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jalapeño jelly
07 Dec 2011 21:38 EDT
If you’ve never had jalapeño jelly the concept may seem strange to you. Jelly is sweet and jalapeños are spicy and savory! But jalapeños, like all peppers, are fruits after all. Chock-full of vitamin C and sugar, too. They make a fantastic jelly with a unique and delightful flavor.
If you like your jelly very hot, leave the seeds and ribs in the peppers. If you like your jelly mild, completely remove the seeds, stems, and ribs from the peppers. Use rubber gloves unless you are a masochist. If you like your jelly somewhere in between, remove the seeds, stems, and ribs, and then add back a portion of the removed seeds.
If you like red jelly, use all ripe peppers. If you like green jelly, use all green peppers.
Ingredients
1 1/2 pt jalapeño peppers (all red or all green)
2 c apple cider vinegar
6 c granulated white sugar
6 oz liquid pectin
Supplies
5 half pint OR 3 pint Ball jars
jarring lids
jarring bands
your own standard home boiling-water canning setup
Directions
Set up your standard boiling-water canning rig. If you don’t know how to preserve, find out how (maybe from http://www.freshpreserving.com) and then come back to this page.
1 Sterilize your jars, lids, and bands.
2 In a food processor, puree the peppers in 1 cup of the vinegar.
3 In a saucepan, combine the pepper puree with the remaining 1 cup of vinegar and all 6 cups of the sugar. Bring to a boil over high heat and boil for 10 minutes. Stir often.
4 Add the pectin and boil for 1 more minute, stirring often. Skim off any foam.
5 With a ladle, carefully spoon the hot liquid into the hot jars, leaving at least 1/4 inch headspace.
6 Wipe the jar rims, place lids on jars, and screw on the bands.
7 Process for 10 minutes according to your normal procedures.
Let cool and set aside for party time or breakfast!
In my family, we like to have jalapeño jelly on top of a dab of cream cheese on a Triscuit. Peanut butter and jalapeño jelly sandwiches are also da bomb. Based on the Ball recipe at http://www.freshpreserving.com/recipe.aspx?r=247
What does Madonna have in common with the NFL?
05 Dec 2011 12:32 EDT
What does Madonna have in common with the NFL?
a) Both have been the favorite pastime of countless American men for decades
b) Multi-million-dollar paychecks for lackluster performance
c) The look of old tanned rawhide
d) Won’t admit to having any connection with Detroit
e) Is expected to disappoint us all at Superbowl XLVI
f) Nothing. Nothing at all. What the h*ll are you thinking, NFL?
Ohio Heat chili
28 Oct 2011 11:35 EDT
I constructed this slightly sizzling chili for a cook-off at work. To my great pleasure and surprise, it won! Notable for its use of Ohio-produced ingredients including peppers from the Beadles garden and Bob Evans sausage.
Ingredients (all measurements, especially the spices, are approximate).
- 1 Tbsp extra-virgin olive oil
- 1 Tbsp corn oil
- 1 large Ohio sweet onion, diced
- 1 large Ohio homegrown yellow bell pepper, diced
- 1 large Ohio homegrown hot red-ripe jalapeno pepper, minced
- 2 tbsp garlic, minced
- 1 lb ground Ohio beef chuck
- 1 lb Bob Evans Zesty Hot Roll Sausage
- 1.5 oz (1/2 tall bottle) Mexene chili powder seasoning
- 1 Tbsp dried oregano leaves
- 1 1/2 Tbsp ground cumin
- 1/2 Tbsp ground cayenne pepper
- 1 Tbsp ground black pepper
- 1/2 Tbsp dried parsley flakes
- 1/2 Tbsp Goya Adobo Con Pimiento seasoning
- 1/2 Tbsp coarsely ground sea salt
- 20 fl. oz. (2 cans) Ro-Tel original diced tomatoes & green chilis
- 20 fl. oz. (1 lg can) plain diced tomatoes
- 1/2 bottle Ohio beer, perhaps a nice Oktoberfest beer like Columbus’ Elevator Brewing‘s Munich Märzenbier or Bleeding Buckeye
- 1 dried red New Mexico chili, whole
- 1-2 Tbsp white sugar to taste
- 1 can light scarlet kidney beans, drained and rinsed
- 1 can dark scarlet kidney beans, drained and rinsed
Heat the oils in a large dutch oven or stockpot. Sautee the onion, peppers, and garlic until the onion is transparent and soft. Add the meats, crumble, and brown over medium-high heat. (Two meats are always better than one, whether it’s meatloaf, meatballs, or chili.) When the meats are just brown, add the dry spices. Continue sauteeing with the meats and veggies, until the aroma and the color of the spices change from raw to cooked. One secret to great chili is to cook the spices on dry heat, instead of adding them to the liquid later. Everything should now be a deep scarlet-red color.
Add the canned tomatoes and the beer. Beer is always a good choice for chili liquid – it’s got alcohol to help bring out flavors from the foods; it’s got liquid to moisten the chili; it’s got grains to sweeten the chili; and and it’s got hops and malt for heartiness. The alcohol will cook off long before the chili is done.
Also add the dried pepper at this time. A dried whole pepper is the bay leaf of Mexican cooking.
Simmer over medium-low heat. When the chili is fully cooked – maybe another hour or so on low heat – add some sugar to taste. You may also need to adjust the saltiness or spiciness now. For example, if the taste is a little one-dimensional, add some more cumin.
Finally add the beans and just heat through. Serve immediately — or for another secret tip — put in the fridge overnight and re-heat in the morning. It will be even better once the flavors have mingled and the spiciness has mellowed.
Serves 1-20, depending on hunger and love of chili.
Pork Loin & Cherry Serendipity
15 May 2011 19:57 EDT
Lambic beers! Their brewing takes years. They are spontaneous fermented by wild yeasts that live upon the timbers of the old brouwerijs of Brussels and the Flemish Brabant, and can be made nowhere else. The hops are aged and dried, without the familiar fresh, bitter hoppiness. Instead, the brewers add fruit – creating raspberry framboises, grape druifs, strawberry aardbeis – and then there are two fermentations. Much like champagne, the beer is first fermented in old wine casks, then bottled with fruit and there fermented once again. When they make it with the juice of sour morello cherries they name it kriek. It’s a fine drink*.
It’s said never to cook with any beer or wine you wouldn’t drink. Conversely, I’d maintain that anything you like to drink you can cook with. So I bought some Lindemans Kriek and a pork loin and set about marinating…
…and what in blazes will go with cherry lambic and pork? Cherries are sweet and tart, I reasoned, so let’s balance the flavors with some saltiness, some herbiness, some spiciness! Why not? Let’s bring together the old earthy timbers and sweet acid cherries of Belgium with the bold smoky chilis of the New World. Cuisine just means “kitchen”. Let’s cook.
Ingredients
- 2 pork tenderloins
- 2 tbsp brown sugar
- 2 tsp sea salt
- 2 tbsp ground black peppercorns
- 2 tsp crushed dried thyme
- 2 tsp cayenne pepper
- 2 dried pasilla peppers
- 4 chipotle peppers canned in adobo
- 1 medium yellow onion, sliced
- 2 – 12oz. bottle Lindemans kriek lambic
Place the pork tenderloins in a pan that can be tightly covered. Combine the sugar, salt, black pepper, thyme, and cayenne. Rub the pork deeply with the spice mixture. Place chipotles, pasillas, and onion in the pan with the pork. Pour one bottle of kriek over the pork and vegetables. Cover the pan and set in the refrigerator for 48 hours. Yes, two whole days. It’s worth it, dude. When it’s ripe, grill it like you normally would. Rest it, slice it, eat it, and drink that other bottle of kriek with it.
Peace and long life.
–
*Beer exacerbates gout. Sour cherries reduce gout. Sour cherry beer, by my theory, is therefore gout-neutral. Worth a try for my friends who suffer from the devil’s toebone.
chipotle chili
06 Mar 2011 23:06 EDT
This is so good your 1st grader will ask for two servings.
Ingredients
- 1 dried guajillo pepper, seeded and stemmed
- 1 dried ancho pepper, seeded and stemmed
- 1 large bell pepper, seeded, pithed, and diced
- 1 canned chipotle in adobo sauce, seeded and diced
- 1 large yellow onion, diced
- 1/2 Tbsp garlic, minced
- 1 Tbsp canola oil
- 1 lb ground beef
- 1 lb ground turkey
- 1 tsp black pepper
- 1/2 tsp cayenne pepper
- 1 tsp oregano
- 1 tsp cumin
- 1/2 Tbsp adobo seasoning
- sea salt
- 1 Tbsp honey <===SECRET INGREDIENT!!! DO NOT REVEAL
- 2 cans diced tomatoes with onions (blended until smooth)
- 1 can dark red kidney beans, drained.
Soak the dried peppers in water in a saucepan and boil until softened. Remove the softened peppers and blend into a paste.
In a large stock pot, sautee the bell pepper, the canned chipotle, the onion, and the garlic in oil over medium heat until the onion is translucent. Add the meats, turn up the heat to medium-high. When the meats are just brown, add the paste from the dried peppers and the dried spices. Sautee until the peppers release their aroma. Add the honey and cook for a minute or so more until the honey starts to caramelize.
Add the tomatoes. Turn down the heat and simmer for 1/2 hour at least. If you need to add more liquid just use some hot water. Add the kidney beans about 5 minutes before eating.
I live in Ohio so this is served over spaghetti and topped with cheese.
The Jennings Test
16 Feb 2011 23:16 EDT
or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Big Blue
Random observations upon the Defeat of the Humans on Jeopardy! by Watson, the wondrous electrical thinking-machine:
1. What Watson got wrong, and how it did so, is at least as interesting as what it got right.
2. At first I thought it was remarkable that Watson would be so closely competitive to the humans. Yes, it won, but it was no worse a defeat than many traditional human-on-human contests. Watson’s timing was eerily close to humans’, as well: sometimes it buzzed in first, sometimes it didn’t. How uncanny to be so closely matched. On reflection I realized that’s just a function of its development: in the past, Watson Beta must have been too slow to compete. It got better and better, but hasn’t yet gotten so good that it just skunks human players. So now’s a good time for it to be on TV – but that means all the general public sees is this snapshot.
3. In less than a decade, there’ll be thousands if not millions or billions of Watsons embedded in the world around us.
4. Watson seems to display knowledge without understanding. Some of its wrong answers, and its visible thought processes, showed it wanted to answer questions about people with a book, or questions about US cities with an obviously non-US city. If a human did this we’d say they lacked very basic understanding of the subject matter. There’s fascinating questions that follow: is this a side effect of Watson’s programming (it was built to win, not to understand)? Is understanding so fundamentally different from knowledge that we need new algorithms or devices to capture it? Or is the difference just one of degree – give it enough knowledge and understanding will emerge? Or maybe do biological creatures come about understanding in a way that silicon-based ones cannot (by what mechanism)? I imagine that places like Douglas Hofstadter’s center are pondering such things. Watson did poorly with wordplay, one of the subjects that Hofstadter has focused on throughout his career. Can a computer make a pun? Can a computer “get” a joke?
4. Speaking of Hofstadters and Gebstadters, when I was 15 and first read their seminal collaboration Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, computers were lumbering, flickering beasts that dwelt within rough metal carcasses, blind and deaf and barely tethered to the rest of us by exceeding narrow pathways of copper admitting only ponderous telegrams as communications.* Now my kid has a Droid.
Times change, and Moore’s law holds, and Watson seems more related to the science fiction of my childhood than its science. To many, it may be indistinguishable from magic.
5. Watson > Ken Jennings > the rest of us poor saps
Anyway, that’s what I thought of when I watched Jeopardy tonight. Oh, wait, no, there were a couple more:
6. If Watson has a rematch will they give it Sean Connery’s voice?
7. My version of the show is called Leopardy! Naturally, wrong questions are punished at the claws of a spotted big cat.
That’s really enough now. Unlike Watson, I need sleep.
*Could Watson parse that sentence?
about mark beadles
I write the things you read here. Polymath renaissance redneck. I build software, stories, and young men. More...on the desk
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