The Jam

I am in possession of something that is life changing. I have a jar of Bacon Jam. BACON JAM. Just look at those two words. It sounds intriguing and insane at the same time. It sounds impossible, but I have some. What’s more, I made it myself and now can have it any time I wish. This may be a problem.

When something new comes on the food scene, you start hearing little mentions of it on the food websites. I can’t remember exactly who mentioned it first, but I think it was on eGullet. Being a fan of all things porcine, I perked up and Googled it. It seems that Bacon Jam was the brainchild of a diner called Skillet Street Food in Seattle. Yes, Seattle. I know, it seems weird to me, too. Salmon jam? Sure. Coffee jam? Maybe. But Bacon Jam? Shouldn’t the birthplace of Bacon Jam be somewhere in Mississippi or Arkansas? Anyway, there it was. You could order an 8 oz. jar…for FOURTEEN DOLLARS!!! Plus S&H, of course. That seemed a little excessive to me. So I kind of dropped it, but it never left the back of my mind.

Recently on eGullet ‘kayb’ has been making it and using it on all kinds of things. When I whined about wanting some, she kindly posted the recipe. Then my friend (and fellow eG’er) Jerry did a food blog last week and HE made some – with accompanying pictures! That sent me right over the edge. I had to have some. We didn’t have any of our favorite Benton’s bacon, so we went to the Fresh Market and got some Nueske’s. (By the way – Benton’s bacon is astoundingly good bacon, the best we’ve ever had. We usually order multiple pounds when we get it, but they are a little slow to deliver. They’ve been featured in a lot of food magazines and websites and are seemingly overwhelmed with orders. It can take up to a month to get an order – so we run short sometimes.)

You start by frying a pound of bacon (all recipes should start with this instruction):


It should be crisp on the edges, but still soft – because you are going to be doing a LOT more with it:

Perfect.

Then you set it aside and dump in some sliced onions and brown sugar:


Cook until the magic happens:

You knew where I was going with this, didn’t you?

Then it REALLY gets good: you add garlic, allspice, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, chipotle powder (I’m a big sissy – so I used ancho chile powder) and paprika:

The smell in my kitchen at this point is amazing – a heady spicy bacon fragrance. Dogs are scratching at my back door. Neighbors are leaning out of their windows. Low flying helicopters.

Now the jamminess starts. Dump the bacon back into the onion mixture – add coffee, apple cider vinegar, bourbon (I’ve confessed before to losing my G.R.I.T.S. card due to the fact that I HATE bourbon – I used apple juice, but cider would be better), maple syrup and hot sauce:


Then it simmers – for TWO HOURS. That fragrance I mentioned? It gets STRONGER – richer and deeper. I think the air in my house actually THICKENED.

After the simmering:


At this point, I was eating it from a spoon. But to actually finish The Jam, you give it a ride in the food processor:

Bacon Jam. Mission Accomplished (for real, this time).

The Jam is best served warm. Here’s one way to serve Bacon Jam:

That’s just a Sister Shubert roll tarted up with butter, Cheddar and chives. Jerry makes these gorgeous little cheese/herb biscuit poppers to slather with The Jam, but this was a Monday night and I barely manage to brush my teeth Monday evenings. We are thinking Bacon Jam and sunny side up egg breakfast pizza. How about The Jam brushed on burgers? Or breakfast bruschetta with The Jam and tomato preserves. Or Bacon Jam caramel corn (Mr. Kim boggled at that one). The possibilities are truly endless.



If you want to try it for yourself (and if you don’t, you may need a check up), you can find the entire recipe here.

I’m so enamored, that I’m making up songs about this stuff:
Bacon Jam, Bacon Jam, I just love old Bacon Jam,
Love my Paw, Love my Mam,
But I just love old Bacon Jam.
(apologies to Roger Miller)
This, I confess is nothing new. It is, in fact, a Shook family foible. We make up songs about everything we love – dogs, cats, one another and now BACON JAM.

Recent Baking

Yes, I’m back wasting more of my time and yours. Three posts in one day. Considering that I had TWO in both March and April (and one of those was actually Mr. Kim), I’m doing pretty well. Of course, with the trip coming up, I doubt I’ll be doing much more this month, so you might want to ration yourselves.

Anyway, in spite of all my verbosity, I’ve actually accomplished quite a lot here today. I’ve sorted out most of my clothes and cosmetics and jewelry and stuff. I’ve gotten all of the Mother’s day and May birthday gifts in the mail (do you ADORE those 24 hour mailing machines at the post office? I refuse to send anything that won’t fit in them). I haven’t made dinner yet, though. Hmmm. It’s almost 9pm. Maybe I’d better check with Mr. Kim before I settle in here for a long chat. (Jeopardy music interval). Nah, he’s fine. I just turned the oven on to preheat for a frozen pizza, so we’re good.

With all of the trip preparation, I have hardly cooked a meal in the last month. I just looked back at my kitchen journal and I counted 16 meals since April 1st. That includes breakfasts and breakfast-for-dinner and cheese, cracker and fruit dinners. Yes, I keep a kitchen journal – with pictures and everything. It is on a Word document, not a book. I used to keep a book and I love the IDEA of a book filled with real handwriting and pictures and cunning little sketches, but it just got incredibly unwieldy. And honestly, as old as I feel sometimes, I am, after all, a child of my era and I just find that I compose much better typing than I do handwriting things. Not to mention the arthritis and neuropathy (I AM old).

Anyway, while I haven’t been doing much regular cooking lately I’ve been doing rather a lot of baking, for one reason or another. I thought I’d like to show these off a little, because I was really pleased with some of the results.

At the beginning of April we had my MIL, Jo, over for dinner. She is one of my very favorite people to cook for. She’s very adventurous and eats almost anything. She’s fun to cook for because I can go all out and take risks. I did a chilled curried apple soup with curry leaf rolls as a starter. Dinner was risk-free – I have a recipe from an online friend, Dianne at Cookskorner.com, for garlic shrimp. We have this shrimp all the time and adore it. Dessert was two different kinds of cookies – both new recipes to me. One success and one…well, not quite. (Click to enlarge any image).

Cooky One:



These are called “Almond Joy Cookies” and the recipe is from Deensiebat at eGullet.org. A fantastic coconut macaroon with ganache and toasted almonds. This was obviously the success.

Cookie Two:

These were something that I called “Cotton Candy Cookies” and were not so successful. They require a little explanation. I love those Lofthouse cookies that they have in grocery store bakeries. They are tender and soft and very cakey. I am also in love with Brewster’s Cotton Candy Explosion ice cream. It is cotton candy flavored with Pop Rocks mixed in. I somehow became obsessed with the idea of making a Lofthouse-type cooky with the flavor of the ice cream. A coworker makes a copycat Lofthouse cooky and gave me her recipe. I put a little cotton candy flavoring in the cooky dough and in the frosting and topped them with Pop Rocks. Then my problems began – the cookies are lovely and tender and the frosting smooth and not numbingly sweet (better, in fact, than the Lofthouse frosting). But the flavoring didn’t taste at ALL like cotton candy – just vaguely sweet and fruity. The Pop Rocks worked just fine when we tasted the cookies immediately after topping the cookies – good explosiveness. But they fairly quickly melted away to nothing. Sigh. I’m sure that Brewster’s gets some special Pop Rocks that will stand up to being wetted with the ice cream. They are much larger than the ones that I got. Oh, well. My next idea for the cookies is to incorporate toasted coconut, which I’m sure will work much better. And Kerry at Cookskorner suggested coating the Pop Rocks with cocoa butter to help them to hold up to the moisture in the frosting. So, I’ll try again.

Another Deensiebat recipe that I tried in April was this delicious coffee cake:

It is cinnamon and chocolate chip and it was fantastic. I made it one Sunday morning for breakfast and will definitely make it again. I got the layers a little messed up – there should be two even layers of cake and a middle layer of chocolate. My chocolate layer is a little low.

The next occasion to come along was a birthday for one of Mr. Kim’s coworkers. She requested an angel food cake:

I was really happy with the way this turned out. I think it was my best angel food cake effort yet.

Next was an actual JOB! Getting paid to bake is both gratifying and nerve wracking! One of the nurses at work ordered a dozen cupcakes and a layer cake for a baby shower at her church. Everything turned out well, but I was plagued with cake issues! To make things easier on myself, I made the cupcakes and the cake layers the weekend before they were needed and froze them. Then the day before I thawed them and set to frosting and decorating. She wanted yellow cupcakes with white icing and sprinkles. She wanted the cake to be chocolate with marshmallow filling and white icing decorated with the mom’s color choice – mainly bright red, orange and yellow. I used canned frosting for everything since I have yet to find a reliable, tasty frosting recipe.

For the cupcakes I used my go to yellow cake recipe that I found online – it was recommended by oli at eGullet. They worked out just fine:


The cake was a bit more problematical, not to mention ultimately exhausting. I used my Chocolate Bar Cupcake recipe – one of the easiest and best chocolate cakes I make. It was the marshmallow filling that did me in. Right after I put the layers together with the Fluff, they began to s-l- i-d-e. Marshmallow Fluff OOZES. I guess I knew this somewhere in my head, but unfortunately the knowledge came to the fore a little late. I wasted a long time trying to edge it back and driving skewers through the layers. I finally faced the fact that it just wasn’t going to work (though I decided that Fluff will make an awesome cupcake filler – so not a totally wasted experiment). Mr. Kim went off to the store for more cake makings (I forgot to mention that this particular cake recipe makes only a 2 layer cake and I wanted 3 – so to get one cake, I made this recipe FOUR times). While he was gone, I made this:

Mistake Cake. I have experience with Mistake Cake – the same thing happened to The Child’s Chocolate Turtle birthday cake in January. Dulce de leche OOZES, too. Sigh. I just sliced up the cake and smooshed it a bit and topped it with melted icing. One went to work for noshing and the rest was distributed to the neighbors.

The next cake worked much better with regular buttercream between the layers. Here is the final result:

My lettering skillz, they are not mad, but I thought the cake was really cute. I used the sprinkles in the colors that she wanted and piped the baby’s name in blue (as requested). I tried my hand at two color piping for the first time with the puffs on top of the cake and the edging at the bottom and really liked the effect. But my favorite part was the ‘poles’. I don’t really know what to call them. I wasn’t crazy about the requested colors – bright red, yellow and orange, royal blue and purple. I thought they were a little garish for a baby shower, not to mention a bit Fall-like. So I went to Lowe’s and got some paint chips in those colors and when I saw them all together, I thought ‘circus’. And somehow (who knows how my mind works) I came up with this ‘pole’ idea. They are just bright Twizzlers on skewers with Dots candies at the top and bottom. They are too long, I think, but I like them a lot and I think they add a little circus or maybe Merry Go Round feeling. A bit of whimsy, if you will.

I’ve already shown my Easter contribution in the Easter post, so we’ll skip over that. The last thing that I baked (and the last thing that I WILL bake until we get back) was for a work luncheon for one of our physical therapists who is going out on maternity leave. This was a surprise, so the mom-to-be didn’t decide the colors, I did! I got to design everything on my own and I had so much fun without that interference. No, no one has ever called me a control freak – why do you ask? I decided to make cupcakes (what else?) based on some I saw in a magazine:

Just yellow cupcakes with homemade fondant ‘bib’ decorations. This was my first time working with fondant and I really enjoyed it. It was so easy – like working with Play Doh! I had always heard about how awful fondant tastes. I thought it was a little bland, but not unpleasant. Seeing as it is only marshmallow, white chocolate, butter, cream, vanilla and 10X, how bad could it possibly taste? Also, these were very, very thin.

Some details:





I tell you, I’ve never had so many impressed people. And it was SO simple!

So that’s it, until at least June. Nobody better ask me to make so much as a piece of toast until then. Really…I hope they don’t. Because I am really BAD at saying ‘NO’. I can barely form the word.


(When I did a Google search for a ‘Hell No’ image, half the pictures were of Sarah Palin. Snort.)

The Child Can COOK!

This was The Child’s first holiday in her new digs and with our imminent trip to England, I was NOT cooking a big company meal, so when she invited us to Easter lunch, I JUMPED. I knew she was a good cook – she’s prepared various things for us in the past: a side dish, a dessert – that kind of thing. But I don’t think she’s ever given us an entire celebratory meal all of her own devising. It was a HUGE success – everything was delicious! I was amazed and proud.

Pre-dinner nibbles:

Crackers and cream cheese with pepper jelly and fig preserves (Southern classic). And:

Sweet and spicy rosemary cashews.

Dinner included a perfectly roasted chicken:

Lemon and herb stuffed with roasted heads of garlic and bacon (very English). A prime test of a cook and she really nailed it.

A gorgeous salad:

Romaine, endive, red onion, dried cranberries, candied pecans, pears and a lemon/olive oil/herb dressing.

Asparagus and corn salad w/ feta cheese:

This is her own creation and it’s the perfect spring side dish – crisp, fresh and cool.

Roast potatoes with pine nuts, bacon and Locatelli:

PERFECT roast potatoes – crisp outside and creamy inside. Again – a hard thing to accomplish and she aced it.

Pasta with two cheeses and spinach:


I contributed (by request) deviled eggs:

Is it even LEGAL to have Easter dinner without deviled eggs???

Yes, this was all for THREE people. She needs to work on amounts (but I cook that way, too – so she comes by it naturally). My babygirl can cook and she has a wonderful palate. Everything tasted wonderful, went together and was just RIGHT. It also, in some weird way validates me and my food focus. I’ve always seen myself as the ultimate ‘normal’ (read a little dull) person. Nothing special. But The Child is an extraordinary person – bright, funny, beautiful – a real individual. So if she is drawn to cooking and creating things in the kitchen, if she gets pleasure from nourishing folks, then I’m not too weird for loving the same things.

Dessert was my domain this year. I made the Easter cake:


This is a Key Lime Coconut Cheesecake. The bottom layer is cheesecake and the top layer is sponge cake – both flavored with Key lime extract. Filled with Key lime curd, whipped cream and coconut. The whole thing is frosted with whipped cream and sprinkled with coconut. We ended up taking this to Mr. Kim’s mom’s house for dessert.
Slice:

This was just delicious. Everyone said that it was one of the best things that I’d ever made.

So we had a Happy Easter – family, food and being together. My girl had a rousing success. And we were a part of it. In the midst of getting the dinner on the table, when we were all three busy doing this and that, she apologized for not having things all ready when we got there but said that it was actually fun doing it together. I chopped things (I has mad knife skillz), Mr. Kim whipped up the salad dressing and carved the chicken. We were sous and she was the executive chef. And it WAS fun – Mr. Kim and I agreed completely on that. All her life, that was exactly how I wanted our family to be and, most often, it wasn’t. I had this picture in my head of the ‘happy family’ that I wanted us to be – cooperating on projects, working together to create a meal, make a garden, paint a room. More often, we did our projects individually. I don’t really know why – perhaps it was because of expediency or lack of interest. But this day was different – we were a team, the team I’ve always wanted us to be. It was a wonderful feeling and one I’ll remember forever.

EDITED TO ADD: I forgot to post pictures of The Child's adorable table:




So, not only can she cook and write, but she's crafty, too! She may look like her Daddy, but she's got a little of me in her, too!

It’s Beginning to Smell A Lot Like Christmas!

My whole house smells like Christmas Eve!! It’s only 12:30PM here in Virginia and I’ve been cooking since 7:30. I still have my pajamas on and I doubt that I’ll get dressed today. Or out of the kitchen. Mr. Kim has been to Costco twice and Kroger once and is on his way to his mom’s to take her some tables and chairs for Thursday’s overflow guests. But that’s all ok. Because it means the holidays have started for the Shooks.

I’m filling my freezer for our big Christmas Eve bash. We have a huge crowd – approaching 50 some years and they get the whole shebang: turkey, ham, oyster stuffing, gravy, two kinds of potatoes, etc., etc., etc. I grew up going to my Aunt San’s and Pop Denson’s for Christmas Eve and I’ve continued the tradition. Family, friends, assorted Christmas orphans. All welcome.

Last week I made the orange cranberry sauce and my grandmother Bebo’s sweet potatoes. Those potatoes are as sweet as dessert with maple syrup, brown sugar, cinnamon and marshmallows – with a bourbon sugar syrup to pour over, for those who like that. I do NOT – I grew up thinking that I hated sweet potatoes. Turned out I don’t like bourbon. Yeah, I know – I gotta turn in my G.R.I.T.S. card.

This morning, I’ve made Sour Cream-Cheese potatoes for 50, Brunswick stew for Mr. Kim to take to work for a soup sale to benefit the Food Pantry and started my gravy. My turkey gravy is the only thing that I do that I truly brag about. It is fantastic. I adore gravy and started out my marriage unable to make decent gravy to save my life. Luckily, my MIL, Jo, is a wonderful cook and she gave me some really good pointers and I’ve gotten pretty good at gravy. But my turkey gravy is in another realm. Rich and dark and the essence of turkey.

First I roast turkey wings, carrots and celery – tossing them with Bell’s Seasoning, pepper and a tomato paste/olive oil slurry. All roasted and gorgeous:


Then they get covered with broth in deep stock pot and simmer for a few hours to make stock:

That’s where things stand now. I’ll use the fat to make a good, dark roux, the stock to make the gravy and then – ADD IN the shredded wing meat to heft it up. Momma says it’s more like hash than gravy and she’s right. A big slumpy spoonful over a roll and I don’t need anything else to eat!

In my plans today are still croutons, cornbread and a gingerbread layer cake with orange-cream cheese icing and orange-cranberry filling. The cake is for a cake sale for Mr. Kim’s office. It will generate more Food Panty money – we really can’t do enough for the hungry, especially at this time of year. When I have a day of plenty like this, I can’t help thinking of those who have so little.

And I THINK Mr. Kim and The Child are getting grilled chicken for dinner – I have two breasts and legs thawing, a half a bottle of BBQ sauce in the fridge and I’ve been cooking snaps and a piece of side meat on the back of the stove since early!!

Cakes, Damned Cakes!!!

I have been cooking for almost as long as I can remember. Fat kids learn early that when they are alone in the kitchen, the world is their oyster (or their Baby Ruth bar). You can go to the store and buy all kinds of things and somehow, no one ever asks why the bag of Cheetos never makes it to the table. Anyway - I've been seriously cooking for probably 30+ years. And for at least that long, I've been searching for the perfect yellow cake. I have a number of great chocolate cake recipes, a good gingerbread cake and one really killer coconut cake. But yellow cake has been my nemesis (not to mention the even more elusive perfect white cake). I eschew mixes. That is to say that I don't WANT to use them. But, back against the wall - I've gotta have a yellow cake, I have been known to resort to what I call "cake mix fix ups". The Anne Byrn school of pastry making. She's that "Cake Doctor" lady. And I'm not making fun of her, either. She's saved my buns a number of times. But I want to make cakes from scratch. I just think that they taste better. And let's face it; it's an ego thing with me - making things from scratch.

What I've been searching for all these years is a cake that tastes like homemade, but has the texture of a mix. I just love the tight crumb that is the mark of a mix cake. So over the years I've tried cake after cake. One time, I even made THREE different cake recipes over a weekend and three batches of the same icing (for testing purposes, of course) and took all three cakes into work for a taste-off. Not one of the three of those was up to snuff:


Some of the recipes that I tried over the years were OK, some horrible - so bad that you wondered how someone could have recommended them. I’m sure that all the folks at Cookskorner and eGullet are sick of me whining about this and tired of sending me recipes that just aren’t right somehow. Just recently, I got very excited about a recipe that was recommended for making your own cake mix. You mixed up a large batch of dry ingredients and cut in butter. Then you could refrigerate it (or freeze for longer storage), take it out when you were ready for cake, add the wet ingredients before baking and bake it off. You could add various things and make a chocolate cake or spice or whatever. I was enchanted with the idea of a freezer full of MY OWN CAKE MIX. I was so excited as I prepared my first batch. I was concerned that the bits of butter didn't seem to really mix into the batter. I think that they never got a chance to cream into the sugar and flour. The cake was terrible. Sodden with the texture of an EXTREMELY healthy muffin. Giant airholes surrounded by gooey (NOT in a good way) 'cake'. Blah.

I was so enamored with the idea of that freezerful of mixes that I decided to give it one more try, only this time I decided to use oil instead of butter, thinking that it would blend better. I got a better texture, but no flavor whatsoEVER. I shoulda known - if something tastes of ass with butter what's it going to taste like withOUT it? It looked fine:

But the crumb was really coarse. And the texture was very bready and sodden.

Just a couple of weeks ago I found what I thought might be ‘The One’. It was recommended at eG and the person who came up with the recipe described it as a combination of a pound cake and regular yellow layer cake. I put it together and baked it. I checked it when the timer went off and decided that it needed a few more minutes. Somehow, I got distracted and forgot to reset the timer. I definitely overbaked it. BUT I really liked the flavor and texture – it was just a little dry:


I knew this one had real possibilities. I even put it on my recipe webpage as “Go-To Basic Yellow Cake, Maybe” (real confidence, that). Then I made it again. I didn’t overbake it. And it was somehow not as good as the original one. Sigh.

Currently I am disgusted with yellow cakes and vow never to try to make one from scratch again. I say I’ll just continue to do the Anne Byrn specials. But I know myself. I’ll try that last one again, to see if I can improve it. I’ll be seduced by another ‘can’t fail’ recipe. I’ll be taken in by the siren song of the promise of my foodie friends.

On the other hand, I finally make a killer peanut butter cookie. After 25 years of tweaking.

MMMMMMMMMMMMMMM, cookies!

Saturday Breakfast

Breakfast this morning was a lamb hash recipe that I developed with help from a roast beef hash recipe in Saveur magazine. We had some leftover lamb from Mr. Kim’s last smoking project and he suggested making hash. I am really glad that he had that thought.

My mise:

Chopped lamb and potatoes.




Finely minced onion and garlic.

There was also some chopped Benton bacon, Penzey’s Lamb Seasoning (I LOVE this stuff), nutmeg, S&P, Italian parsley and those weirdo plastic wrap poached eggs.

The bacon is slowly rendered and then set aside. I sauteed the potatoes in the bacon grease until browned:

Added the onions and let them get soft and browned.

Then lamb, Penzey’s, a couple of scrapes of nutmeg and salt and pepper, to taste:

Good, huh? I’m not finished yet. I forgot to say that there is also 1/2 a cup of heavy cream. I really like gilding the lily.

Put the cream in and let it reduce and make a nice crust on the hash. Serve topped with poached eggs:


We also had CSA cantaloupe, CSA Hanover tomatoes, cherries and some good seed bread that we got at Whole Foods:


This was a Big Fork meal. So good. The lamb has such deep, rich flavor and then adding the bacon makes the taste really BIG! You can find the whole recipe at:
http://recipecircus.com/recipes/Kimberlyn/LAMB/Lamb_Hash__Eggs.html
(copy and paste - I STILL haven't figured out how to make the link icon work)