side for jam.

Look: Nice robust orange color. The specs of carrot remind me of the gelatins my Grandma Bjugstad used to make back in Sheyenne, North Dakota when I was growing up (late ’70s, early ’80s). This would look beautiful served in a small, white porcelain bowl with a wooden spreading spoon. For some reason, I can’t help but visualize the vinyl, yellow-checkered table cloth in my grandma’s kitchen.

Here’s the recipe. I can’t recommend any adjustments at the moment:

Carrot Cake Jam

1 1/2 cups grated, peeled carrots
1 1/2 cups cored, peeled pears
1 3/4 cups canned pineapple, including juice
3 T lemon juice
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsb ground nutmeg
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 package of powdered pectin
6 1/2 cups sugar

In a large saucepan, combine carrots, pears, pineapple with juice, lemon juice, and spices. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring frequently. Reduce heat, cover and boil gently for 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Remove from heat and stir in pectin until dissolved. Bring back to a full boil, add sugar all at once, bring back to another boil and boil hard for 1 minute.

Remove from heat, skim off foam. Ladle into prepared jars with 1/4 inch headspace. Process jars in a BWB for 5 minutes for sterilized jars, or 10 minutes for unsterilized jars.

Makes 6 half pints.

Jelly… I think of toast. Peanut butter. Pastries. Not last night. Think pork. Onions. Mustard. Maybe this is old hat to you, but for me, this was an adventure.

I tried two recipes, actually. Peach-Glazed Pork Chops. Basil Banana Pepper Jelly. Incredible.

I had a couple of buddies over to grill some pork chops. Eric is leaving town for Bulgaria for a couple of weeks, and Matt was curious about the menu. Peach-glazed Grilled pork chops. I’m trying to be more adventurous in the kitchen, and I knew I had heard that meat could be pretty good with glazes, so I thought I would make this my first attempt. (Also, I’m trying to work my way through a bottle of red wine vinegar, so that I can use the bottle for counter top olive oil-it’s beautiful.) I’ve included the recipe at the end of the post. I’ll try to keep these observations short and simple.

First, this is a glaze, not a jelly. I don’t know why I got confused. I guess I just “wanted” it to be a jelly. Further more, it’s actually the peaches that get glazed, not really the pork. Per the recipe, I brushed on the glaze with a minute to go for the meat, but I don’ think that did much. I all honesty, though, I probably slightly over-cooked the meat, thus sealing it fro absorbing much of the glaze. But I digress. What ended up happening was that the pork and peaches became two separate elements of the same meal, rather than the same dish. Disappointing, but…

The peaches were quite good. I’m really starting to get more interested in the combinations of heavily spiced sweet dishes. The peaches were a good start. The peaches tasted like peaches, for sure, which is important to me because I like peaches. I wouldn’t have wanted the spices to overwhelm. But the mustard really emerged after a second or two of chewing. I didn’t have dijon mustard, so I had to use deli mustard. I think deli mustard has more horseradish. We could certainly taste it. Even thought the other flavors faded a bit behind the mustard and peaches, the dish was actually quite good.

My recommendations: Don’t over-cook the pork. I think we missed out on the interaction of the flavor of the pork with the glaze. I’ll get better on the grill eventually.

The other dish was the Basil Banana Pepper Jelly. Oh my goodness. I hesitate even to write much about it, but…

You must, must, must try this. Onions. Basil. Banana Peppers. Chilis. I figured it would only be good on some sort of meat or vegetable, like asparagus. But we were out of anything like those. So toast. Weird. I had forgotten how much sugar this recipe called for (see below). I know banana peppers and onions have plenty of sugar already in them. But using them in this jelly brought that out to the forefront. The basil and green chilis were really just there to shape the taste of the other major flavors.

I’m starting to get a sense for the different aspects of flavors. How flavors are constituted by different levels and different types of sour, sweet, bitter, salt. Combinations of foods are really just ways of coaxing different aspects of those flavors to the front of the experience. Letting some of the flavors or ingredients take much of the attention, while letting other ingredients add a specific variation or direction to that taste. It’s really quite beautiful. (The image I included is someone else’s, but this is exactly how mine looked. It’s overcast here this morning, so I can’t get a decent pic. Sorry.)

I’ll try to think about this approach to my taste descriptions as I continue to figure out this blogging thing.

Also, I’m not comfortable, yet, copying someone else’s recipes from a book or subscription site. So, mostly I’ll just be posting ingredients. I will, however, tell you where to get these recipes, so you can try them yourself.

Peach-Glazed Grilled Pork Chops

1 c. peach preserves

¼ c. red wine vinegar

½ tsp. Minced fresh thyme leaves

1/8 tsp. Cayenne pepper

16 oz. Bag of frozen sliced peaches

1 tsp. Dijon Mustard

4 bone-in rib or center-cut pork chops, about 1-inch thick

Salt/Pepper to taste

(Apparently, not everyone hesitates to lift someone else’s recipe. Here’s a link to the exact recipe from Cook’s Country. Enjoy.)

Basil Banana Pepper Jelly

½ c. Sliced Banana Peppers

¼ c. Green Chili Peppers

¼ c. Chopped red onion

3-4 Large basil leaves, shredded.

¼ tsp. Dried basil

¾ c. White Vinegar

3 c. Granulated sugar

1 pouch liquid pectin.

(This recipe is taken from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving (Kingry and Devine, eds.)

Picked up one of my jars of Mocha Cherry jam this morning, and it was… um… runny. I told you I was a rookie at this stuff. Luckily, it looks like it only happened to one of the two batches.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t drain the cherries when I measured them out. I guess I’ll have to remember that. I figured I would just boil the batch again and add more pectin. However, my fried Eric (donator of the cherries) told me that it even happened to his mom a couple of times. She just called it syrup and saved it for pancakes.

Perfect!