Slow Cooker Minestrone

I suppose it is possible to overcook the vegetables on this, though it wouldn't be any worse than reheating the soup. If you are going to add some type of pasta to this, I suggest cooking the pasta separately, then adding cooked pasta to the serving bowl. There is a lot of flexibility as to what goes into this vegetable soup; though most notably it's root vegetables + beans + pasta.

Ingredients

1.5 quarts vegetable/chicken/beef broth
Two 14.5 oz cans of diced/crushed/whole tomatoes
One 15 oz can beans (cannelini or white/red kidney beans)
2 organic carrots, diced
2 organic celery ribs, diced
1 zucchini, diced
3 garlic cloves, minced or finely chopped
1 cup green beans, fresh or frozen (optional)
1 lb fresh spinach leaves (optional)

Spices

1 tbsp fresh or dried parsley
1.5 tsp fresh or dried oregano
1 tsp fresh or dried thyme
sea salt, to taste (about 1 tsp)
freshly ground black pepper, to taste

Pasta

1/2 c macaroni, fusili, or other small shaped pasta, cooked separately

Directions

Add broth, vegetables (except the spinach), beans, and spices to the slow cooker. Cook on low for 8 hours.

Cook macaroni or fusili pasta separately. Drain. Set aside until ready to eat.

Add spinach leaves and cooked pasta to crockpot at least 20 minutes before serving.

Chocolate Chip Crunch Cookies

This recipe presumably comes from the "Murder She Baked" film, produced by Hallmark. They're a great tasting cookie with crispy edges. If you use real butter, eggs, and sugar in the recipe, each cookie comes out to be roughly 135 calories or so. And, simply eating just one with milk is not possible. The butter is likely to be the most expensive ingredient in this batch. Using a 1/4 cup ice cream scoop can get you uniformly shaped cookies. In retrospect, these weren't as crunchy as I had imagined and I probably should have added in the crushed corn flakes at the same time as the chocolate chips.

Makes: 35 cookies

The Foodening Blog: Chocolate Chip Crunch Cookies

Ingredients

1 c unsalted butter, melted
2 c corn flakes, crushed
2 eggs, beaten
2 tsp vanilla extract
2.5 c all purpose flour, unsifted
1 c organic unbleached granulated sugar
1 c light brown sugar
1 tsp sea salt
2 tsp baking soda
1.5 c semi-sweet chocolate chips

Directions

Preheat oven to 375 F

Melt butter and let cool slightly before mixing in with white sugar, brown sugar, vanilla, and beaten eggs. 

In a separate bowl, whisk together flour, salt, and baking soda. Add this into the butter mixture and stir to combine until no flour powder remains. Stir in crushed corn flakes and chocolate chips.

Spoon or use a small ice cream scoop to drop rounded balls of dough onto a baking tray. For a half-sheet pan, I baked these in batches of six per tray.

(I only own one tray, so at 10 minutes per day you can imagine how long this took to bake.)

Bake for 10 minutes and let cool on racks.

Kitchen Notes: Sourdough Starter

Part of the reason to make your own is so that you don't buy the cup of refrigerated starter from some (un)known company at the grocery store for what amounts to a lot of time and an inexpensive amount of flour. I probably should have started this in say.. summer, when the ambient temperature of my kitchen was in the 70s. Alas, I suppose it'll take longer than the week proposed by King Arthur Flour. They have a non-refrigerator/non-freezer method of preserving your starter too. Which, by the looks of it, reads like it is better than the valuable storage space in the refrigerator/freezer...basically you take the finished sourdough starter as if you were going to use it and dry it out at room temp across several days on parchment paper, then store the dried starter in an airtight container.

Anyhow. Back to the starter. I am not reposting KAF's instructions, but I am going to detail what I am doing with this attempt. Previous tries at sourdough breads have resulted in my killing the starter after I used a portion of it to bake a sourdough bread. It feels bad to waste food ingredients; but alas, you can use discarded starter in a number of recipes that call for bread dough: pizza crust, pretzels, etc.

Day 1, Jar 1:
1/2 c dark rye flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 2, Jar 1:
Half removed, added 1 scant cup AP flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 2. Jar 2 (essentially, now I have two Jar 1s):
Jar1 Discard + 1 scant cup AP flour + 1/2 c warm water

Day 3, Jar 1 & Jar 2:
Half removed from each jar and placed in Jar 3 (which will be refrigerated for later use)

and so on, so far, I am only on Day 2.

Kitchen Notes: Canning Unsweetened Fruit Juice

I thought about making a mixed berry jam using the berries that have been in the freezer; but my pantry currently suffers from a glut of uneaten jams. To convert this into the base of a drink spritzer, take an equal amount of a basic sugar syrup (1:1 ratio of sugar to water, boiled together and volume reduced by half) and add it to the juice. Then add up to a 1/4 c of the juice mixture to a glass with ice and sparkling water (or sparkling wine).

TheFoodening Blog - Unsweetened Mixed Berry Juice

I just needed to free up some freezer space for my dumplings. Anyhow. Onto the process.

This batch had a lot of seeds! OMG. So many tiny seeds to filter out. I batch strained the solids 2-3 times (the -3rd time was the thick goo leftover in the strainer and I let it drip out overnight in the fridge in a bowl).

1/2 lb boysenberries, from the farmers market - big, ripe and not really sweet
1 lb strawberries - uhh, I froze them whole so the stems were still there
1 qt blueberries - these have been in the freezer for a while, a couple years; picked at Majestic Farm Blueberries a few miles away

I am not sure why I tossed in the remainder of an opened jar of Fonseco port, but a bit more than a cup of port is also in this "juice".

Crock it all together in a slow cooker for a few hours on LOW.

Made: 5 half pints

Plum Jam with Whiskey and Ginger

In this batch, I set aside two 8 oz freezer jars to see what this stuff tastes like on toast and/or pbj sandwiches. The jam didn't set in the water bath and spreads easily enough after being refrigerated. And no, pectin was not used. And no, it didn't set like a normal jam where equal portions of sugar and fruit purée were used. If I made this again, I'd omit the whiskey/bourbon. It tastes good with peanut butter without the whiskey. The ingredient ratio comes from the My Friday Food Swings blog.

TheFoodening Blog: plum ginger jam ready to eat

3 lbs Italian plums (dark purple skin, yellow flesh), pit removed
2 1/2 c organic granulated sugar
2 tsp kosher salt
1/4 c fresh lemon juice
2 tbsp ground ginger
1/2 c whiskey or bourbon, any plain variety

Directions

1. Wash and quarter the plums, removing the pits. Place plums in a large bowl and mix with 1/2 c sugar, salt, and lemon juice. Store in refrigerator overnight.

2. Cook plums, its juices, and remaining sugar in a heavy-bottomed pot over medium heat for 15 minutes. If you're going to strain out the skins, do so at this point, otherwise use an immersion blender and purée it all smooth. Stir frequently or the jam will burn. Add ginger powder and cook for an additional 15 minutes.

As you boil the plums with the sugar, don't be alarmed by the not-red color this produces before using the immersion blender.

At this point, I reserved a cup of jam, letting it cool in a bowl before transferring it to a freezer jar.

3. Add the whiskey, if using, and boil for an additional 3 minutes.

4. Process using hot jam in hot sterilized jars/bands/lids in a hot water bath for 15 minutes.

Made: 2 half-pint freezer jars + 4 half-pint jars