Sauce

Salad dressing is incredibly easy to make with ingredients you probably already have around the house. And the basic recipe is so versatile that anyone and everyone will be making their own favorite dressings in no time at all. You start with a simple mix of oil and vinegar - 1/3 to 1/2 oil, and the rest vinegar. Use whatever type of oil you like - olive, canola, vegetable, or as we use here, grape seed. Same goes for vinegar - really all you are looking for is something with a bit of tang. So regular white vinegar works, but some of the fancier ones usually add more character. Regular off-the-shelf apple cider vinegar is one of my favorite. In this video we experiment with rice vinegar for the first time. Lemon juice also works exceptionally well.

A few days ago I cooked up a couple of wonderful steaks from Saffire Farms, but it was a bit too cold out for me to want to do it on the grill outside, so I put them onto one of my cast iron griddles in the oven. When the steaks were done, there were about a half cup or so of drippings left on the griddle, so I poured them into a small bowl and tossed them into the fridge. Drippings of course have an incredible amount of flavour, and are something I am really loath to waste. If all you get is small amounts like what I got from these steaks, it is really easy to keep a container in the freezer that you can keep adding drippings to until you get enough to do something useful with. This time I combined them with some deer drippings I'd canned up a few years ago, and made a truly fantastic sauce / gravy.

Ingredients

• about 2 cups of drippings
• 1/4 cup flour
• onion powder to taste
• salt to taste
• pepper to taste

The dripping usually have a small amount of fat in them, so the easiest way to separate it is to heat them up in a mason jar in the microwave, then stick the jar into the fridge (setting it onto a small cork heat pad / coaster, if you have glass shelves in the fridge like we do). The fat will come to the top and you'll be able to pick it right off with your fingers, like in this video. You then use the fat and some flour to make a "rou", and make your sauce from there.

Oh my, I cannot believe I forgot to post this excellent recipe! At Christmas time just passed I picked up 2 turkeys because they had been mis-priced and I just could not refuse less than half price! My wife does not like putting the organs into the stuffing, and I do not like wasting food, so I put a call out to my friends on facebook for recommendations on what to do with the organs. The first suggestion that came back was "gravy", and I did not even have to ask for a recipe because ideas just started jumping into my head!

Here is what I came up with. It worked really well and I canned some up. I was just reminded of this now when my son wanted some gravy for the pork we had for supper, so I got a 250ml jar of it from the basement.

Making applesauce is pretty easy to do, if a bit time consuming. It does work out to be a fair bit cheaper than buying even the cheapest of applesauce though. 1/2 bushel cost me $12, and gave me 18 x 500ml jars of applesauce. The home made stuff seems to be a lot thicker than the commercial stuff, so there is probably even more apple per unit volume.

Since I made the salsa and pasta / pizza sauce really mild this year, I wanted to make a nuclear hot chili sauce to compensate. Something that I could use just like that, or mix into one of my other tomato sauces to spice it up a bit. I did some googling and asking around, and finally found a recipe that really appealed to me. I did not follow that recipe to the T - left out the salt and pepper, and the vinegar. The latter I believe was only added to make it suitable for boiling water canning, which I do not have to do since I pressure can.

I wanted a sweet tomato-based sauce that was spicey as heck, and that's what I got! It's got apples, peaches, pears and honey to sweeten it up. It calls for 10 lbs of tomatoes - I used 7 lbs of romas, 2 lbs of various heirlooms from my CSA, and about 1300 ml of canned diced tomatoes from my 2006 batch.

We did not make any salsa last summer and so ran out some time ago. When I went looking for my recipe I dug up a list of ingredients but unfortunately had not recorded the procedure before, so I was shooting in the dark a bit here. This time I'm recording it all for posterity though!

Note that due to the lack of vinegar this recipe is not suited to canning by any means other than pressure-canning. The lack of vinegar makes for a nice sweet, fresh flavour that is very similar to the fresh salsas that are so popular these days. This is easy to make, though does take some time to boil down. We cheat and add a bit of corn starch to help thicken it.

This is pretty mild for spiciness.

There we go, the sauce is finally in the canner! This is definitely not a sauce for someone who does not like a lot of work since it takes a good 2 or 3 days to make. First of all, it contains a lot of roasted red pepper, which itself takes a good day of work. Though I roasted about twice what I needed for this recipe and canned the rest. Hmmm, note to self : I still have not written the article on roasting peppers, so please stay tuned for that. Last year was the first year I used roasted red peppers in my Pasta / Pizza sauce, and I liked it so much that I'm doing largely the same thing with a few tweaks.

The biggest difference between this year and last year is that this time around I wanted to use up some zucchini from our CSA, so I decided to toss a good sized one in there. I also have a 2 or 3 pounds of heirlooms tomatoes in there this year as well - just to use up ones from the CSA. I did not measure either, but I did measure another zucchini that was about the same size, and it was 650g. Heirloom tomatoes about 2 or 3 lbs - together after cooking it down for about an hour they made up exactly 2 litres of puree that went into the main sauce.

We were at Costco yesterday and I was looking at some of the various BBQ sauces they had in stock, trying to decide between Tony Roma's, Bull's Eye Original, and some other "Kansas City Style" that I'd never heard of before. I wrote off the last one pretty easily because I wasn't even aware that Kansas City had its own style of BBQ sauce, but I was familiar with both of the other two and really like them both. Oh decisions, decisions.

Then it struck me - what the heck do I need to buy this stuff for? Surely I can make something every bit as good as these! I took a quick look at the ingredients and agreed with myself that yes, indeed I could do as well! Though I had not the slightest clue at that moment exactly how.

We made our way back home, and around noon my wife got called into work unexpectedly. Shortly after she left I had an epiphany! We had all sorts of pickles of various sorts in the basement - stuff we'd canned up over the last several years. I was betting that some combination of those with a good tomato base would be awesome! Little did I realise at the time just how right I was! The base for most BBQ sauces is sweet on the one hand, and vinegar/sour on the other hand. This is also the base for most home pickles!

It's canning time again! Yesterday we were supposed to go over to friends' place for supper, but Melissa and I ended up sick (she a lot worse than I) and so yesterday morning we unfortunately had to cancel. After I had a few cups of coffee into me, I decided I wasn't going to let the day go to waste, and headed down to the end of the street to the farmer's market to pick up a bushel of roma (plum) tomatoes. I figured if I was going to be cooped up in the house all day feeling crummy, the very least I could do was something useful. And canning always makes me feel better.

I started processing the tomatoes before I actually knew what I was going to do with them. At that point my head was pretty thick (and no, not from beer for a change) and all I knew was that I needed to put down some form of tomato. I just wasn't sure which form. Pretty much no matter what you do, you have to plunge them in boiling water for 1 or 2 minutes, peel the skin off, cut them open, scoop out the goop from the little chambers, then boil down the flesh. How much you boil it down depends on what you are making. If just canning tomatoes, you just boil it a half hour or so. If making pasta sauce, you have to boil to half it's volume which takes a heck of a long time especially in a big pot with a smallish surface area.