I have to tell you something

We got 5 ears of beautiful, buttery farmer’s market corn on Sunday and hastened to make it into chowder before it dried out.  Luckily for us, the corn was sweet and delicious.  I made a chowder out of almost nothing: take the kernels off the cob with a sharp knife and boil up the cobs, with salt and pepper, in some water.  Meanwhile, sautee diced scallions, some butter and flour until they are incorporated.  Add some milk (I used organic skim, but you can also use half and half if you are feeling ambitious) and heat, add the corn cob broth, thicken, add kernels, simmer.  That’s it!  Corn, water, scallions, flour, milk.  Delicious, healthy, easy.

Homemade meatballs, pre- cooking. The secret: sautee onions, let cool, then add to meat. To the usual suspects, I also added grated Parmesan, Worcestershire sauce and a dash of tomato paste.

Homemade pickles! They are pretty strong, but very delicious!

Guy made me sweet n sour pork with fried rice for dinner!

I made sloppy joes using our homemade ketchup! They are served on a toasted whole wheat bun with bread n butter pickles and a side of sweet, delicious grilled corn.

Part 3: Homemade Ketchup

Yep, we made our own ketchup.  You know what?  You can buy it in a bottle, but with all that high fructose corn syrup you’d never know it started out as a tomato.  Not so with ours!

Again we turn to Mark Bittman (if you haven’t noticed, he’s our go-to guy.  His book is called How to Cook Everything, after all.)  Ketchup is basically tomatoes, a few other aromatic veg, and spices.  We used our pickling spice along with the aromatics, cider vinegar, tomato paste, brown sugar and cayenne to make some tangy, flavorful and distinctive ketchup.  The whole assembly takes about 2 hours of simmering on the stove, but you don’t have to do much other than stir occasionally.

You do need some special equipment to make ketchup successfully.  An immersion blender is really the best tool for the job, so you can blend the bejesus out of your ketchup in the same pot you made it in.  A food processor would also work, but then you have to deal with transferring hot liquid from pot to pot, and I’m not a fan of that.

Once you’ve blended the ketchup to a smooth consistency, it has to cool.  Tempting though it may be to eat it while hot, I have to say it’s a little weird.  We transferred the ketchup to a wide metal bowl and stuck it in the freezer for a few minutes to cool down, and then used a funnel (what, you don’t have a funnel?) to get it into bottles to store for later.

Let me tell you, our ketchup tasted great with our homemade fries!

Part 2: Homemade French Fries

So we took help again from Mr. Bittman as well as everyone’s favorite nerdy cook, Alton Brown.  Between the two of them, we were in good shape.  Our philosophy going into this comes from another extremely smart food authority, Michael Pollan.  Food Rule #58: “Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself.”  So we did!

To start, you gotta get some good, starchy potatoes.  Alton recommends Russets, which I am fairly sure are synonymous with Idaho potatoes.  We peeled the potatoes, but you don’t have to.  Once you have them in the size and shape you want - ours were fairly standard thin-cut, not shoestring, not gigantic - Alton says you should soak them in cold water to get some of the starch off.  This helps during the frying process.  I used my handy-dandy salad spinner to get as much excess water off of the fries before putting them in the oil.  As you know, oil and water don’t mix.

For optimal crispy-outside-soft-inside crunch, we fried twice.  After the first time at 300 degrees for about 7 minutes, the fries are sort of blond but not ready to eat yet.  We let them cool slightly and drain on a wire rack/newspaper contraption and then did a second fry for just about a minute, until they were golden brown and delicious.  Thanks to my first job at Mickey D’s, I knew to salt the fries immediately after they come out of the oil, so the salt sticks.

After all that, the fries were done and ready to eat.  And they were GOOD, if I do say so myself!  Actually, they tasted just like fries you’d get in a restaurant.  But better, because we made them ourselves!

Organic beef burgers with onions, thyme and: English Stilton, bread & butter pickles, heirloom tomatoes, grainy mustard and caramelized onions. Crispy haricot verts with a touch of butter and salt. And a glass of red wine to top it off. Summer = delicious.

Homemade chicken noodle soup, made from a whole chicken!

Farfalle with artichokes, fennel and peas, with English cheddar and a Hendricks martini to round it off!