Craftertaste Special: Tomatoes

Tomatoes. Aren't they delicious? I mean, compared to their fruit brethren I guess they're actually pretty disgusting. But as a vegetable, the tomato is king.

I prefer to eat them in their purest form: mashed up with sugar and salt in a little something we like to call "ketchup".

Every now and again though, I do eat them au naturel. In this form the tomato faces two main problems. One: its shelf life is significantly shorter than a ketchup packet. Two: it's much more difficult to spread the tomato on other delicious food stuffs (I.e. pizza, pasta, french fries) in its natural state. Especially if you're too lazy to make fresh tomato sauce for yourself (this guy [thumbs]).

My girlfriend's father has the solution. He explained to me that the tomatoes you buy in the store are garbage, chosen mostly for their ability to travel well and NOT for their flavor and texture. I concurred. Then he proceeded to tell me that we would be making jarred plum tomatoes in the traditional Italian style, using bushels of tomatoes fresh delivered from a nearby farm.

"In other words… we're making canned tomatoes? Like Hunts?" I asked. I received a look of disgust that I cannot translate into words. But if I could, it would say something like "there is something wrong with your generation."

So began my education on making Italian tomatoes. First we picked up the necessary (and deceptively heavy) equipment from a friend's basement. Then we swung by to see an older Italian gentleman who was clipping the grass, shirtless, on a riding lawnmower*. I'm not really sure if this was part of the tomato making process, but regardless he was a nice guy. Finally, we assembled the equipment alongside the previously delivered bushels of tomatoes and prepared for our day-long tomato making adventure.

If you don't have the patience to read the whole post, this cartoon should give you the highlights.

Ingredients:
6 bushels of plum tomatoes
Fresh basil leaves
About 140 1 liter mason jars
Blood
Sweat
Tears

Estimated time commitment: the entire day

Why does that cartoon look faded? I'm keeping it "rustica". That's Italian for rustic. I also messed up my usual method and this is was the only way I could save it. Just go with it!

The first stage of the tomato-ing process, I was told, consisted of unpacking the tomatoes from their crates and washing them off with a garden hose. We checked over every tomato by hand, rubbing off loose dirt and grime. A few of the tomatoes had growths and other deformities on them. These, I was told, we're perfectly usable after removing the affected portions with a paring knife. Suffice it to say that I was very generous with my knife strokes for the blighted tomatoes; mold should not be your secret ingredient!

After a good number of tomatoes had been washed, I started up the "cracking" station. I placed three very large pots on the stove and brought water in each to a boil. I then added tomatoes in batches and let them sit in the boiling water for about 10 minutes per batch before removing them with a slatted ladle. The result of their hot tub excursion is that the tomatoes begin separate from their skin, making them easier to peel in the coming step. See the cracks?

After frantically cracking as many tomatoes as possible, I ran batches of piping hot tomatoes outside to a picnic table covered with a table cloth. Here, a number of family members / friends who were convinced (read: coerced) to help out for the day proceeded to handle the piping hot tomatoes and remove the skins by hand. 

If you wait for them to cool off the skin becomes harder to remove, sooo... burning your hands on hot tomatoes it is! Which can have an effect on your disposition after six bushels.

But don't go throwing away the skins just yet! Send these through the tomato mill to squeeze every last ounce of juice and pulp out of them. If you're going to process so many plum tomatoes, you'd better make the most of it!

Next we combined the skin juice with the skinned tomatoes, mashing them up a bit by hand. Then we ladled the tomatoes into mason jars. A LOT of mason jars.

The basil leaf adds a hint of herbal goodness to each aliquot. After all of the tomato mush had been dispensed, we sealed the jars tightly with mason jar lids.

Finally, two extremely large pots were packed to the brim with the mason jars, wedged in tightly with towels to keep them from bouncing around. A hose was connected to a nearby hot water line and each pot was filled to cover the jars. Beneath the jars, huge burners were lit to bring each pot to a boil. Awesome.

But why? Heating the mason jars and allowing them to cool activates the vacuum seal on the mason jar lid. This way, you can keep your jars of fresh tomatoes on the shelf for years! Same red color, same great taste.

Close to being done, it was time to sit back, relax and listen to the soothing sound of tomatoes being boiled in extremely large pots.

We boiled the tomatoes for about 45 minutes, then killed the heat and let the pots cool overnight. The following day, we removed the cooled mason jars and arranged them artistically on the patio table. Final count brought us to over 130 jars!

I hope this batch lasts us until next year. It'll probably take that long for my hands to recover from skinning scalding hot tomatoes.

At least I got a small stash to call my own. I recently tried out some of the jarred goodness in a sauce on top of whole wheat penne. The verdict? Way better than Prego. Who knew!

Thanks to everyone who helped out for including me in a wonderful family tradition. Despite all of my complaining I can assure you that I had a great time!

Until next time, happy crafting!

*Note: Not literary exaggeration.

Fridge Magnets / Magnetic Necklace

This craft project started a little outside my wheelhouse. An old roommate and a fellow classmate invited me to make jewelry with them. Jewelry? I'm not much of a jewelry person myself, but for whatever reason on this particular day I decided to go for it. 

Maybe I thought wearing a necklace would make me seem... "edgy"? Let's not dwell on this idea too much. The fact is I decided to make a necklace.

As we were travelling to get supplies, I had a thought. Why not make a pendant necklace where the pendant portion could be swapped out for other pendants? That way, the same chain could be re-used across multiple necklaces. This was arguably a great idea, within the scope of what continued to be an overall terrible idea.

We arrived at Michaels (my happy place), and I immediately found a way to make this dream a reality: small paired magnets. By attaching one magnetic pole to the necklace chain, and one magnet of the opposite pole to each of the pendants, they could easily be pulled off and replaced on the chain. Super. I bought these, as well as some wire, a necklace chain, a clasp and other jewelry tidbits that I felt would look cool hanging from my neck. Rad.

Back at home, we assembled our jewelry while listening to some awesome tunes. For the chain, I created small loops of wire and fed them through each end of the chain. To one of these loops I added a clasp to close the chain. I then found the center of the chain (opposite the clasp) and attached one small magnet with some wire. 

I created different pendants by looping a small amount of wire through each loop stemming from a small magnet (i.e. the complementary half to the magnet already on the chain). I used the other end of the wire to wrap and hold my Michaels jewelry pieces, paired with various household items: paperclips, cork, Met pins, metal scraps, thumbtacks, guitar picks, some weird hook-like thing. You know, normal things to be seen with in public dangling from your neck.

I'll skip several steps, including saying how I would wear these every day and the inordinate amount of time I spent in front of the bathroom mirror. 

Eventually, I wore one of these pendant necklaces out to a bar with some school friends. I'm pretty sure I even wore one on an OkCupid date once. Needless to say the whole necklace thing was not well received. 

Maybe in the future they'll look back and say that I was just ahead of my time?

Until that day comes, I've found an alternative use for all of those carefully crafted pendants: fridge magnets.

Materials:
Small paired magnets
Thin wire
Jewelry tidbits
Random household items (whatever you can find that you think would be trendy!)

Necklace chain (optional)

Necklace clasp (optional)

Time commitment: 30 mins for three pendants

Estimated cost: Roughly 25$ 

I have to say, they look much better on the fridge than they do on me.

This is not to say that a magnetic necklace wouldn't look good on you! Be bold and give it a chance, knowing full well that you have a Plan B if your friends start pretending to not know you in public.

Happy Crafting!

Cinnamon Cold Brew

Coffee. The savior of mankind.

What can I say, I like my statements like I like my coffee: bold.

Aid to the weekend warrior, the late shift-er, and other people who forgo sleep for staying out late and/or getting up early. And also normal people. Coffee is great for normal people too. I'd hate to go to work on Monday morning decaffeinated, and I'm sure people would hate to go to work with decaffeinated me there as well.

With all the newfangled coffee fixings out there, you can drink your coffee almost anyway you like. Double tall skinny vanilla latte? Sure. Orange mocha frappuccino? Probably.

Myself? I'm a purist, and straight up black iced coffee is how I roll. Although after trying this recipe a few times, I'm starting to spice it up a bit.

Add a kick to your morning habit with this cinnamon cold brew iced coffee.

Ingredients:

Coffee, 12 tbsp (medium grind)

Water, 6 cups

Ice cubes

1 Cinnamon stick

Mason jars (or non-hipster liquid-worthy vessels of your choosing)

Time commitment: 15min active, 8-12hrs inactive

Estimated cost: 2.50$ (the cost of one grande iced coffee a la Starbucks. Can you say "profit margin"??)

Cold brew coffee is really easy to make. What I mean to say is, it's easy to make the poor man's version described here. Leave the fancy gadgets to the baristas!

It's best if you grind your own coffee fresh from whole beans right before you are ready to use them. But if the ground coffee you're using has been properly stored in an air-tight container, it should suffice (read: coffee snob).

Add all of the water and one cinnamon stick in a pot on the stove and boil for 3-5 minutes. Remove the pot from heat and allow the water to cool all the way back to room temperature (about 20 minutes). Your cinnamon water should be brown in color by the end.

Next, pour the cooled cinnamon water into the mason jar containing 12 tbsp of ground coffee. Stir the mixture thoroughly, and seal the mason jar with the lid (or other covering, such as wax paper and a rubber band). Allow the slurry to sit out on the counter for 8 to 12 hours. I recommend getting as close to 12 hours as possible, or else the coffee might taste a little weak. Another option is to add less water to compensate for less incubation time.

When you wake up the next morning, you have a couple options. You can take your coffee mix and pour it into your cup through a fine sieve or a coffee filter. Alternatively, you can press out the grounds in your mix using a french press, if you have one. (You can also do your cold brewing directly in the french press for an even easier time!).

If all of these things sound like way too much work for 7:00 in the morning, just try to carefully pour out your coffee, avoiding the grounds that should be resting at the bottom of the jar. Just think of the grounds that slip through as "coffee nibs".

Drop in some ice cubes, stir and enjoy. Oh yeah, and add milk and sugar to taste, if you're into that sort of thing.

Hopefully your cup of coffee tastes as smooth and cinnamon spicy as mine does. Keep in mind that your coffee can only be as good as the beans you're brewing!

Note: this cinnamon trick is a great way to enhance your tea as well. More on that in the winter. For now, bask in the lingering days of summer! With iced coffee in hand, of course.

Happy Crafting!

Craftertaste Special: Macarons with Friends

Macarons. No, not macaroons, macarons!

I have been seeing these all over New York recently. I think they've actually been there the whole time and I've just been ignoring them; I assumed that the taste couldn't match the curb appeal. But after I walked into the La Maison du Macaron on 23rd street, I realized that every minute of my life before that moment had been wasted not eating macarons.

Is it the most over-engineered cookie you've ever eaten? Or maybe a cake disguised as a small sandwich? Let's be honest: it looks like a lot like an Oreo that has let itself go.

Macarons may look and taste simply delicious, but it turns out they are fairly challenging to make (read: even I have my limits!). So for this one I had to call in re-enforcements. Enter Emily, Eva, and Jacie. And Martha Stewart. People who actually know what they're doing! Hooray!

Did I mention Martha Stewart? I did. Awesome. 

For this Craftertaste special event, we all decided to try to recreate the macaron a la Martha Stewart's recipe, which can be found here. I'll walk you through what we did, and add in a couple of tips that Emily showed us as we traipsed about in macaron land. And what would this post be without an obligatory Craftertaste cartoon??

After first whisking together the almond flour and sugar, we went ahead making the egg white "meringue" that would give our macarons their chewiness on the inside and a hard shell on the outside. Here, we just used egg whites from the carton left out on the counter for about 30 mins (to get them to room temp), substituting one serving size per egg. No yolk separation necessary! 

Beating together the egg whites, cream of tartar and superfine sugar in a stand mixer yielded "stiff peaks" that look a little something like this.

When we folded in our flour mixture into the egg white mixture, a rich and creamy batter formed that we lopped into a pastry bag. Don't have one of those? A Ziploc with a corner cut off will do the trick. Just dont forget to seal the Ziploc before you start piping!

Emily actually had a silicone macaron baking sheet (who has that??) that we piped the batter onto, with its tiny silicone rings to keep the batter in a nice uniform circle. At the end of the day though, we realized the batter that we added directly onto parchment paper came out slightly better, as these cookies were easier to remove from the sheet after baking.

Don't forget to tap the baking sheets on the counter before baking! Air bubbles son no bueno.

For the cream filling, we followed a buttercream recipe (here) supplemented with one tbsp of vanilla bean paste. I know what you're thinking, and yes, the vanilla bean paste DOES have to be from Madagascar, you heathen! (No, it doesn't). For half of the buttercream, we removed it to a separate bowl after mixing and stirred in two tbsp's of instant coffee for filling variety.

What's that you say? Buttercream soup is splattering about and desecrating your otherwise spotless kitchen? Emily has the answer.

If you read the recipe hyperlinked above, you'll realize that Martha Stewart wants you to bake your macarons by letting them sit at room temperature for 15 minutes, followed by baking them in an oven that has been pre-heated to 375 but immediately turned down (for what!) to 325 prior to putting your cookie-laden baking sheet in the oven. To many, this will seem like baking voodoo. You might as well sacrifice a stick of unsalted butter upon a tiny altar before baking them. But hey, it's hard to argue with results.

I should mention that up until this point Emily has actually done 90% of the work while the rest of us tried to look busy. However, everyone could be found constructing the macaron sandwiches at the end. Look at how much fun we're having!

I have to say, the end result turned out much better than expected. I mean, we even got the little crinkly bits coming off the edges of each cookie ("feet"). Go team!

If you're thinking of making your own macarons, save time and macaron with friends! Especially friends that like to do a lot of the work for you.

Honorable mentions: Tommy, for serving us wonderful beer throughout the process. Geoff, Jillian and Ryan, for playing Settlers of Catan.

Happy Crafting!

Chocolate Granola

Hmm... What to eat for breakfast...

Cereal? Boring.

Yogurt? Blah.

English muffin? Again?? No way.

I've got your solution in the form of crunchy, chocolatey, nutty goodness.

Feed your inner (and outer) hippie with this chocolate granola!

Ingredients:

3 cups rolled oats (quick oats)

1/2 cup of each of the following: pecans, dry roasted peanuts, shelled pistachios, cocoa almonds

1/4 cup light brown sugar

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/4 cup extra light olive oil

1/4 cup honey

1 tbsp ground cinnamon

Time commitment: 1hr 15min... But it's worth it!

Estimated cost: 15$

Yield: a LOT of granola

Preheat the oven to 250F. Chop all of the nuts to a medium-coarse chop and stir together with the rolled oats in a large bowl. Add in the brown sugar, cocoa powder and cinnamon and stir to evenly coat the nuts and oats.

In a separate bowl, mix together the honey and olive oil. They don't really come together well, but this helps to distribute them both on the granola mix at the same time. Add the mixed honey and oil to the nuts and grains and stir to coat.

Dump the coated granola mixture onto a parchment paper lined baking sheet and spread the granola around into an even layer. Into the oven it goes!

Bake the granola for 40 minutes at 250F, then bump up the temp to 300F and bake for an additional 20 minutes. Be sure to turn the granola with a spatula every 20 minutes to avoid burning it!

At this point, you're realizing that an hour is a long time. As someone who's willing to take the time to make their own granola, I have a few suggestions as to how to pass the time:

(1) Do a second round of yoga. Lots of child's pose.

(2) Backcomb your dreadlocks.

(3) Repair your torn tie-dye shirts with peace sign patches.

(4) Watch "The Best of Burning Man" on DVD.

Hopefully you enjoyed doing all of those things! I know I did (not). Remove the granola from the oven and scrape it into a large bowl to cool. How good does that smell?

Spoon your favorite yogurt into a bowl and top it off with some chocolate granola. You could even put it on top of some strawberry mousse (wink wink nudge nudge). Or just eat it by the handful; a particularly attractive idea for those without spoons. Store excess cooled granola in a Ziploc bag to preserve its crunchiness.

Going on a hike because your significant other is way more active than you are and enjoys watching you suffer? No worries! Throw some chocolate chips and dried cranberries in that same Ziploc bag and you've got yourself some mighty fine trail mix. 

It won't make the hike easier, but keeping your mouth full will stop you from complaining too much (like I do)!

Happy Crafting!

Alcohol Infusions

WARNING: If you are younger than 21 years of age, stop reading now! Alcohol is gross and uncool. In other words, it's not trending. You won't like it!

If you are older than 21 years of age, have I got a craft for you!

If you've ever been to a speakeasy (or a place masquerading as a speakeasy), you know that infused alcohols are their bread and butter. One of them probably even has bread and butter infused whiskey. 

When you read the menu, it's elderflower liquor this, apple rum that. Then they mix these fancy alcohols with some other lofty ingredients and charge you 15$. 

Thanks bartender man. I'm sure this exorbitant price helps put the wax on that handlebar moustache of yours.

The good news is that once you spend most of your hard-earned money on fancy drinks, you only need a little bit more to replicate the experience at home, Craftertaste-style.

Keep your speaking as easy as your listening with alcohol infusions!

Ingredients

Alcohol of your choosing

Infusion material (fruit, seeds, whole spices, non-toxic flowers, teas, etc.)

Mason jar

Funnel

Coffee filters

Glass bottles with air-tight caps

(See below for recipe ideas)

Does this already seem like a bad idea? I suggest hitting the bottle, and then reading onward. Inhibitions: lowered.

The idea here is simple. Let your ingredients soak in the alcohol to release any water/alcohol-soluble flavorants inside the mason jar. Then pour the entire mixture into a coffee filter lined funnel (to separate out the non-drinkable components) and into a glass bottle for storage.

The key factors controlling how strong the infused flavor presents itself in the alcohol are (1) the amount of infusion ingredient, (2) exposed surface area of the infusion ingredient, and (3) the incubation time. Striking a balance between these factors can be somewhat challenging. But once you find that balance, you'll see it was well worth the trial and error.

Here are a few recipes I came up with after drinking the failed attempts:

Orange and Ginger Vodka

- Peel from 1/2 an orange, in long strips

- 5 slices of ginger root

- 1 cup Absolut vodka

- Stir ingredients in the mason jar and incubate

- Incubation time: 30 min

Fennel and Bay Leaf Whiskey

- 3 tbsp fennel seeds

- 2 bay leaves, crushed up

- 1 cup Maker's Mark whiskey

- Stir ingredients in the mason jar and incubate

- Incubation time: 30 min

Green Tea and Black Sesame Gin

- 1 tbsp loose leaf green tea

- 1 tbsp black sesame seeds

- 1 cup Bombay Sapphire gin

- Stir ingredients in the mason jar and incubate

- Incubation time: 15 min

I would recommend NOT doing shots with your prized creations. The flavors coming out of these alcohol infusions are fairly potent, and therefore would be better served (pun intended) in a mixed drink or cocktail.

You could probably store these infusions for a week or two in the sealed glass bottles in the fridge. I usually just make them fresh before a gathering though, scaling up the recipes above to party sized portions.

Try experimenting with different alcohol and flavor combinations until you get an infused alcohol all your own. Then invite me over so we can get wasted! WOOO!

Happy crafting!