Inspired Saturday

Inspiration comes from many different sources, and sometimes from no particular source at all. Saturday didn't seem particularly suited to work in the kitchen but that is the way it turned out. Breakfast was a crustless egg dish baked in serving sized Lodge cast iron serving pans we found a few years back.

Serves 2
2 sticks celery
2 handfuls of spinach, chopped
2T chopped onion
1T chopped roasted red pepper
seasoning salt
4 eggs
Cheddar cheese

Saute the celery and onion.  When translucent, mix in spinach and pepper.  Divide between two Lodge mini pans.  Beat the eggs with the salt, pour over the veggies, and top with cheddar cheese. Bake 25-30 min or til the eggs pull slightly away from the sides.

Imagine this cast iron pan filled with eggs and veggies

Next up, elderberry wine. The recipe has not been finalized, but this batch dials back the fruit to just under 15# in a 3 gallon batch, and it uses 80% tartaric, 20% citric acid. Today we thawed and simmered the fruit, assembled the must, and put it in the fridge for a 3 day cold soak.  I'm going to double check the acid measurments on this one.  I was aiming for TA around 7 and pH 3.5. According to my first set of calculations, I got a TA 6.6 and pH 3.37.  The plan is to ferment this on heavy toast American oak chips starting Wednesday.

15# of elderberries

The best elderberry wine recipe I've found online, oddly, doesn't come from a winemaking site, but instead it comes from a food blog, Hunter-Angler-Gardner-Cook by Hank Shaw.  I'm not a hunter and the site is heavy on waterfowl recipes, but the site is worth some time.  Inspired by this recipe, we're making elderberry liqueur.

1 pint elderberries
1 quart vodka
1 3" x 1/4" strip of Meyer lemon rind (from the greenhouse)
1/4-1/3 cup sugar

Combine elderberries, vodka, lemon rind in a quart jar.  Leave for 1 month, shaking occasionally. Filter, then add sugar and bottle.

We were on a roll.  Next up, limoncello.  Limoncello recipes on the web vary widely in terms of the base alcohol (everything from 80 proof vodka to Everclear) and ratio of alcohol to lemons. I found some inspiration in this recipe using vanilla from an abandoned blog called That Jew Can Cook.  The website has links to some interesting YouTube videos, including one, seemingly done without any irony, on Halal street food.

10 lemons (smallish)
1 lime
1 orange
1/3 vanilla bean (I got burned by vanilla once, OK?)
80 proof vodka
Simple syrup

Combine all ingredients in a quart mason jar.  Leave for 1 month, shaking occasionally.  Filter, add simple syrup, bottle.

Our patients have over the last several days given us several butternut squash. Lunch was a delicious, creamy, flavorful butternut squash soup.  I cut the cream cheese in half.

It is the holiday season. Coming full circle means digging into the last of our frozen fruitcakes and kicking off the new batch by getting this year's fruit in the rum to macerate.  We'll be baking cakes tomorrow.

Michigan won big, so we celebrated with a marinated flat iron steak, roasted sweet potatoes, and lemon-pepper-locally-grown green beans.  The wine is 2012 Penalolen Cab.