Adventures in batching up a recipe

One of the reasons that everyone I know asks me questions like  “Do you ever sleep” is because I always seem to be doing something canning related when I get home from my full time job. But that very recently went into overdrive with an influx of store orders, Christmas gift basket requests and preparing my own Christmas gifts. And then it went into double overdrive when I took a sample of my cranberry sauce to my local butcher shop for them to try and they LOVED it and ordered 200 jars.

Now if you are at all familiar with preserving, you know that the average preserving recipe yields between 4-7 jars. So even if we leaned a little to the side of a higher yield and assumed we would get 6 jars per batch that would mean I needed to make 33 batches in a little over a week in order to meet this order. Suffering from the inability to clone myself, meant that I had to look at alternate solutions and that is when my butcher took me into the basement and introduced me to Jack, Jill and Sparky and a slow smile spread across my face and a small amount of fear entered my heart.

You see Jack, Jill and Sparky are tilting steam kettles and I have been dying to get my hands on one of these so I could begin to seriously start batching up my recipes.

This past Saturday, with 50lb of cranberries, over 20 bags of sugar, a carton of oranges and enough boxes of pectin that the cashier at Highland Farms looked at me with a curious expression on her face, I walked up to Jill and Sparky and began my first ever LARGE batch.

After consulting a preserver I met in Portland, I knew what had to be done and all that was left was doing it.

I am happy to report that this week I will delivering 180 jars to the Butcher Shop on Kingston Road. So if you are in the area – get them while they last!

Flavoured Vinegars

In previous years people used to give me incredulous looks at this time of year. Some of them even had an undertone of complete disgust. They would ask questions like “You are done already? How is that possible?” and make statements like “People like you drive me crazy”. My organizational skills, while viewed as an asset in most circumstances tended to make people angry at this time of year.

But oh how the times have changed.  This is the first year in at least a decade where I am not done my Christmas shopping. I am struggling on several fronts. Finding the time to shop, finding the desire to shop and finding the inspiration for gifts.

If you are experiencing any of the same issues as me, I may be able to help. This Thursday at The Depanneur I am hosting a class. Now this isn’t the same as my other classes earlier this year. We aren’t going to learn to make jam, jellies or pickles. You will not be constricted by the balance of fruit, sugar, acid and pectin. Oh no…in this class you can let your creativity roam free.

Garlic chive vinegar, raspberry vinegar, apple cinnamon spice vinegar just to name a few of the combinations we will be exploring. I will provide the different vinegars and ingredients as well as a few tried and true recipes but you let your creativity do the rest and see what other combinations you can come up with.

At the end of the class, you will have 2 jars of the vinegar of your choice to take home with you and the opportunity to buy other flavours as hostess gifts or stocking stuffers or just the bottles if you prefer to continue the creativity at home at another time.

Sign up here and see you soon.

https://www.facebook.com/events/487813881252161/

Fighting the Winter Blah's

It has been a foggy grey week in November. The leaves have all fallen off the trees, the grass is turning yellow and the air is damp and cold enough to give me a permanent chill. It is the start of my least favourite season – Winter. I know it is all downhill from here and there is nothing I can do to stop the slip, slip slide down into January and February.

At the moment I am still fighting the cold that slowly pulls my shoulders up closer to my ears. But by the time January rolls around the fight will be gone and I will be clinging to the glimmer of hope that is spring.

It is at this time of year that my commute to my job becomes a real drain. The monotony of the routine – alarm rings, shower, eat, dress, drive to the station, get on the train, shuffle off with all the other commuters, walk to the office, work, calls, meetings, emails, walk back to the train station in the DARK, get on the train, drive back home. Repeat.

So this week as I could feel the grip of fall/winter starting to tighten around my throat I decided I still had some fight left in me. There is only one way to rise above it all and that is to search for inspiration on my commute. Instead of completing the routine in an almost robotic trance, I am looking up, sideways and behind me and taking photos of what grabs my eye.

Crazy for Cranberry Sauce

It seems to be right around this time of year when people start to hang up their Christmas lights, the days get shorter and the wind gets colder and I start to think about cranberries.

There are a lot of great cranberry sauce recipes out there. Some of them add ginger or orange zest to the sauce to make the flavour more complex and interesting.

What do you do to your cranberry sauce to make it stand apart?

I can tell you what I do. I add roasted walnuts and pecans. I take anywhere from 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup of a combination or walnuts and pecans and I chop them roughly and place them in a pan on my stove top over medium-high heat and stir them occasionally. Keep an eye that they don't burn. You want the nice flavour of the roasted nuts to permeate your cranberry sauce - not a burnt flavour. In about 5 minutes the scent of roasted nuts will be evident and they will have turned a golden brown.

Prepare your sauce as per your normal instructions and add the nuts close to the end of the cooking time. Delicious!

When something simple makes it all worthwhile

I have what could be considered a bad habit. Every day while I eat my breakfast before work I check twitter, facebook and the news. Then I spend most of my day plastered to my computer at work, then I come home and write a blog post or do some research or head to the commercial kitchen to create something tasty.

There are a couple of potential bad habits hidden in the above paragraph:

1) checking facebook and twitter every day first thing in the morning

2) checking it while I am eating my breakfast really has to stand alone as a potential bad habit all on it's own

3) I seem to never stop and work almost all the time (with an episode of The Wire thrown in as relaxation ;)

At times, I question whether something needs to change. Then, this morning this was posted on my wall and made all those questions disappear. I do what I do because I love it and I believe that comes across in each and every jar of Manning Canning.