Fresh Apricot Preserves

If I find decent apricots on sale, I buy a bunch of them and make apricot preserves. In previous years, I've made apricot butter, but preserves are less work. They taste just as good. Jams and preserves contain a lot of sugar. That's because the sugar is a preservative. So, don't be tempted to reduce the sugar. There are low-sugar jam recipes out there and if you want to cut back on the sugar, use them. Don't tinker with the high-sugar recipes.

You can "can" it, water processing the preserves in jars. I have tended towards the lazy person's method of preserving since getting my chest freezer. I put the preserves in freezer containers and they keep just fine in the deep chill. There's nothing better than pulling out a bit of summer's golden sunshine in the middle of winter. This stuff makes a great gift too, in which case you will want to preserve it because frozen jam doesn't ship well. ;-)

Fresh Apricot Preserves
(makes about 3 ½ cups)

3 cups coarsely chopped fresh apricots, about 2 pounds
3 ½ cups sugar
¼ cup fresh lemon juice

Stir together all the ingredients in a large stainless steel, glass, or plastic bowl. Cover and let sit at room temperature for 12 hours, stirring occasionally.

Scrape out the apricot mixture into a dutch oven or large saucepan. Bring to a boil over high heat, stirring frequently. Reduce the heat to medium and boil rapidly, uncovered, until mixture is thick and gels on a cold spoon.

Pour into freezer containers for long term freezer storage or put into sterilized jars and water-process for 5 minutes (15 minutes at Boulder altitude).

If you are not familiar with home canning, get yourself a good book that explains the process. This recipe came from Small-Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard. It's an excellent book for modern home cooks on preserving, both for the process and for the recipes.

A Vineyard Odyssey

A Vineyard Odyssey: The Organic Fight to Save Wine from the Ravages of Nature

My dear friend John Kiger has just gotten his book on his second career as a vineyard owner published! John lives on an idyllic piece of Sonoma County with his wife Deb (my grad school roommate and one of my most wonderful friends), one very large dog (that's Francesco on the book cover), one new smaller version of Francesco, a puppy named Marco, a flock of sheep, and a few chickens. His journey to keep his grapevines healthy and producing premium wine grapes is quite a tale. I've been hearing about this on-going saga in real-time and read some of the book in advance. I heartily recommend it!

If you dream of moving to the country and owning a vineyard, or if you love wine and have an interest in learning how the front-end of this process works (because great grapes make great wine), this is a book for you.

Order the book from Amazon with this link and Deb & John get a little extra on the sale: A Vineyard Odyssey

Watermelon Sorbet

You ever buy a lame watermelon? You know the kind - it tastes more like cucumber than melon or maybe it's started to go soft and mushy. And, you wonder "what can I do with this?" If you have an ice cream maker, turn it into sorbet. The sugar, which is essential to create a good texture in a sorbet, helps immeasurably. Of course, if you bought a beautiful watermelon like the one in the photo, your sorbet will be even better!

You can use watermelon with seeds but it's a lot more work to remove all the seeds. Nowadays, seedless watermelons can be had easily, and this is the way to go. In my local supermarket, most of the mini-watermelons weigh in at 3 ½ pounds. I've scaled the recipe to use one mini-watermelon, which makes a bit less than 1 quart of sorbet.

Very refreshing!

Watermelon Sorbet
(makes not quite 1 quart)

Castelas Ginger Olive Oil

Food souvenirs from my trip to Provence.

Last year, I was lucky enough to ride a bike through a little bit of Provence. It was a magical trip. We visited some incredible places, such as Pont-du-Gard, an ancient Roman aqueduct,

Pont-du-Gard. It's big. Really big.

the hilltop town of Les-Baux-de-Provence, with a medieval castle,

Looking up at Les-Baux-de-Provence. The castle and the town are a step back in time.

and a little olive oil producer down the hill from Les-Baux called Castelas.

We got a tour of their facilities. The picture above is the display to their fancy Italian olive oil press. Of course, no tour would be complete without a visit to the gift shop, where they sell their olive oils, olives, soaps, and candle (both made with olive oil). They let us sample their olive oils and they were absolutely delicious. The black fruit olive oil, pressed from ripe black olives, is very smooth with a background flavor of hazelnuts. It is incredible stuff.

But, the really special oil is the Ginger Olive Oil. It is not an infused oil. The ginger is pressed with the olives and the pure ginger flavor is unique. I have tasted every ginger olive oil I could find since I visited Castelas and nothing even comes close. A little goes a long way when used as a finishing oil. It enhances fish, or chicken, and makes a wonderful vinaigrette.

Something this special doesn't come cheap, of course. Well, if you are in Les-Baux, it's pretty reasonable. Unfortunately, I have no plans to visit Provence this year, so I need to order it from the source. Shipping is more expensive than the oil, but it's worth it. Indulgent, yes. But, I don't often splurge on things like this.

You can visit their main website or go straight to the Castelas store (in English) to order some of this exceptional olive oil. I would not wait too long. Last year, when my stash was getting low, I went looking for it and it was all sold out. I've been conserving it ever since. I ordered two 250 ml cans and they should get here next week. Let the olive oil flow!

Experience with Oxtails

Oxtails are one of those cuts that really need a lot of patience. The meat is very tough because it gets a lot of use (watch cattle - they swish their tails all the time) and there is tons of connective tissue holding it all together. That means you will be cooking them for a long, long time.

I tried cooking them in my slow cooker, which I guess would work if you cooked them long enough. I tried about 8 hours. Definitely NOT long enough. Next time, I'll try overnight and through the day.

Why bother with oxtails? They taste so very good, especially when given the Chinese treatment. I adore star anise which is kind of odd since I hate licorice. Some things are unknowable. :-)

Chinese Braised Oxtails

Start with about 1 ½ pounds of oxtails. This is enough to feed 6 if you don't expect to get a lot of meat. The oxtails give up their collagen, making for a very rich broth. So high in collagen, in fact, that the sauce gels when it is chilled. This is good stuff and makes are a delicious sauce.

Place the oxtails in a dutch oven. Add 5 whole star anise pods, 1 4" stick of cinnamon, about a dozen whole black peppercorns, 3 Tablespoons dark or black soy sauce (these are thicker and have some molasses or sugar added), and 2 Tablespoons of sugar. Stir in enough water to nearly cover the oxtails. Heat over medium heat until it starts to boil, then reduce the heat to maintain a simmer, covering partially. Cook for a very long time, like 4 hours until tender. You can't really overcook them. Check the water level and add additional water if most of it cooks off.

You can serve the oxtails whole but I like to remove most of the meat so that it becomes part of the sauce. This is a rather time-consuming process, however. First, take all the oxtails out of the sauce and allow them to cool on a sheet pan until you can handle them.  Pick as much of the meat off the bones as you can and add it back to the sauce. While the oxtails are cooling, strain out the star anise, peppercorns, and cinnamon, then crank up the heat on the sauce. You can reduce it as much as you like, until is quite syrupy (again, have patience). When it starts to get thick, reduce the heat so that it doesn't burn. Adjust the salt after you have reduced it. Add the bones back too because if you love oxtails, you'll want to suck all the goodness off of them. And the sauce adds lots of extra goodness.

The meat and sauce only improve if you chill it all and then reheat it. Great served over noodles.

"Rice with Things"

I'm a big fan of Mark Bittman. I have 6 of his cookbooks, all solid. I'm sure part of what I like about him is his unabashedly New York attitude (I'm a native New Yorker). He's not a purist when it comes to food, another thing I appreciate. And, he's willing to break with tradition even if the purists are out there, just waiting to tut-tut about him monkeying with a classic. A classic like Paella.

Paella is the traditional rice, chicken and seafood dish of Valencia. My daughter enjoyed true Paella last summer when she visited Valencia and said it was very good. Lucky kid. I have never had the true Paella so I don't know what I'm missing. But, I do know that chicken and seafood cooked with short grain rice in rich broth is good stuff.

I live over 1000 miles from the closest ocean/sea. The odds of me recreating an authentic Paella are pretty slim anyway. Not only is the sea very far away, but cooking short grain rice just right this way at 5400 feet is tricky. You need to tweak the liquid amount and time in Bittman's (or any other) Paella recipe. If you are making this at altitude, plan to add at least ½-1 cup more liquid and you'll need to cook it for an extra 10 minutes, I found. If you are adding seafood, which can easily overcook, don't add it until 20 minutes in. To get the crust without burning (yes, mine burned just a bit, but still quite edible), you will need to reduce the heat because you will be cooking it longer. Bittman's recipe says "if you smell it burning..." I didn't smell it burning but I can guarantee it will burn if you cook it on medium-high for 30 minutes!

You can find the recipe on the New York Times site along with an helpful article by Bittman. If you want to see how impassioned people can get about him tinkering with a classic, check out the comments!

I could have used chicken broth, but I had a bunch of shrimp shells in the freezer, just asking to be made into stock. Makes a great shellfish stock that is perfect for rice with things. Here's the recipe, from Bobby Flay's  Boy Meets Grill. It's very easy and you can stick it in the freezer, ready for the next time you want to be transported to Valencia. :-)

Shrimp Stock
(4 to 5 cups)

Slow Cooker Lamb Shanks with Figs and Shallots

Lamb shanks served with sweet potato pancakes, mostly because they were leftover from the night before

It's still slow cooker weather here in Colorado. We got a foot of snow on Tuesday and next Tuesday is shaping up to be more of the same. Time to break out the lamb shanks! Regular readers will remember my post on Scotch Broth and my cache of lamb in the freezer. This is a richly flavored dish that is so, so easy, thanks to the slow cooker.

Slow Cooker Lamb Shanks with Figs and Shallots
(serves 4)