A bowl full of cherries...

One of the things I've discovered and truly enjoy since I've moved to the northeastern part of the country is apple season. It's an annual autumn tradition--apple picking. What can quickly happen, though, is you end up picking MANY more pounds of apples than you intended when you set out. That's led to another autumn tradition that I've adopted--preserving and canning that bounty of apples to become holiday gifts for my friends and family. But every autumn, as I spend my days off from work steaming up my house, canning gallons of apple butter, apple chutney, and cinnamon apples, I kick myself for not thinking to do the same with other fruits and vegetables during the summer. But not this summer...

We've been using a lot of cherries in our recipes at work in recent weeks. I mean a LOT of cherries. But, I found myself inspired, and so today, I turned 10 pounds of sweet cherries into brandied cherries. What can you do with brandied cherries? They're great on ice cream or on pound cake. They're also very good in cocktails. Or, just eating by the spoonful straight out of the jar.

If you don't want to go through the entire process of canning the cherries, I would cut the recipe at least in half, and then just store them in an airtight container in your refrigerator. They should keep for a couple of weeks. Assuming you don't eat them all sooner.

Brandied Cherries

Makes about 25 half pint jars

10 pounds sweet cherries
3 ½ cups granulated sugar
6 cups water

1 ²/₃ cups brandy (or try bourbon, vodka, or amaretto)

Wash the cherries, remove the stems and pits. Transfer to a large, non-reactive saucepan or Dutch oven. Add the sugar and water. Bring to a boil over medium to medium high heat and allow to boil for about 10 minutes. Using a spoon or ladle, skim away any foam that forms on top of the cherries as they cook.

While the cherries are cooking, prepare your jars for canning. Remove the lids and rings from the jars. Bring a large stock pot of water to a rapid boil. Sterilize the lids and rings by lowering them into the boiling water for about 3 minutes. Transfer them to a clean towel. Repeat with the jars.

Carefully ladle the hot cherries into the hot jars, leaving about ½ inch of headspace. Spoon 1 tablespoon of brandy into the top of each jar, then cover the jar with a lid and a screw top ring. Tighten the ring to just finger tight.

When the stock pot of water has returned to a boil, lower the jars into the pot, standing them upright and in a single layer across the bottom of the pot. Make sure the jars are completely submerged under the water. Cover the pot and when the water in the pot returns to a boil, set a timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, remove the jars from the pot and set on a clean towel. Repeat the process with the remaining jars, being sure to let the water come back to the boil each time.

Let the jars sit undisturbed until they are room temperature. You should hear a noticeable "plinking" sound as the jars cool and pull the center of the lids down. After they have cooled, gently press on the center of each of the lids to be sure they have fully depressed. Any jars with lids that have not pulled down tight have not properly sealed. Place those jars in the refrigerator and enjoy them first. 

Down the shore....

Something kind of exciting is happening at work. Sur La Table has partnered with the Smithsonian Museum of American History for the development of a new demonstration kitchen in the Wallace H. Coulter Performance Plaza at the museum. On Fridays beginning in July, the museum will put on Food Fridays at the National Museum of American History, where guest chefs partner with museum food historians for a cooking demonstration for the museum guests. Sur La Table chefs will be the featured chefs on one Friday per month, and I've been asked to do the first SLT session on July 17th. The demonstrations will be held at 11am and 1pm, if you're in the DC area that day, I'd love to see you at the museum!

Each month is a different topic, July is "Summertime Cooking in America". When brainstorming ideas with my bosses at SLT and the Smithsonian representatives, we started talking about the summer tradition along the mid-Atlantic and New England coast of "going to the shore". When I lived in DC, of course folks talked about enjoying a weekend at the Delaware or Maryland beaches, I even spent a weekend in Rehoboth Beach myself. But "going to the shore" has an entirely different meaning in Philadelphia and New Jersey. The city empties. People rent houses and spend the entire summer at the shore. The local news stations set up satellite studios up and down the Jersey and Delaware shore, and they lead the news with stories of beach town festivals, changes in local regulations over beach access fees, and the traffic reports are centered on which routes are the most backed up going to/from the beach. This is the story from Delaware up the coast to Maine, and it was the perfect inspiration for our demonstration menu.

For the demonstration, I'll be preparing Maryland Crabcakes, Old Fashioned Maine Lobster Roll, and New England Clam Chowder. I've got pretty good recipes already for the crabcakes and lobster roll, but I didn't have one for clam chowder. So, I spent my afternoon in the kitchen, and I'm pretty pleased with the results. I hope you think so, too.

New England Clam Chowder

Serves 8

1 50-count bag of cherrystone clams

4 cups water

1 cup diced bacon

1 large white onion, diced

3 tablespoons all purpose flour

2 large russet potatoes, peeled and diced

2 cups cream

2 tablespoons chopped chives

Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

Place the clams in a colander and rinse thoroughly with cold water. Discard any clams that have cracked shells or that do not close. Place the cleaned clams in the pasta or steamer insert of a large pot.

Add the water to the pot and bring to a boil. Place the insert with the clams into the pot and cover with a lid. Continue to boil until the clams have opened, about 4 to 5 minutes. Remove the pot from the heat and allow to cool. When the clams are cool enough to handle, remove the meat from the shells and place on a cutting board; discard the empty shells and any unopened clams. Roughly chop the clam meat and place in a small bowl. Pour the clam cooking water water through a cheesecloth-lined sieve into a bowl and set aside.

Place a large soup pot over medium low heat and add the bacon. Cook the bacon, stirring occasionally, until the fat has rendered and the bacon is browned and crisp. Using a slotted spoon, remove the bacon from the pot and place on a paper towel lined plate. Increase the heat to medium and add the onions to the pot with the bacon fat. Cook, stirring, until the onions are softened and translucent, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle the flour over the onions and mix through. Add the reserved clam cooking water and potatoes to the onions and bring to a high simmer. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are cooked through, about 10 minutes. Stir in the cream and continue to simmer for about 5 minutes more. Stir in the reserved bacon. Taste and adjust seasoning with Kosher salt and black pepper.

To serve, ladle into bowls and garnish with the chopped chives.

Lazy pie...

When I first started teaching classes in Arlington, VA, I taught mostly baking and pastry classes. I've always been comfortable making desserts, those of you who've read my blog from the beginning know I taught myself how to cook by baking my mom's cookies. So, I quickly became the official pastry instructor at our Pentagon Row store. One of my favorite classes to teach back then was pie making. I really like teaching the classes where my students learn a specific technique--knife skills, pasta, gnocchi, pies. I feel like they're leaving me with a new set of skills, that I've expanded their world a bit. 

Pie crust in particular seems to be a challenge, that's usually what most of my students are concerned about learning to do well. I never seemed to have a problem with it, and I don't really know why, it was just one of those things that I guess I mastered early on. I remember one day in particular in culinary school, our topics that day included making pate brisee (pie dough) and breaking down and deboning chickens. In my team that day, I was partnered with two guys, both of whom could butcher a chicken with their eyes closed, but were terrified of pastry. So, I helped them with their pie crusts, and they walked me through breaking down my first chicken. I think it was a fair exchange.

Pie crust is four simple ingredients--flour, salt, butter and water. Depending on how you put them together, you can get a buttery, flaky, tender loveliness....or a pasty, tough, piece of cardboard. The two most important things to manage for a successful pie crust is the temperature of your ingredients and the amount of water you add to the dough. Keep your butter cold, you want to cut the butter into the flour, not make a paste. The separate, distinct pieces of butter mixed into the dough are what result in those flaky layers in the crust. In order to help manage the temperature of the butter, use cold water to make the dough, but don't use too much. You need just enough water for the dough to come together. Too much and your dough will shrink as it bakes--if you've ever had a crust break and leak in the pie plate as it bakes, this is why.

The other challenge my students have is in rolling out the dough. I would love to find a young psychology student who needs a topic for a research paper, I'm convinced that how a person approaches rolling out a pie crust tells more about their basic personality than any test on paper can. I have students that are so focused on perfection, that they start to sweat if the slightest crack appears on edge of the dough or if it isn't staying in a perfect circle, and I have to jump across the kitchen to stop them from balling the dough back up and starting over. That's just about the worst thing you can do, it over-develops the gluten in the dough and pretty much guarantees the dough will be tough and chewy. Then I have students that just roll and roll the dough, blissfully unaware that it's completely uneven, nowhere close to being round, and don't even realize how far off the rails they've gone until it's too late to fix it--and they're often completely unfazed and happy as clams. And, don't get me started on fitting the dough to a pie plate and crimping the edges--that can put many of my students completely over the edge.

I like starting my students out with a galette. I call it a "lazy" pie because you don't use a pie pan. It takes some of the stress out of the situation, not only do you bypass the challenges of fitting the dough to a pie pan and crimping the edges, but the dough doesn't have to be rolled to a perfect round circle. In fact, I think galettes are more beautiful the more imperfect they look. This time of year especially, when we're starting to get such beautiful fruit in the markets, galettes are not only easy, but they really shine. Enjoy!

Honeyed Apricot Galette

Makes one 9 to 10 inch galette

For the dough:

1 ¼ cup all purpose flour

½ teaspoon Kosher salt

1 stick (4 ounces) of unsalted butter, cold and cut into 10 to 12 pieces

3 to 4 tablespoons cold water

For the filling:

2 pounds fresh apricots, pits removed and sliced

¼ cup honey

2 tablespoons all purpose flour

juice of ½ a lemon

1 egg, beaten

1 tablespoon granulated sugar

Preheat the oven to 375 F and place a rack in the center.

To make the dough, place the flour and salt in the bowl of a food processor and pulse to mix. Add the butter pieces and pulse until the mixture looks like damp sand with pebbles.

Add about 2 tablespoons of water and pulse to mix through. Add additional water, about ½ a tablespoon at a time, pulsing the food process to mix, until the dough just begins to come together into large pieces. 

Turn the dough out onto a clean work surface and bring it together into a round flat disk. There's no need to knead the dough, just press it together. Kneading it will only further develop the gluten and toughen the dough. Forming the dough into a round flat disk will make it easier to roll out later, the dough will tend to stay in the shape it starts in.

Wrap the dough disk in plastic wrap and place in the refrigerator for a minimum of 30 minutes. This will allow the butter to get cold again, it allows the flour to fully absorb the water and the dough to evenly hydrate, and it will allow the gluten to relax. You can also freeze the dough at this point, a great way to get ahead of your holiday baking.

While the dough is chilling, make the filling. Mix the apricots, honey, flour and lemon juice together in a bowl. Make sure the apricots are evenly coated with the other ingredients.

Remove the dough from the refrigerator, unwrap it and place it on a lightly floured work surface. Roll out the dough into a 12 to 14 inch circle about ¹/₈^th of an inch thick. Carefully transfer the dough to a parchment paper lined baking sheet.

Spoon the apricots into the center of the dough, making a mound of the fruit and leaving a 2 to 3 inch border of dough around the edge. Lift the dough edge, folding and pleating around the perimeter of the galette, covering the edge of the fruit. Using a silicone brush, brush a thin layer of beat egg on the exposed dough, then sprinkle with the sugar.

Bake for 40 to 50 minutes until the crust is browned and the fruit filling is bubbling in the center of the galette. (The starch in the flour is activated when the liquid in the filling boils. If the filling isn't bubbling in the very center of the galette, the flour has not fully activated, and the filling will be watery and run when the galette is cut to serve.)  Allow to cool, slice and serve.

Spice it up!

The time has come, my online cooking class is now LIVE and available for registration on Craftsy!!! Just got to:

http://www.craftsy.com/…/cooking-with-spices-technique…/5163

I hope you enjoy watching the class as much as I enjoyed putting it together!

One of the features of the Craftsy platform is that the online students can ask me, the instructor,questions. They are sent to my Craftsy inbox and I can respond to them when I log in to my instructor account. I've already had a few, it's been fun to see what the students are curious about so far. During the process of developing the class, one of the most frequent questions I got was how to use certain spices and techniques, particularly the spice powders, for different dishes than what we presented in the individual lessons. I've even had a question along these lines from one of my Craftsy students. So with that in mind, this week's recipe showcases another use for chili powder.

We spent an entire lesson on chili peppers, and those of you who have been following the blog these last couple of months will remember the posting where I made chili powder from scratch. For that post, I made a traditional Texas beef chili, but since then, I've been really enjoying using the chili powder in my everyday cooking. It makes a great spice rub for any kind of grilled meat. So, for this week's recipe, I thought I'd try it on salmon. I hope you enjoy it.

Chili Rubbed Salmon with Grilled Nectarine Salsa

Serves 4

For the salsa:

2 nectarines, cut in half and pit removed

2 tablespoons canola oil

¹/₃ cup thinly sliced green onions

¼ cup diced radish

½ cup diced, seeded English cucumber

½ cup sliced grape tomatoes

2 serrano chili peppers, seeded and finely minced

2 tablespoons finely chopped cilantro

Juice of 1 lime

Kosher salt and black pepper, to taste

For the salmon:

4 salmon filets, about 6 ounces each, skinless and pin bones removed

2 tablespoons Texas chili powder

Kosher salt and black pepper to taste

3 tablespoons canola oil

To make the salsa: Heat a grill pan or outdoor grill to medium-high heat. Using a silicone brush, lightly coat the nectarines with the oil. Place the nectarines on the grill, and cook, turning as needed, until they are well marked and beginning to soften. Transfer the nectarines to a cutting board and dice.

Place the nectarines and the rest of the ingredients in a bowl and stir to combine. Season to taste with Kosher salt and black pepper.

To make the salmon: Season the salmon filets with salt and pepper and sprinkle both sides with the chili powder. Heat a skillet over medium to medium high heat, and when hot, add the oil. Place the salmon filets in the skillet skin side up and cook until well browned, about 3 to 4 minutes. Flip the salmon filets over and continue to cook another 3 to 4 minutes. Transfer the filets to individual serving plates.

To finish, spoon some of the salsa over each of the filets and serve immediately.