to boldly go...a new direction

One morning while I was clearing the dining room table of the previous evening's canning jars and silver bands, I said jokingly, "This week on Canning: The Next Generation, Joanna vows to never eat another bean again." We watch a lot of Star Trek in my house, particularly due to my wish to complete my list of 30 things to do before I turn 30, and watching every episode of every Star Trek series and all of the movies is on the list. We are currently on Season 7 of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I had probably just finished watching an episode or had just woken from a dream I was on a mission in deep space when I made that off-hand comment.

But it stuck in my head, especially as I've been thinking that this blog really isn't the place to talk about sweet corn and pickle brine. So I've decided to separate the posts, and leave this one to baking and books, and the other to our adventures in canning and preserving. You can find it at http://nextgencanning.blogspot.com. I'll update both blogs at the pace that we accomplish canning/baking/food projects, which is sometimes a full schedule and other times less often than I hope. (Oh full time work, you are so overrated.)

So head over to Canning: The Next Generation for more green beans than you can imagine and vegetables aplenty.

blueberry swirl birthday cheesecakes

My friend Jenn at work had a birthday earlier this week. So I brought in a few blueberry swirl cheesecakes for her to share. This was the first time I tried this recipe, and it worked out relatively well. At least the office food vultures seemed to devour them quickly enough!

The cupcake liners get a crust made out of the typical cheesecake crust ingredients: graham crackers (ONLY HoneyMaid - generic graham crackers are garbage), butter, and sugar.


While the crusts set in the oven, make a blueberry sauce. Fresh blueberries of course. (These ones were from our CSA last week.)


Puree in the food processor and then press the juice through a fine mesh sieve. Add sugar and whisk.


While the crusts cool, make the cheesecake filling.


You swirl the cheesecake by using a toothpick in the drops of the fruit sauce. I forgot to take photos after they came out of the oven, but they looked pretty much the same. And tasted great!

grandma's peanut butter swirl bars

I promised Mark when he got a Darth Vader cookie jar for his birthday from Amber and Anthony that I'd make him some cookies to "go in it." Even though the cookies didn't make it into the jar and made it to the freezer instead, these were meant to serve the empire. They're Mark's favorite cookie, and one of my grandma's signature cookie recipes. She made these for my sister and me all the time in our cookie care packages in college.

Side note. Chocolate has become a problematic ingredient for me as of late. Most conventional chocolate providers in this country are not fair trade, and child slavery is rampant in the cocoa industry. More than 1/3 of the chocolate we consume in this country comes from the Ivory Coast, where human trafficking is a huge problem. There are groups that work to get children out of this life (www.stopthetraffik.org/ourwork/chocolate). I've tried to stop purchasing chocolate that hasn't been verified from a third party to have not come from the work of child slaves, and so I picked up these SunSpire chocolate chips. More expensive than a bag of Nestle chips, yes, but I know it's coming from farmers who do not enslave children and who are compensated fairly for their goods. Something to think about, certainly. Luckily there are several brands of chocolate that are recommended that are confirmed to not participate in child slavery which are fantastic. SunSpire is just one, but Green & Black's is a great gourmet chocolate that also makes bars for baking.

But on to the baking! Beginning with peanut butter, my all time favorite.


Once the chips are in the pan, you put it in the oven for just a few minutes, until they look like this.


Then swirl!

Bake them up, and you get one giant cookie, ready to be cut into slabs and devoured. I am pretty sure we didn't even let this cool.

blueberry lime jam

We made yet another variety of jam recently: blueberry lime. It had a really surprising flavor - something you wouldn't get from Welch's in the store, but it is delicious. Our amount of blueberries gave us about 6 half pints of jam. All fruit jams have an inordinate amount of sugar in them. (This one didn't have that whole container, just 5 cups. Which is a lot anyway.) This is the first recipe we canned using my grandma's jars.