dianaschnuth

A while ago, I was extolling the virtues of my homemade tomato jam to one of my coworkers, and he came back with a description of his homemade bacon jam.

Of course, I had to try making my own.

I found a recipe on The Kitchn that involved bacon, onion, maple syrup, balsamic vinegar, and Worcestershire (and shallots, but I left those out). I made two-thirds of the recipe, since my package of uncured bacon from ButcherBox was 10 oz and the recipe called for a pound of bacon. I got everything ready to simmer before I went upstairs to supervise my son’s bath and bedtime routine, and enjoyed the sweet scent of bacon as we did our thing. When I came back downstairs after lights out (having already checked on it a couple of times), I was worried that I’d over cooked it — the jam was a deep mahogany. As it turns out, it was damn near perfect, and yielded about a cup and a half of deliciousness after I hit it with the immersion blender.

It’s more of a reduction than a jam, per se, since it’s not really thickened… but that’s just semantics.

Whatever it is, it’s delicious, and I’m glad my coworker unwittingly put me up to it.

I asked for this cookbook a couple Christmases back because I had fond memories of my Mom cooking from her drip-stained copy of it when I was in junior high. It’s a cookbook we got from the Mormon church, and the backstory on it deserves its own blog entry.

For whatever reason, I never actually cracked it open until this year’s Cookbook of the Month project. As I was flipping through it, I realized two things: one, this cookbook doesn’t really know who its audience is; and two, my Mom didn’t actually cook many recipes from this cookbook. I only recognized a couple things, and the rest were either dead-simple staples or slightly unusual ways to recombine the food from your pantry.

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To prepare for February’s cooking adventures, I spent some $100 at our favorite Asian grocery / Korean restaurant combo, buying ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. I even had to ask for help finding the last half dozen or so items on my list, like specific kinds of seaweed and dried mushrooms.

But it was worth it. It was so worth it.

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In 2017, I resolved to cook 50 new-to-me recipes. In the end, I tried a total of 55 from various sources: online, magazines, cookbooks, the recipe box.

This year, I decided that I’d delve into my collection of cookbooks. We inherited several old-school cookbooks and compilations from my husband’s family, plus I’ve gotten some as gifts over the years, bought some for cheap at garage sales, and gotten some freebies from Weight Watchers meetings.

I’m planning to devote each month to one cookbook, and cook at least one recipe per week from that cookbook. January’s cookbook was from Trinity United Methodist Church in Swanton, Ohio, published in 1990 — from the estate of my in-laws.

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