EveJohnson, Author at Ant & Anise

Micro-Batch Blackberry-Lime Jam

I love making jam.

It triggers one of the happiest memories of my childhood, August days spent on big blackberry picking parties with the Sheens, family friends from Mom and Dad’s Alberta days. Jack Sheen and Dad went at the bushes with clippers and ladders. The seven of us kids looped our buckets into our belts for two-handed picking. And Mom and Grace provided the picnic lunch, which always included chocolate cake, “for the men,” Mom said, but I doubt they enjoyed it any more than we did.

As years went by, I kept on making jam. I’d pick enough berries for a batch or two, mash and measure them, then freeze them. When we ran out of jam, I’d pull the berries out of the freezer, and, following Mom’s lead, cook up enough for seven good sized jars.

That worked well for a long time, but it doesn’t any more. We eat less added sugar, and less bread. Last year I picked raspberries and put berries for two batches in the freezer, measured and ready to go. They’re still there.

I have, however, found a way to satisfy my jam making urges: the micro-batch.

I made the first one last summer, after arriving on Read Island with no jam, and a peach and several apricots rapidly heading towards rot. Read Island is the one place where breakfast always includes toast, which always requires jam. I pulled out the Joy of Cooking, read through the recipes and then struck out on my own.

Here’s the pattern: 2 cups of crushed fruit, 1.5 cups of sugar (much less than in a traditional batch, where the sugar is almost double the volume of the fruit) and whatever extra flavoring you might want to toss in. No pectin required and not much time. And because the quantities are so small, you have more freedom to play around with flavors.

First time around I added some chopped dried apricots that I found at the back of the cupboard. My second micro-batch jam came from two cups of strawberries that were rapidly approaching their best-before date. Two tablespoons of orange liqueur improved them immensely.

But the best jam of all has to be blackberry lime: straight up blackberry jam with lime juice and zest squeezed in when the cooking’s finished.

If, like me, you like to re-use Bonne Maman jam jars, you’ll get one full jar with some left over. Standard 1-cup canning jars should give you two full jars.

Blackberry and Lime Micro-Batch Jam

Ingredients

2 cups crushed blackberries
1 1/2 cups sugar
Zest of 1/2 lime
2 tablespoons lime juice (about 1/2 lime)

Instructions

Combine berries and sugar in a two-quart saucepan. Stir over medium heat until the sugar dissolves.
Raise the heat to high and bring the berries to a full rolling boil for one minute. You can skim the foam from the top if you like.
Reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the jam is as set as you would like it to be, about 20 minutes.
Test for jelling by dropping a teaspoon of jam on a saucer, then tipping the saucer. If the jam moves slowly, and starts to set as it runs down the saucer, it's cooked. You can also check that you spoon leaves a track on the bottom of the pan.
Remove the pan from heat, and stir in the lime juice.
Pour the jam into whatever heatproof container you've chosen.
If you're using a standard jam jar, you'll have about half a cup of jam left over for another container.
Makes about 2 cups jam.

Spinach and Gruyere Scramble

At lunch and at dinner, I’m an adventurous eater. Give me the choice, and I’ll almost always pick whatever is on offer that I haven’t had before, or haven’t had recently.

Not so at breakfast. I always want to eat exactly what I ate the day before, until suddenly I don’t. At that point, I always want to eat a different something every day.

It’s always porridge (Sunny Boy cereal and rolled oats, old style), until suddenly it’s always yogurt with berries and almonds, which continues every day until it’s always two boiled eggs and a piece of cheddar cheese.

So there’s no telling how long my current breakfast fixation will last, but I know exactly when it started: April 11, the day Al and I came home from Palm Springs, via Los Angeles.

Our step-daughter Kim, and her husband Max took us out for a good-bye breakfast at the Sweet Salt Food Shop in Toluca Lake.

“You’re going to love the Spinach and Gruyere Scramble,” Kim said. Privately I doubted that. Normally I don’t eat anything called a “scramble.” The word brings up memories I’d rather repress of weepy tofu scrambles in vegan restaurants.

But Kim knows her food, and she recommended them highly, so I took the plunge, expecting indifferent eggs rating high on the health-o-meter – spinach for breakfast! – but low on taste.

These eggs were light, puffy curds. The spinach was just wilted enough to soften it and the Gruyere added a slightly sharp, slightly salty flavor.

We got home late that night. The next morning I bought some baby spinach, and pulled out the Gruyere. Then, as any modern cook would do, I Googled, and found this short video by Chef Keith Snow of Harvest Eating: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t35G9iQ0qO4

And there was the secret revealed: for light fluffy scrambled eggs, so much expanded that two eggs are plenty, you first buzz them in a blender with a little cream. Who knew?

I followed the instructions, with a few minor deviations, and there they were: excellent scrambled eggs, a cup of spinach at breakfast, and so sustaining that you’d never miss the toast.

As months have passed, I’ve played around with them. Sometimes more spinach, sometimes with bacon. With some oranges and strawberries, a blueberry coffee cake, and excellent bacon, they were even glam enough to serve for family brunch. They’re my late breakfast, yes, but also a psychic anchor: my current champion breakfast, the breakfast to have every day until it isn’t any more.

This recipe is based Keith Snow’s video. Here’s what I changed:

• I added less salt overall, because with the salt in the cheese, it’s salty enough for my taste.

• Instead of adding the salt to the egg mixture, I ground it onto the heated olive oil in the pan, just before I added the spinach, which helps keep the spinach green.

• I used less olive oil – a tablespoon per person, instead of what looks like two or three.

Spinach and Gruyere Scrambled Eggs

Ingredients

per person:
2 large eggs
2 tablespoons cream or milk
pepper to taste
olive oil
salt
a large handful spinach
2 – 4 tablespoons grated Gruyere

Instructions

Break the eggs into your blender and add the cream and a good grind of pepper.
Heat the olive oil over medium heat in a medium fry pan.
Add a grinding of coarse salt, then add the spinach. Wilt the spinach briefly, just until it softens. Then pour in the egg mixture, and grate the cheese over the eggs.
To make big fluffy curds, stir as little as possible. Instead, wait until the eggs are partially cooked before folding them in from the sides of the pan toward the centre.

Phyllo cups: an all-purpose dessert delivery system

One of the things I love about cooking with my niece is her decisiveness. Last spring, we were making a company dinner together. I had conceived of a dessert of grilled figs in phyllo pastry, but couldn’t quite figure out how it would work.

“Got a muffin tin?” she asked.

A short while later, there they were, phyllo cups for dessert. Phyllo pastry, brushed with melted butter, sprinkled with a bit of sugar and baked….

Milk frothers, perfect mugs and the fear of loss

One of the best parts of seeing John Cleese in his Last Time to See Me Before I Die show was hearing the list of his mother’s phobias.

She had all of the common ones, including both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, plus a list of less well-known fears, of, among others, bats, raccoons, brass bands and bells.

Among many other fears, my own mother feared Thursdays – far more inconvenient than worrying about Friday the 13^th. “Thursdays are bad luck,” she said, and waited with resignation for the end of the day, to see what would go spectacularly wrong….

Cabin Cooking: from brie on sourdough to Chocolate Wiggies in nine days

I’m back from two weeks of unbroken sunshine, warm lake water, starry nights, canoeing and encounters with wild things.

Some, like the carpenter ants invading the cabin, were unwelcome. Others were magical. One day I lifted a board in the compost pit, and found a handsome garter snake, black with a yellow stripe, coiled up in rectangles with the precision of a small modernist sculpture.

On the trip in, we barged the Land Rover onto the island. On landing, our friend Jerome had an encounter with a clamp on the barge that cut a deep gouge on his right forearm.

We drove up to the cabin, found the first aid kit, cleaned the wound and put on a bandage, then unpacked the truck, made up the beds and put away everything that’s dangerous to eat if it’s not kept cold – all while trying to keep Jerome sitting down….

How I found my new favorite kitchen gadget

For the past few months I have been moving in to my new kitchen.

I had no idea it would take so long.

After all, the cupboards now rise to the ceiling. I have two stacks of small narrow drawers instead of one. There’s a pullout pantry, and deep drawers holding both baking dishes and pots and pans.

I naively expected that there would be space for everything. And then the reality of the new kitchen set in. It’s still a small kitchen. It still has limited shelf space.

If I plan to cook in harmony here, and I do, then I have to limit the things I put in it. Everything has to be considered; nothing gets a free ride. Sift, sort, put it in, remove it: it’s a meditative process with a few surprises.

Take the little wooden Thai Buddha head for example, a gift from someone who had just come back from Thailand, (John Bishop, but I don’t want to name drop). For the past few years, it has floated around between the kitchen and dining room, and never really had a home.

I was clearing the counter a few days ago and sat it up on the ledge in the corner. It snicked into place as though it had always been there: a benign kitchen spirit overseeing all that goes on.

Another surprise: because much of the cupboard space is glass-fronted, any groceries behind the glass have to be good-looking. That means space in the pullout pantry is at a premium.

In the old kitchen I could tolerate half-boxes of diverse pasta shapes. Now I look at them and think: how long has it been since I used seashells in anything? Do I really need two sizes of penne?

I don’t make pasta often, and usually prepare some variation of a long noodle, like my Baby Artichoke and Spot Prawn Pasta. So couldn’t I just cut it down to one or two slim boxes? Angel hair, spaghetti and linguine – okay, three boxes – would pretty much cover what I need.

And as I stare down the half-empty pasta boxes, I have another major puzzle.

I don’t have a good place to hang a dishtowel.

The current solution – the stove door – guarantees that whoever wants to dry their hands is going to drop water on the floor between the sink and the stove, which will turn to grime by the time dinner’s cooked.

I don’t want to add a rack to the outside of the sink cupboard. It’s a logical place, but visually disruptive.

That leaves the hooks on the back of the sink door, currently occupied by the oven mitts.

Where else could the oven mitts go?

One logical place is the narrow top drawer to the left of the stove, currently occupied by the spices, measuring cups and spoons, and the cooking implements.

I was giddy with joy on the day I realized that I could put the spatulas, flippers, and wooden spoons away out of sight in that drawer. No more jar on the counter sprouting implements, just clear space beside the stove.

If I put the oven mitts in there, it’s going to be crowded.

I opened the door and contemplated the contents. Could I pare down the spices? Move the measuring cups? Discard another implement?

That’s when my eyes lit on my current favorite kitchen gadget: the pasta-testing wooden spoon.

On the surface, it’s just a wooden spoon like any other. But this wooden spoon has a super power – like Superman’s cape, only it’s always there – a groove cut in about half an inch from the end of the handle.

Poke it into a boiling pot of spaghetti and you can pick up one strand, which will rest in the groove, ready for you to nab it, cool it and test it.

I felt a sudden rush of affection for that spoon, not dissimilar to the affection I feel about my iPhone, and I’d say for the same reason. My phone is also an address book, music player, voice recorder, notebook and camera.

In a world of proliferating objects, it collapses multiple functions into one compact space.

My wooden spoon, so much humbler, does the same thing, blending either tongs or a pasta claw, plus the best spoon for baking, into one simple piece of wood.

If only it could take pictures.