Girl+Fire Turns 1 With A Top 5

Today is the day marked in all the Girl+Fire calendars as the day this site was born!

It's been a lovely year of experimentation in the kitchen, learning the ins and outs of food photography (an ongoing process), how to style food, and getting to hob nob with some of the coolest food bloggers in Los Angeles, the FBLA.

I'd like to thank all the readers and Facebook fans for your support, and hope to give you more and more good stuff!

To start, how about a retrospective? Here are the Top 5 Moments in G+F First Year:

5. Surviving the first Chopped-Inspired Dinner. Luckily the gathered friends and family made it easy. And we now have a running joke about Kevin Bacon and shrimp shakes (see the video here).

4. Learning the very simple art of canning! This was so much fun, and completely cured me of my fear canning. Which then led to my next favorite blogger moment...

3. Making sweet and spicy poblano jam. What happens when you add blueberries to jalapeños and poblano peppers? DELICIOSITY. It's a new word. I loved this jam so much, it's one of the few G+F recipes you'll see on both the blog and the calendar.

2. Meeting Chef Aarón Sanchez on my mom's birthday. He is such an incredibly nice guy, and we had the greatest time that evening.

1. The absolute highlight of the year, however, was being voted top pizza among the gathered food bloggers at Rosti Tuscan Kitchen last April. Getting to meet everyone who's blogs I'd been lurking on, and then having them pick my pizza was mind blowing.

There are, of course, plenty of other memorable moments. Finally getting to meet Oakley at the OC Foodie Fest AND learning her bacon scotch recipe—which was later featured on BaconScotch.com!!—are just two of the many.

Thank you all again. It's been hectic, heartbreaking, and wonderful all rolled into one!

Sweet & Spicy Poblano Pepper Jam

Remember back when I was afraid of canning? Well I got over that fear right quick after the public jam. And I couldn't wait to try it with peppers!

Well, peppers and other fruits. Despite my cultural roots, there might actually be such thing as too many peppers. I didn't want to burn my tongue right off. So I seeded and chopped up a pound of jalapeños and poblanos, and then added pluots, figs, kumquats, basil and—because I wanted the jam to be a deep, dark red color—blueberries. It made a beautiful rainbow of flavors in the bowl.

I also didn't want a particularly sweet jam, so I held back on the sugar. The pectin I used was a "no sugar needed" variety. But because I've come to learn that sugar is both a preservative and responsible for color vibrancy, I did add 2 cups of it. Just to be on the safe side.

The experiment paid off. It looks like any sweet berry jam but with just enough heat. As one friend described it, "it's like a party in your mouth! You're expecting it to be sweet, but the spice hits you...then the sweet follows!" Which is exactly what I was aiming for. I swear.

My family can't get enough of this. They'll use it on toast, in fruit salad, as a meat topper, etc and so on. I like it as a snack, on top of pieces of truffle cheese or even queso fresco.

Sweet & Spicy Poblano Pepper Jam
yields 2 pint jars

1/2 pound poblano peppers (also called ancho chile peppers)
1/2 pound jalapeño peppers
5-6 medium figs
2 pluots
1 cup blueberries

1/2 cup kumquats

2 tablespoons basil chiffonade
2 cups sugar
1 cup water
1 packet of no-sugar-needed pectin

1. Remove the seeds from the peppers. Chop the peppers, figs, pluots, and kumquats into similar-sized pieces. (Note: use gloves when dealing with the peppers! I touched my lip hours after I'd made this—hours after I'd washed my hands several times over—and still managed to have burning lips for a while.)

2. Put the peppers and fruits into a large pot with the pectin over medium high heat and bring to a full boil. This should take 5-10 minutes. Stir to incorporate the pectin, and continue stirring occasionally to prevent scorching.

3. After reaching a full boil add the sugar and basil, stirring to incorporate. Boil hard for about a minute. Remove from heat.

4. Skim off the foam if it bothers you. Transfer the jam to sterile jars and proceed with water bath or vacuum sealing.

5. Refrigerate after opening.

Be sure to hide the jars from over-zealous relatives who will eat it all without sharing it with you. Or, to avoid this awkward situation, triple or quadruple the recipe.

Jalapeños en Escabeche

Simply put this is a pickled jalapeño dish. Depending on what part of the world you are in, escabeche can mean a variety of things, and spelled the same way it is pronounced a variety of ways. For our purposes, it's a vinegar and oil concoction of jalapeños.

My education on the subject started when I procured a small bag of the hot peppers. My mom suggested I make "un escabeche." Since I'm half-Mexican I should have known what that was. Instead (because I'm also half-not Mexican, or Mexican't) I Googled. And found a mess of recipes that called for sugar and vinegar and oil in varying quantities and a variety of added vegetables. My mom laughed at me and gave me her very simple breakdown:

Note: even though I put these in a plastic jar for a quick bit, they should be stored in glass or ceramic containers. The acid will leech the icky stuff out of the plastic and cause a third eye or something equally bad.

Rosita's Jalapeño Escabeche 
Yields about 1-4 pints, depending on additional vegetables

1/2 pound jalapeños
1/3 cup oil
1/2 cup vinegar (apple cider is a good choice)
1 cup water
4 cloves garlic, peeled and smashed (but kept whole)
1 shallot, thinly sliced
5-10 leaves of fresh oregano
5-10 black peppercorns (This was my father's contribution to the recipe. He is also not-Mexican.)
Optional ingredients: 1-2 carrots, handful of cauliflower florets, a small onion, etc (I only wanted to concentrate on the jalapeños, so I left all these out.)

1. Prepare the jalapeños any which way you want to preserve them. If you opt to keep them whole, cut a small X in the bottom of the pepper to allow the liquid to penetrate the insides. (As you can see from the picture, I kept some intact, sliced others).

2. Do a self-assessment. If you're heat-intolerant, you may want to discard the seeds. I did not follow my own advice here. The half-Mexican part of me took over the half-not Mexican and left ALL the seeds in.

3. Put all the ingredients in a sauce pan and bring to a boil. Open all the windows, and keep the hood fan running because boiled vinegar is pungent.

4. Once the boiling point is reached, simmer uncovered for an hour.

5. Enjoy the pungent smell of vinegar. Or go sit outside. This step is open to interpretation, but you do have an hour to kill. I chose to talk to my mom on the phone about how my Mexican side was showing itself. She was very proud.

6. Cool your concoction then store it in a glass or ceramic container. You can put in pickling jars and do a hot water bath. They'll supposedly last longer (about a month) in the fridge. Mine have been in the fridge for a week in a simple glass container and they're already half gone. So your mileage may vary.

The liquid from this recipe can also be used separately. I've used it on pizza dough to give it a golden brown crust with a spicy kick. Or as a simple spicy vinaigrette. The options are endless.