Another Kitchen Day

I have dutifully spent time in the kitchen each Friday the past few months, with varying success, which is to say not a huge amount lately. In my last post about jam, I showed all sorts of apple jellies (it's taken me decades to work out the difference between these two terms, that's how daft I am). These were made with scraps - the peels and cores - mostly from the many cooking apples that my friend Pat gave me, but also with some apples from Vivien, another friend. I used the recipe from this blog and had great success, along with the 'zingers' mentioned on the Northwest Edible blog I mentioned in that other post. The rest of the apples were stewed, because Bill loves stewed apples with his porridge in winter.

Apple Syrup
I had not so much success this time. I'd saved apple cores from a lot of Royal Gala apples and when I couldn't cram anything else in the bottom scrap drawer, I made some more jelly but it never even pretended to set, not after two tries to make it work. For the 3rd time I pulled out the last bag of scraps which had some peels in and it almost - but not quite - set. So I've concluded that most of the pectin is in the peel. The failed jelly has been poured into a wine bottle and frozen with the label 'Apple Syrup'. As it also has ginger and brandy in, I'm sure it will make breakfast cereal or pancakes sing!

Cold Tea
I'm aware that this will be anathema to most Brits, but for me it is a celebration of lovely warm, sunny weather we've enjoyed these last few weeks (due to disappear soon, I believe). I make a pot of tea and when well steeped - more like stewed, probably - I pour cold tap water into an empty coffee jar and add the hot tea (don't want the glass to break!). It then goes into the fridge door to cool. I don't bother with ice these days - it's not that warm! - and in any case most of my ice cube trays are full of herbs in olive oil or the like. I used to enjoy lemon juice in my tea, but this isn't good for my tummy these days so I drink it black (pale brown, actually). I find it very refreshing. What can I say? I'm a Southern gal.

Carrot and Coriander Soup 
I pulled out the last (I hope) box of chopped carrots from the chest freezer. I may have mentioned elsewhere that we found ourselves buying horse carrots on a couple of occasions, in quantities that were just silly (but incredibly cheap). In each instance they began to go off before we finished them and so I had a session of chopping, blanching and freezing around the end of last year. Well, this box didn't work out as well for some reason and the carrots were all fairly mushy. Bill noticed our bowl of coriander was possibly going to bolt and he hoped I'd come up with a use for it before that happened. (That sort of thing always seems to be my job, but since he does so much other stuff around the house, I can't really complain). I wasn't sure I'd like the soup, but it was worth a try and as I only had one third of the carrots required for the recipe, we weren't overwhelmed with the amount of soup that resulted from mathing (that's a word, right?) the ingredient list down to one third. Sadly, I forgot to take a photo of the soup, but I can show you my coriander 'bed'.

Turns out I like carrot and coriander soup just find. There is a bit of the soup left and it will go into a curry recipe in A Girl Called Jack, by Jack Monroe, one of my culinary
heroes. 

Salmon Pasta
We've not had yoghurt in the house for a while but I found some available for delivery and this enabled me to use some of my Brexit stash - bottles of salmon paste - to make Jack's recipe for salmon pasta, even though we were out of onions, which are apparently in short supply these days. I used onion powder instead, and chili flakes instead of a chopped chili and it turned out fine. I've forgotten what a bottle of salmon paste costs but it's buttons and, combined with the yoghurt, it makes a wonderful pasta sauce. Which is a good thing, because putting salmon paste on crackers, probably what it's intended for, just doesn't appeal to me.

Crabby Lime (chutney??)

If my apple jelly didn't work great, Bill really enjoyed the last small jar of Crabby Lime something (I'm not a fan of chutney - other than mango - and wouldn't ever attempt to make any on purpose). I made this on a whim with the leftovers of the last of a batch of crab apple jelly (too little to make a full jar) and some compulsively hoarded lime 'endocarp' according to this website. I probably would have called it the 'meat' as opposed to the rind, or the juice, but endocarp sounds terribly erudite, doesn't it? I had got a bunch of limes inexpensively but hadn't known what to do with them other than put slices into tonic as a form of 'soft drink'. When they threatened to dry up, I wrung the little devils dry but thought all that ...endocarp... shouldn't go to waste so I scraped it out and froze it; the peels were definitely unattractive. Not knowing what else to do with it I threw it into the crab apple jelly - and crabby lime (something) was born. I thawed it and presented it to Bill to tell me if it was trash and he LOVED it.  Kitchen experiments are just my absolute favourite things. Looking up the definition of chutney, one finds that it can be a condiment made of sweets and acids, so chutney it is.

Have you played in the kitchen lately?