Put up or ... : Saving the Season, a new blog about preserves

 
A new Los Angeles-based blog, Saving the Season, celebrates the art of home canning (or "putting up") and all things deliciously jammy -- preserved huckleberries, blueberry butter, white peaches in lavender syrup, apricot jam with maple and vanilla, mulberry-plum preserves and more. 

The blog is about "jams and other fruit preserves, pickles and briny things, canned vegetables (above all tomatoes)," according to its author, Kevin West, who is also West Coast editor of W magazine. Though it's just a couple of months old, there already are several recipes for jams and fruit butters, as well as one for cocktail onions -- for Gibsons, of course.     

It's also rife with good reading, punctuated by canners' secrets (such as the judicious use of gin), literary references (Pablo Neruda's "Ode to Tomatoes"), and even personal advice from Alice Waters ("do everything neatly always").

On Saturday, West and Bettina Birch of BeeGreenFarm will give a free canning demonstration at Surfas in Culver City from noon to 1:30 p.m. They will show how to make peach jam and how to can tomatoes, with a tasting to follow. (Surfas is at 8777 Washington Blvd., Culver City; (310) 559-4770.)

-- Betty Hallock

Photo credit: Kevin West

Cook's Illustrated: Vanilla smackdown

Cook's Illustrated is a favorite among cooks for its practical, no-fuss, no-muss approach to food. For one, there are no ads. Also, with the exception of soft, natural colors on the front and back covers, the magazine is completely black and white. Inside, recipes are deconstructed and reconstructed to make them as fast and easy as possible, but without sacrificing taste (Kinda like a Consumer Reports for food and recipes). Another popular feature is the taste tests that, not surprisingly, often result in the blue ribbon going to a brand or product that is the least expensive one out there.

But the latest taste test, in the March/April issue, seemed almost sacrilegious: Cook's Illustrated found that there was no discernible difference between real or imitation vanilla when used for baking. Here's the article, which would normally be found behind Cook's Illustrated's pay wall, but they kindly agreed to let us use it here temporarily.

Read it and tell us what you think.

Can you tell the difference between real and imitation vanilla? Do you keep one, or both, on hand? If you're looking to conduct your own taste test at home -- in the interest of research! -- here are some dessert recipes to choose from, including two L.A. Times test kitchen recipes that call for vanilla extract: Tall and creamy cheesecake and Auntie Em's coconut cupcakes.

-- Rene Lynch

FOR THE RECORD: An earlier version of this post said that all the images in the magazine were drawn. Wrong! They are black-and-white photos.

Photo credit: Los Angeles Times

David Myers to open Comme Ca Bakery; Boule closes

Boule Atelier, the stylish WeHo pastry shop on La Cienega Boulevard, has closed its doors.

Owner David Myers (whose empire of restaurants -- Sona, Comme Ça and, most recently, Pizzeria Ortica in Orange County -- continues to expand) and baker Hidefumi Kubota told the Daily Dish that they would be putting their energies into a new Comme Ça Bakery instead.

Fans of the shop's macarons, chocolate sables and sea salt caramels might ask, why close Boule? "It’s pretty simple," Myers says. "We’ve had incredible demand for our breads. I’m so passionate about what Hide’s doing and he’s so talented when it comes to baking bread. Unfortunately, our location [at Boule] doesn’t give us the right space to delve deeply into bread."

Comme Ça Bakery's retail shop will be down the street from the current Boule location on La Cienega, and is set to open this summer, next to the space planned for Myers' forthcoming second outpost of Ortica. Myers is moving the bread baking operation into a 10,000-square-foot facility in Culver City. (Comme Ça Bakery also will be offering the bread wholesale.)

Sweden gets its first bacon pillow

I was chatting up the guys over at Bacon Today this afternoon, and they mentioned they sold their first bacon pillow to someone in Sweden. Yes, a bacon pillow!  Yes, Sweden!

Also referred to as "Stuffed Bacon," this red-and-white fleece creation is about the size of a standard pillow, all soft and fuzzy and bacon-y at the same time!

And as of this writing, I'm told pillows were sold this afternoon to Canada and Australia too. It truly is a small, bacon-loving world.

Sweet bacon dreams, everyone!  This is No. 26 on my list of "1,001 things to do with bacon."

— Noelle Carter

The rest of the list:

Get Cooking: Fresh ingredients are just the start to this soup

Today's article on making vegetable soup is our last installment in our Get Cooking series, which is all about learning some recipe basics, tossing in some kitchen staples — and then improvising.

Several readers were kind enough to share their take on some of these recipes, including Kathy Leslie, who favored the pasta and broccoli dish, and offered up this variation:

"Thought you might like to know about a variation that we've made for years — to your pan of olive oil, add about 2 oz chopped pancetta (I just use the whole package of chopped pancetta available at Trader Joe's for $2.99) and cook till it renders and browns a little....

Rocker Dexter Holland's spicy offspring: Gringo Bandito hot sauce

Dexter Holland could be described as a Renaissance man.

He's a rock star: His Orange County punk-pop band, the Offspring, has sold 17 million albums in the U.S. He's also designed and patented software for BlackBerry.

He's an experienced pilot who owns three planes. He has a master's degree in molecular biology from USC.

And he's also an up-and-comer in the quirky world of boutique hot sauces.

His indelicately named Mexican-style sauce, Gringo Bandito, is bottled at the brisk pace of 300 gallons a month and is even being sold through Albertsons supermarkets in Southern California and Las Vegas. Read more about Holland's hot sauce.

Photo: Wally Skalij / Los Angeles Times

Beverly Hills meat shop specializes in worldly tastes

Ask among the nearly 30,000 South African expats living throughout the Los Angeles area where they go for freshly made biltong -- foot-long chunks of coriander-and-cider-vinegar-cured, air-dried beef -- and fingers will likely point toward the Sausage Kitchen in Beverly Hills.

European-style sausages may have been the foundation of the shop when it opened in 1948, but it's the South African specialty products that keep the brick smoker churning today.

Read more here.

Have yourself a merry little D.I.Y Christmas

Considering everybody on your holiday gift list -- friends, family, co-workers, neighbors, your kids' teachers -- you might be needing a stimulus package before you even get to the big-ticket items this year.

So why not take a page from your grandmother's playbook and make the smaller gifts yourself?

Not only are homemade gifts less expensive, they also capture the spirit of holiday giving in a way that purchased gifts simply can't. And if you consider the ubiquitous traffic and holiday crowds, a leisurely morning spent baking breadsticks or whipping up a batch of homemade marshmallows seems positively Zen-like by comparison.

Gifts you make yourself can triangulate personal taste with both economy and invention. Make a stack of shortbread cookies spiced with your neighbor's favorite lavender, then tie them up in cellophane the color of her kitchen. Or wrap up a tin of brownies in the sports page for a friend who's a rabid Lakers fan (maybe the standings -- an idea you might need to finesse if your friend is a Clippers fan).

Use antique bottles found at flea markets (sterilize them first) to show off a rich caramel sauce spiked with Cognac or a batch of vinegar you've infused with thyme and peppercorns. Just tie the tops with velvet ribbon and thread on greeting cards and you have terrific gifts, at once pretty and practical.

Here are 50 ways to get the job done:

--Amy Scattergood

Photo caption: Homemade marshmallows. Photo credit: Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

The holidays? Just an excuse to get crafty

The world of entertaining seems to be divided into two categories: hosts who care mainly about the meal and would be perfectly happy eating off fancy paper plates, and hosts who are all about the fine art of tablescaping -- that is, making sure the table settings and decor are just so.

If you fall into the latter category, and you ramped up for Thanksgiving by putting together a centerpiece and table setting that would make Martha Stewart's head spin, we want to know about it.

Send your best photo to food@latimes.com, with a subject line of TABLESCAPE. Include a brief description, and a contact phone number. (We promise we won't publish it, and we won't turn it over to the subscriptions department, either.) We'll consider it for use in a photo gallery later this month on table decor.

Eat your heart out, Martha!

Here's a look at a Moroccan-themed Thanksgiving table for 24, set by Times staff writer Megan Garvey and her husband, Steve Carney, and a cast of thousands. (This is done on a shoestring budget, so that means everyone who is invited to dinner needs to pitch in in some manner.)

More photos of the outdoor tent, which was swathed in bolts of bargain-basement fabrics, at the link below.

-- Rene Lynch

Photo: Sheila Garvey / Sheila Garvey Photography 

These foodscapes are making you hungry. Very, very hungry.

Today we were sent these incredible pictures, called foodscapes, by London photographer Carl Warner. Unfortunately, we can't just web-nap the photos and put them up, but we can link to a recent article by the Telegraph, which displays 14 of the arresting, hungry-making photos, along with quotes from Warner and a breakdown of how he creates the images. Trust us, you won't be disappointed. Click here, now! 

-- Jessica Gelt