Tucked in the back of one shelf in my kitchen is an item that is easy to make, a great way to preserve extra produce (especially fruit), and a fantastic way to add depth to myriad baked goods and other recipes. Not to mention, an easy way to impress your neighbors with dishes that seem really fancy.... pinkies out, everyone! Yet, for as much as I love this item, I often forget I have it, and it's even more rare that I remember to make it during harvest time.
Today, I made one of my favorite brownie recipes, and as much as I love a good old fashioned fudge brownie, sometimes I want something a little extra. So I dug around and stumbled upon the rum soaked cherries that I had preserved a couple years ago. Score!
Alcohol is a preservation method that has stood the test of time... literally. It doesn't require special equipment or a whole day in the kitchen. You don't have to worry about ph levels or dealing with a water bath. You also don't have to fuss over airlocks and risk possible spoilage like in standard lacto-fermentation.
You can go all out with a German Rumtopf, or keep it simple like I did – fresh cherries, stems removed, in a quart mason jar with enough rum or bourbon to cover. You can even get crazy with spices and herbs, or other flavors like a bit of vanilla extract, or add some sugar to yield a sweet liqueur. I would recommend covering with a plastic mason lid because the alcohol will tarnish the metal lids, but just put the jar in a cool, dark place and forget about it for a while. The longer it sits, the better, but you can start tasting after about a month.
Not only did these boozy beauties add a pop of flavor to my brownies, but the cherry-flavored rum will end up in a fun experiment some day in the future when I stumble upon them again. But for now, back to the dark recesses of my cupboard the jar goes.
Tanya Arts is a Torah keeping artist from Minnesota who recently moved to Florida. She loves all things food including gardening, connecting with local farmers, cooking, baking, and has a special passion for saving and preserving foods in myriad ways... sharing that passion on her blog www.WhatDoIDoWithAllThese.com. Her Torah inspired artwork can also be found on her website www.ArtbyArts.me.
Canning is intimidating. Fermenting a huge crock full of pickles is scary. Seeing the posts from those friends that have a sea of jars in their kitchen at the end of a long day can be inspiring, but also incredibly overwhelming. My first thought is "wow, they are set for a good long time!" Then reality sets in, knowing just how many hours they had to have spent cutting, cooking, packing, etc. to end up with those extra-full shelves.
When we are just starting out, it seems daunting... all the recipes, all the possibilities. What do I do first? Where do I start? Even as a seasoned preserver, my mind freezes (pun intended) from an overabundance of possibilities for saving good stuff for later use.
The other day, I went to the store for the week with my list. I was excited because I was finally going to try the "egg roll in a bowl" that everyone raves about. I know, I'm super late to that party. But I grabbed my head of cabbage and a couple carrots and some ground beef and headed home.
Fast forward after the meal was cooked and in my belly (it was delicious with a bit of my sweet chili relish I had on the shelf, by the way) and I was left with a big pot of egg roll and most of a head of cabbage left over.
So I'm left with a choice, do I throw away the cabbage? Do I try to find another meal that uses cabbage? And then it hit me, why do I have to have a "project" to preserve food?! I can just as easily slice up this cabbage, release some aggression into a mason jar, and end up with a lovely quart of sauerkraut in a few weeks. So that's what I did. Then I regretted not spending a tiny bit more for the big bag of carrots instead of just getting the two single ones that the recipe required.
It starts with a pint, then a quart, and one day, you will have your own sea of full glass, waiting for the winter. Don't wait, jump right in!
Tanya Arts is a Torah keeping artist from Minnesota who recently moved to Florida. She loves all things food including gardening, connecting with local farmers, cooking, baking, and has a special passion for saving and preserving foods in myriad ways... sharing that passion on her blog www.WhatDoIDoWithAllThese.com. Her Torah inspired artwork can also be found on her website www.ArtbyArts.me.
Great Kitchen Tips
Check out these food hacks. Good tips to save time or money in the kitchen. I think I have to watch this a couple times.
Cast-Iron Fried Eggs
For the past year I've been learning and perfecting cooking on cast-iron in a way that doesn't stick. For a long time I thought that was not possible but after seeing some videos showing me just how wrong I was, I began to experiment.
The break through came while I was camping during sukkot. The campfire I had my pan on was very hot. I was frying some diced potatoes and scrambled eggs. As they fried I saw they were not sticking just as I had seen and been trying to replicate. My error was the pan was not hot enough.
Potatoes and scrambled eggs seemed not much of a problem to do on my range at home. Now I must try fried eggs. Nope stuck on that pan and made a mess. Why? The pan was hot.
The secret for that elusive cast-iron fried egg was a really hot pan and enough oil in the pan to keep it off the bottom. It fried very fast. I had to be quick to season it and turn it before it burns but that little bit of crisp really makes it taste good. Different and dare I say better than the non-stick pans I have been using.
I think I don't need teflon for my eggs anymore.
Top Recipes 2022
I know this is a little late but I wanted to make a list of the top recipes in 2022 the family asked for again and again.
In no particular order:
Poblano Chicken Spaghetti
Buttermilk Pancakes
Soft Peanut Butter Cookies
Green Pozole
Carne Guisada
Rice Pilaf
Lessons on Matsah 2022
This year I learned a lot about making matsah. Still won't be winning any prizes. I learned that fried matsah is much easier and tastier than trying to make it very thin for baking.
I thought I'd been fancy this year and mix the All Purpose Flour with some Barley Flour for a bit more flavor. Turns out the flour I thought was Barley was actually Spelt. It tasted fine but the texture of the Spelt flour was fiberous and not very finely ground. Probably would have made a fine cracker but it's still hard to roll it thinner. Need much more practice. Ended up a thick cracker that sometimes wasn't crunchy. Tasted good anyways.
I also tried fried unleavened bread. Frying was definitely the way to go as you don't have to make it so thin and it still gets a nice crunchy fried texture. It was really good fried!
Next year I'll definitely be frying my matzah but I'll still try my hand at rolling that dough thin enough for a good baked matsah too.
Making Matzah
Looking at a lot of matzah recipes I realize there isn't a big difference between them. Maybe one overall recipe will do that has lots of ideas and subtle differences to try out is better than a hundred individual recipes.
There is a theme in all the recipes I read. Seems a 2:1 ratio of flour to water or 1.5:0.5 ratio is common. A very hot oven reaching temperatures of 475-500degrees is needed as well. A few called for a hot broil setting for a nice brown crisp on top. A pizza stone or the like gives good results as well.
Some differences I noticed, not all recipes used oil in the dough and the toppings varied a lot from nothing, to salted, to seseme seeds and more. Salted being the most common. Some traditions fry the dough instead of baking it.
Kosher tradition attempts to mix, knead, and cook the dough before 18minutes. The thinking is any longer and the wild yeast in the air will start making the dough rise. Does it really? I don't know. Nothing in scripture says you must make it in a certain time.
With all this information let's see if we can come up with an all purpose recipe.
Ragout of Lamb, Next Recipe to Master
The French Cooking Academy has many very tasty dishes. Ragout of Lamb, Poulette Style has got to be the next recipe I master as it has many things I like in a dish. I especially like one bowl dishes. Stephen takes you step by step through the recipe.
The French Cooking Academy is a great channel to learn cooking techniques. It has helped me get much better at cooking in general and sauces and gravies specifically. And if you like butter then french cooking is something you are going to like!
Cooking Hacks Debunked
In the last few years and probably longer I've seen many cooking hacks being passed around fakebook. These hacks are often terrible or don't work. The creators of these websites and videos have been caught faking many of them sadly.
I came across the channel of a lady that likes to debunk these hacks as well as give good cooking and baking tips. How she includes her husband in her videos is funny too! Her channel is How to Cook That Ann Reardon.
Add A Recipe
The Recipe Submission Form is done. It was done before Sukkot but I got busy and didn't add a link to the form. Oops! That's fine, Sukkot was more important.
Recipe Submission Form. Share a recipe with the community! I'll be adding some more soon myself.
18th Century Hushpuppies
The Townsends is one of my favorite channels. It's interesting how people used to live and eat prior to modern conveniences. These meatball recipes that they found in an old cookbook show you can make a good meal with meager resources.
The first meatball recipe is a good way to stretch a small amount of meat and use up some bread thats getting hard. In the video he uses beef but I'm sure this would be good with lamb or bison. The recipe calls for suet, a type of fat around the kidneys. This isn't to be eaten according to lev. 3:14-17. Fortunately, the recipe says you can substitute with butter.
The second recipe is a meatless meatball. Chef Ryan compared this to a really good hushpuppy. That sounds really good!
Both of these recipes use a pennyloaf that you turn to crumbs. A pennyloaf is a loaf of bread that cost a penny. It was a small loaf whose size changed with the price of flour.
Out of these two I'm most interested in trying is the hushpuppy like, meatless meatball.
New Torah Observant Recipe Resource
After coming to the realization that keeping Torah was a big part of belief in Messiah Yahusha I started changing my diet. When searching the web for recipes that don't call for bacon or canned ingredients or other shortcuts that contained questionable or unclean ingredients in them, I didn't find any good resources. So, I decided to put my website building skills to use and create a place without those ingredients and try to build a site that focuses on scratch made recipes and recipes for ingredients to other recipes. Recipes written in such a way that if you did find a trustworthy shortcut or cooked up some of your own you are covered either way.
In my search for recipes I found many websites that have good and thorough articles and tutorials for the beginner, so I wanted to do something for the more experienced cook. Not being overly wordy in the recipe and assuming some level of basic cooking skill. Some references of terms and conversions will be linked in the future.
I'd like to do an old school link share with other relevant websites. It would have been nice to come across one in my search to see other resources vetted or liked by other believers.
One very annoying thing most other popular recipe sites do is bother you for your email address or add a million ads in the recipe or article to the point there is hardly an article visible. I'm not opposed to some advertising but I want to do it better, less obtrusive and more relevant. Only food, kitchen tools, etc. relevant stuff.
