The Most Expensive Mincemeat EVAR - Coming to a Tolkien Marathon Near You!

"'And mince-pies and cheese,' said Bofur.


My father and I are a couple of those rare birds who still like mincemeat. For the past several years, I've thought about making some to give him at Christmas; this past year, I finally, actually did it.

I usually depend on Allrecipes to look up recipes to try. I've depended on it for more than a decade, and I've had few disappointments because of its rating and review system. So that's where I went to find the right mincemeat recipe, too.

I settled on this one because of the wide variety of fruits involved. If you read the jars in the store, you'll see that most include just apples, raisins, citrus peel, and spices. That sounds like slacking to me. So I decided to go for a little bit of biodiversity in a jar.

But I immediately faced problems getting all the ingredients. Had I thought this out ahead of time, I could have canned some things over the summer and gotten them less expensively and also locally. It was weird how many stores had a space on the shelf for canned sour cherries, but no inventory. And I never did find cans of gooseberries, except online, where it would cost me more than $40 to get them. I eventually substituted gooseberry jam instead, after toying with - and rejecting - a number of other possible substitutes. I wiped out the entire supply of the stuff at a local farm store.

Without further ado, I offer you the recipe below - with descriptions of what actually happened as I went through the steps.

Mincemeat III
(brought to us by Allrecipes user Linda Correia)

2 pounds cranberries (the bags in the store ARE NOT A POUND but 12 oz.)

1 quart water

9 apples - peeled, cored and ground (I grated them instead)

2 pounds raisins

3 (16 ounce) cans gooseberries (I subbed in 6 8-oz. jars of jam)

3 (16 ounce) cans pitted sour red pie cherries (found 2 24-oz. glass jars)

2 cups brandy (om nom nom nom nom)

2 tablespoons lemon zest

2 tablespoons orange zest

2 cups distilled white vinegar

4 cups white sugar

1 tablespoon ground cloves

1 tablespoon ground nutmeg

2 tablespoons ground cinnamon

2 tablespoons ground allspice

 

Place cranberries in a large saucepan and pour water over them. Simmer on low heat until cranberries begin to split. Remove from heat and pour into a big giant pot.

 

To cranberries add apples, raisins, gooseberries, cherries, brandy, lemon rind, orange rind, vinegar, sugar, cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, and allspice. Stir this mixture thoroughly. It will look like red vomit and smell like sangria. (I tried not to be too discouraged at this step, but it was hard.)

 

Divide mincemeat between as many crock-pots as necessary and turn on low; cook overnight. Mine still looked disturbingly red and also thin and watery; the recipe doesn't say to drain any of the ingredients, so I didn't. I tried to thicken with cooking, propping the crock-pot lids open partially, but all that happened was that it finally turned brown (prompting renewed panic - OMG did I OVERCOOK now?!?!) but stayed just as watery. I decided maybe I'd thicken it with cornstarch if I ever finally got to the pie-making step - you can't fiddle with the recipe before canning because you might poison yourself if the acid balance isn't right. 

 

Sterilize enough canning jars and lids to fit all mincemeat. Can in quarts or half-gallons; it makes 8 quarts if I remember correctly, but two of them blew up in the water bath. I think I wasn't careful enough about the amount of head space. I always follow directions from PickYourOwn when canning; the instructions given in the original recipe do not meet modern standards of safety for canning.

 

 

Now here we are having a Tolkien party with Britishy Tolkieny foods, and mince is one of those things specifically mentioned in the books. Isn't that a handy coincidence? Given the fact that Bofur asks for "mince-pies," plural, I'm thinking little hand pies are what's called for here. It looks as though you can put them together in muffin tins, making the process that much simpler; I'm toying with the idea of making my own pastry and flattening it with my handy-dandy tortilla press. Awww yeah.

I'm also going to make little blackberry pies, because blackberry tart is served to Frodo & co. at the Prancing Pony, and I'm extrapolating so that non-mince-lovers can have little pies, too. Because everyone should have pie.

Cold Chicken and Pickles

"'Put on a few eggs, there's a good fellow!' Gandalf called after him, as the hobbit stumped off to the pantries. 'And just bring out the cold chicken and pickles!'"


For this party of hobbity greatness, the condiments are nearly as important as the rest of the food. I want everything to be delicious, to be home made or local or simply fantastic. Everything right down to butter and jam and yes, pickles.

Tolkien mentions quite a few condiments directly in the texts - The Hobbit opens with dwarf-filled scenes that include raspberry jam, butter, pickles, and more. Where I can buy ahead, I've started.

Here are the hand-picked condiments I've gathered together:

That's buckwheat and clover honey from my favorite bee man, who was kind enough to have a long discussion with me on the day our backyard spruce was taken over by a swarm. Also, Bonne Maman raspberry jam and orange marmalade, which isn't local but is a variety I've wanted to try for ages. I could swear I remember seeing a jar in my friend the cake-maker's kitchen, too, a sure sign that it's passed stringent taste tests.

Then there are the pickles. I work in the state offices at the Empire State Plaza right now, where they have a farmer's market every Wednesday. Bird Haven Bakery sells pickles and jams alongside their delicious sticky buns, so I bought some bread and butter pickles from them (and some whoopie pies for my son, who is obsessed for some reason). Then I visited the lady from The Grey Mouse Farm; she was offering a discount if you bought two jars, so I got baby sour dills (tiny! dill!) and dilly beans. Beans don't seem hobbity to me - too American - but you know, I wanted something a little different. She had some lovely gardeniera, but that being so associated with Italian food, I was afraid it would seem even more out of place.

I also bought some pretty molds to shape the butter (which I won't buy till closer to the event, for obvious reasons of flavor). Rather than a traditional wooden butter mold, I got a silicon muffin mold with a number of fancy shapes. It'll be so much easier to wash. I don't really like wooden implements, and I avoid them as much as I can.

Yesterday's trip to the Saratoga Farmers Market yielded two-plus pounds of lamb for Shire Hotpot, plus a brace of coneys for stewing. I got myself a new-to-me chest freezer that's all plugged in and freezing stuff to beat the band, so next weekend, the first of the real, non-test-kitchen cooking can begin.

It's on.

Hobbit Test Kitchen: Seed Cakes, Three Ways.

"'A little beer would suit me better, if it is all the same to you, my good sir,' said Balin with the white beard. 'But I don't mind some cake - seed-cake, if you have any.'

"'Lots!' Bilbo found himself answering, to his surprise; and he found himself scuttling off, too, to the cellar to fill a pint beer-mug, and then to a pantry to fetch two beautiful round seed-cakes which he had baked that afternoon for his after-supper morsel."


Seed-cake being specifically mentioned in the opening scenes of the Hobbit and many other places, it's a food that I've wondered about for a long time. I have a certain curiosity about food because I love it so much, so I often make things just to see how it's done or to see what something tastes like.

Of course this had to go on the menu. So the research began.

The recipes were quickly narrowed down to two versions, both from old cookbooks and translated into modern measurements and terms by bloggers. The first recipe dates from 1861, approximately the correct point in time, and the blogger tells us it stays nice for days and that a sprinkling of demerara sugar just before baking makes a delightful crisp texture on the crust. Sold.

But the problem is, this recipe (like most of the others) calls for caraway seeds. I hate caraway seeds. They're the most common type of seed used in seed cakes, but ick, no.

Enter this recipe. It's from a 1591 cookbook, making it rather old and complicated. (It's leavened with yeast, for example, because it predates baking soda and baking powder.) However, it also allows for a variety of seed options ("anise, caraway, coriander, cardamom"). Now that gives me some wiggle room.

I definitely wanted to try caraway because it seems to be the most-frequent option. But I also bought some anise and cardamom at the store, thinking that those would be most-likely to go well with the mace and nutmeg also called for in the recipe.

Today, I gave it my first try. I've altered the recipes in a few places for boring reasons. And for this baking, I didn't use a round pan because I don't even know whether I like seed cake, but whether or not I do, I doubt I can eat three of them before they go stale. These are just tasting size, in mini-loaf pans.

Three Kinds of Seed-Cakes

1½ cups flour
2¼ teaspoons baking powder
⅜ teaspoon salt
2 sticks of butter, softened
1 cup sugar
4 large eggs, beaten
½ teaspoon mace
½ teaspoon nutmeg
3 tablespoons brandy
4 to 6 tablespoons milk (I used all 6)
2 teaspoons each caraway, cardamom, and anise seeds
demerara sugar

Preheat your oven to 350°. Grease three mini-loaf pans.

Sift or whisk together the flour, baking powder, and salt. This is to substitute for self-rising flour.

Beat the butter and sugar together until light and fluffy, then beat in the eggs. Add mace and nutmeg and mix in along with flour mixture. Add in brandy, then enough milk to get a good "dropping consistency." It took 6 tablespoons of milk to get that for me.

Split the batter between three bowls. Put 2 teaspoons of seeds into each bowl and mix in; pour into loaf tins. (I found out later I should have crushed the seeds, at least the bigger cardamom ones - whoops!)  Finally, sprinkle with demerara sugar and bake; mine took 30 to 35 minutes. They're done when the toothpick comes out clean, you know the drill.



....and now.... for the taste testing!

Hobbit Test Kitchen: Asparagus + Carrotses = Pretteh!

One of the problems with hosting a hobbity meal is that it's supposed to be pretty simple, description is often spare, and in some categories there are no recipes (who writes a recipe for "boil peas; add butter"?). But, I found one important clue in the hobbit food study I read; it quotes Tolkien himself stating that "growing food and eating it occupied most of their time." You know what this means: veggies. And fruit!

Filling in some of the gaps left in the books requires some speculation. That's as it should be - most of us wouldn't want to read a book that stopped and described every detail about what each type of character ate; we want storyline! But it does leave us guessing. And personally, when making those guesses, I want to make sure that I'm not filling the space with the conspicuously-modern, say California blend frozen vegetables or some nonsense.

So, in serving veggies, I'm trying to come up with simple dishes that contain likely ingredients, for which I can use presentation that's just a little bit different from my norm, as a modern person. It needs to feel old school, while still suiting the modern palate. And it gives me an opportunity to put something together for the vegetarians fairly seamlessly. I can't really break out the veggie burgers and Tofurkey here.

I've jotted down a few ideas for myself - creamed potatoes with peas in? Asparagus with carrots? Carrots with leeks and mushrooms? Peas and mushrooms? Parsnips and carrots? And just the other day I began the taste-testing process.

I'll want to have myself a trial run of most everything I'll be serving that day. I mean, the day of the big party is no time to find out that a casserole takes longer than you thought, or that peas + mushrooms = herk. And I'm exited to get my test kitchen running! But it's also almost Christmas right now. I want to whip up Lancashire hotpot and steamed puddings, but I'm broke and I already have a lot to juggle. So I started small.


Asparagus + Carrotses, Precious
2 parts asparagus, cut on a diagonal for pretteh
1 part carrots, cut into thin sticks for faster cooking +pretteh
SO MUCH BUTTER OMG
salt to taste

Place asparagus, minus tips, into steamer basket with carrots. Steam two minutes before adding tips, then cook for 5-6 more minutes until tender.

Put in serving dish and add salt and butter. LOTS of butter. Hobbits love butter; it's a known fact.

Enjoy beautiful veggies!

Lord of the Rings Marathon: The ([Extremely Rough] Draft) Menu

I'm finding it very hard to contain myself. Ten bucks says I run out of steam on this, like, a month before it happens. But that's okay, because I'll probably pick it back up a week or two before the actual event.

I've rifled through several cookbooks for inspiration. I've researched British cheeses. I've researched what sorts of nuts are indigenous (or at least have been cultivated in Britain for a long enough time to be suitable). I've rejected some ideas (trifles, treacle, possibly even steamed puddings) as too modern or simply not hobbity enough.

I'm torn on Lancashire hotpot, which may seem too modern because it's a casserole, but is full of yummy baked meatiness and topped with potatoes and just says "hobbit" to me. Apparently it dates back to at least the 19th century, which puts it in the correct time frame, though Lancashire is quite a bit north of Warwickshire, the inspiration for the hobbity lifestyle. But then I'm also likely to serve Cock-a-Leeky soup, which is Scottish and therefore even more northerly.

I'm going to be leaving the lamb's kidneys out of the hotpot, though, because we're dealing with an American audience here. I don't think any of my guests will be huge fans of organ meat. Matt thinks I should rename it "Shire Hotpot," and maybe I should.

Today I drew up a very rough potential menu as a starting point:


FIRST BREAKFAST
fried eggs
bacon
sausage
bread & butter & jams or marmalade
tea & coffee
(sausage stuffed shrooms?)


SECOND BREAKFAST
apple cinnamon oatmeal (absolutely killer)
spiced nuts
(shrooms?)


ELEVENSES
lembas?


LUNCH
cock-a-leeky soup
cold ham and chicken
hazelnuts
pickles/cheese/fruits
bread & butter


AFTERNOON TEA
seed cake
apple salad? brandied apples?
tea breads


DINNER
coneys?

stuffed mushrooms here (chestnut)?
asparagus/julienned carrots?

SUPPER
Lancashire hot pot?

carrots/leeks/shrooms

DESSERT
pies - mince, blackberry
sugared chestnuts
shortbread


AND SO NOW... Let the recipe testing begin.

Locavores: The Dorkening.

I follow NPR on my FaceBook feed, which is how I came to see this article about Beth Accomando's annual Lord of the Rings marathon parties. Given the length of the Peter Jackson films, this takes all day - so she serves up heaping helpings of hobbit meals that leave her guests in a food-based stupor. Every. Year.

Being a person who loves to put together overly-elaborate parties, and being married to a person who loves the Tolkien-verse, I felt an instantaneous pull to make this happen in our house, at least once. I have a saying: If it's not practically impossible, I'm not even interested.

And in terms of difficulty, this party has it all. Research on the dietary habits of the shire. Research on the dietary habits of the British (apparently the inspiration for hobbit fare). The challenge of finding guests who will sit through such a thing. Developing a menu that includes seven meals plus dessert. (I share Ms. Accomando's conviction that the movie hobbits' seven meal schedule is superior to the book hobbits' six.) Cooking seven meals plus dessert. Eating seven meals plus dessert.

I decided that this level of effort and expense might be excusable if it were staged to celebrate Matt's birthday. After all, he's the real Tolkien fan. I just like to cook. This makes finding guests easier, too, since Matt's friends have already proven a willingness to travel and participate in grueling events - they all traveled for our wedding, and most made the hour-plus-long mountain hike that served as our processional, too.

And so the research began. I started with a study of hobbit eating patterns linked in the NPR article, and when I neared the end I learned the most amazing thing of all about hobbit food:

Almost all hobbit food seems to have been grown, raised, collected, brewed, processed, and baked in the Shire, a feat which inspired great pride and perhaps even a little smugness amongst the hobbits.

Hobbits. Are. Locavores.

So now, I have a grand opportunity to revive both this blog and some of our own locavorian eating habits (some of them have gone by the wayside in the last few years). I'll be planning a day-long, marathon get-together including seven meals and approximately a thousand hours of film, and I'm going to do it all locavore style.

Challenge. Accepted.

Locavore Christmas = Planning Ahead

So last year, I signed up for my bank's Christmas club. The money just hit my main account this week, and I'm beginning to plan things out in earnest. And when I was grocery shopping at a certain superstore (I know, I know - I told you I'm no purist!) I saw these canning kits that were really inexpensive and I said to myself, I said, "why not? I've been dancing around this for years!" and then I bought them.

Both were made by Ball - one was a utensil kit with the jar grabber and all, and one was called a "Canning Discovery Kit." (I am not in any way monetized, by the way; I link just to show you what I bought, and won't gain a thing if you click or even purchase them there.) I liked the idea of the "Discovery Kit" because you can use it right in whatever pot you already have, and then the utensil set came with everything else I knew I'd regret failing to buy.

But as it turned out, the goofy plastic rack they put in the discovery kit was broken before I even got it out of the box. I felt that even if I replaced it and the new one was unbroken, it probably would break before very long, because of course canning goods are heavy.

And yet, by this time, I was really attached to the idea of canning. I'd already gone so far as to look up recipes and instructions to make sure you could can the things I wanted to without a pressure canner. (I don't like the idea of canning most produce, whose seasons mean heating up your kitchen in the middle of the summer, but it's hard for me to get enough of cooking apples. And it just so happens that apple butter is an old favorite of my father's. I wasn't sure apples were doable, but a little research reassured me on that point.) I was invested in the notion of presenting my dad with something he'd be genuinely excited about at Christmas time - which is no mean feat. And when I looked up instructions, an Amazon link on the page showed you could get an enamel canner with a metal rack for about $20.

Man, was I ever sold. That's only a $10 difference from that stupid "Discovery Kit!" I knew I'd pay more at the hardware store around the corner (it's a chain, too, so arguably not much better than the discount store), but it's so close and it was just calling to me.

Now I have everything I need. The kids and I went apple picking that afternoon, and began cooking down a half-bushel of Golden Delicious that very afternoon.

I'm following these instructions here, except that a half-bushel only makes 7 quarts, not 9 - so all the other ingredients have to be scaled down by approximately three quarters. It's also taking far more than 18 hours to cook it down the way it should be, so it seems unlikely that I'll get to actually try canning until at least tomorrow.

I hope it goes smoothly! Matt will wanna kill me if I bought all this equipment and none of it pans out.