Corn and Peach Salsa with Pickled Jalapenos and Onions

Doing a lot of grilling this summer? Totally, me too! So I’ve found that after making a meal, I usually have some grilled corn left over. I’ve been throwing it omelets or just eating it cold. Needless to say, I’ve gotten bored with it quite quickly.

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve been hitting the pickling scene pretty hard lately. So, for this post I decided to take two previous pickled items and combine them into an easily assembled salsa. You can also use (lemon vin) to make it a salad, or heat ingredients in sauce pot with some butter to make it a hot dish. Either way, the spicy-sweet-salty combo is a killer side dish, substitute for sauce, dip for chips… or serve it shooter-style like the picture below.

Make it Mexican: Add 2 tsp cumin, substitute lemon with lime, substitute chive with cilantro, add more jalapenos or other hot peppers (I would suggest Anaheim).

Corn and Peach Salsa with Pickled Jalapenos and Onions

Ingredients:

6 ears of grilled corn (cut off the cob)

3 ripe peaches (diced around the same size as the kernels of corn for a salsa, larger for a salad)

½ cup Pickled Red Onion

¼ cup Sweet-Pickled Jalapenos (chopped)

2 Tablespoons Chives (chopped)

Juice and zest 1 lemon

1 Tablespoon olive (or corn) oil

“Makes Everything Awesome” seasoning to taste

Directions:

1. Combine all ingredients into mixing bowl. Mix until incorporated.
2. Season to taste with salt and pepper, or “makes everything awesome” seasoning.
3. Serve hot, chilled, or room temp. 

Sweet-Pickled Jalapenos

One of my favorite flavor combinations is sweet and hot; so what better thing to do than sweet-pickle some hot peppers? I chose to use Jalapeno peppers here because I know a lot of people grow them and around this time they are super abundant.

If you’re into jarring/canning things, this is something I would suggest highly. They also make great gifts when transferred to mason jars. Keep in mind though that the shelf life probably won’t be more than a few months – if that.

I haven’t really experimenting into how long these pickles last before they spoil. I can tell you from the restaurant industry that refrigerated pickled vegetables can last up to four or five months if kept properly. The key is to keep the pickled whatever under the liquid so it doesn’t get a chance to grow mold on it.

One industry tip for doing this is putting a plate on top of the product to keep it submerged. However, the normal person doesn’t have a large enough container for something like that. So, fill a plastic Ziploc bag with dried beans or salt to create a weight. Important: remove as much air from the bag as possible by submerging it in water while holding the top of the bag. Once you get as much air out of there as possible, seal the bag. Do this once more, creating a double bag (so you can use it again). This creates the closest you’re going to get to a vacuum seal without a vacuum sealer. Anyway, place the bag on top of your pickled veg so the product is forced down and cover the container your pickle is in with the appropriate lid.

That being said, pickling peppers does take some of the heat out of them, so they aren’t as spicy as when they are raw. If you want to remove even more heat (like if you were pickling a habanero), remove the pith and seeds before you pickle it. This will result in the full pepper taste, but dial the heat down quite a bit. You can also add more sweetness to the liquid, or add fruit into your combination.

Sweet-pickled jalapenos

Ingredients:

8 Jalapenos (sliced)

3 cups apple cider vinegar

4 Tablespoons pickling spice

2 Tablespoons salt

4 Tablespoons sugar

2 teaspoons honey

Sauce pot (medium sized)

Mandolin or knife

Container large enough to hold four cups (a quart)

Directions: 

1. Sanitize your peppers 
2. In a sauce pot over medium heat, slowly toast the pickling spice until you begin to smell it (you may hear some popping too)
3. Add your vinegar, salt, sugar, and honey; and bring to a boil
4. While you are waiting on this, slice down your peppers and place into container
5. Once boiled, either strain the spice mixture out or leave it in
6. Pour into container with peppers
7. Let sit uncovered until it begins to cool down a bit
8. Place your weighted bag on top of the peppers and make sure they are submerged fully
9. Cover the container and store in the refrigerator for 48 hours before transferring 

Tomato and Herb Sauce: How-to

Anyone up to their ears in tomatoes? Well, first off – share some with me! Secondly, don’t let those delicious fruits get the best of you and wind up rotting away. These gorgeous colorful gobfuls of flavor are just waiting for you to use them.

One of the easiest and tastiest ways to preserve a tomato is with a sauce. Now, see, I don’t really like tomatoes all that much unless something is done to them. It’s embarrassing, but such is life. So, I’m always taking them and morphing the tomato into something spectacular.

This recipe explores a tomato and herb sauce. It’s pretty basic and comes straight from the garden (or farmers stand) so it’s not very labor intensive at all.

In the culinary industry, we are taught to concasse the tomato to make a sauce. This involves taking the stem out, making a few incisions, blanching them, cooling them, peeling them. I think it’s silly and it takes too long. 

However, my process still has the same principles in mind. Luckily there is more than one way to get things done in the kitchen!

Before I get into the recipe with you, I would like to bring up a few variations on the sauce:

1.       Romesco – add some peppers to the roasting process (seeded of course). Finish with lemon, basil, and oregano.

2.       Make the sauce more red – before transferring ingredients to pot, put about ½ tsp of tomato paste in the hot pot and stir until it starts to brown up and caramelize. This will make the sauce a little heavier in flavor and you may have to offset it with a little acid (white balsamic, lemon, champagne vinegar)

3.       “Fire roasted” style – keep the tomatoes in the oven longer until the skin starts to roast and gets black in some areas. Don’t peel the skin off! Simply add to the pot and puree it up after it reduces. This is also another way to add additional color to the sauce.

4.       Tomato soup – simply add carrot, celery, and onion to a hot pot on medium heat. Stir and cook until onions are translucent. Add 2-3 tablespoons of oil/butter and allow to melt/heat up. Sprinkle in some flour (enough to coat the vegetables) then add a large amount of tomato sauce (I figure 1 quart of sauce per 2 cups of additional veggies) slowly, while stirring. Cook that down for about two hours, blend and enjoy!

5.       Colored sauce – with the ever popular heirloom tomatoes, the color variation is superb. Follow the same recipe, but use yellow, brown, or purple tomatoes. I would suggest blanching tomatoes if they are green though – it preserves the color better.

So, as you can see by taking this very simple sauce, you can go much further. The best thing I’ve found to do is to do batches in different styles, then portion them off into pint containers /freezer bags and then freeze it for a later use. There’s nothing like having an amazing go-to tomato sauce right at your fingertips in the dead of winter.

Enough jibber-jabber; on to the recipe!

Tomato and Herb Sauce 

Ingredients:

10 ripe tomatoes (the big guys are usually the ones used here)

1 sweet onion (large dice)

2 cloves garlic

Olive oil

2 stems worth of basil leaves (or as much as you like)

3 stems worth of thyme leaves

(optional) “makes everything awesome spice” to taste

Mixing bowl

Oven

Large/medium pot

Stirring spoon

Sheet tray/cookie sheet

Blender

Strainer (optional)

Directions:

1.       Take all ingredients, except herbs, and toss in olive oil, salt and pepper.

2.       Place in oven at 400°F on a sheet tray.

3.       Once cracks in the skin form on all the tomatoes, pull them out and shut off the oven.

4.       When tomatoes cool, peel off the skins and toss them out

5.       In a pot on medium heat, place all contents of the sheet tray

6.       Once the tomato concoction comes to a light boil, turn heat down low and cover the pot

7.       Stir occasionally every fifteen minutes or so.

8.       After an hour and a half you should have been able to cook down the tomatoes pretty well.

9.       Blend contents in a blender, or use a little stick blender right in the pot if you have one.

10.   Transfer back to the pot

11.   Leave  the pot uncovered and add your herbs.

12.   Cook down for at least another half hour, or until color desire has been achieved, or you are satisfied with the flavor.

13.   Season to taste with salt and pepper or “makeseverything awesome spice”

Rotini and Kale Salad

Given my last post on pasta, I thought it only appropriate to make some kind of pasta dish. 

However, I ate it! 

So, I did what any good cook does and utilized a ton of leftover product; and made this delicious concoction I am dubbing “Pasta Salad with Kale.” I try and sneak in and experiment with dark leafy greens in dishes as much as possible.

This application makes a marinade/dressing for the pasta and really works well with kale to provide a great texture differential. You also get some of the bitterness from the kale which contrasts nicely with the other ingredients.

On a side note, I realize there were other ingredients in my pasta salad that aren't displayed in this picture and will make a better effort next time I do a pasta salad or something to have them in the picture. It really doesn't help when you do a photo shoot and you’re hungry…

Anyway, this is a great way to utilize pasta from the previous day and kind of clean out the fridge of random stuff. Please don’t feel limited to this ingredient list at all. Pasta salads are super unique in that they can be an entire grab-and-go meal depending on what you put in it. So, for instance you could increase the veggies and add a protein. I tend to view my unlisted ingredients as flavor builders and not as main stars of the dish – in this case it’s pasta and kale.

It is also super easy to just use (lemon vin) or any style dressing you have chilling out in the fridge. 

I used rotini pasta , but the goal is really to have something that is medium in size and in a shape that is more willing to include the other ingredients with it. Curled pasta works best here, don’t use string-style pastas or delicate pastas such as those wheel shaped ones (they break apart and don’t look good).

Ingredients:

1 lb pasta

1 tomato diced small

1 red pepper diced small

1 suntan pepper diced small

1 medium red onion (julienne)

2 cups (packed) red leaf or Tuscan kale (ripped or cut small)

¼ cup olive oil

Zest and juice 1 lemon

Sprig fresh dill chopped

Sprig fresh basil sliced thin

Salt

Pepper

Directions:

1.       Cook your pasta (learn the proper way here) or pull it out of the fridge

2.       While you’re cooking up your pasta, cut your veggies and remaining ingredients set aside.

3.       Combine ingredients with cooled pasta in mixing bowl or in original pot pasta was cooked in

4.       Season to taste

5.       Let sit/cool for at least an hour and a half before service

6.       Serve cold or room temp

Cooking Pasta: The truth about salting water and using oil.

Does anyone salt their pasta water and then put oil on top?

I’ve been working in restaurants for almost seven years now and the idea behind these two items has been expressed very insistently that this is the best way to do it. “Adding salt to the water makes it boil faster and the oil lightly coats the pasta when it’s done cooking so it doesn’t stick together.” When I heard this, I was curious if this was actually true so I decided to do some research, combine it with my (probably millions of pounds of pasta) experience, and provide you with the information.

So, let’s address this oil in the boiling water issue first. I’m sure we’ve all had times where you cook pasta and it sticks together in one huge clump. It’s horrible and disappointing to say the least (imagine having a chef chew you out for those clumps!) I haven’t found that putting oil on the top really helps on a small scale – which I’m sure most of you are only feeding a few people on average. You can also toss the pasta in oil after you transfer it out of the water so it doesn’t stick.

The real secret to cooking pasta that doesn’t clump at home is having your sauce hot and ready to go. I would suggest having it on the stove at a light simmer next to your pot of boiling pasta. Here is where you may need to go and invest in a strainer with a handle (called a spider in culinary terms). Once your pasta is done cooking, pull it out with the strainer and give it a shake to let it drain. Then, put it straight in the sauce, cover the pot/pan and let simmer for a few minutes and then serve. No need to empty the whole thing out in a colander over the sink and then bring it back to the stove. In the time it takes the pasta to drain, it won’t clump. Plus allowing the pasta to cook further in the sauce allows it to absorb the flavor of the sauce therefore making those glutenous little gobbles burst with flavor.

Right, on to salting the water! Let me make something clear straight off the bat: adding salt to water increases its boiling point. This means water will be boiling above 212° F and therefore take longer to reach that temperature. Anyway… when salted, you will have a higher cooking temperature and therefore theoretically cook it faster. However, in reality, you would need roughly ½ a pound of salt (that’s right, half a pound!) per quarter gallon of water, just to raise the temperature 3.6° F. So, I think it’s safe to say that salting the water really isn’t going to benefit you as far as the boiling point and cooking time are concerned.

This means the flavor is the remaining issue to address. Chefs in the industry describe the water you use to cook pasta as “salty as the sea” and the idea is that the salted water solution will absorb into the pasta and therefore give it more “flavor.” I’m a bit of a salty skeptic (pun intended), and have always disagreed with this concept. Yes, it will taste better if you add salt to it. I think it’s unnecessary if you already have a flavorful sauce and furthermore if you are cooking the pasta in the sauce for a few moments.

But why increase your sodium intake when you don’t have to? Every single ingredient does not need to be seasoned if you are seasoning the entire dish. I don’t see the point really, it’s rather redundant.