Preservation Link Roundup 3/7/10

Fellow Master Food Preserver Delilah Snell will be giving a 1-hour lecture on food preservation at the Spring Garden Show at the South Coast Plaza (Ed Begley and....Delilah Snell ????). Set your calendars for Friday, April 23rd from 2:30pm-3:30pm.

Hungry Passport is a blog dedicated to travel and good food. It is written by a tour professional who, as you might imagine, gets around quite a bit. Recently, she was in Alsace Los Angeles enjoying a rustic French meal at Café des Artistes (Week 25 - Rustic French).

I noted throughout the evening that our meal looked like a study of food preservation methods. Since it was late wintertime, this meal reflected what we'd be eating when we're relying on our reserves of food and awaiting the return of springtime and a new growing season.

Pickles, marmalades, confits, rillettes, pâté and, of course, cheese. What would French cuisine be without food preservation?

Chiot's Run has a good post on using canning jars for freezing (Using Canning Jars in the Freezer). Plenty of good tips:

You may worry about freezing in glass because of the possibility of breakage, but there are a few things you can do to minimize this chance. Do not fill jars all the way, most wide-mouth canning jars have a “freeze fill line” marked on the side of the jar. Using smaller jars also helps, with less liquid you don’t have to worry as much about expansion and the possibility of breaking the jar. The larger the jar the more expansion room you’ll need to allow. I freeze in jars often and have only had a broken jar once, it was my fault for filling it too full and not allowing enough expansion room. (another note, make sure the stock or veggies are cold before putting into freezer)

The "freeze fill line" he is referring to is actually the 1-inch headspace line - good for freezing and most pressure canning.

Hitchhiking to Heaven makes a conserve with dried fruit, Clementine syrup and red wine (Red Wine and Clementine Stewed Apricots and Prunes). What a number of flavors going on; it sounds truly delicious. Conserves just don't get the respect they should.

What do I do with partial bottles of red wine? I pour them into my red wine vinegar jar. What does preservation guru Eugenia Bone do? As she explains on Well Preserved, the Blog, she makes a reduction sauce (Red Wine Reduction Sauce). This can be a sort of secret ingredient that you can take in many different directions and use with all sorts of different dishes. Bone uses it with duck breast, but add some sautéed mushrooms and you've got something that will go well with beef. Add some cherries and suddenly you've got a sauce for pork loin. Stir it into stews, or add it to a tomato sauce for pasta. Your imagination is the only limit.

Earlier in the week I hosted a birthday dinner party for my girlfriend's sister. She had requested a Red Velvet Cake for dessert. Traditionally, Red Velvet Cake is served with cream cheese frosting. I have to be different, of course, so I used a standard buttercream frosting (with ganache between the two layers of cake) and put the cream cheese into the ice cream, instead. Tonight, I had some leftover cherry pie filling from a pastry I made in the morning. Just a little over the cream cheese ice cream was sort of like a frozen cheesecake with cherry topping. Go light on the cherry pie filling, though. Its flavor can overwhelm the ice cream, which has a more delicate cream cheese flavor than a real cheesecake.

When a recipe for a preserve says that it is good on ice cream ... it doesn't mean it has to be a common ice cream.