Mirabelle chutney recipe

Here's how I made a mirabelle chutney. I started by investigating recipies for plum and mango chutneys, and adjusted them to our taste.

3 shalotts, finely chopped
1 Tbsp. of olive oil
1 Tbsp. of ginger, minced
1 garlic clove, minced
1 Tbsp. black mustard seeds
1 cup of water
seeds from 7 cardamom pods, ground in mortar
1/2 Tbsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 Tbsp. red chili flakes
1 cup of raisins
1.5 cups of sugar
6 cups of mirabelle puree, prepared as described here (Probably about 4-5 lbs of fresh unpitted fruit?)
apple cider vinegar (optional)

In a big pot, brown the shallotts in the olive oil, then add ginger and garlic, and brown those a little bit. Add the water, remaining spices, and raisins, and boil for 5-10 minutes. Add the sugar and mirabelle puree and bring to a boil.

Adjust the flavor to your taste with more spices, sugar, raisins, or fruit puree. This mix is already quite tart, but you can add some vinegar if you like. Let the mixture boil on a small flame to thicken it (about 45 min), stirring often so it doesn't burn. Fill the hot chutney into sterilized hot jars, just like any jam. Wash your dishes and clean off any spilled chutney before it has had time to dry. Keep the jars in the fridge after opening.

     Christian

Mirabelle cake recipe

As promised, here's the recipe for mirabelle cake. While the mirabelle claffoutie is richer in eggs and less fluffy, this recipe is aiming for something more similar to Austrian "Marillenkuchen" (apricot cake). You can probably use this dough for many other fruit cakes (plums, cherries, ...) - in fact, I adapted it from a recipe for rhubarb cake.

Wash, half and pit the mirabelles. Determine the amount you'll need beforehand by putting the whole fruits close to each other on the baking dish you're going to use. The mirabelles should cover about 60% of the surface in a single layer. The dough is going to rise a bit, so a deeper dish is preferred. I use a 13x9x2 inch pyrex glass dish for this recipe.

Add the following ingredients to a mixing bowl, mixing thoroughly when indicated:

7 Tbsp. of melted unsalted butter
1 cup of sugar

     - mix -
4 eggs

     - mix -
1 tsp. of lemon zest (preferably from untreated lemons)

1 tsp. of vanilla sugar or extract

seeds from 3 cardamom pods, finely ground in a mortar

    - mix -
1 cup of flour

1 tsp baking powder

pinch of salt

     - mix -
2/3 cup more flour

     - mix -

Grease your baking dish with butter, and pour the dough into it. Preheat your oven to 375 F. Put your halved mirabelles on top of the dough, skin-side down, as close to each other as possible. No need to push them down. Bake in the oven for 30-40 minutes. The cake is ready when the top is turning golden, and a clean toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean, without dough sticking to it. If this recipe turns out not sweet enough for your taste, you can cover the cake with some powdered sugar. If you like it more tart, use a bigger dish or less dough to adjust the cake/fruit ratio.

Enjoy, Christian

Fiesta Prawns! In a Garlic-White Wine-Butter Sauce

We've been trying to cut back a little on going out to eat (San Mateo has so many awesome restaurants such a short walk from us that it's always tempting... some people call it "Date Night" but we call it "Tuesday"...) But the reality is that we like artisan cocktails, so throw in a few of those with your meal, and it adds up quickly. I thought about it and realized that since we're both well-versed in the kitchen, we could easily splurge a little on raw ingredients, invest in some premium liquor (we have one heck of a homemade infused liquor stash already, maybe another post...) - and we can have a restaurant-quality meal at a fraction of the price, complete with al fresco dining in our backyard if we choose.

So I tried to ignore the voices in my head screaming "Sushi!" (which is better than what they're usually screaming...) Fri night as I made my way home from sweltering Palo Alto, and instead thought about the prawns stashed in our freezer. Shrimp/prawns are awesome because they're delicious and you can get a gourmet-style meal that's fast - shrimp cook in ~5 minutes, pretty amazing! Christian suggested using up our CSA haul this week (squash, red onions, garlic, sweet peppers) and we were off!

Somehow we ended up with 12 heads of CSA garlic. We used an entire head in this dish. Peeling was kind of a pain, but I love garlic so it was worth it. (Note to self: learn those clever hints to peel garlic faster - this was actually the most time-consuming part). 

I <3 alliums. Most of this is from our CSA (the rest of our CSA garlic wouldn't fit!)

Cooking this was simple. You could almost certainly do this faster, but I was trying to coordinate the cooking of all these vegetables without overcooking anything so they still remained slightly crispy, so I used lower heat than I usually do (working on my patience here!) which actually worked exceedingly well.

Started with chopping a whole head of garlic and heating it on very low heat in as much oil as I planned on using for the whole dish. I wouldn't even call this "sauteeing" - more like a very gentle heating, allowing the garlic to perfume the olive oil. I think I got this from Mark Bittman. You don't want the garlic to really turn brown at all here, really just perfume everything. This was probably ~10 minutes - during which I chopped everything else, and make sure to keep an eye on it/stir occasionally.

Chopped all the squash/sweet peppers we had. Christian chopped the red onion, added it to the garlic after probably about ~10 minutes, kept the heat on very low. This worked well in the final dish, since the onion was still a little crispy. After a while, threw in the sweet peppers as I worked on peeling the prawns.

Fiesta!

Got distracted and added the squash later than I meant - oops! Would have sped things up a bit. You really want to keep the squash a little crispy here - which is why I was delaying adding them initially - so be mindful to not overcook. Turned up the heat though as we really had a pile of veggies at this point.

Last summer we had a ball slow-roasting tomatoes from the farmers' market (these are amazing!) - we would buy pounds of them, slow-roast them (another post on these to follow?), and use them in all sorts of recipes. The flavor really develops in an amazing way. Faced with the end of the summer, we froze a lot of slow-roasted tomatoes so we could continue to have a taste of summer whenever we wanted. We threw in a healthy dose of them here too.

Tray of slow-roasted tomatoes from last summer

So while the squash seem nowhere near done, throw in the prawns. Added some butter for flavor (~2 tbsp?) and a healthy dose of white wine too (1 cup?) Shrimp cook quickly, so be careful not to overcook them, but also make sure the wine boils down.

The HerbMaster (Christian) chose the herbs to accompany this - tarragon and parsley fresh from our garden.

HerbMaster with his lemon verbena harvest last year

Completed dish:

And dinner is served!

This made an awful lot of food (I love leftovers!), was definitely restaurant-quality (and restaurant shrimp seems to be ~$20/plate, so...), and was the perfect summery gourmet fare for a nice Fri night dinner. :) Really, how can you go wrong with prawns in a garlic-white wine-butter sauce, with CSA veggies and herbs from your garden? You could sub in any veggies you have on hand here. Delicious and easy!

 Veena

The first Aperol Spritzers of the season!

I love summer so much - nothing like hanging out in the sun! I was introduced to Spritzers when we went to Austria two years ago; they are very popular summer drinks there. Spritzers are basically white wine, sparkling water, and some kind of other apertif/flavoring - for instance, Aperol, an orange-y herbal-y apertif similar to Campari. We then proceeded to spritz our way through Austria.

This was at Christian's former university in Vienna.

Hanging out by the Danube:

And about an hour after our engagement, of course we had to celebrate with Aperol Spritzers when we got down from the top of the Alps:

Anyway, today was such a gorgeous summer afternoon that of course we had to break out the Aperol for a spritzer! The classic uses Grüner Veltliner, but barring that, we decided to experiment with a sauvignon blanc from Washington State because Christian thought it might have the right characteristics for a spritzer. Add Aperol to taste, and some sparkling water.

Throw in an authentic Austrian and you're good to go.

Whenever someone asks me what my hobbies are, I'm tempted to say "Hanging out!" Because really, what's better than hanging out with a cocktail in the summertime?

 Veena

What to do with mirabelles

We love mirabelles. They are a type of yellow plum, that is very delicious. Like other stone fruit, mirabelles are mild in flavor when fresh, and more tart when cooked. Our neighbor has a mirabelle tree with a few branches hanging into our backyard, and just from those we get quite a harvest every year.

Mirabelle tree in spring...

... and in summer. Here, most of the fruits have already fallen down.

There's two problems with mirabelles: 1) they all ripen within a few days, and 2) once ripe, they don't keep very well (which is probably why you usually don't see them in stores). So you'll get a lot of them at once, and then you'll have to act quickly before they go bad. Once they are ripe, they fall easily off the tree (shaking the branches also helps). This year we put out a plastic tarp under the branches, and that made things a lot easier. Here are a few things you can do with them (besides just eating them raw, which also works really well).

Wash and halve them, and take out the pits. With that, you can make:

• Mirabelle cake: recipe will follow.

• Mirabelle clafoutis: try for example this recipe. 

• Store them in the freezer: Place the pitted fruits in a thin layer in a ziplock bag and freeze them, for more cake throughout the year.

Pitting is a lot of work - here's an alternative, if you are going to make something jam-like anyway: Wash the mirabelles, throw them in a big pot with some of water (about one cup), and slowly heat them to boiling, stirring constantly. Careful that they don't burn. If they do: don't scratch the bottom, or you'll end up with tiny black flakes everywhere. Once everything is boiled soft, let it cool a bit. Mush the remaining intact fruits with a potato masher or something similar. Then scoop the mixture into a big-holed colander/wide-mesh strainer that is placed above another pot, to filter off the stones. Use something as wide as possible, it really just has to hold back the stones. Otherwise it will take too long. I used our plastic pasta colander. You might have to stir the mixture inside the colander to get the puree through. With this fruit puree you can make:

• Mirabelle jam: Add sugar to taste (probably about 2:1 puree to sugar), boil it to thicken it down (don't forget to stir), and fill into sterilized glasses while hot. There's no need to add pectin, as it's already pretty thick. There's lots of more detailed recipes out there.

• Mirabelle chutney: recipe will follow.

• Mirabelle ice cream: mix 4 cups of the above puree, 1 pint of heavy whipping cream, and 1.5 cups of sugar together in the blender. Cool the mixture in the fridge, then pour it into your ice cream maker and follow the manufacturer's instructions. This gives a soft, very intense and refreshingly tart, delicious ice cream. Use less purree/more sugar to make it milder/sweeter.

• Store it in the freezer: pour the puree into ice cube trays, freeze, and fill frozen cubes into a plastic bag. Make more ice cream at a later point, or experiment with it in cocktails.

Speaking of alcohol - you can make infusions by soaking mirabelles (washed, whole) for a couple of weeks or months in wodka, rum, or gin. This method also brings out the tartness of the fruits, so sweeten it by adding sugar afterwards.

Lastly, you can make compote, either with pitted or unpitted mirabelles, water and sugar (quantities are really up to, depending on how liquidy or sweet you like it), which you boil in a pot until the fruits are soft. Keep it in the fridge for a few days, or fill it into sterilized jars while still hot.

     Christian

Testing our new Dutch oven, with a Bahamian Chicken recipe

Yesterday I decided to try out our new Dutch oven! We bought it together with a recipe book called "Glorious One Pot Meals", which introduces a method called "infusion cooking". Basically, meat and vegetables are layered in a Dutch oven, which is then closed and heated in the oven at high temperatures for a relatively short time (usually 45 min at 450 F). It uses only small amounts of liquid and thus resembles more steaming than making a stew.

I used the recipe for "Bahamian chicken" (somebody else posted it here), for which we had most ingredients ready. I substituted cherry tomatoes and kale for the bell peppers, because that's what we had and needed to cook. We decided to use about four times the amount of listed ingredients (the linked recipe above uses twice as much as what's in the book), which filled our 6 quarts Dutch oven basically to the rim. Since we noticed halfway through that we did not have quite enough oranges & vinegar for this batch, we just added some lemon juice and mirabelle jam instead. That's also sour and fruity, and worked just fine. Cooking took considerably longer with this amount (about 1 hrs 15 min), until the potatoes were done (next time I will cut them smaller).

Everything came out nicely - the meat was cooked thoroughly and really infused with the seasoning, while the squash and broccholi were still firm. It tastes very light, thanks to the low amount of oil that is required.

I was at first sceptical whether this method is going to be any different from our slow cooker, or our much lighter metal roasting pan, but it actually is! We'll definitely experiment with it some more.

Downsides: The full cast iron pot is heavy, even heavier than the slow cooker. And other  than with the latter one, you have to actually move it while it's really hot. Maybe we'll get a smaller pot for smaller portions.

Important observation: Not only will the lid, including the handle, be hot when you take the whole thing out of the oven (at which time you'll probably be wearing oven mittens anyway), but also when you have taken out your portion and want to close the pot again (no, I didn't get any blisters, but close...).

     Christian

Hello World!

Hello! After months of debating, we've decided to bite the bullet and start our food blog! Our kitchen experiments, cocktail alchemy, grilling endeavors, etc got to the point where we wanted to have a place to document our experiments - a lab notebook, if you will. So this is mostly a reference for us, but we decided to publish this too, especially for our friends who always ask for the recipes. :)

About us:

We're a married couple and both science Ph.D.s - a synthetic chemist turned computational chemist, and a biochemist turned computational chemist. And yes, we met in the lab. (Insert joke about physical chemistry here!) In the kitchen is where we get out all that pent-up chemistry experimentalism that isn't satisfied by sitting in front of the computer all day. Plus, let's face it, we all have to eat. Both of us are California transplants - one of us from Austria, one of us from the East Coast - but it's rubbed off on both of us, and we are big into organic this and carbon footprint that. (We don't have a car - I like to tell people that we believe in a small carbon footprint and public transportation, which is most of it, but part of it is sheer convenience, aka laziness.) We've got a pretty awesome organic vegetable garden - which is 95% Christian's doing to date. Like many things, Veena was like "Hey, it would be awesome if..." but Christian's actually the one who managed to execute this in a pretty spectacular fashion. :) We also belong to a CSA - keeping up with a weekly CSA vegetable delivery has changed our diet pretty dramatically! We've been really happy with Farm Fresh To You (yes, we accept referral credits :)

Due to health issues (I'm lucky enough to have both reactive hypoglycemia *and* lupus - no matter what House says, sometimes it actually is lupus...) - good nutrition is very important to both of us. We're not vegetarians (I just can't fathom giving up lamb and sushi, Christian can't fathom giving up... well, meat) but we eat tons and tons of vegetables. Pretty much everything we've ever read speaks to the importance of vegetables for good health - and videos on autoimmune disease like Fat, Sick, and Nearly Dead and Dr. Terry Wahls' TED talk on her struggle with multiple sclerosis, along with countless other sources, have really been an inspiration: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc (It's long but very worth it, and the end is even more spectacular than the beginning) I think there are amazing health benefits to be gained by getting back to nutritional basics, at least within reason. I aim for at least ~80% adherence to healthy eating, and don't extremely about the remainder, in order to keep myself happy and sane (life is hard enough as it is!)  In general though, I am pretty strict about my low-carb diet. I tend to get sick (reactive hypoglycemia) if I exceed ~25 gm of carbs at one serving, so we tend to eat quinoa and other low glycemic index carbohydrates, and I've been eating mostly sugar-free for six years now. (Good thing I don't have much of a sweet tooth - but if I really want to try something, I try it. Especially if we've made it. Trying is usually different than eating, if that makes sense.) Christian being Austrian though misses his potatoes/pasta/etc, and we currently have a backlog of CSA potatoes, so we've definitely been experimenting. I'm passionate about health - not only do I work on biomedical research for a living, but many of my hobbies revolve around reading/thinking/working on various aspects of it as well.

A couple who's fanatical about personal privacy starting a public blog together - this should be interesting, let's see if it actually works! Welcome to our journey! :)

PS - Background photo by Christian - water drops on his garden kale. :)