15 February 2014

a valentine or two

the weather in philly these days has been dreadful. just absolutely gross out. after a snow and ice storm on thursday, we had a bit of a reprieve on Friday, and now it is wintry-mix-ing all over the place. gross.

what else can one do, in such weather, but hole up inside with some rich, delectable comfort food? it being valentine's day yesterday, will and i had quite the feast planned - we decided to make short rib grilled cheese, with home-pickled-red onions. they were delicious. and as we were cooking in the late afternoon, i decided that we needed some dessert! and this recipe had popped up in my email, for a chocolate pomegranate tart.

forgive the terrible instagram photo - but here the tart is in its glory!


i didn't have any pomegranate juice (the one thing i forgot to buy!!) so I squeezed some blood oranges that I had, and cooked down that 1 cup of juice with some pomegranate seeds in it + 2 tbsp sugar. uh, delicious.

thick, rich, and chocolate-y. a perfect end to valentine's day!

11 February 2014

It had been a while...

It is amazing how busy one gets working, and then in business school. I'm not sure that I actually have time to restart this blog now but I had my first canning success yesterday and it was too exciting not to share.

I'm currently trying to figure out what favors to give out at my wedding. We're doing a bit of a cooking theme and so I have been thinking about spice rubs and flavored salts and sugars. Cute, not too hard to make in bulk, has a personal touch. But also would take a decent amount of work. So I ordered a small number of jars that I wanted to test out, and planned to try making a flavored salt. I splurged the other day and went to whole foods, which is not close by. While there I saw a bag of Meyer lemons. They just looked glorious - big and beautiful. Perfect to zest into salt.


I only needed about 1 lemon to zest into the 1 cup of salt I used for my trial. It is quite yummy smelling, but i am unsure whether it is the right favor to use for my wedding. Hmmmm. 

But what else to do with the lemons after making the salt? I started googling ideas. Meyer lemon curd came up a bunch. Then I saw a Meyer lemon marmalade which uses the whole fruit. Very exciting. I started getting obsessed with the idea of making meyer lemon marmalade, even though I had never canned before. I read online a recommendation to follow the recipe for the blood orange marmalade by foodinjars. it just looked so amazing.

I ordered some ball jars and chopped up my lemons. I decided to use my mandoline to make the slices thinner, as a reviewer had recommended...and it kind of shredded them. Next time, I'll try the z-motion a later review recommended (of course I didn't see it until later!) But still, the lemon slices looked so glorious soaking overnight. Grabbed my handy dandy candy thermometer and cooked it down to a jammy little marmalade. So pretty. I was super paranoid about hitting the 220 degrees if I wasn't watching, early...no need to fear, it was pretty clear when I got to the marmalade stage, and definitely needed to cook down more than I had initially thought.



I had an extra lemon and a half, one missing its zest - but this was just enough for meyer lemon curd. So easy, to make, and smooth. I'm not convinced I actually like lemon curd (something about the egg yolks) but I recently made small fruit tarts with a filling that was lemon curd mixed with marscapone, and they were pretty fantastic. perhaps a good use for the lemon curd that I canned!


all in all, a successful experiment! I can't wait for my next canning adventure!