Slow cooker.

If you don’t have one, get one. If you have one, get one of another size (the damn things come in every size from ‘makes enough dip for a small crowd’ to ‘small turkey’ size). Personally, as a working mom, I think slow cookers are one of the 2oth Century’s great inventions – right up there with electric toothbrushes and vacuum cleaners as far as I’m concerned. You can make literally everything from soups, stews and chili to baked goods, small roasts, and whole chickens in them. The only thing you can’t make in them are items like salads. Seriously. At this time of the year, when we are all running around either entertaining or running out to someone else’s house to BE entertained, being able to throw dinner into a slow cooker and set it on ‘low’ before you go to work is genius. No more ‘what’s for dinner?’ And if you have vast voracious hoards who come home from school in the afternoon before you come home, and you get that “Mom, we’re starving’ phone call at 3:30 – just direct them to the giant pot of all things good on the counter for just a little bit of sustenance until you do get home (of course, if you have a 16 year old boy, you might want to tell him to go outside and catch and eat a couple of ground hogs first, just as an appetizer – the family does want to have dinner when they come home).

But this is not about ‘168 things to do with a slow cooker during the holiday season’ (although I am fairly sure that someone has done a book with that title out there and if they have not, then after reading this last sentence, someone WILL). There are writers out there who are vastly superior in terms of providing that level of information; my favorite is: A Year of Slow Cooking

However. What I am going to discuss here is the report recently in the news about canned foods and BPA. BPA is a substance which has been in the linings of cans for quite some time. BPA stands for Bisphenol A, which is an organic compound used in making various plastics and resins. This substance, by the way, is banned in some European countries and in baby bottles in Canada. I’m not going to go into the dangers of ingesting this; there are plenty of stories in the news about this and have been for at least 5 years. But the most recent report in November, where research findings were described showing that people who ate canned goods had BPA levels thousands of times higher than people who did not, certainly has caused us here at Chez Siberia to think seriously about replacing canned goods with either home canned (that is, things end up in sealed glass jars) or frozen.

One of the items we use a lot is canned beans. One of the reasons we’ve used them is that a can of beans is such a convenient thing. Want chili or soup or burritos? Just open up a can of beans, rinse and use them. Over the years, Aunt Toby has tried various methods for cooking dried beans from scratch and has had mixed results; using canned beans was so much faster and convenient.

So, let’s circle around again to the slow cooker, shall we (you knew I’d get back to this sooner than later, right?)?

Let’s say you just want to make beans so that you have cooked beans ready to use. You are not trying to make anything in particular; you want beans ready for later. Here’s how:

What you need:
Dried beans (in this exercise, I’ve used black beans. This works for all other sorts of dried beans)
Water
Slow cooker
Dinner plate, pie plate, shallow dish
Bowl
Fine sieve

Tonight:
Step One: check the beans. Take your plate or shallow dish and put enough beans on the plate so that you can see plate in between the beans. Look through them and if there are any little pebbles, dirt, etc. pick that out. Put the beans into the bowl. Keep doing this operation until you have cleaned as many beans as you want to use (remember – when they are cooked, they become a lot bigger – I think it’s a ‘1 cup of dried to 3 cups of cooked’ ratio).

Step Two: Rinse the beans. A lot. And pour through the sieve and rinse again. Once the wash water is clear, then pour out one last time and put the beans back into the big bowl and cover with water and leave overnight.

Tomorrow morning:
Step Three: Is there any liquid left covering the beans in the bowl? This is almost magic. If there isn’t, carefully put more water into the bowl until you are just covering the beans. Then take the bowl and pour everything into the slow cooker, put on the lid and set on ‘low’. Leave it all day.

Step Four: it’s tomorrow night. Unplug the slow cooker and allow to cool down. Put your beans into containers and freeze. Voila – you now have beans that you can use anyway you want to. If you want to see directions on how to home can your own beans (this is for home canned baked beans, but it works the same way and I’d just replace the tomato sauce with the liquid in the slow cooker or some water. home canned baked beans

Now, a lot of recipes out there for making beans call for putting in chicken or beef stock, spices, bay leaves, etc. etc. and I cooked mine with onions and cilantro and soup stock. But, I’m going to recommend you put absolutely nothing in with your beans except for water. This way, when you are done, you have a completely neutral product. If you want to make black bean soup with them, you can. If you want to make black bean brownies or black bean cookies – ah ha! You still can.

As good as canned beans, only better.

And if you look at the ingredients list, you will see that whoops, the apple sauce has been given a boost of some stuff that perhaps you are not interested in seeing – the top sweeteners in commercial apple sauce are corn syrup (which actually has the added ‘commercial processing benefit’ that the corn syrup merges with the pectin in the apples and produces a thicker sauce which means that the commercial processors get a ‘twofer’ for using it – cheap sweetener and thickener all in one) or sucralose, which actually is the active sweetening ingredient in…aspartame (which I’m not sure we want to be eating or giving to our kids, n’ok?).

Also, let’s look at the sugars up there: 22 grams in a serving. As a point of comparison, a 12 ounce can of Coke™ has 40 grams of sugar. I’m not making any value judgments here; just a point of comparison. Now, part of the reason is the added sweeteners, and the other part of the reason is that it actually takes much more than one apple to produce a cup of apple sauce. A four ounce apple (what I’m holding in my hand – I actually weighed this and it weighs just north of 4 ounces – 123 grams. The metal measuring tape will give you a good idea of just how big this thing is – your hand size might vary) has 13 grams of sugar and 3 grams of fiber. Now, if it takes a lot more than one apple to make a cup of apple sauce (I’m going to estimate that it would take 3-4 apples, actually), what happened to all the fiber?

Well, first of all, that 3 grams of fiber in the 4 ounce apple also includes eating the peel, which has a lot of fiber in it. The second thing is that cooking actually reduces fiber; heat breaks it down. On the one hand, this makes vegetable matter a lot more digestible and therefore makes the nutrients more available to us (since we are not herbivores), but on the other hand, it reduces the amount of fiber (and, repeat after me, “Fiber is good”).

But, I digress. Back to apple sauce. If you want to eat apple sauce that doesn’t have a whole bunch of stuff in it that is NOT apples, then you are going to want to produce your own apple sauce, which requires two things: cleaned cored apples and some form of heat.

That’s it. Now, if you don’t want to have to mess with putting the stuff through a food mill to get the skins out (and this is actually not a bad idea since there is a lot of good stuff in and just under the peels of apples), you’ll want to peel them and then core them, but we’re still talking a one-ingredient item.

Now, how you apply heat to this is your choice. Today, because I had to run a bunch of errands, I loaded up my two crock pots, turned the chunked up apples on low and left the house. Two hours later I came home, having dried a load of laundry (long story for another time) at the Laundromat, stopped at the grocery store and the farmers market and found, voila the apple sauce basically all done.

Now, I have a couple of options at this point:
Let it cool down and put it into containers in the fridge for immediate use.
Let it cool down and put it into containers in the freezer for long term storage.
Keep it hot, clean and heat up jars, lids and bands, put it into the jars, seal and process according to appropriate directions.

Now, I happen to like to have frozen apple sauce around to bake with. It’s easy enough to store – I put it into ziplock™ bags, flatten to get out all the extra air, and store the bags in a pile in the freezer but everyone to their choice. It will not stay ‘good’ in the fridge indefinitely and frankly, no one wants to have to throw out 2/3 of a jar of apple sauce that has gone moldy. So, my advice, sincerely, is to either process everything or put one smallish container in the fridge and freeze the rest in appropriate sized packages (again, a cup or two in a sealed bag is enough for most baking recipes that call for apple sauce.

And remember – all you get with this is apples. Period.

Please note: Just one more day to participate in the poll on what readers would like to see more on at KCE! Vote Now! Tell Me What You Think Poll!

But, as usual, I’ve wandered off the topic.

So, this week, we picked sweet cherries and raspberries. Years ago, when the DH and I were young, early married and did not have a freezer, we went out to pick sweet cherries and learned the very painful lesson about pick your own, which is that you need to pretty much make up your mind how much you want to pick and stick to that. Because when you are up on a ladder picking and handing down buckets, it becomes really really easy to get off target and get into the ‘just a few more..oh, these look sooooo good.”. So, in this case, there we were, with literally 40 pounds of sweet cherries (which doesn’t seem like all that much except that it would take up nearly a garbage bag in terms of space) on a hot afternoon, and no idea whatsoever what the heck we were going to do with them.

And sweet cherries go bad really…really fast, so you need to get them clean and cold really fast so that you can then start pitting them.

Don’t pick cherries for processing unless you have a two person team willing to stand there with pitters to get the job done. Otherwise, you will be throwing out a lot of fruit the next day. There are two basic designs on cherry pitters and both work really well, the grip type and the plunger type. Plunger Pitter
Grip Pitter

The grip type is less expensive but in addition to being slower, it is also harder on your dominant hand, so if you have any issues with carpel tunnel or your joints, you will end up with a very sore hand the next day. The plunger type is more expensive but is actually more efficient if you have a lot of cherries to do (and if you are picking for more than casual eating that day, then you will have a lot of cherries) and the action uses the palm of your hand and your arm so your hands do not get sore.

Also – be aware that finding organic cherries to pick is practically impossible – no matter what anyone says, everyone sprays something on their cherry trees, whether it’s copper for fungal diseases or the full Magillah of pesticides. So, your cherries are going to be flat out filthy when you pick them and when you get them home (resist the urge to eat them in the orchard – picking is not the time to find out what bird did what on that gorgeous Oxheart or Queen Anne cherry in your hand). Research shows that multiple washings with running water are as good as using one of the veggie washes out there so just keep rinsing and rinsing those cherries until they look clean — and then rinse them again. Then use a pitter and they are ready to process.

Sweet cherries can be turned into almost everything that you can process fruit for – salsas, jams, chutneys, but at Chez Siberia, we tend toward the short term thinking, so it’s better just to get the cherries washed, pitted and frozen on cookie sheets and then bagged or dried. Then later, when the weather is cooler, we can turn them into anything we want to but your mileage may vary. My elder daughter turned hers into a salsa with jalapeno peppers, so let your imagination go crazy.

The raspberries are an easier deal – no pitting, but they are even worse in terms of perishability, so as soon as the picking was done, they were quickly put into a cooler with chill packs and then rinsed a lot, popped onto cookie sheets and frozen and put into bags.

Next up should be pie cherries and I’m hoping that we’ll be able to pick and process some before the DH and I leave on our trip to the UK in a couple of weeks because we don’t have any.

And you know how I know we don’t have any (and actually how we know we have a huge amount of rhubarb in the freezer and need to do something with THAT)? This week, we also did the freezer inventory for the fruits and veggies. Now, we’ve talked about needing to know what’s in your freezer before – one of the big issues is not only knowing, but also actually using. One of the things I did this time once we have counted everything was that as the DH repacked the freezer, I made a diagram and put it on the freezer so that people can actually SEE, physically what we have and where it is. Using stuff in a freezer is all about convenience and people really don’t like to dig around to try to find the one bag of frozen tomatoes at the bottom if they don’t really know it’s there. And while I was at it, I yelled, to no one in particular, “Hey, I think we should make a mixed fruit crisp for din – anyone disagree?”

And of course, since no one disagreed, I hauled out a bag of apples, cherries, blueberries, and peaches, crossed them off the inventory list and brought them upstairs and made a mammoth mixed fruit crisp featuring a huge amount of cinnamon and our usual topping made with oatmeal. For anyone who has only had apple crisp, a mixed fruit crisp is a revelation, a great complex mix of flavors and certainly easier than making a pie. Grease a pan, fill it full of fruit (even half frozen fruit) sprinkled with cinnamon (or nutmeg and ginger if you are feeling adventurous), put the crisp topping on top and bake for 45 minutes at 375 degrees F. Great stuff.

In our last episode, I was bemoaning the lack of certain items in my wardrobe and it occurred to me that our son, basically because he’s still young and doesn’t work at the sort of job that requires ‘business dress’, doesn’t have much in the way of nicer shirts to wear in his closet. One of the big changes over the past 20-30 years in terms of clothing is that there has been this huge blurring of the separation of what gets worn when. Years ago, there was a division between ‘every day dress’ and ‘the clothing you wore to go to religious services.” For women, there was the separation between what you wore at home and what you wore if you worked outside the home or what you wore if you were what we refer to now as a ‘SAHM’ and what you wore if you were going out to grocery shop versus what you wore if you were going into town to shop for something else. And then, if you were a family with real money, then there was the morning versus afternoon versus evening clothing.

Today, especially for guys who don’t live/work in a large city, the choices have been blurred down to blue jeans/tee shirts/golf shirts/sneakers versus khaki pants/golf shirts/sport shirts/loafers or a casual tie shoe. So, for many guys, making the break to dress up a little bit more takes a lot. And our son has plenty of jeans, tee shirts and golf shirts in his closet but if he wants to dress up a bit more…he doesn’t have anything between that and full on dress pants, a dress shirt, and a sport coat.

So, I showed him some shirting fabrics, had him choose a couple and I pulled out a vintage men’s shirt pattern from the stash and off I went. Making a sport shirt for a guy is a fairly easy endeavor – no collar stand, no separate band, no placket at the bottom of the sleeve for a cuff. And with today’s fusible interfacings, it is even easier. I used Pro-Tailor Deluxe Fusible from Pam Erny at Fashion Sewing Supply for this casual shirt, though I did add an addition strip of the Pro-Tailor Deluxe at the back of the neck at the bottom of the collar to give it a little bit of ‘lift’ and ‘oomph’ since there is no separate collar band.

Now, the print on this shirt is interesting and you’d think I’d have noticed the fact that it is a one-directional print,but I did not. The only place where you can really see the effect is on the collar. If I’d thought about that, what I would have done is this:
1) Make a copy of one half of the pattern (remembering to add the seam allowance at the center edge) on tissue or my usual go-to: waxed paper.
2) Cut one full pattern for the undercollar.
3) Cut one half pattern with the fabric pattern going in one direction. Then flip the half a pattern and cut out the other half, making sure the pattern at the collar ends will go in the same direction as the first half.
4) Sew the two half pieces of the collar together at the center seam. Iron seam open.
5) Putting right side to right side, sew the under collar and the seamed top collar (the part that will be seen) together and finish the collar.

So, what is everyone else trying to get accomplished this summer?

Yes, there are such places as ‘U Pick” in terms of grapes. Some of the vineyards will set aside wine grapes for home wine makers, but some people with grapes that are not really popular for making wine now (grapes go in cycles – thirty years ago, these particular grapes were being used by the big commercial wineries; then they got out of this and started using more fancy ‘vinifera’ grapes) are doing “you pick’ rather than just rip out the vines . This particular place grows Concord (the staple of you-know-who’s grape jelly), Niagara, Catawba and Delaware grapes. We picked Catawba and Delaware because they are different, and are actually better for jams and jellies. We really did not ‘pick’ per se – we were actually given little clippers to snip the clusters off the vines. Very tidy. And there is something truly magical about lifting up the leaves and finding these huge clusters of grapes. So, it was easy for us to pick our two boxes in 30 minutes (that was 36 pounds – a lot of grapes for actually very little work), weigh out and come home.

Now, the DH and I have made all sorts of jams from fruit – but we almost ground to a standstill when we tried to put the grapes (after we’d washed them well and taken them off the stems) through the vegetable attachment of our Kitchen Aid mixer. This is an amazing piece of equipment (and is featured on that tomato photo at the top of the page) but obviously, it was never meant to deal with grape seeds.

Which are big. And hard. And basically jammed up the end of the attachment and caused it to explode. Why am I thinking about that scene at the dinner table in “Alien”?

Anyway, while the DH was working away, I beat a hasty retreat to ‘the large housewares and bedding store’ and bought myself the biggest food mill they’ve got. Why I never had one is beyond me, but I can tell you that other than a bit of arm work, it’s a cinch to use and made short work of the grapes, which we’d smooshed down and simmered a bit. Now, if I could have figured out a way to separate the grape seeds from the rest of the skins and grind them up to get grape seed oil, I certainly would have done that but even the vineyards have issues with that and usually just put the stuff from the wine making operations out on the fields.

In any case, making jam is simplicity itself. Although I found plenty of recipes for grape jam/jelly that called for commercial pectin, I have no issues with using plain old sugar, particularly with fruit that is as ‘hit you in the head’ sweet as these grapes were. As a matter of fact, the amount of sugar I had to use to get it to gel up was actually about half of what I usually have to use with strawberries – for two big pots of grape solids and juice, I ended up using about 4.5 cups of sugar. Just heat up the solids and juice until it starts to cook down (it basically is a lot thicker than when you started), add the sugar and cook until it starts to coat a spoon. Then put a spoonful on a cold plate, wait a minute and if the whole puddle stays together and starts to move down the plate in a mass, you’ve got jam.

Put the hot jam into clean, washed, heated jars (I put mine into the oven at 350 for 5-10 minutes), top with clean lids and bands which have been heated up in simmering water. Screw down the bands and lids, put the jar on a cooking rack. Within a few minutes, you should hear the ‘ping’ of being done.

Nothing easier.

Now, where’s that peanut butter?

But, what to do with them? Some of my most depressing moments in the kitchen (and as hard as it is to believe, Aunt Toby has moments of domestic self-loathing just like everyone else) have been in the middle of an August or early September heat wave, with the sauce on the stove and the canner going as well, and sweat dripping down my face (anyone wanting to excuse themselves may do so now), the sink full of washed tomatoes and three humongous bowls of freshly picked tomatoes sitting out on the counter. This is usually accompanied by the sound of the DH’s voice gaily wafting from the garden, “Hey – we missed a lot out here; I’ll pick them so the slugs won’t get them!”

Yep. Those are moments when a shower at the Bates Motel has a certain charm.

However, a bit of creativity and outright avoidance will get us through.
First: Drying.
One of the best ideas we had several years ago was to get an electric food dehydrator. We use this for just about everything that can be cut up and then used later, whether it’s fruit, veggies, onions, you name it. We had a lovely appetizer in an Italian restaurant on our last trip to Edinburgh, Scotland (vs Edinburgh, PA), which consisted of little tomatoes which had been dried and preserved with garlic in olive oil, accompanied by thin slices of mozzarella cheese. This works especially well with tomatoes such as Princip Borgese, but being a totally classless American, I did it with cherry and grape tomatoes. Same great ‘summer in a bottle’ flavor.

Second: Freezing.
Don’t ask me where we got this technique, but we’ve been using it for fruit for years and it works for really any veggie also that is not too watery (for example, it will not work with things like zucchini – to freeze summer squashes such as these, grate them up, squeeze out the excess water, bag up and freeze for things like baked goods later). What we do for tomatoes is slightly different but the theory is the same: Cut up the fruit in question, lay out on cookie sheets, leaving space in between, and put in the freezer. When they are completely frozen, take off the cookie sheet (you might need to pry them off with a spatula), put into bags or other freezer containers and seal. If you are using ziplock(tm) bags, close almost all the way and suck out the air. The fruit will still stay in separate pieces.

For tomatoes, there is just one small additional thing to do: once you’ve cut them up in pieces (and with a big tomato, you should be cutting it up into 6-8 pieces; with a plum tomato, probably 4 pieces), use a spoon and get out as much of the “gishy” gelatinous stuff inside as you can. In freezing this will be very watery when you defrost. But freezing is a great way to keep tomatoes for when you want to do something later. Later in the fall, when it’s cooler, the garden is done and when you need tomatoes OR, you actually want to do a bit of canning or make sauce or whatever, you just pull out the bags, throw the tomatoes in a pot and off you go. You can cook up whatever you want and serve or cook it up and using the directions on your canner, can it up then.
A bit of summer when you least expect it.

So, how do you know when they are ready? Well if you have soft necked garlic, the top of the plant just collapses and dries up. Once that happens, you are good to dig them up. If you have hard neck garlic (and these are obviously hard necked), the central stem dries up and turns white. Once that happens, the bulbs have matured and you can dig them up.

There are several ways to save garlic, but all of them start with cleaning and drying. Once you have dug the bulbs up, shake as much dirt off them as you can and rinse well. Put out in the sun and let them dry for a day. Some people save them in jars; there are methods of braiding the stems and the leaves. Here’s our method:
First: Make the decision of whether or not you are going to use any of this harvest to replant for next year. If the answer is ‘no’ then you can buy or order garlic stock from other sources. If the answer is yes, then look over the bulbs and choose the biggest healthiest one you have, split it up into cloves and plant into a prepared bed as far down as your hand can reach in soft soil. The best time to plant is right after the first frost in your area.

Second: Take the rest of your garlic, split into cloves and peel, break off the little root bit at the end, rinse off and put into some container that you can reopen, like a yoghurt container or a ziplock(tm) bag. If you are using a bag, you can suck out the excess air when you get to the last little bit to zip shut. Then just put into the freezer and use as you need them. Easy as pie and lasts seemingly forever.

Why do I like purple podded bush beans?
First: Earliness. Bush beans are notoriously finicky about soil temps. In general, if it’s not warm enough, they just lie there and rot at their leisure. Purple podded beans, for some reason (don’t ask me why; I have not a clue), can handle temperatures much much cooler than the standard, much beloved by all (but not by the Siberians, I’m afraid) “Bush Blue Lake’. So, I’d love them even if they did not have any other advantages.

Second: Hardiness against damp conditions. Again, bean seeds can be very delicate when it comes to spring conditions where it rains and it rains and it’s chilly and it’s raining and the soil is just wet. Again, I’ve had springs here where we’ve had to sow beans such as Bush Blue Lake several times before conditions have dried out enough for the damned things to germinate. Purple podded beans just pop up, no matter what.

Third: They have this ‘gee-whiz’ feature which is very helpful when you want to blanch and freeze them: Put them into boiling water and as soon as they turn from purple to green (and it’s a good, dark, pine green), YOU ARE DONE! Pull them, throw them into cold water, freeze them under whatever method you use (we use the ‘stick them into plastic bags and vaccuum seal them’ but to each his/her own). Just take a look at the photographs: Same mix of beans, same pot, photo just taken one minute apart. Magic. I love it.

And a got a little done…and a lot ended up, shamefully, on the compost heap.

So, for today’s plums, because I’ve got a million things (like everyone else), I did this:
1) Washed all the plums.
2) Set aside some plums for German Plum Cake (see below)
3) Took out a cookie sheet, greased it a teeny bit to prevent sticking, cut the plums in halves, put them on the cookie sheet and stuck them in the freezer. When they are frozen, I’ll put them into a ziplock ™ bag. Do I have a specific plan for them? Actually, no, but I can make jam or preserves with them, bake with them, even just eat them defrosted, but at least they are taken care of. Plums are the easiest stone fruit to deal with: Just cut in half, take apart, and flick out the flat, eye-shaped pit. Nothing like dealing with cherries or peaches. Neat and very tidy.

But, to the cake. This is a modification of the German Plum Cake from recipezaar.com. To call this a ‘cake’ in the way that we understand the concept here in the United States is a little confusing. To Americans, all forms of ‘cake’ are the same: spongy, light, with some sort of thick frosting or sweet sauce or fluffy sweetened something all over it. This German Plum Cake is technically referred to as Pflaumenkuchen (don’t you just love those German cooking names – you can practically taste the thing when you say it – Flou-men-koo-ch–like you’re clearing your throat—en). Cooks with any mileage in the kitchen will recognize that this is NOT your father’s birthday cake when you read the list of ingredients. German Plum Cake

• 1/4 lb butter
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla
• 1 egg
• 1 tablespoon sour cream
• 1 pinch salt (only if you use unsalted butter)
• 1 teaspoon ground lemon rind
• 1 3/4 cups flour
• 1 teaspoon baking powder
• 2 cups plums, pitted and sliced into thin wedges
For the topping
• 6 tablespoons butter
• 3/4 cup flour
• 1/3 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
1. In a large bowl, cream the butter, add the sugar, vanilla, egg, lemon peel, sour cream and salt (if desired).
2. Mix the flour and baking powder and add that into the mixture.
3. Grease the base of a round baking pan and spread the dough over the pan.
4. Liberally spread plums over the dough.
5. To make the optional topping, cream the butter, add flour, sugar and cinnamon.
6. Sprinkle over the plums and bake for 30-45 minutes in the middle rack at 375 F.
7. Serve with lots of freshly-made whipped cream.
8. If you like, you may also sprinkle rum or cinnamon over the fruit before baking.

Now if you do this straight, according to the recipe, what you get is really almost like the dough you press into a pan to make bar cookies with. It ends up being held together with the butter/sugar/ juices from the plums. Like many Central European ‘treats’, it’s meant to be eaten in quite small slices. I’d rather have something more like a dense brownie on the bottom, so instead of 1 table spoon of sour cream (which I did not have), I added a half cup of vanilla yoghurt (I had Greek style in the fridge which has twice as much protein as the regular low fat stuff and has 0% fat, so I can do the ‘Oh what a good girl am I” thing). That made the dough much closer to brownies in density. I just emptied the bowl into the greased pan, put the sliced up plums on top and the topping and let ‘er bake.

This is, I’m afraid, a very grown up dessert and definitely in the European mold. And by that, I’m not referring to the rum that they are suggesting you sprinkle on the fruit (actually, I sprinkled a teaspoon of powdered ginger and a teaspoon of ground cinnamon on mine before I put the topping on . I LOVE ginger). Check out the amount of sugar as compared to a standard cake baked here: 1/3 cup of sugar to a stick of butter – which is a half cup of shortening and an egg. The standard ‘throw it together at the last minute’ cake recipe in the US would be 1.25 cups of sugar, ½ cup of shortening, and 2 eggs. You can see that the fat to sugar ratio is totally different and makes for a dessert that depends much more on the quality of the fruit and the crumb topping for sweetness than what we expect from a standard cake here in the United States, which generally depends as much on the sweetness in the cake itself as it does on the sugar in the filling between the layers (if it’s a layer cake) and/or the frosting or topping. And considering that half of the calories in the dessert come from the butter, this is a calorie dense treat indeed. A small slice with a cup of coffee or tea would definitely round out a meal — we are definitely not talking about the standard “fill the plate and share it with two of your friends” serving of a piece of cake that gets presented in the US. A bit of a ‘dainty’ as they might say.

So, take out the nice china, brew up some lovely coffee or tea and enjoy.

Unfortunately, the DH’s method of making sure that we would get some zucchini, even if the only space left for the seeds was at the deepest, darkest end of the garden, hovering right underneath the maple, was to plant – six hills of the stuff. So, needless to say, by the end of the summer, we were looking for more ways to enjoy it.

I know zucchini has become sort of this gardening joke punchline – ‘the vegetable that wouldn’t die’ and ‘the vegetable that took over the garden’ and ‘I woke up one morning and we had zucchini big enough to throw a saddle on and ride off..” Actually, zucchini is just the victim of its ability to mimic the Eveready Bunny ™ in the garden. The trick really is to keep ahead of it and go out every single day and pick it. Even if you end up throwing it on the compost heap for that day, you need to keep the plants producing and keep the squashes you get on the small side. That’s when the skin is tender, the flesh tastes at its best and you can do more things with it in terms of eating it fresh or cooking it. Once they become big enough for seeds to form, the skin gets tough, the flesh gets sort of spongy and they really are not worth eating.

Here are three Chez Siberia Family Favorites that take advantage of zucchini’s flavors at this time of the year, when literally, if you go to the office bathroom down the hall, you will come back and find that some ‘garden produce fairy’ has gifted you with some. If you are lucky, the fairy has brought you little ones rather than ones you will have to build a barn for.

Chocolate Zucchini Cake (or bread – see end note)
This cake is a cousin to the Banana Bread/Carrot Cake family, whose reason for being is a) to use up something you don’t want to waste, b)to increase the amount of fiber your family is eating, and c)to introduce a sort of ‘wowee – I didn’t know you could do that’ aspect to your cooking. The function of the bananas, carrots and zucchini in these recipes is they take up space, add fiber, and add inherent moisture to the item. So, remember this when cooking or baking up other recipes – if the batter seems a little bit ‘stiff’, don’t reach for more milk, another egg, or anything like that; if you have a zucchini in the fridge that is lonely and languishing there, grate it up and throw it into the batter (half a cup at a time to see what the effect is).

½ c, butter (1 stick)
½ c, vegetable oil (we use the light olive oil for sautéing and baking)
1.5 c. sugar
2 large eggs
1 tsp vanilla
½ c. sour milk (if you don’t have sour milk sitting in your fridge – and who does these days – take ½ c. regular milk and add a tablespoon of vinegar OR, and this is frankly nicer, substitute ½ c. of plain or vanilla flavored yoghurt)
2.5 c. unsifted regular flour
½ c. cocoa
½ tsp baking powder
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp cinnamon
¼ tsp nutmeg (if you don’t have this, don’t worry)
2 c. grated zucchini (this is not a hard and fast rule – I’ve made this work with up to 4 c. grated zucchini – a lot depends on how much moisture the actual zucchini has in it)
½ c. chocolate chips (if you don’t have any chips, you can leave them out or you can add ½ chopped walnuts or slivered almonds or something else – coconut, anyone?)

Cream butter and sugar.
Add eggs, vanilla, sour milk and oil
Mis all dry ingredients together and add to previous mixture.
Beat well with electric mixer.
Stir in the zucchini
Pour into a greased and floured 9x12x2 inch pan.
Sprinkle with chocolate chips
Bake at 350 degrees F for 40 min.

Baking Notes: I have doubled this and for some reason, when I do it seems to require a whole lot more than double the amount of zucchini. I have also used a combination of cake and bread flour and that works. If the ratio of cake to bread flour gets more toward the bread flour end of things, you get zucchini bread, which is very nice sliced and toasted, with cream cheese spread on it. If you double it, you will need a really big roasting pan for it. Mine is 17x12x2 inches.

Zucchini Bread and Butter Pickles (modified from: The Complete Book of Home Preserving, Ann Seranne, Doubleday and Co., 1955)
These sweet-n-sour pickles traditionally are made from cucumbers(and frankly, the photographs of them here show B&Bs made from the 20-30 cucumbers I got gifted with this weekend) but zucchini offers one advantage over cucumbers – as long as you use young ones, the skin is tender enough that you can just wash and slice with no peeling.

Zucchinis and white onions: thinly slice up enough of both to fill a big roaster. It takes about 8-10 fist-sized cooking onions and 5-6, 12-15” zucchinis to fill just over the top of my 17x12x2 inch roaster. Mix up well – break apart the onion rings.

Salt: Salt is used in these pickles to get the veggies to release their water. For as much zucchini and onions that will fill just over the top of my roaster, I use ½ cup of salt. Sprinkle the salt all over the top and then, with your clean hands, turn the veggies over and over so that everything gets salted. Put the zucchinis, onions and salt mix into the fridge for 3 hours. While it’s wilting there in the fridge, mix up your pickling liquid.
Pickling liquid: Mix together the following:
5 cups of vinegar (cider or white will do as long as it is 5%)
4 cups of sugar (if you like your pickles sweeter, you can go up to 5 cups of sugar)
1.5 -2 tsp. Of turmeric (depend on how yellow-green you like your pickles)
2 tablespoons of mustard seeds
½ tsp. Of ground ginger

Just before the end of the wilting period (like, when everything has been in the fridge for about 2 hours, 45 min.), do the following:
1) Wash and rinse your canning jars and bands. Put jars into an oven set at 250 degrees F. Put the bands and the lids into a saucepan with water and bring to a simmer and turn off.
2) Take the biggest pot you have (I use my dutch oven and can do half at a time) and fill it half full of the pickling liquid and heat until it simmers. Turn down.

Take out the veggies from the fridge and pour into a colander and rinse with cold water until the water coming out of the colander no longer tastes at all salty.
Put as much of the veggies into the pot of pickling liquid as you can fit but leave about an inch at the top of the pot and turn the pot on high. Stir and heat until it starts to simmer. Turn off.

Using your jar tongs (or whatever other method works for you – those jars are HOT), take out a jar and put on a plate or other heatproof surface. Using a canning funnel and a clean heatproof cup, pour the veggies into the jars and using a clean spoon, make sure you have the veggies packed down tightly in the jar until you get to the neck of the jar. Fill the rest of the jar with the hot pickling liquid. Take your clean spoon and put it into the jar and jiggle it a little bit to release any air bubbles that might be trapped; press the veggies down again.
Wipe off the lip of the jar and using another set of tongs, take a lid out of the hot water and set that on the top of the jar and take out a band and screw that down. Put that sealed jar aside on a cake rack or something like that to cool.

Keep doing that until you run out of veggies, jars, bands and lids. If you still have veggies in the pot, then take whatever you use to store leftovers in the fridge and put the rest of the veggies and some of the liquid in there and refrigerate them and eat them right away.

These pickles are good as is, in sandwiches, or in a pinch, you can chop them all up and use them as relish on hamburgers, hotdogs, in tuna salad, tartar sauce for fish and so on. And remember – with turmeric and ginger in them as well as vinegar, these actually have some health benefits in them.

Kitchen Sink Summer Veggie Stuff
This is something we came up with when we did not have enough of any one item for a meal or to do a big canning. If you want to can this, you will need a pressure canner – follow directions for pressure canning items like green beans or peppers to make sure this is safe.

Combine the following, using whatever you have as long as the major ingredient is fresh tomatoes:
Fresh ripe tomatoes, washed and chunked up
Fresh sweet peppers, washed, seeded and chunked up
Fresh zucchini, not too big, washed and cut into chunks
Garlic – one clove for every 4 cups of zucchini you’ve got – again, just chunk it up
Herbs as you like – a good combination for this is basil and oregano; if you are going to a Mexican thing, use cilantro instead

Heat up and simmer. If you are not going to can this or serve right away, let it cool and refrigerate. If you are going to can, follow the directions for pressure canning. Great cold or hot, by itself or with pasta with a little grated cheese.
(squash blossom photo by Big Grey mare)

Snap peas are just coming into the farmers markets here in Upstate New York and I’m going to use them as a demo of how to do freezing Chez Siberian Style. You’ll end up with snap peas in small enough packages that you can just open, pour into the wok, fry pan or whatever and they taste really good and crunchy – not exactly ‘just like fresh’ (shoot – I did ‘cook’ them for 10 seconds for heaven’s sake), but definitely crunchy, sweet, not starchy, and not mushy.

Whether you do ‘pick yer own’ of buy off the stand, your job is to get them home ASAP. If you buy from the farmers, they’ve picked them early in the morning – so get them as early as you can. The earlier in the day, the better. Get the pea pods home and rinse them several times to make sure you get any dust, dirt, dead pea blossoms, and the odd bug off. While you are doing that, put a big pot of water on the stove to boil. I’m using a great pot we got years ago that has an insert you can pull out; it was originally meant as a cooker for things like asparagus or corn, but we use it because we can blanch things really easily with it. Although I have not seen another pot like it, something that looks as if it would work about the same are the pasta steamer inserts for big pots. They have handles and you could get one just one size smaller than your pot and still be able to use it and life it out (you might want to rig some lifting out handles out of …mmm…a heavy duty wire coat hanger so that you hands don’t get near the water). At the same time your water is boiling up on the stove, fill your sink with really cold water; if you can’t get really cold water out of your tap, also throw in some ice cubes.

Take off the heads and tails off the pea pods and fill your steamer basket, colander or whatever you are going to use to put the peas into the pot of boiling water.

Blanch and leave for a count of 10. No more. Pull out your basket/colander/whatever and drain until all the hot water is out. Empty the peas into the colander in the cold water and swish around. Pull out the colander and drain really well; you want as little water on the peas as possible.

Take a clean cookie sheet and put the peas on it in as few layers as possible and put into your freezer until they are totally hard. Take off the cookie sheets and use whatever freezer packaging system you use – ziplock(tm) bags, Seal-a-meal(tm), etc. and put in only as much as you think you’d use in a recipe – 1-2 cups is usually enough. With this method you won’t end up with a solid block of pea pods, so if you use a ziplock(tm) bag, then you can always just open it up, take out what you need, and reseal.

This same exact system (except for not having to do the blanch and cooling) works extremely well for all small fruits such as strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, and pitted cherries. For larger fruits such as peaches, we use a slightly different system which I’ll go over at peach time in August.

(snap pea photo at the top courtesy of Jeff Cushner)