Remember the cotton/rayon roving that I dyed?

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Just an update on eating, and canning.

So how is everyone's summer going?

I was starting to feel a lot of self pity, wah wah wah, poor me, because I couldn't scrape together the cash in the spring to sign up for either of the CSA programs that I like. For those who aren't familiar, CSA = Community Supported Agriculture, and it's a system where you buy a share of what the farm produces in a growing season. So around here it's ~$400 and you get fresh local veggies every week, usually from mid May through October. My mom suggested I check out farmer's markets in town instead, since there is one literally every day of the week right now (hooray!!). So, I tried the one closest to work, on Tuesday, and the farmers who did one of the CSAs that I really like were there selling retail. Huzzah! So, I'm allotting myself $20 every week to buy fresh veggies, and I am saving money for next year.

This week I got a HUGE head of red lettuce, kale, napa cabbage, zucchini, tomatos, garlic greens (like green onions only solid and garlic-y) and small onions with thier tops, kind of a hybrid between onions and green onions. Total of about $17. Yes, I realize over the long run the CSA would be cheaper, but this way I don't have to come up with the cash all at once.

If you can find a program like this, or farmers markets near you, go do it, it is so worth the extra grocery trip.

So dinners this week - stir fry with the napa cabbage,  spicy greens and white beans with the kale, marinated chick pea salad, and I already used the garlic greens to make a pasta - fresh broccoli, tomatos, red onions.... yum!

I also made jam over the weekend (last saturday), Mom dropped off a flat (2 gallons!) of locally grown berries, which she got for $17 since it was the end of the day. I did have a lot of waste, and they were a bit overripe for jam, but all told I got 9 pints and 3 jelly jars plus enough fruit for a batch of triple berry jam when the blueberries start coming in next week and a small bowl of perfect ones to eat. All gone now of course, just a pleasant memory.

But blueberry season is one of my favorites. I love going to the upick, and I know I'm terrible, but I do the kid thing... one for the bucket, one for me. One for the bucket, oh that one looks good, chomp. One for the bucket, oh, do these two taste any different?? Takes me forever to get my bucket filled.

But there is something sincerely gratifying about picking fruit, bringing it home, washing it, and canning it for later. Not all on the same day, of course, are you insane? This is all exhausting labor and needs to be split up over a weekend. I always joke that mom raised me to be a historical re-enactor, since I have so many skills which are not really requirements for modern day living. Canning is one of those things which is getting harder, so I wanted to talk a little bit about it, just to preserve my memories a little.

To preserve foods for long term storage, you usually have a couple of options. Often we use preservatives, chemical substances which inhibit decay that makes food inedible. In the pre-made world of baked goods this takes the form of all sorts of complicated words, but substances like sugar, salt and vinegar do work as well. So jam uses the sweet end of the spectrum. This seems kind of counter intuitive, but there is some logic. Jam, fruit made thick and sealed away from air is a rather inhospitable place for beasties to grow. So canning works on all of these aspects.

There are still materials available to can, usually more prominently displayed in the summer. You need sturdy glass jars, lids with a soft rubber seal and then rings to hold those lids in place until they do seal. You need several large pots, and a source of heat to make boiling water.

Here's where I had an interesting twist. I inherited one of Mom's old canning pots, a huge porcelained monstrosity with several racks. It tends to live in the basement until canning season. This year, I pulled it out and the rust was sufficiently bad that parts of the bottom looked decidely thin. So, with pictures of multiple gallons of boiling water suddenly escaping from the bottom of the pot, I decided to buy a new one this year. They tend to run all of $20, so not a huge investment. I found one at Wal-Mart (see, I told you it was getting more difficult to can, I have to spend my money at a store I hate shopping at in order to do this process. Trade offs.) and brought it home. As I was getting ready to give it a cursory washing before use, I notice the label says "not for use on glass cooktops" Umm. Excuse me? Sure enough, it dawns on my the the somewhat corrugated bottom would be a Bad Idea on smooth cooktops. Le sigh.

So, I dig out the biggest of the stainless steel soap pots, which has never actually been used for soap, since I don't think I've ever made a batch that required a 20 quart pot. Nice flat bottom, stainless steel, lid to keep the heat in. Deal, Done, Thank You, Drive Through. So I get some water in there and put it on medium heat, since it takes a long time for ~5" of water to come to a boil. I've got the jars I'm going to use in the dishwasher being washed, and then I give them an extra rinse on the rinse and hold cycle. Dish soap and rinse aid taste nasty in jam, trust me. Rinse well. Jars should be hot and seriously clean, you really want sterile. The whole purpose of this exercise is to hold food without spoiling for long periods of time, so starting with jars that have yeast or bacteria in them is, well, pointless. Similarly with the lids, so those go into a bowl and are covered with boiling water until it's time to use them.

Fruit should be washed, prepped and crushed. Strawberries are easy, since prep = cut off green bits with a sharp knife. Blueberries are even easier - wash, try to remove any spiders and/or moldy bits. The best jam comes from a mix of ripe and underripe fruit, so don't worry too much about using only perfect fruit. Yes, perfect fruit would likely make better jam, but let's not obsess about such things. For the jam I was making I used a total of 10 C of crushed strawberries, 14 C of sugar and 2 boxes of pectin. Here's the modern convienence coming out. Old school, you don't have pectin extracted from the tons of underripe fruit that can't be sold for eating. You have underripe fruit and tough luck to you if there's too much of it (jello instead of jam) or too little of it (syrup instead of jam). Since I happen to think fruit in syrup just means pancakes for breakfast instead of muffins, I wouldn't be too put out if commerical available pectin went byebye. But it does make things very easy.

Fruit comes to a boil with the pectin. Once it's at a full rolling boil you stir in the sugar, and let it come to a boil again. A word of warning, this is not pasta. It takes a lot longer for the sugar to dissolve, flow and get loose enough to allow boiling again. And in the process you will likely get a lot of foam. I tend to make jam in a pot twice as big as I think I need to accomodate the actual fruit/sugar mix, because that foam can make a serious mess if it overflows. It's boiling hot, and sticky. Not my favorite combination. Now, a lot of people throw a little butter in the mix to help keep that foaming under control. But I love the foam. More on that later. Once it finally boils you set a timer for a minute, and keep stirring. Stir for that full "are you serious this can't be only a minute I've been stirring in this steam and AIGH! it exploded at me! ow ow ow ow hot hot hot why does it always explode straight at me! Where was I, right, I've been stirring for AGES now and it has to be done, is my timer broken, what do you MEAN it's only been 48 seconds... ok, deep breath almost done now, count it down, 3! 2! 1 BEEP!!!"

Ok, maybe you won't have to be as frantic as I am about it all, but once the minute is up, jam comes off the heat, stir it until it settles down and thinks about forgiving you, and then contemplate the foam. Lots of people think this is just the nastiest stuff, and I suspect thier opinion is shaped by that truely nasty foam you get from say, cooking chicken stock. But this is strawberry flavored meringue candy, more or less. I scrape it off into a bowl, put it in the fridge to harden and eat it on english muffins or biscuits.

While the fruit/sugar was coming to a reboil, pull the jars out of the dishwasher, set them up on the counter. I find a funnel to be of critical help here too. Ladle the hot jam into the jars, filling almost but not quite full. Formal recipes have headspace recommendations, but I've always found them to be ~.5" which is almost always where the shoulder of the jar hits. Smaller jars have smaller shoulder slopes and need less headspace. It all seems to be well designed to me. Fill them up, wipe any spillage, drop a lid on and try to screw the ring over the lid without 1) burning yourself terribly 2) overtightening 3) undertightening. It takes some practice and finesse, but "fingertip tight" is the goal. Repeat with all remaining jam and hopefully all remaining jars. If you planned it right you have enough of each to go around.

Then the sealed jars go into the boiling water. There's jar tongs out there that make this incredibly comfortable, adding a good five inches between your fingers and the boiling water. If not there's a lot of cursing in this step and a greater chance for dropped (meaning cracked, meaning MESSY) jars. For most jams you leave them in the boiling water for 10 minutes after it returns to a boil. There's a few purposes to this step. One, bringing things to boiling is a good way to kill the beasties who want to eat our jam before we do. Two, it heats up the air in that headspace, which expands, and escapes through the soft rubber of the lid seal. After the boiling time is up, the jars come out, set on a soft towel on the counter to cool completely. The air inside contracts, and you have a vaccum in the jar, complete with a satisfying "ping" from the lids.

That's actually my childhood memory of canning, and I still do it today. After whatever it was came out we'd play 'count the pings' There's usually silence for a second, then one or two slowly, then usually some in rapid succession... then you think it might be done, wander off to do other things, then unexpectedly "PING!" from the kitchen. Still makes me laugh, actually. It's right up there with popcorn for silly joys.

And then you have this:



Or rather, more importantly, you have this:



Enough strawberry jam to feed my husband PB&J sandwiches for, hopefully, a year, although I honestly doubt it. He seems to eat twice as much homemade as storebought. And yes, I am reusing Frog Ranch salsa jars, since they are kind enough to package in real Mason jars which are canning appropriate. I also tend to pick up jars at places like Big Lots after season.

This is one of the reasons why I'm worried about canning as a means of food storage. I need lids every time, and those are getting harder to find. Eventually jars chip or crack, rings rust. All I can really hope is that this idea of slow food, slow living, eating locally will continue to catch on and we'll keep alive the idea of putting by summer for winter. There really is something deeply gratifying about pulling one of these jars out in December. When you open it, it SMELLS like June. It tastes a lot like when you are so stuffed full of strawberries you think you'll never want to eat one again, and then have just one more. It's the payoff of the pleasure delayer.

Do you can anything? have any family favorites? Next time I might tell you about Grandma's grape juice. Yum.

I just finished listening to the Golden Compass on audiobook. This was one of the first ones I've listened to that had a full cast doing the voices. At first I didn't really like it. I honestly like the "dad reading me a story at bedtime" aspect of the single narrator style. But a few chapters in I surrendered to the radio show quality and really enjoyed it.

And of course, I got curious. What shape would my deamon take? I took the quiz, and his name is Boreallus, and he seems to love being a tiger. He's shiny!

Tell me what you think. In 12 days he'll settle down, so you have that long to decide whether or not this really suits me.


ETA: AIGH! When did he become a mouse?! That's a big switch. LOL Wonder if he'll stay that way??

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