The New York Times Recipe Lab + Blueberry Jam

I'm excited to reveal that tomorrow, at 7pm UK time and 2pm New York time, I will be participating in the New York Times Recipe Lab live video chat with Kevin West (who wrote Saving the Season), Julia Moskin from the NYT and two other readers.

We'll be chatting about the recipe for Blueberry Jam from Kevin's book (which we've all made) and preserving in general. I've really enjoyed finding out a bit about the differences between UK and US jam making and I'm looking forward to finding out more tomorrow.



I found the Recipe Lab series a few weeks ago and quickly watched all of the episodes (some of my favourites were Ottolenghi, Deborah Madison and Nigella). It's lovely to see cookbook authors chatting casually about their work. On the off chance, I filled the reader participation form in last week and was very surprised to be called an hour or so later.



I've now made the jam twice, once in Oxford last week and then again in Switzerland today (I flew out last night). The recipe for the jam is here. For those that work in metric, I used 1.36kg of blueberries, 600g sugar and 120 ml of water (the second time I made a half recipe).

So if you're interested in preserving and jam or just want to check out my accent and mannerisms (my usual motivation for watching videos of bloggers I follow), then you can either watch live on the NYT Dining Section site or catch up with the video later - I'll update with a link to the video as soon as I can.

UPDATE: the video of the chat is embedded below.





Three other posts that involve preserves:
2010: Ginger and Apple Jam
2012: Seville Orange Marmalade
2013: Strawberry Jam (with a touch of lime)

Blueberry Braided Bread: A Guest Post

My post today is over on The Pastry Affair, a gorgeous baking blog written by Kristin Rosenau.

Kristin started out as an astroparticle physicist. Then, in 2010, Kristin left physics to work as a baker (she's pretty good at it... Hello, Nutella Espresso Rolls.). She worked as a full-time baker for two years, tutoring on the side, then changed course once more, to go back to graduate school to become a physics teacher. As you can imagine, I've followed her journey with great interest as the parallels between our lives played out across the ocean.

While Kristin goes through a few more life changes, she asked me to write a guest post. I made this soft, sweet braided bread with blueberry compote and cream cheese filling and got a bit carried away with braiding metaphors. You can find the post, recipe and photos of the finished braid here.



Three recipes of Kristen's that I'd love to try:
Chocolate Chunk Ginger Cookies
Pumpkin Espresso Bread
Toasted Almond Cookies with a Dried Fig Filling