Peach caramel sauce

What to do with the leftover peach juice syrup from home canned peaches?

Too good to toss. 

To thin to use directly in most cases. 

Often not wanted in the dish I was making that I needed the drained peaches for. 

The solution: reduce it until it caramelizes then (slowly) add some cream and get a lovely peach caramel sauce.

Two tones of caramel sauce

Continuing to work my way through Cooking for Geeks. There are "dry" and "wet" approaches to making caramel. This is a dry approach and I am a fan. 

Assemble the team:

• 1 part sugar,
• 1 part cream.

In this case, 1 cup of each. (Later I add a pinch of salt and 1/2 tsp of vanilla extract).

Start with just the sugar in a cold pan. Put over medium-high heat. DO NOT STIR -- until the edges have started melting. Then stir to blend the melted and unmelted sugars.

Once it is melted through you have a choice:

• Add the cream now
• Let the sugar darken some more

Or, none of the above. Divide into two batches and do both! Whenever you decide, add the cream slowly and stir to incorporate as you go. BE CAREFUL -- THIS STUFF IS HOT and STICKY -- a DANGEROUS combination. Add a pinch of salt and vanilla if you are so inclined (which I am).

Since you get different flavors developed at different temperatures I was aiming for a blended sauce.

What is an experiment without evaluating the results? An accident. So we sampled the light sauce, the dark sauce, and the blended sauce. Sharon liked the light sauce. I liked the blend best. They were all good. There was much more depth to the dark sauce.

Next time: I really like the blended sauce. I think I would divide the sugar and cream into 3/4 cup for the light sauce and 1/3 cup for the darker sauce and cook them in separate pans. I might not go quite as dark on the dark sauce. And I would warm the cream before adding it.

I dividing the blended caramel sauces in two containers so I could heat a small batch to serve without having heat the whole batch.

And for clean up, I just couldn't stand the thought of losing any of that great flavor stuck to the pan. So I deglazed the pans with milk, then drank the warm caramel milk.

Update 2/12/13: I just made this again using two pans and a 2:1 relation of light caramel and medium caramel and it worked out great!

Canned Tomatoes

I've been suffering from a bit of insomnia, so it totally wiped out my energy this week; I hardly managed to do anything productive. Today, however, I finally had some energy and I decided I wanted to deal with our growing pile of tomatoes. Between our CSA and our tomato plants, we had a pretty large backlog.

I first made a batch of tomato sauce. Since I mostly used cherry tomatoes, I used the easy method where you just throw the clean tomatoes into the food processor and turn them into juice then cook them down until they're sauce. (I found the method at this website.) I turned five heaped pint baskets of tomatoes into three small jars of sauce.

Then I did a second batch of diced tomatoes from the larger tomatoes. (I used the method from this website.) I peeled the tomatoes and Jeff cut them into small pieces for me and added a bit of basil from the garden. Then we added lemon juice and put the cut tomatoes into the jars. Though, I don't think we smashed the tomatoes down enough in the jars, so there's a big gap now at the top. So, I don't really know if they worked or not. They all sealed, so perhaps they're OK. I may pop them into the refrigerator just in case.

I have finally gotten the hang of using the reusable canning lids. It's best not to put the rubber seal part into the hot water bath because it expands and then doesn't fit jar properly. I just keep them at the side and add them as I put on the plastic lid. The rubber ring doesn't come in contact with the food.

Black Sauce Experiments

We made some Black Sauce in a medieval food class I took this weekend. I used it up last night.

So I made some more this evening to have with some meat and cheese. This batch I made with almond meal, red wine vinegar, my pepper spice blend, ginger, and galangal.

I want to do some experiments to determine My Favorite Black Sauce mix

• bread crumbs | almond meal | hazlenut meal
• Toasted | untoasted
• round pepper | long pepper | tail pepper | grains of paradise | a blend
• red wine vinegar | white wine vinegar | cider vinegar | balsamic | verjus
• ginger | galangal | both
• whole thing cooked | fresh 

I don't think I will try all 900 combinations. 

I suppose I'll do two passes of varying individual variables and just keep my best choices to date. 

I still need to decide which order to test the variables. 

...

Update (7/21/2013):

I tried making black sauce at a recent camping event using gluten free bread crumbs and did not like the result. Eulalia speculated that in the process of toasting the GF bread crumbs the xanthan gum  became bitter. 

Apricot Salsa

Apricot salsa inspired by a recipe from the web. In my take I mixed:

• 2/3 cup diced fresh apricots
• 1/2 cup diced onion
• 1 tsp minced ginger
• 1/8 tsp Duke's powder II
• 1/2 a roasted red pepper
• 2 roma tomatoes from a can, chopped
• 1/4 cup fresh apricot-pineapple butter

I made up half of it fresh and cooked the other half. 

We'll do a tasting soon and I'll update this.
Fortunately Sharon had just made some nice Apricot-Pineapple Jam.

Update: the results of the tasting are in:

• The uncooked salsa tasted very strongly of onion. Certainly had a "fresh" taste. Might be good for some application where you really want a "pop" of flavor, but be careful not to use too much. 
• The cooked salsa was mild and flavorful. Not too sweet. Sharon thought it didn't taste enough of fruit. 
• As a baseline we tasted some Trader Joe's Peach Salsa. Definitely had more "heat" from chillies. Also a little sweeter. 

Next Time: 

Looking at the ingredients for the TJ's Peach Salsa we might consider adding some: tomato paste, salt, spices, and/or sugar. 

Pasta Sauce with sardines

 After reading Michael Pollan's "Food Rules", we have been wanting to eat more low-on-the-food-chain fish. This is completely new to both of us so we have no idea where to start. I bought a tin each of sardines and of herring.

Our first effort has been to make pasta sauce with the sardines. We basically used the Fix-it-and-forget-it recipe for italian sausage sauce, but used minced sardines in place of the sausage (and frozen tomatoes in place of the canned diced tomatoes). Freezing the tomatoes whole made it very easy to skin them once they defrosted in the fridge.