Clementine whiskey confiture

Last Sunday I accompanied my wife to a local market, here in France where we are staying for the holidays. It was nice, though a bit cold. Lots of local produce on the stands, including different kinds of honey, dried sausages, regional cheese variants etc. There were a couple of fruit stands as well and we ended up with a rather large bag of clementine mandarins.

To finish of the year, and the bag of clementines, I decided to make some nice marmelade with them today. I quartered them and cut the parts into small pieces. I weighted them, and added the same amount in sugar. I had ended up with 1 kg (2 lbs.), so 1 kg of sugar -- and I added 150 mls (roughly 10 tablespoons) of water. After cutting as much of the white stuff as possible of half the peels, I cut them up into zests and added them to the slowly warming sugar and clementine parts. Quickly brining it all to a boil, and then bioloing for about 1 hour, stirring occasionally.

For the last 10 minutes I added a similar amount of whiskey as I had added water. The result is 6 nice pots of confiture, one of which I will be enjoying for New Years Eve!!! To be a bit ahead of time, I labled them with etiquittes dates Jan. 1st 2009.

Last pumkpins of the year

Since a bit of mold started showing up, I decided to take care of the last two pumpkins that lasted of this years harvest. I also took a handful of their seeds to save for next season, kind of hoping that taken the seeds from the best preserved onces will provide me with a crop of pumpkins that can be kept well a bit longer then this year.

I washed the seeds with a bit of warm water in a steel restrainer, now they are drying wrapped in some kitchen paper. Once they are dry and don't risk going moldy I might either pick them from the paper, or save them with paper and all. I read somebody just tears the piece of paper they are glued to, humidifies it and plants. I like easy methods!!

Bussy Christmas time

Not surprisingly, it has been a rather busy time, the last couple of days. We are spending most of our holidays with my in-laws at their place in France; but are fortunate enough to have spend a couple of days already at their remote farm in the country side, with more days to follow. Of course, lots of cooking went on for the last two days, I'll post some of the recipes (and a couple of photo's, though I don't have many) once things have settled back into their normal rhythm.

Practising for Christmas meal

We tend to have fairly copious Christmas meals with the in-laws, and it has become a habit the last couple of years to try some of the new recipes beforehand. I tried a bunch a while ago, but a change of plans has put a turkey on the menu for the 25th. I figured that for once we could go American, and will prepare some sweet potatoes as accompaniment — and with sweet potatoes, for sure, there should be some cranberry sauce or jelly.


I found an interesting recipe for an 'orange - cranberry' sauce, that I decided to give a try:

• 250 g (8 ounces) cranberries (fresh or dried)
• 1 tbsp brown sugar
• 1 orange
• zest of one orange
  

Put cranberries in a bit of water (if using dried cranberries, weak them for 30 minutes or so) add the brown sugar, start heating slowly. Prepare the zest of the orange, in small slices. Cut up the orange parts in small pieces, and add the zest and orange to the pot. Cook slowly for roughly 20 minutes. In case needed add some water.

Gave a great sauce, was wonderful with the sweet potatoes as expected and gave enough to have some ready for Christmas already, as can be seen in the photo above. But, I'll certainly need to prepare an additional batch.

Snow today, lots of snow.

Gotta fix me something easy to eat, then I'll post some more stuff and recipies.

One simple meal

Sliced tomatoes, sliced aubergine (eggplant, for the linguistically handicapped) into a slightly oiled oven dish. Some mozzarella on top. 25 min at 180 C.

Dellicious with some fresh, homemade bread.

Oil with thyme

Very simple to prepare, delicious — and a nice test to see if I can properly upload a photo.



Seems to work, though the image seems a bit tiny....

Creating this post was definitely more time consuming then making the oil, which consists of some twigs of freshly collected thyme put into some high quality oil. In this case I used olive oil. I slightly heated the oil in a microwave before adding it to the bottle, this tends to decrease the time necessary for it to adapt the thyme arome.

First post

Well, lets see where this leads....

At the moment little to write about, lots to explore.