Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Call it "Recipe Wednesday"

I have to start this post with an announcement and slight digression:

I ate a piece of candied ginger today, and enjoyed it.

This may seem like no big deal until I tell you the back story.  It goes back to when I was just a few weeks pregnant with LW.  Morning sickness hit like an merciless wave, and I was working full time (and not from home).  I had to keep it together, because no one at work even knew the news yet.  I read somewhere that candied ginger was good for nausea, so I gave it a go - everytime I started to feel sick, I grabbed another piece to chew on.

The good news was that it really did work - for about three days.

The bad news was that after those three days, I couldn't stand the taste, smell, sight, or even thought of ginger.  It was so bad (those of you who've had true pregnancy aversions will know what I mean) that it wasn't until about the 9th month that I was even able to reach into my desk drawer, fish out the tub of candied ginger that I had buried there, and throw it in the trash.  And the aversion didn't go away when I had LW - for months afterwards the very idea of ginger made me cringe.  By Thanksgiving time I was able to have foods with ginger in them (thank goodness!)... but candied ginger was still a no-go.

So imagine my surprise when I went shopping on Monday, saw that peaches were 87 cents a pound, and thought, "hey, I could make ginger peach jam!"

To test my recovery, I fished the long-abandoned tub of ginger out of the back of our home cupboard, and tasted some.. and it was pretty good.

So now I have all the ingredients on hand to make this recipe this evening.

As you may have noticed, and surely will in the future, I'm not a kitchen genius.  I don't make up my own recipes (generally), but I will point you to ones that are tried and true favorites.  And sometimes I'll even include my own tweaks :)

For instance, last night we had Linguine with Tomatoes and Basil for dinner.  We have the Silver Palate cookbook, and this is one of my very favorite recipes in there.  However, a little bit of experimenting has found that my husband and I both prefer fresh mozzarella to Brie in the recipe, so I always substitute the same amount of the former, cut into chunks, for the latter.  Either is super yummy, though - it is a perfect recipe for a summer day, you can throw together the sauce early in the day in about ten minutes, then dinner is ready in the time it takes pasta to cook.

Also "cooking" at the moment, or rather freezing, is this treat that I found on a Stonyfield yogurt carton awhile back.  I omit the strawberries because when I made it with them it ended up a little bit watery/icy, and let's face it, we eat cheesecake pie for the cheesecake, not the berries :)  I'll probably buy some to serve on top, though (but it is amazing either way).

So what's going on in all your kitchens, today?

2 comments:

Josée said...

Yum! That ginger-peach jam looks yummy. We don't get our local peaches for a while yet but I'm going to try this jam when they arrive. Let me know how you like it.

I made a triple batch of yogurt this morning. Hubby keeps mentioning that there is never enough... that may have something to do with my current cereal strike and the fact that he won't eat oatmeal voluntarily :)

Abby said...

I definitely recommend trying it! It was super easy, and very tasty as well as long as you like peaches. You can adjust the amount of ginger to your preference - I left it mostly as just a hint rather than an overwhelming flavor, because as I mentioned, I'm just getting back to liking ginger.

How do you like making your own yogurt? My mom makes her own, she had me try it once and it was a little sour/fizzy compared to the store bought stuff, but I'm sort of tempted to experiment with it just the same.