breakfast Archives • 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.

Gluten-Free Granola #1

Bob’s favorite breakfast these days is fresh fruit topped with Greek yogurt and granola. Reasonable, right? Only thing is, it’s a generous helping of all three, piled up high like a mountain. A mountain of fruit, I tease him.

So we’ve been plowing through these breakfast staples pretty quickly. Being my dad’s daughter I’m, ahem, frugal in many ways. It irks me to pay a lot for food that I can easily make at home.

Like granola. Paying $15 for one kilogram of it seems like a lot to me, especially when we plow through a bag so quickly. So I set out to make my own….

Old fashioned oatmeal, a new breakfast habit?

What does it take to change a long-held breakfast habit?

I’m not exactly sure. What I do know is that my peanut butter on whole wheat toast, my go-to breakfast for — dare I say it — years, is out the window. Maybe for good.

A crack in my breakfast habit first started last summer, when I experimented with eating grain-free in my Paleo Diet Challenge. It was an admittedly lax version of a Paleo diet (yes to nightshade vegetables and dark chocolate, and absolutely yes to wine) but I succeeded in not eating any bread or grains for a whole month….

Carrot Apple Breakfast Cake

I’m on a quest to find a quick, nutritious breakfast.

Let me qualify that a little. There’s a few other criteria it has to meet, along with being fast and good for you: It has to have some protein in it, it needs to taste good alongside my morning coffee and, ideally, it should be free of gluten.

Seems simple enough, right? Well, not really.

On the breakfast-y protein front there’s eggs, cottage (or other) cheese and yogurt. I like eggs well enough, but I don’t want to eat them every day. I do like cottage cheese, especially with fruit, but it doesn’t match very well with my coffee. And yogurt? It’s never been my favorite texture, unless copious amounts of granola are mixed into it.

Fussy, I know….

Quinoa porridge: comfort food with the power to soothe

Mom’s breathing, which had been labored for several hours, got shallower, and the space between breaths took longer. With my hand on her forearm, I watched her face and listened as her breathing slowed even more. In, out, pause. In, out, pause. Then in, out, longer pause. In, out, longer pause.

And then, just like that, she stopped breathing for good. I waited a few more seconds, but that was it. The last breath. And the end of a very long, incredibly painful journey through Alzheimer’s disease.

That was on March 29, Good Friday. And that is why you haven’t seen much going on at Ant & Anise lately. My mom, Ann, is Eve’s sister. Or was, I should say. I’m not used to the past tense with her just yet….