Baklava

For Labor Day weekend, Chris, Neil and I went for a lovely hike in Ansel Adams Wilderness. As that's in the Sierra Nevadas and we live around SF Bay, we had to go across the Central Valley. And my, even growing up in farmland in the Midwest doesn't prepare you for the farms of Central Valley. Fields and orchards and orchards and fields! So vastly many different crops that you'd never expect to be able to grow right next to each other!

Among other things, we picked up a bag full of roasted pistachios. Seeing as it's been so long since I've had baklava, I knew just what to do with my largess of pistachios, too. After sifting through a few recipes, I found the perfect one for me. I got the oranges fresh from my orange tree, shelled all those pistachios (a bit of an undertaking, best done a cup at a time or with more than one person), and set to. It was heavenly!

Pistachio Baklava with Orange-Cardamom Syrup
adapted from Molly Wizenburg via Bon Appétit

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups plus 1/4 cup sugar, divided
1 1/4 cups fresh orange juice
1 to 1 1/2 teaspoons ground cardamom
12 ounces shelled pistachios, toasted (scant 3 cups)
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter, melted
30-40 13x9-inch sheets phyllo dough (2/3 pound, give or take)

1. If your pistachios aren't already roasted and shelled, it will likely take you about 3 hours to do both

2. Chop your toasted and shelled pistachios until you like the texture (for me, it's rather fine, but some people like a larger nut to bite into in their baklava)

3. Mix the nuts with 1/4 cup sugar and the cinnamon

4. Preheat the oven to 350°F

5. Melt the butter a half stick at a time during this next step, otherwise the last of it will end up quite milky (alternatively, use ghee)

6. Lay out the phyllo dough according to the instructions on the box (usually this entails laying it out flat and covering it with a damp cloth inbetween pulling off sheets) and trim if necessary (I don't as I like a little extra phyllo up the sides of my pan)

7. Butter the bottom of a 13x9-inch baking pan and layer the phyllo dough in, buttering each (or every other) sheet until you have 8 to 14 layers

8. Spread out one half of the nut mixture, then repeat layering in phyllo (be very gentle with the first layer above the nuts as it's easy to poke through)

9. Repeat step 8

10. As you can't cut phyllo after it's baked without crushing it, you'll cut the triangles now, leaving a thin layer on bottom uncut

11. Bake for 1 hour or until golden brown

12. During the latter half hour while the baklava bakes, you'll make the syrup. Bring the juice, 1 1/4 cups sugar and cardamom to a boil and reduce to 1 1/2 cups total liquid (if you add much more than that to the baklava, it will be soggy)

13. Once you pull the baklava from the oven, you'll pour the syrup over it (it will bubble a lot!), then let the baklava cool

Store baklava at room temperature at least overnight so that it can finish soaking up all the syrup. Then put it in an air-tight container and store either at room temperature (can last at least a week I'm told, though mine has never made it that long) or in the fridge.

Strawberry and Rhubarb in Many Ways

Oh goodness! Strawberries! Strawberries! Strawberries! We picked nine quarts of strawberries on Wednesday. Nine! And thus there was Strawberry Rhubarb Pie, Strawberry Rhubarb Jam, Rhubarb Jam (well, sort of, it was supposed to be butter, but the rhubarb was too fresh for butter making--but the week old rhubarb was perfect for that application), Strawberry Jam, and for good measure some Orange Rhubarb Butter with fruit in the fridge that hadn't been eaten before we picked. And we have at least five cups of strawberries frozen. Oh, and might I say, the food processor that Chris's mother has was key in making this go quickly.

So let's get right to the onslaught of recipes.

Strawberry Rhubarb Jam

Yields: 6 to 6-1/2 cups

2 cups thinly sliced rhubarb (~6 stalks)
2 cups thinly sliced strawberries
(optional) 1/4 cup lemon juice
5-1/2 cups of sugar
1 box pectin

General jamming directions apply (and will follow).

Strawberry Jam

Yields: 8 cups

5 cups thinly sliced strawberries
7 cups sugar
1 box pectin

General jamming directions apply (and will follow).

Rhubarb Jam/Butter

Yields: 3 cups for jam, 2 cups for butter

4 cups thinly sliced rhubarb
2 cups sugar

For this recipe, you mix the sugar into the rhubarb and macerate overnight in the fridge.

Dump it all in the pot, bring to a full rolling boil for at least one minute (until it reaches the jamming point [222°F]) or, if doing a butter, until it reaches an appropriate consistency.

Then you jar as normal.

What makes this a jam versus a butter is the variety and freshness of the rhubarb. For instance, the rhubarb that I had picked only the day before (processed that same day, macerated overnight, and did up) turned into a jam.  The same variety of rhubarb, picked the week before (and buried in the fridge) turned into butter.

Orange Rhubarb Butter

Yields: 1 cup
Adapted from FoodinJars

2 cups thinly sliced rhubarb
1/2 cup sugar
1 cup (fresh-squeezed) orange juice

Mix everything together, bring to a simmer, and let butter. Or, if you're impatient and like a darker butter, turn up the heat and stir constantly 'til it reduces into a butter. This is particularly pretty if the rhubarb is more red than green or if you have some honey tangerines to squeeze in there (if you didn't know, these are nearly fluorescent orange).

And, of course, jar as normal.

General Jamming Directions

1. Wash and rinse the jars, rings and lids

2. Place the jars and accessories into your water bath canner (aka, a really big pot), make sure the water comes to about 1 inch above the top of the jars and bring the pot to a boil

3. While that is coming to a boil, measure the fruit into your jamming pot (I use a 1.5 or a 2 gallon pot) and your sugar into a separate bowl

4. Stir the pectin into the fruit

5. Bring the fruit to a full rolling boil, stirring constantly

6. Dump the sugar into the boiling fruit all at once and stir quickly until it is all incorporated

7. Bring back to a rolling boil, stirring constantly, and hold it there for one full minute

8. Pull off the heat, and take a spoon to skim the foam off the top (to eat with ice cream later)

9. Pull the jars from the boiling water, pour the hot jam into them, cap tightly, and place back into the boiling water canner (be careful not to overflow it if you poured the water from the jars back into the pot like I do) for 10 minutes (assuming you're using half-pint or pint-sized jars)

10. After that, pull them out onto a towel covered counter and leave them alone for 24 hours

Orange Marmalade

Oh, oh, oh! I almost forgot. We eventually got some temple oranges instead of the navel oranges (which apparently the one company was out of stock, but never felt the need to tell anybody on our end...but the new company that Chris's mum ordered from--The Orange Shop--is grand). Anyway, we ate the vast majority of the oranges, but the last five I turned into a bit of marm...or, well, orange jelly with orange zest might be more accurate...but anyway, it was with the following recipe:

juice of five orange (1 1/2 c)
minced zest (I minced 3 or 4 of the oranges, but ended up using less--just eyeball it, whatever looks like enough)
1 c sugar
part of a pack of pectin (1/2 - 3/4)

The marm turned out deliciously, if a bit zingy. The set was loose, which I don't mind, and the recipe is a bit iffy, but the result stands for itself. Next time, though, I might try something more like everyone else's marm recipes--that is, cut the juice with water (I could also use more zest in this case, I suppose), and simply cut the fruit up instead of juicing it. Oh, and they suggest using more sugar, which I know would improve the set, but I think the sugar to acid ratio with this recipe is just so grand, it would be hard to justify. Maybe I could up it a titch, but we'll see. That's all the way 'til next December or January anyway.