Can Jam for March: Purple Onions Caramelized For Relish and Pickled In Rings

It's time for the third installment of everyone's favorite new drama:  Tigress' Can Jam!

This month's secret ingredient has rings... and bite... and just a hint of lively royal color...

Or at least mine were colorful.

That's right, ladies and gentlemen - this month the fine folks at Small Measure chose alliums for our canning pleasure.  I was initially stoked by this choice, since Vidalia onions usually make their debut this time of year.  But two careful weeks of scanning the shelves at my favorite produce store yielded not a single Georgia sweet.  So I bought some truck farmed purple ones and got on with my life.

I wanted to pickle those bad boys.  Pickle them in a sweet brine and eat them by the dozen on spinach salads with oranges and local pecans.  But somehow I couldn't find a recipe to meet my needs.  So I gave that up and found a lovely one for caramelized onion relish (recipe linked at the end of the post).

I was especially taken by its simplicity.  Except for salt and pepper, those are all of the ingredients right there.

Since I bought too many onions I decided to make a double batch.  I should have checked that balsamic vinegar, though.  I only had half the prescribed amount.  The finished relish was perfectly edible, but I bet those extra couple of tablespoons would have really propelled it from good to delicious.

Oh, well - next time :)

And then, wonder of wonders, I found a sweet onion pickle recipe.  It was an amateur one, posted on group recipes, so I at first wondered if I could can it safely.  But the acid ratios jibed with those of Lisa Zeidrich's bread and butter cucumber pickles in The Joy of Pickling.  I even had all of the necessary spices.  So it was full speed ahead.

I crammed those jars full of onions, but I still ended up with a lot of brine in each one.  Next time I'll use a crowbar if necessary.

I have to wait a month for these to mellow, so I can't report on the flavor just yet.  But I will tell you one thing now: unless that turmeric adds a can't-be-missed flavor, I will be skipping it next time.  My fingernails are still yellow.

Why, hello, Gretchen....

Recipe Links

Caramelized Red Onion Relish from The Complete Book of Small Batch Preserving by Ellie Topp and Margaret Howard.  I found it featured on the Wood Ridge blog, which is great reading for anyone who's interested in sustainable living or homesteading.

Crunchy Pickled Red Onion Rings from Group Recipes, posted by the lovely and talented auntybea.

Plotting

Yes, last weekend in Tampa was a glorious time of kickin' back:

But since then I've slowly gotten myself back into the groove.

However, that groove has a few kinks in it.  The biggest one is that I'm going to be changing things up around here next month.  I'm starting a new companion blog to this one, and the focus here in Recluseville will change a little as a result.  I'm still working out the details, but I'm planning to launch the new blog and the redirected Housewife during the first week of April.

I'll be checking in as the month progresses, especially since the March Can Jam is next week. But there's no theme for this month, unless you count upheaval as a fitting subject.

Don't have too much fun while I'm preoccupied :)  See you at full strength in a couple of weeks.

- K.

Other People's Recipes: February Roundup

First and foremost, I should address the distinct lack of bread experiments last week. I did try to make the pumpernickle bread I was scheming at the beginning of the month, but my main ingredient turned out to be dud. So that went down to the tubes. I also had some awesome stuff from the King Arthur website that I was dying to try, but I didn't get around to them. Judge me if you will, but Red just came home from a six-week trip on Wednesday, and housecleaning and hubby time trumped kitchen experimentation. A girl does what a girl has to do in such cases.

Anyhoo, I did do some other kinds of cooking. And to prove it, here's my list of tried and true professionally generated recipes from this month:

Black Bean Soup from Smitten Kitchen
Deliciously easy. Did you know you could cook beans in the slow cooker in three hours, with no presoaking? Neither did I, but it's true. I didn't make the toasted cumin crema - too lazy - but a little plain sour cream gave the soup a little richness. Highly recommended.

Palak Daal from 101 Cookbooks
Creamy and exotically vegan. This stuff makes enough for a small army, even after you half the recipe, so cook it for a crowd or get ready for way too many leftovers. Recommended.

Lori's Smashed Potatoes from 101 Cookbooks
This was fun - if you've never smashed a red bliss potato with the bottom of a two-cup Pyrex measuring cup, I must say that you're missing out on a lot in life. These were fast and simple, and they made a nice side dish to the following recipe. Highly recommended.

Choucroute Garni a la Polonaise from Culinaria Eugenia
As the folks at the old Hezbollah Tofu could concurr, there is something so incredibly satisfying about veg*nizing an Anthony Bourdain recipe. After I eighty-sixed all the meats (and replaced the plain boiled potatoes with the above recipe), I seasoned things up with a bit of smoked salt and paprika and added a few handfuls of white beans. I may post my entire variation after I try it again. If you like sauerkraut, this is highly recommended.

*******

On a personal note, I may not be back to blogging until sometime next week. I have a milestone birthday this weekend (rhymes with "The Pig Free No") and I'm dragging Red to Tampa in celebration. I won't even pretend that I'm going to do anything productive during this time.

So I'll most likely see you guys in seven days or so. Until then - if you live in the Southern U.S. - get outside and enjoy this fantastic weather.


If you want to take a walk, Gretchen's game.

Until later :)