While I might be more known to pickle everything in sight, I do tend to make a batch of jam here & there upon occasion. Jam took me quite some time to really master – somehow I was able to teach others how to do it without ever actually being successful at it myself. I know, go figure. The people that live in my house, scarred by years of bad jam, prefer to not eat the jam I make. One of them requests I purchase large tubs of just plain, grape jelly that the act of making a pb& j doesn’t use half a jar. The other has decided she’s only going to eat Daniel’s jam and when I get sneaky and reuse his jars, keeping the label and filling it with my own, she knows.
Category: canning
Misadventures of the gardening foodie sort.
Last summer, my friend Cynthia introduced me to this adorable little relative of the cucumber family, the Mexican Sour Gherkin. The flavor of these miniature watermelon-appearing fruits has a crisp, tart (think lemon) cucumber flavor. I immediately thought they would make an excellent pickle. Continue reading
Well I’ll be.
It’s not all fun & games, lazy pool days & popsicles for breakfast while slowly overhauling the dining room here. This morning, I got up, put a second coat on the walls (ain’t nothing left to do but the trim!!), packed some lunches, made a decent breakfast (and got it into her!) before dropping Edie off at her ‘mother’s helper’ gig at The Boar’s Head and then headed out to pick blueberries.
So far this week.
I bought beets at market last Saturday. I roasted them in a foil packet in just a wee bit of water at 375 for just over an hour. I let them cool, peeled them, tossed with with salad greens, goat’s milk feta cheese, salt & pepper, olive oil & red wine vinegar. We liked them. So much so I bought more beets at market this Saturday and when I suggested making that salad again today, Edie said okay. Which means she likes them I think. Dare I say we are starting to like beets? Continue reading
As local as it gets.
We have a cherry tree in our front yard. The neighborhood critters tend to get to it before we do, leaving us not more than a handful of cherries, at best.
This spring the tree was loaded. You could see it walking down the street. We had hope there would be enough for all of us. Tuesday I had a bite of a cherry, realized they were not quite ripe yet, and noticed the tree was still loaded – a good sign.
Friday morning, there was much activity at the tree. Every bird & squirrel within a 6 block radius was feasting. I ran out with my basket and picked everything within reach without a ladder. I noticed a good deal of the fruit had some sort of funk, which was a bummer and the remaining fruit wasn’t entirely ripe, but I was going to get a crop off that tree dammit.
Two pounds later, I did.
Since they were mostly underripe, I knew cooking them was the way to go. Having picked 8 pounds of strawberries later that day from our little garden patch, I thought about combining the two.
Yes, you read that right. EIGHT POUNDS of berries from our little strawberry patch in one day. Two pounds the day before that. It’s been a banner year for strawberries.
Where was I? Oh that’s right, cherries. First, I had to pit the cherries. I got this little pitter last summer at Bed, Bath & Beyond.
It pits four cherries at a time, popping the seeds out into a tray underneath. That’s practically doing it in bulk when you think about it AND it keeps clean up to a minimum. 
I love this thing. I strongly recommend it, especially if you are considering doing anything with cherries this summer.
After pitting the cherries, I chopped up an equal amount of strawberries, added sugar and let it macerate overnight. I found this great post on Northwest Edible Life on making pectin free jam without a recipe that I used as a guideline. Because my cherries were not fully ripe, I went with 1/2 cup sugar for each pound of fruit.
The resulting jam is sweeter than I expected it to be, with big chunks of fruit.
I packed it in 4 oz jars, trying to stretch out the yield as much as I could. The result? 8 lovely jars of what we are calling “Greenleaf Cherry Berry”. I’m beyond excited that we grew enough fruit to make jam with this year. Take that squirrels.
Spread on sourdough toast for breakfast, it’s quite lovely if I do say so myself.
Cherry Berry Jam
2 pounds cherries, pitted & chopped
2 pounds strawberries, chopped
Combine the fruit in a non-reactive bowl with 1-2 cups of sugar. Cover and refrigerate overnight (or longer). Simmer on stove top, stirring occasionally. As the fruit starts to fall apart, you can mash it if you’d like. Add 2 tablespoons lemon juice and cook until it is ‘set’. Pack into jars and process in a hot water bath for 10 minutes.
Yield – 4 pints.
Adventures of a few different sorts.
Remember how last year it was freakishly warm super early last spring? Strawberry season came & went in the blink of an eye with that heat. This year, the opposite has happened – it’s just not warm enough for strawberries to ripen at many area berry patches, including the one in my own yard. Some of the berry patches have yet to open for the season – including my favorite, Middle River Farms, outside of Grottos. Considering it’s over in the Shenandoah Valley, which is always just a little bit behind us in the harvest, it’s not that much of a surprise. I’ve been chomping at the bit to pick some strawberries this year though. Maybe it’s the result of last week’s canning class, with it’s successful jam that Edie said was “almost as good as Daniel’s“. High Praise indeed. Or maybe it’s that we finished up the last of the freezer strawberries last week. Or maybe, it’s that it’s mid-May and I want fresh strawberries every day, because this is the time of year for them.
Whatever the reason, I decided to check out a new berry patch I’d heard about south of town, Seaman’s Orchard, outside of Roseland. Which is more than a little south of town – it’s south of Lovingston and closer to Lynchburg than it is Charlottesville. Price wise, their pick your own is more expensive than Middle River Farms, but still cheaper than Chile’s. And the view?
It’s Canning Season.
Sarah Cramer Shields for Beyond the Flavor
I kicked off the season of canning classes at The Happy Cook last night. Thanks everyone who came out – I had a blast, I hope you did too while learning something. I’m happy to report that the jam I rushed into jars last night that hadn’t quite set was good and firm when I got up this morning. Hooray. A jam success story!
I popped open a few jars of pickles in last night’s class and when asked for the recipes, I promised to get them up on here. My friend Justin was there with his camera last night, capturing the class for an upcoming blog post for The Happy Cook and I’m going to let him sum up the class for everyone while I post the requested recipes and links.
And for everyone who didn’t make it to last night’s class, there will be plenty more as the season progresses. Keep an eye on my Events page, for others. I’ll be at The Happy Cook again on May 28 with more hot water bath canning and on June 11 with pressure canning. Onto the recipes…..
In progress.
Now that the canning season is winding down, I’ve been able to move out of the kitchen somewhat and onto other projects. First up, a check on the progress of Pat’s sweater.
From that angle, it doesn’t appear as if much progress has been made, but really, it has.
See? That’s a few inches there. There’s 360 stitches per row. The first few rows took me about an hour each, but I’ve managed to pick up some speed and can now do a row in 30-45 minutes. I’ve completed the armpits and am now starting to shape it, heading up to the shoulders. I had Edie help me with the math and I think I have about 60 rows or so until I can start the collar. If I sat and did nothing else for an entire work week, I might get it done by Christmas. I think I’ll shoot for his birthday towards the end of January. That seems do-able as well as gives me a project for those lazy days after Christmas when I like to sit around, watch tv and eat cake.
I also went ahead and bought another cone of yarn, ensuring that the last of the two cones I had on hand for this will be enough. Whenever I get nervous and go out and buy more yarn to finish a project, I ensure myself leftovers. I haven’t decided what I’m doing with the leftovers yet. Thoughts?
I’m also whipping up a pair of fingerless gloves for the lucky coworker that my husband drew in his office holiday gift exchange. She had fingerless gloves on her list of suggested gifts. I’m using some merino from the stash that I inherited when the university students moved out last spring. Someone left two large boxes of yarn out by the curb that my friend Eddie found and dropped off here. There was a mix of acrylic and really nice stuff (like this merino), but most of the nice stuff was in some weird colorways. I kept some for myself and shared some, just for projects like this. This yarn is from a local farm and is dreamy to work with. The pattern is a slightly altered one from Knitty called Fetching– they are quick and easy. I knit the left handed one seen there in a night’s worth of television watching.
Also on my needles is a poncho for Edie. I’m trying to surprise her at Christmas, which means working on this when she’s not around. Which means outlasting her at bedtime. Thankfully she’s got a sleepover this weekend, so I’m hoping to make some real progress, because outlasting her at bedtime is really hard.
I’m basing her poncho on the poncho I knit for myself several years ago that was only slightly based on a pattern. Her poncho involves a good bit of counting stitches, looking at my poncho and math. Oh math. How I don’t like you.
The yarn for Edie’s poncho is also from the stash, some of it from the discarded stash Eddie dropped off. I’m hoping I have enough and am resisting going out to buy more until I really have to. Really.
This last project is something for me. I found this yarn (which I can assure you does not glow like this in real life) for $2/ball at the Fiber Festival last month. I had gone telling myself I was not going to buy myself anything unless of course, I found a deal too good to pass up and especially if it involved orange yarn. Clearly the yarn gods were listening. I want to do a lacy scarf with this, but I’ve had the hardest time finding a pattern I can work without having to rip it out and restart it 4 times. These two have passed the test, but I’m not sure about committing to either one.
Yes, this one is lovely and open, not to mention knits up incredibly fast and easy, but I just knit myself an orange zig-zag scarf last fall.
And while one can have multiple black velvet pants, black wool pleated skirts and black cardigans, how many orange zig zag scarves can one really have?
And while I like this pattern, something about it says Old Lady Acrylic Sweater to me. I like it, but I’m not sure I want to commit to it. I’m starting to think that maybe I should knit a cowl out of the orange yarn but I’ve yet to find a pattern I really like, so I’ve started pondering the idea of maybe just making one up. I know, it’s a huge, HUGE step for me, poncho not withstanding. For what I have in mind and from what I’ve read, I think I can do it. I am starting to see the appeal of a cowl, and I want something new & orange to go around my neck, so why not?
I have not completely abandoned the kitchen though. Currently sitting on my counter are two hot pepper ferments:
On the left is a roasted poblano ferment. My friend Kathy brought some to last Sunday’s swap and it was quite tasty. I swapped her for a jar of it, in addition to her recipe, as I still had a few gallon bags of poblanos sitting in my fridge, waiting to be dealt with. (Also, it was soooo good, I wanted to make sure I had a supply before eating it all!) I had a goal of getting a few more jars of pickled peppers, another batch of fermented peppers and at least one batch of chili rellenos out of what I had grown this year. I can report complete success – I got two more pints of pickled peppers, a batch of Kathy’s roasted ferment AND I have exactly enough good sized peppers to make chili rellenos for the fam for dinner soon.
The ferment on the right is a mix of chili peppers from my friend Cynthia, some of Grandpa Jack’s habaneros and my jalapenos. They’ve been sitting there about a month or so now. I’m not exactly sure what my next step with them is going to be, as it’s an experiment, but I can tell you that when you open the jar, your sinuses totally open up. I read that fermenting chilis was the key to a good flavorful hot sauce (Tabasco is fermented), so in my quest to make a good hot sauce, I thought I’d try it.
I haven’t totally stopped canning, but it has been winding down. I did several batches of applesauce and apple butter from a few bushels of apples I got out at Henley’s orchard. I came to the realization that I could make a batch of applesauce in my stock pot in a fraction of the time (45 minutes) it took me to make it in the crock pot (about 4 hours), although with the crock pot, I can come & go and not have to keep an eye on it. I also get nervous about burning the bottom of my pot, as I’ve done with things in the past. So far so good, I even did a batch of cranapple butter on the stovetop, which took less than 2 hours on low (vs. overnight on low in the crockpot). I’m not totally giving up the crockpot, as it makes far less of a mess than doing it on the stove and I can leave it unattended, but it’s nice to know I can put up a bushel or two of apples in no time flat on my stove top.
The cranapple butter came out tasting like cranapple juice – you mostly taste the cranberries, but they are sweet thanks to the apples. I threw some cranberries and a bit of water in a pan, cooked it for about 10 minutes, then threw it in with the applesauce, about a half cup of sugar and cooked it down until it was the right consistency. Edie has a big thing for cranberries and claims to be ‘over’ apple butter, so I thought she’d like this. The freezers got a few apple pies while I was at it. My two basement chest freezers are now at capacity, I’m out of half pint jars and down to my last half case of pint jars. I might try a small batch of pickled cranberries before I completely call it a season until strawberries come back around, but as you can see, I have some knitting to knock out in the next few weeks.
At it again.
I’m teaching one last pickling class for the season. Sunday, September 30, 1-4 at EAT! over in Belmont.
Sign up here.
I’ve got my Cville Swaps partner, Vikki lined up to assist, so you’ll get lots of canning how-to’s in this hands on class, as well as some of our favorite recipes. Spread the word!
On Preserving the Harvest.
I’ve been getting a good number of questions on the subject of canning and pickling here lately. I don’t claim to be an expert, but admittedly, I engage in that activity on average a few times a week most of the year and find that along the way I’ve learned much through trial and error.
Certain rules you must abide by – the whole idea of acid contents determining processing styles and times still intimidates me, so I don’t play around with that one nor do I skip sterilizing steps, although I might not always hold fast to the 10 minute boiling rule anymore for sterilizing my jars. Should one of us get botulism this year, I’ll revisit that, definitely.
I have never pressure canned, so I can’t really answer questions on that process. I struggled for a long time with making successful jams, but was finally (!) successful with it this summer – thanks to the Food in Jars Cookbook, I learned the temperature at which jam sets (220 degrees F) and since then have successfully made several small batches, including a cantaloupe jam. I’m definitely feeling more comfortable with jams these days than I was even 6 weeks ago. After years of massive failures because I was attempting to jam 20 pounds of fruit at a time, I’ve come to embrace small batches and with that, I have finally found success.
It’s so much easier to get a feel for what you’re doing when you do it in small batches. My first successful jam ever was a small batch of stone fruit jam inspired by new favorite cookbook mentioned in the above paragraph – I had a handful of cherries and two small peaches that needed to go, so I threw them in a pot and gave it a go. I yielded exactly one half pint jar that I didn’t bother to process but just stuck it straight in the fridge. It gave me the confidence to try more. Like the cantaloupe jam.
I have two chest freezers in my basement and consequently, freeze quite a bit of food as well, like corn, green beans, tomatillos and peppers. I keep a spreadsheet of what’s in each freezer so that I know what’s where (I have my Type A- moments). I have experimented with drying foods (like tomatoes) and am starting to read about fermenting, because I want to try that out as well. Preserving the harvest by canning, pickling, jamming, freezing, drying and fermenting are really an extension of cooking as I see it. I don’t like to waste food, and so over the years I’ve learned that when my green beans are tough because of hot, dry weather, they make fantastic pickles. Bolting arugula not only cooks well as a green, it makes an excellent pesto. And then there are Watermelon Rind Pickles, in which someone once upon a time thought to use every last part of that watermelon.
I’ve started a page on here that lists my favorite resources for food preservation, with the first link being an article from the Virginia Cooperative Extension that I was given when I took my first canning class. I keep a printed copy in a binder along with the rest of my food preservation cookbooks. The websites I have linked to are listed in the handout I give my canning students and these are the links I tend to reference when searching for an answer to a question I receive. I know canning can sound intimidating, but if you approach it one little bit at a time, it’s really quite easy. And I assure you, there is nothing better than opening up a jar of something you put up one hot afternoon in August to eat when you are snowed in again come January and February.
Chicken Wire & Paper Flowers 