Fernando's Whole Orange Marmalade

Axel F and I went to Mexico City for a few days last month, and it was such a great trip in so many ways, too numerous to go into here.  The food of course was particularly thrilling (Tacos al pastor! Horchata!  Mole!), and one thing I ate I instantly resolved to make when we got home - a whole orange marmalade that our host Fernando, at the Hostal del Maria Alma in Coyoacan, had made himself and served at breakfast (along with eggs, toast, guava, fresh squeezed grapefruit juice, rich coffee, and very interesting conversation).

I've never had marmalade anything like it - all other marmalades I've had have been sticky, overly sweet but also unpleasantly bitter, with hard bits of orange peel floating in a whole lot of sort of clear sugary stuff.  Fernando's marmalade was juicy, tender, and very orangey, with a bitter and sweet flavor I just loved... Fernando's marmalade is to regular marmalade as homemade strawberry preserves are to strawberry jelly - a real fruit experience, as opposed to fruit flavored candy.  I just wanted to keep loading it onto toast forever.  I asked him what he did to make it so incredibly, addictively delicious.  He said he used agave nectar instead of sugar (which explained why it was juicy and fruity rather than candied), and just cut up whole oranges (commercial marmalades seem to use only the peels, and not the flesh of the orange itself), and cooked it for four hours.  He also spiced it with cinnamon stick and star anise - which is a really... (if I may say) magical flavor with citrus.

Armed with this description, I gave it a try yesterday - and I think I nailed it!  This yielded quite a lot of marmalade, about 1 1/2 quarts.  It is dreamily delicious just spooned on buttered toast, but I'm thinking it would be incredible stuffed into croissants, baked into a tart or thumbprint sugar cookies, or even as an accompaniment or glaze for roasted meats.

Whole Orange Marmalade from Hostal Maria Alma

3 lbs. organic oranges (about 14 medium small oranges.  Fernando said he used Valencia, I used Florida oranges)
2 1/2 cups agave nectar (divided)
1 cup water
1 cinnamon stick (mexican canela, if you can get it!)
2 star anise
5-8 whole green cardamom pods

 

Be sure to wash your oranges thoroughly.  And definitely use organic oranges - it is really necessary for this, since you're cooking and eating the whole thing.  The beauty is that they don't have to be those gorgeous, enormous orange monstrosities that cost an arm and a leg.

 

To prep the oranges, trim off both ends, and slice in half lengthwise down the middle.  Next time I will cut in half again lengthwise (in other words, cut the oranges into 4 lengthwise wedges instead of just in half) before cutting them into 1/4 inch thick slices.  Remove and discard any seeds as you go.

 

Very quickly I discovered that a serrated knife and a plastic cutting board to catch the juices were a much better plan and saved me many levels of aggravation.

 

This is all those oranges (the $5 bag I found at Whole Foods was about 14 small) sliced up.

 

Cinnamon stick, star anise (don't skip it!), cardamom pods (optional).

 2 cups of agave nectar goes into the pot with the sliced oranges and spices, along with a cup of water.  Bring it all to a boil over high heat, stirring occasionally.  When it comes to a boil, reduce the heat to very low (though it should be bubbling gently in a couple of places) and cover.  Come back to stir now and then, for about 2 hours.

 

 After one hour.

 

After two hours.  At this point, I tasted it, and I felt it needed to be slightly sweeter, so I added another 1/2 cup of agave nectar.  Do this to taste - I think it will always depend on the sweetness of the particular oranges you get.  I was looking for a balance between bitter and sweet and slightly tart.

 

After three hours.  At this point, the flavor was great, but it was still pretty liquid.  So I removed the lid and upped the heat till it was bubbling a bit more quickly, and let it go one more hour uncovered, stirring often.  This was when I decided next time I'll quarter the oranges before slicing, because as they cooked the strips of peel seemed to get longer and longer, and I spent some time cutting as many in half with my wooden spoon as possible - not a hard task, because they were very tender, but the problem is easily solved with better planning!

 

After that fourth hour at a slightly higher temp, the marmalade had thickened up nicely, still juicy and lovely, but not runny.

I'm excited to give some as gifts, and have a lot for myself too.  Thank you, Fernando!

the best way to eat tomatoes for breakfast

Sorry for the blurry photo, I was just so excited to hurry up and eat it.

Our dad has always grown tomatoes in his garden, every year whether in California or Massachusetts, and during the height of tomato season (when you have tomatoes coming out your ears) our folks would have this for breakfast. As a little kid (whose ideal breakfast was pancakes with log cabin syrup) I was a little baffled by this. But now I know it's probably the best breakfast in the whole world.

Toast bread, spread with good mayo (hellman's/best foods in my house), top with sliced super ripe tomatoes, sprinkle with salt and freshly ground black pepper. Mmmmmmmmmmmm.

The better the bread you use, the better this breakfast will be, but it's still incredibly good on regular old sandwich bread like we had today.

make your own greek yogurt, and what to do with the whey

A quick post, which is hardly a recipe, but it was so easy and the results so delicious that I'll probably do it on a weekly basis from now on.

I strained regular plain yogurt (I did 2% but you could do any kind) and ended up with half the volume I started with of thick creamy greek-style yogurt, and about the same volume of super nutritious whey (the clear liquid that collects on the top of your plain yogurt which you should drink, not discard).

My method of straining was to put a mesh strainer over a large bowl, and lined the strainer with paper coffee filters (I never seem to have cheesecloth when I need it). I poured a full 32 oz container of plain yogurt in, and put it in the fridge, uncovered, over night. In the morning, I just flopped the strained yogurt back into its original container, and it really had reduced by half. Once it's strained even fat free yogurt becomes thick and creamy, and it's so good alone, with a spoon or two of your favorite natural fruit preserves, a drizzle of honey, or some fresh fruit.

With the whey, of which I now had about 2+ cups, I put it into my blender with some frozen mango chunks (about 1 1/2 cups), and it made enough for one light and delicious mango lassi type drink, only it was more refreshing than if it had the creaminess of the yogurt solids in there.

Just to sell this process a little more, even with the volume reducing by half, it's much cheaper than buying greek yogurt ($3 for 32 oz strained down to about 16 oz for plain regular yogurt, vs. as much as $7 for 17.5 oz of greek yogurt). And drinking the whey is so good for you, in fact the whey is probably more nutritious than the yogurt solids, containing more protein, healthy bacteria and calcium. I can imagine using the whey for all kinds of smoothie-type drinks. Yum.

There are no digital cameras in my house right now, so the picture is courtesy of my computer, apologies for the lack of image quality.

Clementine Muffins, or Morning Sunshine Muffins

Saying Clementine Muffins gets the job done - you know what you're eating. Morning Sunshine Muffins (Jenean's idea) is much more evocative of the lovely experience you will have while eating them.

Have you ever bought a big box or bag of clementines, and at first it is a delight, you are eating three a day and loving every bite, but by the time you're about two thirds of the way through, you are clementined out, and some of them are starting to go bad, and they begin to create anxiety in your household? That's where we were on Thursday evening. So we googled around a bit for ideas for what to do with clementines in a cooked capacity.

We found this recipe, at the beautiful blog smitten, which I believe is originally (or possibly only most famously) Nigella Lawson's. It calls for boiling several clementines in their skins (go look at smitten's beautiful photos of that process, I failed to take any) for 2 or sometimes 3 hours. I saw another recipe on orangette that was very similar, but used an orange and a lemon, and only boiled them for 30 minutes... Anyway - Friday night rolled around, I was all alone in the house and feeling anxious about the clementines, so I set them to boil, and turned them off after 30 minutes. Then Jenean got home and reminded me of the 3 hours in the other recipe, so we added more water and turned the heat back on... and we went and ate dinner, and watched some tv... and we forgot about those clementines. Not till a mysterious, possibly corn-dog-type smell began to waft from the kitchen did we realize what was happening - all the water had boiled off, and the bottom of the pan of clementines was scorching. Quel horreur. We felt terrible. What a waste of what we had thought was a process to SAVE those clementines from going to waste! Dad would be so mad!

We poured in a bunch of water, and joked about burnt sugar clementine cake, and Jenean went to bed. After a little while, I thought it couldn't hurt to at least take the next step, which is to drain the boiled clementines and grind them up, skin and all, in the food processor. Weirdly, the burned bits remained large and separate, and the orange clementine-y bits ground up into a pretty, dark orange paste. I pushed it through a mesh strainer to catch out all the black burned pieces, and sheepishly put it in the fridge.

The next day I decided the Clementine cake recipe, though thrilling, was not what was called for, considering it calls for expensive things like 3 cups of blanched almonds. I wasn't wasting all those nice nuts on burned clementines. So I modified the basic muffin recipe from the Joy of Cooking (not the old one, and not the newest one... the in-between one), and by George, they came out really really good! I mean, I'm going to make these all the time type good! They have such a nice round citrus flavor, without having to grate zest, or squeeze juice, or any of that, and they're really moist. You want to make these. And so without further ado, the recipe for...

Clementine AKA Morning Sunshine Muffins!

Boil 5 clementines in their skins (after removing any stickers, stems, etc and washing), in plenty of water for 1 hour (I really think that's enough). Try not to forget about them and burn them, but no big deal if you do!

Drain, and allow them to cool.  Cut into them to check for seeds, then grind them up into a paste in the food processor. For me this yielded about 1 cup, and it had the consistency of sour cream (up to this point can happen at least a day in advance, if not a lot more).
Have a 12 cup muffin tin ready, lined with paper liners, or just grease it up. Preheat your oven to 400 degrees.

Measure out 3/4 cup of the clementine puree into a medium sized bowl and add and whisk together with:

2 eggs
1/4 cup milk
2/3 cup sugar
6 tbsp melted butter (or 4 tbsp butter and 2 tbsp oil)
1 tsp vanilla

in a large bowl meanwhile, whisk or sift together:

1 cup all purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat pastry flour (if you don't have it, just do all A-P flour, I wouldn't sub regular whole wheat flour here)
1 tbsp baking powder
1 tsp salt

Make a well in the middle of the dry ingredients, pour in the wet ones, and as the Joy of Cooking says, "mix together with a few light strokes just until the dry ingredients are moistened. Do not overmix; the batter should not be smooth." That's just so well said, I had to quote. Anyway, parcel out the batter into the cups, it should come almost to the top of the cup, when they bake the make nice domed tops. These took my oven about 21 minutes to bake... the recipe says to start checking after 12-15 minutes. You'll be able to see they're done when they're fully dry on top, even in the little cracks. Toothpick test them to make sure, and cool on wire racks.

Homemade EGGS!

Look at these little beauties:

I have two adult students who are a married couple, and they happen to live in a town north of here where keeping your own chickens is legal. They got a bunch of chicks back in November sometime, and since I go to their house for their lessons, I've been able to get updates on them weekly. They have built the chickens a beautiful heated coop, and have given them names like Henry, Joanne, Ashley and Halloween. Actually, the truth about Henry is that he is no longer with us - he was beating up on Joanne so badly that the family had to step in. After a few failed attempts, they finally succeeded in... killing him, and ate him for dinner.


But that's not what this post is about! It's about the adorable little eggs the hens are finally laying! Here is a photo of them with a regular sized supermarket egg, for scale.
Three of them made a nice serving. Their shells were surprisingly hard - much harder than supermarket egg shells. They were really delicious - creamy bright yellow yolks. We just fried them up in butter with the last of the CSA ham steak.
Also surprising is how beautiful all the chickens are - there are almost no two alike in the... herd? is that what you say with chickens? Oh, flock. Right. Some are huge and black and white with red wattles, and some are golden colored with tons of feathers around their legs, making them look like they're wearing bell bottoms. They're pretty adorable, actually. But that's not to say I'm planning to stop eating chicken. I would have eaten Henry, had I been invited to dinner that night, with all due respect to him.

Anyway, according to the family, they're getting about 6 eggs per day now, and have to brave rooster attacks to get into the coop to get them. It's really fun, I hope I can keep chickens someday. I'll try to take pictures of them next week to post here.

Granola

I've been making huge batches of granola lately which we all dip into for a quick breakfast option. There are so many different recipes out there that it really comes down to using the ingredients you enjoy the most - I mean, being in control is one of the best things about cooking at home. Plus, store bought granola tends to be so full of sugar and fat - you can control all these things when you make your own.

Generally, all granolas start with oats, have one or more nuts/seed ingredients, some dried fruit, and then something to bind everything together. Here's what I put in mine today:
- 3 cups rolled oats (not instant)
- 1 cup unsweetened coconut flakes
- 1 cup pecans
- 1/2 cup wheat germ
- 1/2 cup fruit juice (new addition, usually it is 1/4 cup brown sugar but wanted to try this today)
- 1/2 cup olive oil
- 1/2 cup maple syrup
- 1/2 cup dried cranberries (I would prefer these be cherries, but apparently I cannot read labels so cranberries it is!)

Combine oats, coconut, pecans and wheat germ in a large bowl. Over medium heat, I combined the juice and maple syrup. I thought maybe it would all thicken up and it did a little but obviously the syrup thinned down so not really sure what the net result was. Anyway! I poured the juice/syrup mixture and the olive oil over the dry ingredients and mixed to coat. Spread this mixture on a baking sheet in one even layer and pop in a 300 degree oven. Total cooking time is 40 minutes, but you will want to stir it every 10 minutes. Incorporate the cranberries only for the last 10 minutes of cooking. Allow the granola to cool on the baking sheet before storing in an airtight container.

This is great with milk, soy milk, yogurt and would also be awesome on ice cream or stuffed inside some apples for baking.

I love making this stuff because you can get really creative - some other things to add:
- sunflower seeds
- pumpkin seeds
- walnuts
- almonds
- flax seeds
- any type of dried fruit (I may make a tropical version for the summer time with dried papaya or mango to go with the coconut)
- cinnamon
- vanilla

The possibilities are endless. Go do it.