Food Preserving {Sweet & Spicy Tomato Jam}

I have been following Marisa's blog over at Food in Jars for a while now, and the funny thing is that I wasn't even a canner!!

Her pictures, recipes, and instructions are all fantastic. I knew canning was something I wanted to get into this year, in case our garden produced a ton of goodies, I surely wouldn't want to waste any. 

I actually took a canning class from her back in July in CT with my mother in law. It was a great class. We learned how to make a rhubarb chutney and it was fantastic. 

I also got a signed copy of her new book Food in Jars. 

The one crop of our that did very well in the garden was our tomatoes. We planed a variety called Gold Medal, which are extremely meaty yellow/fire red heirloom variety as well as a rockstar of a cherry tomato. 

Marisa's tomato jam recipe just sounded so good. I decided to go for it and make it.

After her class, her whole attitude and demeanor about canning put my mind at ease a little bit. I was so stressed about it because every recipe made me panic that I was going to kill someone. Seriously, take one of her classes if you can.

I followed her recipe pretty spot on, but my tomato variety was probably very different from hers. 

 

It was amazing. So far, I've had on both grilled cheese and brie. They were both phenomenal. Do it. You will not be sorry. The end product is a sweet and spicy autumn flavored jam. I can't praise it enough.

HOLLER.

Food Preserving {Roasted Plum Tomatoes}

I have been in food-mode lately. Well, let's be honest, I am pretty much always in food-mode. 

On week nights, I constantly struggle with my desire to cook a gourmet meal, and my lack of time to adequately do so. I need to complete meals from start to finish in about 1/3 of the time that it currently takes. I need to plan for easier meals during the week, so I can get all of my other crap done timely. Therefore, I am dabbling into thoughtfully preserving more. 

I know, people have been preserving forever and I am just getting started. But I'm only 26, so leave me alone. 

I follow Marisa's blog over at Food in Jars on a regular basis. I have merely tested the waters on canning, but I have gone full force into the other preserving methods she talks about, primarily freezing.

I am freezing everything these days. More importantly, I am trying to freeze foods in the serving sizes that we would actually use on recipes we frequently make:

• Chopping and freezing our red peppers that we plucked from the garden in little baggies and I can saute them up for our quesadillas/fajitas.
• Making eggplant cutlets and freezing in baggies, two ways. Large freezer baggies are for dinner sized portions of eggplant parm and smaller bags are for my husband to take to lunch.
• We eat homemade pizzas probably once a month. I generally don't like sauce on my pizza, but husband does. So instead of letting the sauce go bad in the fridge until its time to make another pizza, I froze it in small tupperware containers (just enough for me to make him another 2 pizzas). 

I love love love tomatoes. We haven't really had an amazing tomato year, but when I saw this recipe for Slow Roasted Tomato Dip. I knew that I had to acquire some romas and make it, STAT.

Of course, before I could start with that recipe, I had to make her Slow Roasted Tomatoes. 

I went to the farmers market last week and got some gorgeous plum/roma tomatoes and followed her recipe to a T.

Here is roasting them after 5 hours at 200F. 

Here are these little gems after 12 hours in the oven. Don't they look amazing???!?!? In Marisa's recipe, she says they are so good that they barely last through the night. She was 100% correct. These little concentrated tomato bites were truly irresistible.

 As she does in her recipe, I put them roasted tomatoes onto a cookie sheet in the over to freeze. After that, I froze them in half-pint jars, in 2 cup increments (according to her recipe for the dip). 

Then I just had to make a batch of her dip for a BBQ we were having. I followed her recipe pretty closely. I did increase the amount of goat cheese in the dip to 1/2 cup, and in retrospect, I should have decreased the amount of garlic I used. I think that the recipe calls for 2 cloves of garlic, which I did use. However, my cloves could have been twice the size of hers. 

You know what else would be good? If I had roasted garlic on hand (freshly roasted or frozen). That would have been amazing in this dip. I love the depth of flavor and creaminess that roasted garlic adds.

Using my immersion blender, I busted up the tomatoes, then added the chevre, sour cream, garlic, and basil leaves plucked from the garden.

Unfortunately I don't have a picture of the finished product. It was devoured before I even got the chance. Trust me, it was amazing. I served it with red pepper strips and pretzels. 

MMMMmmm you know what it would be good with? Homemade sourdough pretzels!! Next time we have those, I will make another batch of this dip. 

Ok now I'm hungry. Hope you enjoyed. Check out my Bucket List and my Finished Projects.

HOLLER!

Food Preserving {Eggplant Cutlets}

Given that this is the first year we've ever had a real vegetable patch to call our own, this is one of the first times we've had to consider how to preserve our precious crop.

Our most abundant crop to date has been the eggplant. We are growing the Black Beauty variety, and they are big and gorgeous. We could have eaten all of the eggplant, if that was the only thing we planned to eat for the next two weeks. Obviously, that is not something we wanted to do. Remember, I am a rationer after all.

My husband loves Eggplant Parmesan. It is probably his favorite dish ever. I can't say that it is my favorite (I'd much rather have a big juicy ribeye), but I definitely love it. 

We thought that the best way to preserve the amazing eggplant plucked from our garden was to make cutlets and freeze the cutlets after they were cooked/fried. 

We have been following a VERY GOOD America's Test Kitchen recipe for eggplant cutlets. The recipe actually calls for white bread pulsed in a food processor rather than any breadcrumbs at all. It is phenomenal.

It was definitely a cook-two-eat-four type of situation for a while there. It was almost like we had never seen food before.

Needless to say, we were sad to Put These Babies in the Corner of our freezer, but it will make meal planning/weekly cooking easier for me, and we can enjoy the eggplant all fall.