Category: Side Dishes


Nov
2024

New Year, New Day, New Ketchup

categories: Food, Recipe, Side Dishes

Vanessa here,

First I’d like to start by saying Happy New Year and thank you. Thank you for reading my romances. Thank you for all the notes, tweets, and emails of encouragement. Thank you for telling your friends and aunties about by stories. You gave so many smiles this past year, on days where I couldn’t lift my head. The year of Lord, Two-Thousand and Sixteen was a very difficult year for me personally, loosing two important people in my life to cancer and heart disease. These two helped shape my life. I pray their influence continues. I know the love will.

Nonetheless, 2017 is a year of new beginnings. I am taking back power this year. My first battle is on salt. Yes, salt, sodium chloride. Those little delicious crystals are in everything. Why does the good tasting bread have to have over 150 mg a slice?

I digress. My goal is to improve my health, so I have to reduce the salt. Currently, I’m on salt punishment, and I am limiting my intake to 300 mg. Sadly, that means limiting my intake of the lovelies: Cheese, Bread, Ketchup.

Ketchup, that yummy sauce of wonderfulness can have over 150 mg of salt per a tablespoon. First, I can eat more than a tablespoon of ketchup on a small portion air-fried french fries.  Secondly, why Hunts and Heinz, why?

I tried to drown my sorrows in Hunts’s salt-free ketchup. Ummm, no. Facing life with no ketchup was not an option so I decided to make my own. I did, and I am in hog heaven.

Vanessa’s Low-Salt Ketchup

1 Large can (28 oz) of no salt tomatoes, diced

1 Small bottle (187 ml) of Cabernet Sauvignon

Blend the tomatoes until smooth in a blender and add them with the cabernet into a sauce span. Simmer the two on low heat, almost boiling. Add the following:

1 Tbsp of Garlic Powder

2 Tsp of Ground Celery Seed

1 Tbsp of Ground Mustard

1 Tbsp of Balsamic Vinegar

2 Tbsp of Tomato Paste (This is the only salt of the recipe. The amount you add should be 30mg of salt.)

1/2 to 1 Jar (13.8 oz) of Pepper Jelly (This must be salt free.)

Add as much of the jelly as you want to your taste. It add a smokey sweet heat to the ketchup. Add black pepper to taste.

When the sauce has reduced by 1/3, use a stick blender and blend the sauce (the remaining 2/3) to make smooth the spices and any thickened bits of the sauce. Continue to simmer sauce for another 30 minutes. Cool the sauce then put in air tight containers. Keep in the refrigerator.

You have yummy low salt ketchup which is down to 3 mg of sodium per tablespoon. I love it. It was even great baked on trout. 

Enjoy!!!

 

Originally posted 2017-01-20 22:40:42.

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Apr
2024

Regency Cookery

categories: Cookbooks, Desserts, Food, Main Dishes, Side Dishes

English Housewifery Exemplified
In above Four Hundred and Fifty Receipts Giving Directions
for most Parts of Cookery

Elizabeth Moxon

published in 1764.

This cookbook precedes the regency by about 50 years,but I imagine many of these recipes (or “receipts” as they were called then) were still in use.

Scrolling through this cookbook on Project Gutenberg’s site, I found some interesting dishes including:

 HOW TO JUGG PIGEONS.

I wasn’t sure what ‘jugging’ meant. The dictionary has the verb, to jug, meaning stewing meat in an earthenware jug.

Take six or eight pigeons and truss them, season them with nutmeg, pepper and salt.
To make the Stuffing. Take the livers and shred them with beef-suet, bread-crumbs, parsley, sweet-marjoram, and two eggs, mix all together, then stuff your pigeons sowing (sic) them up at both ends, and put them into your jugg with the breast downwards, with half a pound of butter; stop up the jugg close with a cloth that no steam can get out, then set them in a pot of water to boil; they will take above two hours stewing; mind you keep your pot full of water, and boiling all the time; when they are enough clear from them the gravy, and take the fat clean off; put to your gravy a spoonful of cream, a little lemon-peel, an anchovy shred, a few mushrooms, and a little white wine, thicken it with a little flour and butter, then dish up your pigeons, and pour over them the sauce. Garnish the dish with mushrooms and slices of lemon.

 

This is proper for a side dish.

 

How’s this for a little deception, making a rabbit look like a partridge? The only thing is, I have no idea what they mean by cutting off a rabbit’s wings (cutting off its floppy ears?):

Kitchen Still Life with Hares, Fowl, etc. by Cornelis Jacobsz Delff
Dead Hare and Partridges c.1690 Jan Weenix

 

TO DRESS RABBETS TO LOOK LIKE MOOR-GAME.

 

Take a young rabbet, when it is cased cut off the wings and the head; leave the neck of your rabbet as long as you can; when you case it you must leave on the feet, pull off the skin, leave on the claws, so double your rabbet and skewer it like a fowl; put a skewer at the bottom through the legs and neck, and tie it with a string, it will prevent its flying open; when you dish it up make the same sauce as you would do for partridges.

Three are enough for one dish.

 

And for a little dessert:

AN APPLE PUDDING

Take half a dozen large codlins, or pippens, roast them and take out the pulp; take eight eggs, (leave out six of the whites) half a pound of fine powder sugar, beat your eggs and sugar well together, and put to them the pulp of your apples, half a pound of clarified butter, a little lemon-peel shred fine, a handful of bread crumbs or bisket (sic), four ounces of candid orange or citron, and bake it with a thin paste under it.

 

 

The recipe ends there. Perhaps a thin paste is a pastry shell?

 It would have been interesting to sample some of this fare.

 

Originally posted 2012-08-20 10:00:00.