zoramargolis

Earlier this Summer, I picked fourteen pounds of blackberries and returned home and split evenly between three freezer bags. Originally it was my thought to can the fruit, but decided to do something different since I have peaches and strawberries in the freezer as well.

I participated in the Free Range discussion yesterday afternoon on the Washington Post and the suggestion that came back was to use some of the fruit to make a blackberry sauce. The suggestion was to add one Tb of brandy and one Tb of orange juice.

Using this recipe, is is possible to can and then give out later in the year as gifts, etc...? If yes, is there anything that you would change to make the sauce more than just ordaniry? And lastly, should I cook the liquid mixture down until it thickens up a bit instead of being runny?

Thank you.

Local blackberries taste much better cooked than raw, IMO. I have had amazingly sweet, wild blackberries in Oregon, but most of the cultivated blackberries I have tasted locally have a slightly green, vegetal quality and aren't sweet enough to eat without sugar.

Blackberry preserves are just about my favorite. I haven't made them in the past couple of years, because my family prefers sour cherry, so I have concentrated my efforts there--I have about 3 dozen pint and 1/2 pint jars of sour cherry preserves, which took about 35 pounds of cherries to make. I am totally with JG about seeds--I always puree and strain out all the seeds before doing anything further with blackberries. If you puree and strain blackberries, you basically have slightly pulpy juice. If you add sugar (recommended), brandy or any other flavor (I don't get orange juice at all--a little lemon juice to brighten the flavor, but orange would just distract from the blackberry, which is what I would want to taste), you have blackberry syrup, essentially. There is some pulp in the berries, but you do lose a bit of the pulp when you strain out the seeds, so it is going to be thin. If you reduce it enough so that it becomes thick--I think you will degrade the flavor significantly. You want to cook the berries, but only until the raw taste is gone--I don't like most jams made without pectin for that reason. By the time the fruit has cooked long and hard enough to thicken, much of the flavor has boiled out. If you want to make a dessert sauce that has some body to it, you'll need to add some starch. You want one that is not going to make the sauce cloudy--arrowroot, corn starch or tapioca starch.

You'll then need to pressure can your product.

Why not make jam instead?

I'm eager to sit down asap and start slurping some oysters even before my better half shows up.

You can sit at the bar in front of the oyster shucker and have some while you are waiting.

I like the sound of this...are figs still in season? Might be a hard sell with the family. How about a couple olives in there? One thing too many?

What would you serve this with? I'm thinking fish, but that's right out. ^2

Fresh figs are just coming into season, as it happens. I have some just beginning to ripen on my tree, but they don't have much flavor, so I roast them with almond oil, honey, marsala, lemon zest--to give them more taste than they brung to the party. I have also dried some in my convection oven, and those are pretty good. For eating fresh or roasting with fennel, I prefer the black mission variety. As for olives--interesting idea. I say try it. If it doesn't work, don't do it again. You may have discovered something wonderful.

I haven't ever served the roasted fennel-fig slaw with fish. It'd probably be great with wild salmon. I have served it with duck (once with grilled duck breast and several times with duck leg confit) and also with pork.

Don't neglect to stock up on Cowboy lump hardwood charcoal for late fall, winter and early spring grilling. They consider it to be a "seasonal" item and don't carry it after what they deem is the summer season, has passed. It's just about impossible to get an absolute fix on the date of the last shipment, however. I tried last year, and blew it. Had to buy Cowboy at Strosnider's at about 3x the price I paid at TJ's.

Yes I did. I opened it when I got home and dabbed a little bit on my finger before putting it in the fridge. Tastes just like maple syrup to me. I suppose there are people out there who would sneer at the Grade B Dark Amber, but who cares? This isn't Log Cabin, Mrs. Butterworth's, or some generic store brand, all of which tout that they contain "at least 2%" REAL maple syrup. Screw 'em.

In Vermont, the maple syrup connoisseurs go for the pale grade AA or grade A, which requires greater care in the sugar house. Truth be told, grade B has more intense and powerful flavor. More bang for your buck. When a friend from Vermont comes to visit, she always brings me a can of grade A fancy syrup. When I'm buying, though, I get TJ's grade B.

Three-bean salad--the traditional version with wax beans, green beans and kidney beans, which my husband adores, a taste memory from his traditional upbringing, undoubtedly. Only I don't think his mother used Vidalia onion, roasted garlic, lemon zest and Riesling vinegar (okay, I added cider vinegar, too.)

Roasted beets with orange vinaigrette

Tomatoes and cucumbers with fresh basil

Cheese grits with fresh corn

Charcoal-grilled wild salmon

2005 Ch. Guiot Rose

<shrug> not really sure. Onion, potato. Finish it with some alcohol as monovano suggests. Maybe serve it with fish? Or add chunks of fish? Or crab?

Hey--that traditional New England staple: fish and fennel chowder! Fish and fennel are a natural pairing in Provence, so why not?

They seem to have something against pork, too. I had to look really hard to find enough porky things. I only saw one kind of pork sausage, although there are lots of chickent and turkey sausages. I don't think they've finished getting all their goods. The ice cream is still arriving.

They sell Niman Ranch bacon, ham steaks and pre-cooked bbq ribs at other stores. I imagine this store will have them eventually, if they are not there already. Niman Ranch bacon--applewood smoked--is excellent, IMO. And of course, TJ's sells it cheaper than anywhere else.

I chatted briefly with Michel Richard when I ate at the Citronelle Bar a few weeks ago. He was VERY excited about this book--more so, it seemed than opening a new restaurant.

Maybe start with a roux, then add stock and milk. Hopefully you can thicken it with just enough flour to get a nice creamier texture without any flour flavor. Finish with Zambuca, Pernod or anisette That'll finish it off very nicely.

A good way to thicken a soup without any starch is to puree all or part of the solids. Ratio of liquid to pureed solids will determine how thick the soup will be. What else do you plan to have in it, besides fennel? If you are willing to put some potatoes in to cook with the fennel, that will give it a nice, creamy texture when it is pureed.

I wanted a bottle of peanut oil (not an outlandish demand of a grocery store, surely). In their oil section, they had several kinds of remarkably reasonable olive oil, walnut oil, and grapeseed oil, and nothing else. Is this typical of other TJ stores? Or were they simply sold out of other oils, or not yet stocked?

I haven't ever seen peanut oil at TJ's. They don't sell corn oil either.

If cod were simply left to "dry age" for a few weeks, I don't think I'd want to eat it.

Native Americans in the Northwest dry strips of salmon to make a kind of jerky. So? Will you eat that? Maybe-- because it is being "preserved" and not left out in the sun until it spoils? Dry-aged meat is NOT spoiled. Every food you eat, animal, vegetable or grain is on some trajectory toward decomposition before it is cooked, and then again after it is cooked. We consume them at varying points of that trajectory, depending on personal taste and cultural custom. Disgust is mitigated by human psychology. It is a product of the survival instinct, but it is culturally determined. So those raised in Kosher homes might find rare meat disgusting, but not because it is de facto not safe to eat. Disgust is not the same thing as bacterial gastroenteritis. Very few people would consciously choose to eat something that would cause them to become ill.

We share the earth with bacteria, and some varieties of them have been harnessed during human history to transform and preserve foods. Some of these, as mentioned above, may be so familiar, that you don't even think twice about eating them. Others may be considered delicious by other cultures--as a general rule, though, thoughtful, mature individuals don't say: "Ewww! You're going to eat THAT? That's GROSS!" about food that someone else is enjoying. I'm just sayin' ...

My mother and I called this "cook's syndrome": the inability to enjoy what you've prepared. And the longer we spent in the kitchen, the worse it was.

Do you taste frequently while you are cooking? Tasting while cooking can sometimes add up to the equivalent of a full meal, so it's no wonder that it is possible to have no appetite by the time dinner is served. Also, anxiety about a dinner party going well, the dishes coming out right so they please or impress the guests, conflicts in the family (or frustration about one's homemade tomato sauce disappearing into the Twilight Zone) can all affect one's appetite on a situational basis. I think that happens on occasion to everyone, it certainly does to me.

It doesn't seem that this is always the case for you, however. Do you think that if you rarely or never enjoyed eating food that you'd prepared, that you would be as interested in cooking as you undoubtedly are? Maybe, if you still enjoyed food prepared by others, you could. But if you didn't enjoy eating, period?

How would we feel about, say, dry-aged fish? Mmm-mmm good?

What do you think bacalao (salt cod) is?

I know this is off topic, but I think you were out of line for you to doing this in a public forum. You never know who is reading this board.

Eating disorders are not crimes, or moral failings. Obesity is obvious to everyone who sees it, anorexia may be obvious only to those who are familiar with it. Would it be inappropriate to describe Paul Prudhomme as morbidly obese, if you had seen him on tv? And to speculate about his relationship to cooking and eating? Not that interesting to me, since no cognitive dissonance is engendered by a good cook who loves food and undoubtedly eats a lot.

I can introduce you to a couple of people if you would like

Not completely when you consider the fact that the underlying cause of anorexia and other eating disorders can come down to gaining and maintaining control. Food and weight become the one thing the person can control. Cooking, while directly related to food, can be a form of expression and art. It can also be theraputic, with the chopping, mixing, pounding, etc.? While I don't want to speculate about this woman's psyche it is possible to seperate cooking from eating.

From another perspective, what about chefs who detest an item yet create brilliant dishes using said item?

While you are correct in your understanding, gaining and maintaining control are among numerous underlying factors in anorexia, which are not necessarily the same in all individuals or in all of the various permutations of eating disorders. Anorexia is a very complex problem, both medically and psychiatrically, and is generally considered to be among the most difficult of all psychiatric disorders to treat successfully. And only about half of those who get into treatment, who have lost as much weight as the contestant in question has, actually survive.

Being conflicted about eating, gaining weight, body size are so common among women that it is almost too much of a cliche even to discuss. And I am sure that there are legions of the svelte among us, who live on salad with lemon-no oil and eschew dessert, who enjoy cooking and will eat a little bit of something fattening and delicious and have the will power to ferociously control portion size and dress size. And many relatively normal-weight bulemics, who purge in various ways after eating something they fear will make them fat, who may love to cook. This, however, was someone with full-out, advanced anorexia, who looked like she weighed about seventy-five pounds. Anorexics who look like this refuse to eat just about everything, so she obviously must completely separate cooking and thinking about food and creating recipes from eating, though she seems to do a lot of the former. I just find that remarkable.

About chefs who "detest" a particular food yet cook it well. Jeffrey Steingarten, the food critic at Vogue, has some interesting things to say about food dislikes and prejudices in his first collection of essays, _The Man Who Ate Everything_. When he first started reviewing restaurants and writing about food, he realized that he would have to give up many of his reflexive attitudes and learn how to stop rejecting and disdaining certain foods and flavors he had always disliked, if he was going to be able to be good at what he wanted to do. And he did. I'm sure he doesn't like eevery food and flavor equally, but he claims not to avoid any food. My guess is that you won't find very many really talented professional chefs who are picky eaters. Were you thinking of someone in particular?

I have a couple of unfortunate allergies--to apples, walnuts and pecans. I certainly am capable of making wonderful food using those ingredients, but I just about never do, even though my family would be happy if I did, because I like to eat what I cook. The love of cooking and of eating are not separate for me, though I am discovering that is the case in some rare instances.

A couple of years ago, I bought three bottles of St. Cosme CDR at Calvert-Woodley. We opened one and were overwhelmed by the smell of horse-poop (brett). My husband, with the super-sensitive nose, was utterly repulsed and insisted that I pour the remainder of the bottle down the sink. I took the other two bottles back, and told Pepe what the problem was. He cheerfully gave me a refund, telling me that he had customers who would love to buy the two bretty bottles of St. Cosme from him.

I just started reading _The Reach of a Chef_ by Michael Ruhlman. I came across this statement on p. 29: "And I love to eat–loved it. When you are cooking you're kind of eating in your mind the whole time. I can't imagine the drudgery daily cooking would be if you didn't love to eat."

I completely agree-- I love to cook and I love to eat, and to think and read about food, as well. You don't have to be a good cook to love to eat, but I have always believed the opposite to be true.

Ruhlman's declaration put me in mind of a somewhat mind-blowing observation. The other night, I was watching a Food Channel program involving competition cooking. This was the finals of the "Build a Better Burger" contest. This may be prompted by sour grapes, since I entered the contest and didn't make the cut. But in the "non-beef" sub-competition, one of the selected competitors was a woman named Kelly, who had won that same contest two years ago. I have worked in mental health for a number of years (I am a licensed clinical social worker), and I could tell with absolute certainty that Kelly has severe anorexia nervosa. She had many observable hallmarks of the disorder: in addition to her cachectic appearance, she had enlarged parotid glands under her jaws, which are the result of frequently inducing vomiting. She wore a gigantic sweatshirt, a typical gambit to disguise a skeletal body, until she presented her salmon burger, when she had removed the sweatshirt and put on an apron, and her tiny body was revealed. The other contestants talked about having made their recipe hundreds of times, but when the judges asked her, she admitted that she had developed her recipe at the computer and had tasted it once--she probably took a bite and then spat it out. She didn't win this time, but it seemed amazing and bizarre to me that someone so conflicted about eating could concoct a recipe good enough to propel her to the finals of a contest with thousands of entrants, not once but twice. I have been involved in the treatment of a number of anorexics--some hate food and will do anything to avoid eating, others gorge and then vomit. But have never met one who was a really good cook.

To me, deriving pleasure from food is all of a piece: cooking for myself and others, eating and talking about food. I don't have any desire to cook for my family if I am unable to eat for some reason. Kelly demonstrates that it is possible to think about food and cook wonderful food for others while simultaneously denying herself pleasure in eating it. Anachronistic, don't you think?

On another note, the finalists in the beef burger contest all had bizarrely complicated recipes. I thought my Flamenco Wagyu Burger with smoked paprika alioli, sofrito relish and manchego probably tasted better than any of them, and I tried out and tweaked the recipe numerous times before submitting it. Oh, well...

I had a great collection going--a bucket-ful. My husband persuaded me to throw them away. When I was in L.A. last Spring, I went to a gallery in Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, and saw chairs made out of wine corks that had been drilled and wired together. Big, easy chairs made completely out of thousands of wine corks each. And I've got to tell you, they were extremely comfortable. And extremely expensive. I can't even conceive of how much time it took to make one, or how the artist had acquired all those corks.

Didn't I read that someone built an entire boat out of wine corks?

Got a few years with nothing else to do?

The place was completely mobbed today. The line went back to the dairy section. I left.

One advantage of working nights, while the "normal" people are relaxing, is that you can do your shopping while they are all at work. Avoiding Trader Joe's, Costco and Home Depot on weekends and holidays is highly recommended. Try going at 10 in the morning or 2 in the afternoon on a weekday, and you'll pretty much have the place to yourself.

We followed with the soup of the day -- a carrot and fennel soup that had wonderful taste, yet a very unusual texture -- seemed creamy, but no cream. I would never be able to get a puree quite like that at home.

You would if you had a VitaMix Blender. That is the machine used in the Black Group restaurant kitchens to make purees and mayo/aioli sauces. You can buy a home version of the machine (same motor--plastic housing instead of metal) from the company (www.vitamix.com). I use mine daily, and wouldn't want to cook without it.

To see 'Two Buck Chuck' in the same sentence as 'terroir' ... it's surprising and shocking somehow.

I forgot to put in.

What you perceive as "dryness" may simply be hardness. I decided to try to find you a place to buy White Lily flour, which I always stock up on during trips further South. Can't remember seeing it further north than Fredericksburg, VA.

First place I tried, Food Lion, which is where I look for funkier stuff such as pickling supplies, didn't have White Lily but did have Martha White, made from the same wheat variety, Southern white wheat, low in gluten so has a softer texture.

I believe I have seen both White Lily and Martha White at Harris Teeter.

The employees were cheerful and very helpful, checkout was quick and pleasant - a seachange from the usually surly union employees at the Watergate Safeway where I've shopped for the last 20 years and no one even knows my name. I have a terrible feeling that I'll be going back this afternoon! Oh, yeah. In the District, Two Buck Chuck has morphed into Three Buck Chuck.

There is a young woman at my Palisades neighborhood Safeway who has been a checker and a manager for the ten years that I have lived here. She learned my name almost immediately, always greets me by name and remembers what kind of bags I prefer--paper in plastic--sort of like the neighborhood bar where they know your name and fix your favorite drink before you even ask for it. I don't shop there very often anymore, since TJ's, the 'burban Asian markets, Whole Foods and Costco get most of my business. But Jackie is unfailingly glad to see me when I run in for a carton of milk. An unusual and exemplary employee, it seems.

The only place that Two Buck Chuck actually costs $1.99 is in California--everywhere else TJ's charges extra for the shipping costs incurred in moving the popular plonk from it's home terroir...

I was there today and forgot to ask about beer and wine sales on Sundays, but I can't see any good reason they couldn't. Rodman's and Whole Foods sell beer and wine on Sundays. I think it's mainly an issue with liquor stores needing to be closed.

On the whole, I was impressed by the store. It's less cramped and more navigable than the Bethesda store, that's for sure. Also, their beer selection is interesting. Samuel Smith's and Ommegang Belgian--I don't recall seeing them in other TJ's, and three kinds of Magic Hat for $6.99 a sixpack. One of the freezer cases is not functioning, so there was no ice cream. The two guys who do most of the food demos in the Bethesda store are trained chefs, and can be quite creative, given the limitations of the setting. The kid in charge of food demos in Foggy Bottom opened a jar of sauce and a can of beans, cut up some frozen chicken, heated them together and spooned it over pre-cooked brown rice. Maybe GW students who live in a basement with only a microwave to cook with would get inspired by that. I'm mostly just looking for a little snack while I shop, anyway...

The place was packed with shoppers and high energy employees. There were two managerial expediters keeping the checkout line moving smoothly--a single line feeds about 10 checkers, so it went quickly. Parking was convenient and easy. My new store! Bye-bye Bethesda.