cranberry sauce alternatives

And since I’m on a blogging roll, I wanted to brag about my Punchy Cranberry Sauce again this year.  Need a cranberry sauce recipe to wow your friends?  You’ve come to the right place.  Ginger Street and Northwest Orangezest, turn left at the bog.  I’m amending the recipe this time to include less cinnamon, and adding star anise, more zest, and a hit of sugar plum syrup.

But if you insist, there are some alternatives on this old Chow thread, too.  I’m particularly interested in the pear-coffee-cranberry sauce, and the cranberry-onion-horseradish relish.  Not that I’d switch teams or anything, but thought I’d throw ‘em out there.

There’s also this cranberry pie recipe from fellow Michigander blogger Kitchen Chick.

What’s your recipe?

 

holiday help line

And just a reminder, since the Register-Guard Thanksgiving food section failed to note that we’ve got a terrific local resource and don’t need to rely on the Butterball corporate hotline…

and the local radio DJs reported on people calling 411 for turkey help…

HOLD THE PHONE!

The OSU Extension-Lane County Master Food Preservers are ready and waiting to answer your Thanksgiving food questions.  Call in with your turkey, squash, stuffing, and cranberry queries the week before Thanksgiving. 541-682-4246, now until T-Day, M-Th, 9-4:00.  A certified volunteer will provide all the information you need.

Also, if you’re near the Fairgrounds this week, stop by the Extension Service building at 950 W. 13th, Eugene.  Great, inexpensive holiday food gifts and stuff to bring to Thanksgiving parties.  We have some plum juice from the King Estate plums available for purchase at the remarkable price of $2 a quart, mentioned in my previous post.  We also have jams, sauces, relishes and chutneys left over from the tasting buffet fundraiser: $4 a half-pint and $10 for three.  Some pie fillings are also available, if you’d like to take a homemade pie to your feast.  Or just stock up on condiments for your leftovers.  I’m particularly excited about fixing myself a turkey sandwich on Friday afternoon, slathering the bread with cranberry chutney or corn relish, mmmm..

 

gifts in a jar 2009

Now that I’ve overseen my second annual “Holiday Gifts in a Jar” class for the Master Food Preservers, I’m in jar gift mode, and I thought I’d share the bounty of my research with you.  Once a week, from now until New Year’s Day, I’ll be posting a recipe or link to something unusual and creative I’ve found that can be jarred up and offered to your loved ones as delicious holiday gifts.

The class was a great deal of fun.  We offered two sections, an afternoon and an evening, and had a range of demonstrations and hands-on workshops, including some crucial tips for decorating jars and baskets.  There was a canning overview and workshop making (low) sugar plum jelly, a comparative analysis of chutneys and conserves, and creating layering of white powders for baking mixes in their regular and gluten-free forms.

The big hit of the entire shebang was Katya Davis’ homemade vanilla extract.  Who knew it was so easy?  She demo’d the process of slicing the vanilla beans and preparing them for their bath in spirits, and even gave out samples of vanilla sugar and apple pie/pumpkin pie spice mixes to include in a baking gift basket.  I think I’ll be showing up at her door on Christmas morning with my stocking…

We also discussed safely making flavored oils (sun-dried tomato) and vinegars, and the class took home jars of blackberry and herb vinegar made with the remains of my 2009 herb garden and frozen chesterberries.  There was a demonstration of making cranberry mustard from scratch by our local mustard experts, Jan Hurlow and Suzi Busler.  I spent some time discussing local products that are particularly notable, and how to find them.  Cindy Ambrose backed me up in the evening class by demonstrating how to make hazelnut brittle in the microwave.

If you’re interested in making sugar plum jam, we have a few 1-Q jars of juice made from donated plums from King Estates winery left over from the class.  We’re selling them at $2 a jar, a fantastic price for a high-quality, pure, unsweetened jar of juice.  The quart holds slightly less than 4 cups of juice, which would work well for the following recipe that was featured in the class.

(Low) Sugarplum Jelly

This jelly spread was adapted from my recipe for cider jelly.  It uses spices that are traditional in making Victorian sugar plums.  Makes 4 half-pints of low-sugar jelly using Pomona pectin.*  Perfect for Christmas morning on cinnamon raisin bread, or mixed in with ricotta for a crepe filling.

➢    4 t. calcium water (in Pomona pectin box*)
➢    4 t. natural pectin (in Pomona pectin box*)
➢    1 quart (4 cups) plum juice, either canned or freshly made in steam juicer
➢    Spice mix: one stick cinnamon, zest from one orange, big pinch of whole allspice, pinch whole cloves, pinch whole coriander, pinch cocoa nibs (optional)
➢    1 cup sugar
➢    1/4 cup fresh lemon juice
➢    4 t. (divided into four) apricot liqueur (optional)

Macerate the spices in the juice at least several hours before canning.  Measure out your juice and place in a jar or bowl that can be covered.  Add cinnamon stick.  Place the other spices in a little cheesecloth square that can be tied shut with string, then add to the juice. Refrigerate overnight, if possible.

Before beginning your jelly, wash your jars and sterilize them by boiling them in your canner for 5 minutes.  Wash your new lids and your rings.  Keep the lids and rings in water at a simmer (180 degrees), don’t boil them, in a small pot on the stove.  Filter out the spices from your juice and pour into a medium-sized pot.

To make jelly, follow the instructions on the bottom of the Pomona instruction sheet. These are, basically, as follows:

Add calcium water and lemon juice to juice in the medium pot on high heat.  As juice is being brought to a rapid boil, mix together the pectin and the sugar in a small bowl.

When the juice comes to a boil, add in the sugar/pectin mix, stirring constantly for one minute, to melt the pectin.  If you don’t stir constantly, it will lump.  Remove from heat.

Skim foam that rises to the surface of the juice, if any.

Fill hot jars, leaving a quarter-inch headspace, and add 1 t. per jar of the optional apricot liqueur.

Wipe rims, cover with lids and rings, and process for five minutes in a boiling water canner.

* If you live in Eugene, you can find Pomona pectin at Sundance, Market of Choice, and Down to Earth throughout the year.  Do not substitute Pomona pectin for another brand of pectin, as they all process differently.

 

dark days challenge: squashed

I joined up with the bloggers doing the Dark Days Winter Eat Local Challenge, a once-weekly meal made from SOLE ingredients (sustainable, organic, local and ethical).  Since so much of what we eat here at Raccoon Tree Acres is from the local farms, I thought it wouldn’t be a problem to showcase one meal a week.

“Local” is often defined as 100 or 150 miles from your home base.  Eugene is within that range distance from Portland and our bounteous coast, but even the 150-mile radius doesn’t include the Rogue Valley (home of award-winning Rogue Creamery blue cheeses) or Ashland (home of Dagoba chocolate, a full-circle sustainable company that imports quality chocolate products), much less the dry, low desert areas in the northeast part of the state that produce incredible onions, melons, wines, and many more things.   Since it doesn’t make much sense to me to exclude parts of Oregon that offer wonderful products, I’m setting my boundaries to include the entire state, but I will make every effort to stick as close to home in the Willamette Valley as possible.

We’re allowed to state exceptions, and for me, that’s the usual coffee and spices.  I’m using our Eugene-based fair-trade importers, Café Mam and Wandering Goat, for coffee.  Asian food is a big part of my cooking repertoire, and I can’t give up imported soy sauce.  This, along with coffee, is probably my biggest exception.  Herbs and hot peppers will come from my own garden, but I don’t have a local source for pepper, salt, sugar, ginger, cumin or coriander — all of which I use frequently.  (We do have a local fair trade cinnamon and vanilla importer, Kestrel Growth.) If I use lemons, they will be sourced from Northern California, since my little lemon and lime trees (bushes, really) already have been harvested.

We get our eggs from a local farmer in my husband’s department, and our dairy from Noris Dairy, just north of us near Salem.  As for cheese, I mainly eat Noris farmhouse or Tillamook sharp cheddar, both within the 150-limit.  Starches are more challenging, and I’m still looking for local sources of rice and wheat flour.  Our pulses and some grains (polenta, Tarbais white beans, Zolfino yellow beans, frumento) will come from Ayers Creek Farm in Gaston, others (garbanzos and pinto beans) from Stalford Seed Farm in Tangent.

Of course, the first blog post was due the week that I was not the least bit interested in cooking, due to all the other pressing deadlines I had.  That’s OK, though.  I managed to get one full meal on the table with local ingredients, pulled together with many of the tidbits I was using in my cooking classes, article, etc.  Voilá!

My version of pork chops and apple sauce.  It’s a pork chop from Springfield-based Biancalana Pork Growers, spread with quince paste made from farmer’s market quinces with cardamom.  The chop is surrounded by the chioggia squash whip Queen of Hungary I made for my Eugene Weekly article from Ayers Creek Farm squash, salad greens also from Ayers Creek with a homemade dried cranberry vinegar dressing and dried corn “croutons” (dehydrated from a humble bag of frozen organic, local corn), and a tiny bit of illegal rice with fresh local chanterelles.  Since the quince paste is so sweet, I probably wouldn’t pair it with the winter squash side for a dinner party, but leftovers is leftovers.

And speaking of leftovers, the rest of the roasted squash went into a cream soup with thyme, a bit more quince paste, and chicken stock from my freezer.

 

new column in ew: squash whip queen of hungary!

I’m failing as a blogger this week: just too busy.  But I have good reason.  Today, I’m teaching 50 students (including some of my own from the Clark Honors College at U of Oregon, yay!) how to make “gifts in a jar” for the Master Food Preservers.  Two full classes, yikes.  I’ve started the dried vegetable chowder, washed over 100 jars and lids for various activities, prepped the dried tomatoes for sun-dried tomato oil, picked and washed herbs, withdrawn from my berry account in the special depository in my friend’s freezer, and even dried my own cotton-pickin’ raisins for the Swiss trail mix.  All this is in the last quarter of the term, so it’s been a bit hard and the days have been loooooooooooooooong.

I still owe y’all a report of the delicious treats we enjoyed at the NW Food and Wine Festival in Portland last weekend, and another post on what we’ve been doing during our first week in the Dark Days winter local food blogging challenge.  Soon, I promise.  Stuff just keeps on, well, happening, know what I mean?

So in lieu of a real post, check out my latest food column in the Eugene Weekly, which hit the stands this morning.  It’s all about a most regal Thanksgiving side dish — Squash Whip Queen of Hungary.  For the column, I managed to get the photo of Anthony Boutard cutting squash this weekend on my mad dash to the Hillsdale Farmers Market.  He was discussing the differences between the Sibley (not pictured), the squash I used for the purée (marina di Chioggia) and the musque de Provence in the back.  Num num.  The fruits of his labor are really something to see…and taste.

The picture at the top of this post is also from the Hillsdale Farmers Market.  I didn’t write down the name of the farm selling these lovely romanesco and kale, but their produce arranger has a keen eye for green.

Ok, off to do the thousands of things that still need to be done.  Wish me luck!

 

gettin’ lucky in pdx: sichuan!

After a trying week, we drove in the rain up to Portland for the weekend.  I’m here to learn everything I can about Portland restaurants and food trends at the Northwest Food & Wine Festival, and I’ll be posting about that tomorrow.  But for now, let me just say that Lucky Strike Sichuan restaurant, a hole-in-the-wall on the southeastern outskirts of town in the so-called Felony Flats, serves the spiciest food I’ve had in years.  I think they use more peppers in their “hot pepper chicken bath” dish than all of Eugene uses in a year.  Is this a bad thing?  Not really.  But I can’t do spicy as I used to do it…spicily.

And Retrogrouch offered this ancient Chinese secret:  eating leftover ma po tofu in the middle of the night is never a good idea.

Nevertheless, the Lucky Strike folks know how to cook, and the food tastes quite good.  Sauces are their strength.  The seafood pancake had a sesame-tinged soy dip, made slightly sweet and topped with scallions, red chilis, and garlic, and the dumplings had a chili oil with much more garlic, chiles, and ginger.  The ma po tofu had a numbing sauce of Sichuan peppers, chilis, and prickly ash (sansho pepper).  Delicious.

The show-stopper (or gimmick, as Retrogrouch put it) is the hot pepper chicken bath — nuggets of fried chicken thighs under a thousand whole red chili peppers.  The peppers do not heat up the dish as much as you might expect.  They flavor the cooking oil in a relatively quiet way, providing the nice red, toasty flavor of the chiles without the burn.  I don’t mean the dish is bland by any means, but the ma po tofu was much, much spicier.  I posted about Mandarin House’s version of the dish on my short trip to PDX when I was in the final throes of my dissertation (shudder).  You can see from the image I posted that the dish can — and in my opinion, should — be more chicken-heavy, but it’s always bathed in hot peppers.

If you’re in PDX and you’re up for a drive out SE Powell Street, check ‘em out.  Call first, though.  The review sites (such as the one linked above) say that they have eccentric operating hours (some say closed M and Tu, some say they close early arbitrarily, others say sometimes they are not open on Su).  We arrived late, but still had a 45-minute wait, they claimed.  We were seated a bit earlier, but it was a little odd that they wanted to call us when our table was ready (as in, please leave and we will phone you).  It’s a tiny place, slightly more grungy than hip, but worth the experience.

 

dining niblets: what’s for dinner edition

• Last Saturday to buy your produce and local meat/fish/cheese at the outdoor Farmers Market.  The venue moves indoor at the Fairgrounds, but many of the local farms will be shutting down market operations for the season.  So don’t miss it!
• If you do have to miss it, however, remember that there is still the farmers market on campus at UO, Thursdays through the end of the month.  It’s an experiment, so show them some university love today and make it worth their while!
• And yet another option is River Bend Farm, just south of Eugene off Highway 58. Annette and crew, whom you may have seen recently at Saturday Market in their booth selling fresh apple cider, are keeping their farm shop open through December. Each week, they make ready-to-eat meals and baked goods that will weaken the hardest of hearts.  You can pre-order (call 541-520-2561)and pick up meals on Fridays at the farm.  This week’s specials include bacon/spinach or broccoli/chanterelle/red pepper quiche, cream of tomato pesto soup, Oregon clam chowder, meat pasties and five-layer dip for the football game (call ahead to order), and wonderful breads (rye caraway (Thur.); Oregon cheddar (Fri.); pesto/garlic/parmesan (Sat.)). They also have cider, new crop filberts, walnuts, chestnuts, apples, Asian pears and local meats — Biancalana Pork, Schloss Dexter Beef, and lamb from a local purveyor whose name I have forgotten.  AND PIE.  PIE!
• Hungry yet?
• Nib Dessert and Wine Bar is hosting the first (of we hope many) weekly dinner prepared by  local/seasonal catering outfit Field to Table.  Check out Field to Table’s booth this weekend when you visit the last Farmers Market.  Last week, Retrogrouch and I dined on wild mushroom macaroni and cheese (him, above) and a fried egg openfaced sandwich with mesclun, wild mushrooms, and goat cheese (me).  I’m slightly grumpy after searching for 45 minutes for the menu, which I swore I saw somewhere in my capacious in-box, and on the websites for Nib and Field to Table, where the event does not appear!  Bah.  All I remember is a compelling dish of Ninkansi-braised short ribs.  Corey, if you are reading this, let us know more details, please.  I do know that seating is at  6:30pm on Friday, November 20, and price per person is $25, or with wine $40 per person.
• And while we’re on the topic of short ribs, I had the beef short ribs soup for lunch at Café Arirang on a stormy, dark day this week.  I needed comfort food, and comfort food I got.  Imagine a big bowl of deeply, richly meaty broth, filled with saucy glass noodles, poached egg whites, a russet jujube, Korean radish, and more rib pieces than you can eat, all showered in green onions.  Now make it a reality and go visit!  The soup is a seasonal special and is served with rice and homemade kimchi that will blow your mind.
• If you haven’t checked out Hideaway Bakery’s pizza night on Tuesdays from 5-7 pm, hurry before the weather makes it impossible.  They serve pizza and beer on the patio.  Good idea to call ahead (541-868-1982), as they cancel if it looks like there will be too much rain.

 

gearing up for the dark days blogging challenge

My entire house smells like the floral, slightly apply, slightly pineapply fruit most of us wouldn’t even recognize: the quince.  It’s a part of the supplies I’m gathering as part of the 3rd annual Dark Days blogging challenge, run by Laura of (not so) Urban Hennery up in the great rainy north (Washington).  I and a bunch of other food bloggers will prepare and serve one completely local meal through the roughest days of the year in terms of local produce: late fall, winter, and early spring.  It is going to be a challenge, but I’m excited about it, since I’m already learning a great deal about sourcing local grains and other necessities.  You can bet my preserved foods are going to be a big part of the challenge, and I’ve been looking through my freezer for what I managed to save over the summer.

If you’re interested in playing along, follow the link above (also listed on the right side column as a pretty little button) and join me!

As for the quince, he and his brothers will meet a sad but delicious end as a cooked, strained juice.  Quince is high in natural pectin, so it makes a great addition to jams and jellies.  It’s also delicious served as a compote.

I see quince as a long-lost friend because I had an alphabet book that couldn’t find anything else in the child’s universe for Q other than a quince.  A quince, sure!  Little did I know that unlike the banana or dog or umbrella, I wouldn’t see a live quince until college.  And, truth be told, it ain’t much to look at, either.  But the smell, oh man, words can’t even begin to describe it.  If you find an ugly, bumpy, yellow (or green that will ripen to lemon yellow) thing in the produce bin, pick it up and breathe it in.  There’s nothing like it in the world.

Edited to add:  Looking for quince recipes?  Our own Laura McCandlish, a Corvallis-based food blogger, has gathered a handful from various cooks, near and far, for an article for NPR’s Kitchen Window.

 

café arirang – best korean in eugene

Café Arirang on Franklin, the best kept dining secret in Eugene, now has a list of fall specials, including these spicy soups and noodle dishes to warm your insides:

• Zzambong, a “very spicy” noodle soup with seafood (9.95);
• Zzajang Mjun, vegetables, pork, potatoes in a black bean sauce over noodles (8.95); and
• Beef Short Rib Soup with glass noodle, egg, and vegetables (10.95).

The only problem is that they are closed on Saturdays and the location is kind of wretched (up the street from Evergreen Indian on Franklin, located on that weird little jog where E. Broadway joins Franklin with the Ferry St. bridge).  But once you’re there, you’ll meet the nicest elderly couple who cook and prepare wonderful, homey Korean meals at reasonable prices. They make their own kimchi, and the most authentic Korean in town.  They really need some support from the post-teriyaki crowd.  Every time I go back, I see more and more patrons in the restaurant, but let’s help them flourish!

(I’m sorry about the horrible picture of standard dinner entrée accompaniments taken with my old camera,  but you won’t be sorry.)  Click the restaurant name above for Yelp reviews and the address.

 

new farmers market on campus

Thursday marks the second of four weeks that local farms will be hawking their fall produce on the University of Oregon campus.  More information by clicking here. Check it out and make it worth their while! They’ll only be around until Thanksgiving.

I am amazed and proud that U of O is making efforts to bring farms to the university.  Grab-n-Go, a convenience store set up in the dorms, is also purchasing produce directly from local growers.  Students can use their dining points to buy in-season apples and such.  I’ll bet that every single one of us who once had to live on dorm food is jealous.