Newer version of Annie's Salsa - BWB only Annie's Salsa 8 cups tomatoes, peeled, chopped and drained 2 1/2 cups chopped onion 1 1/2 cups chopped green pepper 3 to 5 chopped jalapenos (for milder leave out seeds and ribs) 6 cloves minced garlic 2 tsp cumin (optional) 2 tsp pepper 1/8 cup canning salt 1/4 c fresh cilantro (optional) 1/3 c sugar (optional) 1 cup cider vinegar (see note on subbing lemon or lime juice option) 16 oz canned tomato sauce (to adjust density) 8-16 oz canned tomato paste (to adjust density) Mix all ingredients, bring to a boil, boil 10 minutes. Pour into hot jars, process pints for 15 minutes in BWB. Makes 6 pints. _________ A lot of changes have been made to this recipe over the years. Some people like lemon or lime juice in place of some or all of the vinegar, that's fine. (Note from Sheila - I like half lemon half lime.) Some people leave out the cilantro, that's fine too. Do not increase! Some people add more hot peppers or fewer onions, fine as long as you keep the same total measurements. (Note this is what NCHFP does in their new Choice Salsa recipe.) Some people leave out the sugar, that's fine. You can scoop out the goo in the middle of the tomatoes with your thumbs when I'm peeling and chopping for a less seedy version, so it's 8 cups of chopped tomatoes without the seeds and goo. Most who make it regularly as well as Annie recommend using a variety of different slicing tomatoes, not paste types, for best flavor and consistency. (Note: use the tomato sauce and paste to adjust the consistency of the final product to a "sloshy" consistency.) According to Annie "My salsa is not as thick as Heinz catsup but it's thicker than taco sauce. If you don't like it quite as thick or sweet, cut down the amount of paste. I would add some, then taste. Reducing that ingredient shouldn't affect the safety of the recipe. I use equal amounts of sauce and paste. You can pull it off the heat at any point and adjust for flavor. Before I cook it I check for salt, sugar, check the consistency. Add more pepper or cumin if I want. When I first started making this salsa, tomato sauce and paste came in 8 and 16 ounce cans. Like everything else, they've now been downsized, so now I have to use partial cans." Does anybody have good versions of the other recipes that have weird symbols in them for measurements?

We have a hand-crank Donvier we got when we were married in 1995 that is almost constantly in use from about the 4th of July to mid-September. (The brand-name one is overpriced. Get a clone, which can be had for under $20 on sale.) DH wants an electric and I may get him one for his birthday (which is 2 days after Christmas LOL) if end-of-summer sales yield any REALLY good prices on reliable machines. Here's the base recipe we use, from the Ben & Jerry's book... I don't think you could GET any simpler, and it's surprisingly good. We pretty much never use a custard base because our kitchen is not air conditioned, and diddling around making custard in a 90-odd degree kitchen is officially Not Worth It in our book. For a 1 quart ice cream maker, combine 1 can sweetened, condensed milk (many of us remember it as "Eagle milk") with 2 cups light cream, a splash of vanilla extract and a pinch of salt. Do NOT leave out the salt! Stir well, chill at least 2 hours before putting in the ice cream maker. You can substitute full-fat ("cream top") vanilla yogurt for half the cream but it doesn't really save you much calorically, just does interesting things to the flavor and can make you feel a little virtuous LOL! Lower-fat yogurts give a strange chalky texture and unsweetened yogurt makes for very sour product. (Found from unpleasant experience that just chucking a quart of yogurt straight from the container into the ice cream maker, no matter how yummy it is normally, does not make nice frozen yogurt, oh no not at all!) There's a simple plain base, now start playing... A super easy way to get a delicious fruity flavor ice cream is to substitute 1 cup of a good strong jam for 1 cup of the cream. (I don't recommend doing both jam and yogurt and eliminating all the cream. The result came out... the only word I can find for it is "stretchy".) The jam concentrates the fruit's flavor; warm "seedy" jams like raspberry or blackberry until they're liquidy and push them through a strainer if you don't want to be picking seeds out of your teeth for days. If you want fruit pieces, line a cookie sheet with the nonstick foil or baking parchment (or a Silpat if you're blessed with one), spread out a layer of finely chopped fruit with the pieces not touching, or minimally touching, and freeze rock solid. Add the fruit pieces at the very end of churning. Toast any nuts you wish to add for a stronger, "nuttier" flavor; and grating frozen chocolate bars on the largest holes of a grater (use an oven mitt to hold the chocolate so your body heat doesn't melt it) gives a better result IMO than using chocolate chips, even the mini kind. If you want to use something like butterscotch chips, freeze them and break them up in small batches in a food processor on "pulse". Good use for one of those mini-chopper types. Remember that your liquid ice cream/sorbet/yogurt mixture has to be almost sickeningly-sweet in its unfrozen state to taste "normal" as a finished product - the cold numbs your taste buds so all the flavors have to be STRONG. Oh, and filling the churning chamber more than about 2/3 full, 3/4 at the most, can be a recipe for a Big Sticky Mess. So don't do it. Honey-sweetened ice cream does not store well more than 24 hours - it gets crumbly and weird-textured, so if you want to do something with honey, have enough people around to scarf it down within hours of curing. Alcohol will interfere in the solidifying process so if you really load it up even with an overnight cure you may not get more than a "soft serve" texture. We bought a whole slew of nice little (not quite 1/2 cup) lidded plastic containers into which we portion the ice cream while it's still in the "soft serve" state. Pop them in the freezer and in 4 hours it's solidified enough to have the proper ice cream "mouthfeel", although I like 8 hours' curing time. If we don't pre-portion it DH will go WAY overboard! Oh, and the famous Mark Bittman/New York Times "eggless ice cream" was IMNSHO utterly REVOLTING.

Love2weed, how does your ice cream turn out - what is not ''creamy'' about it? Is it simply too hard - that probably just means you can stop churning a bit earlier and serve that much sooner. Am I misunderstanding what you are after? If you want ice cream that remains soft and creamy after sitting in the freezer for days, I don't know how that is done. I'll be very interested to find out. I make ice cream using a old ice cream maker that has a built-in refrigeration unit. Meaning, you don't need to plan ahead and put a bulky tub in the freezer overnight. You can be spontaneous about your ice cream, well, if you call an hour or more of preparation ''spontaneous''. [Delete tasteless Viagra joke here.] My machine is a SIMAC Il Gelataio 800 ''The Ice Cream Boy'' model, might be 20+ years old, they show up used for around $100, sometimes less. During the churning, the ice cream goes through a creamy, soft stage. If I stop there, I have creamy ice cream - it can be as soft as soft-serve ice cream frozen yogurt if I stop early enough. If I continue churning, the ice cream gets firmer, gelato-like consistency. Keep churning, and it gets harder yet. If I place the churned ice cream in the freezer for an hour, it is as hard as conventional store-bought ice cream - but I don't like such hard ice cream, actually. My process is very conventional. Click Ice Cream Boy's ''CHILL'' switch to ''on'', let him start chilling his tub. Make custard from 2 cups heavy cream, 1 cup whole milk, 1 cup sugar, then 2 beaten egg yolks added a bit later. Using a double boiler, I cook this at about 160F until it seems thick enough, usually around 15 minutes. I've read recipes that call for a higher temperature, but I had some curdling problems if I went too much above 160F. Transfer to a steel bowl, place that in a larger bowl with ice and water, swirl around to cool the custard to 40-50F, the colder the better but it tries my patience. I add the flavor ingredient after transferring the custard to the steel bowl, either right away or after the custard has cooled some, depending on whether the stuff tolerates higher temperature. Then I pour the flavored custard into Ice Cream Boy and start him churning. Usually around 25-35 minutes for softer ice cream, 35-45 for harder. Starting with very cold custard shortens the churning considerably. Since Ice Cream Boy is actually Ice Cream Elderly Man in ''appliance years'', I try to not work him too hard.

Here's one for you, Cauliflower-bacon soup with chives and truffle oil Faced with a head of cauliflower one night, I bought a new hand blender and set to work creating a basic, but delicious soup. Ingredients: olive oil 1 head of cauliflower 6 slices good quality thick cut bacon 2 cups of chicken broth (home made is best) 1 cup of milk 2 tbsp heavy cream 1 onion 1/2 teaspoon ground coriander and/or cumin (optional) chopped fresh chives truffle oil (or olive oil) 1. start by chopping the onion and frying it gently in a little olive oil, with a little salt to sweat 2. chop the cauliflower: remove the leaves, core it, then cut into florets, and chop the thick parts into smaller pieces. 3. once the onion is soft, about 5 minutes, add cauliflower and fry for another five minutes. remove from pan and cover. 4. slice bacon thinly, and add to pan. fry until cooked, but not crisp, and drain most of the fat. return cauliflower and onion, and add coriander/cumin. cook for 2 minutes, until it starts to smell wonderful. 5. add the stock and milk. bring it all to a boil, and season to taste (lots of pepper is good). reduce heat to medium-low, and simmer gently for about 25 minutes, covered, stirring occasionally. taste to see when the soup has taken on the flavor of the smoky bacon and cauliflower. 6. if you have a hand blender, start blending the soup to to a thick, but liquid consistency. the longer you do it, the better it will be. you can transfer soup in batches to a regular blender if you don't have a hand blender. i really like my hand blender. can you tell? now, if you really want a veloute consistency, you could pass the liquid through a chinois and blend the catches until there is no solid present. however, i'm not that picky. 7. serve hot, with chives sprinkled on top and some truffle oil drizzled in. you can add some cooked orzo in for substance. or whatever you feel. Shelley