Sangria Jam

It is tricky trying to throw a fabulous party on a thrifty budget. Sangria stretches your most expensive ingredient (wine), but it does it in a sneaky, deliciously fruity way. Yes, sangria is cheaper than your average glass of wine. But it's also festive, bright and delicious enough to avoid the bad rap that stretching recipes sometimes have. Peak citrus season plus inexpensive red plus a little time in the fridge and voila! Sangria-infused party success.

But then there is a slight problem... what to do with all of that leftover fruit? Sure some of the fruit should be attractively ladled into the punch bowl or pitcher, but there's inevitably a big pile of fruit left over. I might be the kind of person who enjoys eating a boozy piece of fruit or two from the bottom of my glass of sangria. So *ahem* I knew this fruit was still good enough to eat. I threw some of the fruit in the punch bowl, but kept most of it in the fridge in the hopes that I could turn it into something useful.

Turns out, this fruit makes a spectacular jam! Boil the fruit until it breaks down then strain out the peels. Add some sugar, pectin and another quick boil and the jam is done. This jam doesn't need any other flavorings to make it interesting-- the combination of fruit and unexpected spicy notes from the wine make this jam tangy, bright and rather addictive. Now you can have your sangria and eat it too.


Sangria

3 bottles of red wine
1/2 c. brandy (optional)
2 lemons
2 oranges
2 apples
1 lime
half of a pineapple (optional)
1/3 c. sugar (adjust to taste)
soda water (optional)

Slice Fruit: Wash all of the fruit thoroughly. Use a vegetable peeler to cut thin strips of peel off one of the lemons. Set these aside in a damp paper towel for garnish. Squeeze the juice of that lemon into your bowl. Slice the rest of the fruit into 1/4" thick slices, leaving the skin on everything except the pineapple. Pour in all of the wine and brandy. Add sugar to taste (start with less than 1/3 c.)

Infuse: Cover your sangria and leave the mixture to infuse in the refrigerator for at least 4 hours, up to one day in advance.

Serve: Use a ladle to transfer the sangria to a pitcher or punch bowl. Throw in a ladle or two of fruit, but keep the rest of the fruit for jam. Serve with a lemon peel garnish and a splash of soda water.




Sangria Jam

6 c. leftover sangria fruit
8 c. water
2/3 - 1 c. sugar
1 t. pectin (low sugar type)*
2 t. calcium water (comes with this type of pectin)
Yield: 2 1/4 c. jam

Boil Fruit: Add water to the fruit and bring to a full boil. Boil, partly covered, for 45 minutes, or until the apples and citrus fruits have completely broken down.

Strain off waste: Pour hot liquid through a strainer. Press gently to extract all of the liquid that you can. Discard the fruit pulp (or reserve for compost). Measure the resulting liquid. You want to have 2 c. If you have more liquid, return the liquid to the stovetop and boil until it is concentrated down to 2 c. If you have too little liquid, add water so that your total volume equals two cups.



Cook/Activate pectin: Rinse any remaining fruit pulp out of your stock pot. Mix pectin together with sugar. Add strained fruit puree and calcium water. Bring to a simmer and cook, covered for ten minutes.


Store: Pour into clean jar. Refrigerate.** Keeps several weeks in the refrigerator.


* Pectin is a naturally occurring gelling agent. With just the right conditions (the right concentration of acid and sugar) pectin will gel perfectly. Unfortunately, the right amount of sugar for gelling might not be the same as the right amount of sugar to produce the best taste. If you can get your hands on a low-sugar pectin (such as pomona's), you can bypass this whole problem. This type of pectin, in combination with a calcium salt solution, will gel with much less sugar.

**Since this recipe makes just one jar, I'm giving the easy instructions for making jam, so this jam is not ready to be stored out at room temperature. You certainly could sterilize everything and process it, but personally, I wouldn't go to that trouble for just one jar. And I'm pretty sure you'll want to eat this right away anyhow.

Potato Skin Crisps

As I have mentioned before, potato skins can be put to good use in making a flavorful batch of broth. But they are also quite tasty cooked all by themselves. Recently I made a huge batch of sunchoke soup (incidentally if you ever have the better part of an afternoon to kill and feel like you need a good, tedious task to calm your nerves, I'd recommend peeling sunchokes. It is one of those interminable, manual cooking tasks -- right up there with skinning chestnuts and cracking almonds. ) In the end I had a wonderful sunchoke soup, and a big pile of peels. So I figured that it was high time for me to figure out the nuances of crisp potato skins (or sunchoke skins, really any root vegetable, but I think that sweet potatoes might be too fibrous to be terribly palatable).

Salted and cooked to a delicate crisp, potato skins are an intoxicating blend of earthy and ethereal. They taste, well, a little bit like dirt -- but the most delicious, wholesome, addictive dirt that you can imagine. Think of them as the strange looking, interesting uncle of the potato chip. You can eat them as an appetizer or snack, or sprinkle them on top of any dish that you'd like to add a little crunch to.

While the procedure is simple enough, I spent a surprisingly long time fussing with it to get these to come out just right. A lot of recipes call for a high cooking temperature and just scattering butter over the skins. This procedure gave me a half batch of charcoal crisps and some undercooked, lackluster skins. I found that a quick saute in butter evenly distributes the butter over the skins. Then cooking at a medium temperature for a longer time gets all of the skins crisp, without burning. If you know you want to make a batch of crisps, you can reserve your peels in a bag in the freezer until you have enough. Take a little more care and cut your skins into long, even strips (about 3"), and they will be the perfect size to serve as an appetizer. Smaller, uneven crisps (like my sunchokes) can be used as an accent to another dish.

Yield: 2-3 servings

3/4 c. Potato Skins (or similar)
1 T. Butter
salt
pepper

Preheat your oven to 350 F.

Saute Skins: Melt the butter. Toss in your skins. If you are using previously frozen skins, make sure to let any excess water that the peels have released steam off at this point. Cook for 1-2 minutes on medium heat, stirring. The skins should be evenly coated with butter and steaming.

Bake: Let the skins cool for a few minutes. Spread them out onto a parchment lined baking sheet. Make sure that you are separating them into one layer. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Bake for 15 minutes. Stir the skins, (just to rearrange them on the sheet). Bake for an additional 10-15 minutes until all of the skins are crisp. You won't see them brown very much because of the darker color of the skin. You can snap one or two to test for crispness, remembering that they will continue to crisp as they cool.

Store: Store cooled crisps in an airtight container for up to a week (but I don't think they'll last that long..)

Cabbage Stems

If you are cooking any member of the cabbage family-- brussel sprouts, cauliflower, broccoli to name a few-- you probably cut off the leafy budded portions and discard the stem. The stems are more fibrous (and you are right to cut them off), but if you shave them thinly, you need only throw together a quick dressing and you'll have a tasty slaw. You can use the hearts/stems of cabbage in the same way. I use a Japanese mandolin to cut these stems into paper-thin slices. Then just throw in an acid (a little lemon juice or vinegar), some oil, and salt and you have a delicious cole slaw. I'm posting one recipe that I found to be quite good, but this is an ideal dish to play around with the flavors on-- I just experimented a few nights ago with fresh ginger and cilantro. Slaws will keep for several days in the fridge.

Bread Scraps

Leaving leftover bread out to stale is actually on of the best ways to preserve it. When my bread has past its prime (usually 5 days for a home-made sourdough loaf-- breads that are not leavened with sourdough will stale more quickly) I cut off the crust and tear the remaining bread into pieces. Leave these pieces out on a sheet tray and they will be completely stale and dried in about a day, depending on the climate you live in. Bread scraps dried in this manner can be kept for a very long time, then used for croutons, puddings, stuffing and breadcrumbs. To make breadcrumbs simply throw thoroughly dried bread pieces in your food processor. Bread crumbs and dried out hunks of bread can be stored in an airtight container at room temperature.

You can also keep your fresh bread in your freezer, wrapped tightly with two layers of plastic wrap-- I'll often do this if I know that I'm not going to be using a whole loaf right away. Or it can be convenient to make two loaves at once and save one in the freezer for later. Refresh your frozen loaf by throwing it directly into the oven for a few minutes. When I make a light sandwich loaf or brioche (even on a budget, I am of the opinion that we all deserve some pastry-related excess) I slice the whole loaf at once and throw it in the freezer. Then I toast individual slices as I need them. I find this method keeps the bread fresh enough that I am excited to eat it even when it gets down to the very last slice.

Onion Ends & How to Cut an Onion

While I was writing a recipe for vegetable broth, I realized that it might be helpful to include instructions on cutting an onion. Cutting onions seems to cause a lot of undue strife. It's not just the tears, it's the geometry. The concentric rings don't translate obviously into an even dice. If you cut an onion properly, then you leave the root end in tact (which you use as a handle to hold the rest of the onion while cutting it). Then you have a little end of onion leftover which can be saved with the rest of your veggie trimmings for broth. So without further ado: my treatise on slicing and dicing onions.



-Before you start, it is most important to use a very sharp knife. The tear-inducing chemicals are the product of a reaction that occurs when chemicals from different parts of the cell come into contact with each other. So the more you crush your onion's cells with a dull knife, the more you will be crying.

1. Halve and skin the onion. If you are preparing a lot of onions, then it can be worthwhile to soak them in tepid water for a few minutes. This will make the brittle skin more flexible and easier to peel off. If I'm just cutting one or two onions, I don't bother. Cut the unpeeled onion in half from root to stem. Trim away the top quarter-inch of the onion, and then pull the peel away from the rest of the onion. Trim away the very edge of the onion roots; you only want to get rid of the roots that are holding dirt. Discard skin and root trimmings.

2. Make horizontal cuts. With the palm of your left hand gently pressing down on the onion, make a series of three or four (depending on how big the onion is) evenly spaced horizontal cuts (the cuts should be about 1/4"-3/8" apart). If you are right handed, that means the root end of the onion will be to the left and you will draw your knife from right to left, holding it parallel to the counter. Do not cut all the way through, though. Imagine a line about half an inch up from the root end and do not cut past that line. Keeping the root end in tact is the key to cutting onions efficiently.

3. Make vertical cuts. For these cuts, the stem end of the onion should be facing you. Make a series of (6-7) evenly spaced vertical cuts. Again, leave the root end in tact by starting all of your cuts a half inch away from the root end. Place the knife blade precisely where you want the cut to begin (see illustration) and press straight down.

4. Dice. Hold the onion with your left hand, curling the tips of your fingers in (this technique makes cutting safer -- your knuckles keep the knife edge away from the tips of your fingers.) It is a grip that feels awkward at first, but will actually allow you to cut more quickly once you have mastered it. Starting at the stem end, slice your onion in 1/4"-3/8" slices (this is the exciting part, when all of your diligent skillful cuts reveal a gorgeous dice!). When you get down to the end of your onion, you will be left just holding the last little bit attached to the root end. Toss these onion ends in a freezer bag with the rest of your veggie scraps for making broth.

*If you want slices of onion rather than diced onion, skip steps 2 & 3.

Citrus Peels

Very often I’ll need the juice of half of a lemon for something; the remaining shell need not be neglected. The peel is, in many ways, the most interesting and useful part of a citrus fruit. It contains the fragrant, flammable citrus oil, and a lot of handy pectin to boot. There are a few different uses for citrus peels, and they require different preparation. Lime peels are an exception to a lot of the rules of citrus peels... you can’t dry or candy them (a difference in the chemical composition of their skins makes them turn brown and leathery). You can, however, shave the zest off and save it in the freezer until you have another use for it. I feel compelled to mention that I have read some very alarming reports about pesticides used on citrus fruit trees seeping into the oil of citrus fruits, making the peel of conventionally grown citrus a bit questionable. For whatever its worth, I only use the peels of organic citrus.

To dry citrus peels: Use a vegetable peeler to shave off the outer layer of peel. With a needle and thread string the strips of peel onto a length of string. Hang the string of peels up in a well ventilated area, and the peels will dry in a few days. Dried peels can be stored indefinitely in spice jars. Dried strips of citrus peel can be added to stocks or soups to brighten the flavor, You can also use them to make your own flavored tea. You can turn the dried strips into powder them by whizzing them for a few seconds in an electric coffee grinder. The resulting powder can be added to baked goods or sprinkled on top of a cappuccino.

To save citrus peels for marmalade: If you only need the juice of an orange or lemon, you can use a course grater to remove the zest and some of the peel from the outside of the fruit. Then you can juice the fruit as you normally would. Again, wrap the zest well and freeze it until you have enough to make the preserves of your choice.

To save citrus peels for candying or jams: Scrape away the inside of the fruit so that all you have left is the spongy white peel. Throw it in a bag in the freezer until you have accumulated enough to make a batch of candied peels (I promise to post a recipe once we reach prime citrus fruit season).

Saving Scraps

If you are cutting your vegetables in a very formal, French manner, there is a prescribed, unvarying system. Your cutting station contains three bowls: the first bowl contains the whole, unmanipulated plant matter; the last bowl contains the finished, geometrically cut product; the middle bowl contains everything you have scraped, cut and peeled away in the process. Savvy cooks know that there is a lot of useful stuff that gets thrown in that middle bowl (and usually subsequently into the trash.) Turning those scraps into useful and delicious food is a really easy and rewarding way to stretch your food budget. It certainly gives me the feeling that I have performed some feat of wizardry- making something delightful from nothing. So this is the beginning of what will be an evolving list of useful scraps to save, accompanied with recipes and tips about how best to use them.