first harvest

We've had a somewhat dismal summer in terms of sunshine. I'm not really complaining, I know most of the country is broiling and we are still at the blissful highs mostly in the 70's stage of summer, which is nice but boy is it wet. The lack of sun, the lack of dry days where we can get out and take down the trees that are blocking the little sun we are getting in the garden and the crazy (CRAZY) amounts of rain mean that our garden, instead of providing the vast amounts of vegetables and herbs for eating and preserving that I dreamed about this winter, is waterlogged and looking a little sad. The only thing rocketing along are the potatoes, maybe I should have just planted potatoes.

The rain has also washed away much of the local strawberry harvest. Picking started late and ended abruptly less than two weeks later. My mom and I went out on the (surprisingly sunny) last day that any strawberry farm within driving distance was open for picking and brought home 17 pounds of berries. They aren't as sweet as I'd like, what can you expect when they didn't get much sun, and I had to go with full strength pectin instead of lemon juice or low sugar pectin because I worried about getting it to set, but an evening of topping, chopping, mashing and cooking and we are stocked for the year with 18 jars of ruby red strawberry jam. The jam shelf in my make shift-basement stair landing pantry (it's on the project list to expand the couple of shelves into a much bigger, nicer pantry soon) is half full as the strawberry joined the rest of the marmalade and a few jars of apple butter from the fall. I love seeing bursting with mason jar pantry shelves. I suspect that if I want to keep filling up my shelves with home canned goodies I'll be doing more pick-your-own and farmers market buying instead of picking from my garden, but oh well. All that rain keeps it green here, right?

lemon curdy goodness

We've had sort of a rough week around here with everyone dropping like flies with the stomach flu. Yesterday was really the only day that no one was sick (we're back on the sick wagon again today though with Briton down and out as of 6 am this morning) so I jumped at the chance of a quiet morning to for a) clean everything that the sickies touched and b) make some lemon curd in the newly cleaned kitchen.
The recipe I used this year is from Jam it, Pickle it Cure it which was given to me by my lovely friend Kim last year. Now before I go on with the lemon curd I'd just like to point out that buying me this book was very brave of Kim. She has, for more than 15 years now, been subjected to my culinary and crafting projects. Some successful, some not. And to be fair, she's been my co- conspirator in many of them (I think she has better memories than I of the Buche de Noel we made for French class in high school) and I've been her guinea pig often as well (she makes killer muffins!) But still, buying me a book that includes a recipe for making your own bacon, well, that's pretty daring. Because at some point I'm going to try it and make her eat some:) Even if she does live on the opposite side of the country (that's what Fed Ex is for!)
But back to the jam. I've tried a few recipes over the years, my favorite is one you make in the microwave (yes, really!) that my grandmother gave me ages ago. But alas, I have no microwave. And since the only things I really miss using a microwave for are warming up coffee (bad habit anyway) and making Lemon Curd and poppadoms, well, I don't think we'll be getting one anytime soon. So it was the stove top method for me. This recipe has you blend everything but the butter well before putting it on the stove which I liked a lot, I think it helped to keep the egg from curdling somehow. And it was also pretty fast once the lemons were squeezed. But the end result was a little too tart. Not bad tart, just not quite the sweetness I wanted. Maybe the lemons were extra sour, who knows. I think I may attempt a second batch when I've eaten up this one and adjust the sugar so I'll wait and post a recipe when I'm really happy with it.
And now I have to go and peel two dozen stickers off of the coffee table. Because when you are four and a half and you've been sick but are feeling better, well, naturally you are going to get into a little mischief, you have to prove that you're well, right?

What about you? What projects have you been up to this week? Anything fun?

first, last, best

Every time I make jam I think "THIS is my favorite kind of jam!" There's strawberry, I mean, strawberry, it's just, well, it's strawberry jam. And then blackberry which, if I get a chance to make some just tastes like summer to me. And even better than blackberry jam, there's apple-blackberry jelly which makes me swoon. Apple butter is a must, it just has to be made and lemon curd, well. I could just about live on lemon curd and scones alone. But marmalade? I think it might actually be my favorite preserve.

Depending on how you look at it, marmalade is either the last or first jam of the year. Last if you are talking the last thing you make before spring planting and first because it's the first after the new year. Either way, it's probably the most exciting to make for me. All of the other jams, with the exception of Lemon curd which follows right on the heels of marmalade, are made during gardening season, which means that they are done around the making of other garden producey things like tomato sauce and frozen corn and passata. So while I love them, they are sometimes just one more thing that needs to be squeezed into the week before things are overripe. But Marmalade is like being able to throw the doors open in February because of an unexpectedly sunny day(which, incidentally, I was able to do while making this batch). It's just what you need after a long, cold winter.

This year I made straight marmalade. No mixed fruit, nothing fancy, just oranges and sugar, and a little lemon juice for sweetness. It's probably the prettiest jam I've ever made, golden and light and almost sparkly. I went a little Dorian Grey on it and spent a lot of time just staring at a jar sitting in my kitchen window yesterday while the sun shone through it. And you don't even want to know how many photos I took. Ridiculous. But so pretty. And tasty.

We went through a lot of marmalade this year, more than I had expected. Partly because my friend Tara served breakfast sausages cooked with marmalade last spring and now I can't cook them any other way (you just stir a tablespoon or two in with the raw sausages before popping them in the oven and give them a shake every now and then while they are cooking). Delicious. But also, I just like marmalade, especially at breakfast, and especially with buttered bread. See, I didn't even make it to the office before taking a bite.

I used the recipe from The River Cottage Handbook No. 2 this year. This has, hands down, become my favorite preserving book. Every time I open it to look up one recipe, I'm reminded of three more I've been meaning to try. It's not a very big book but it is simply packed with goodness. If you don't have it and you even think you might want to make jam sometime in your life, go get it. And if you've never made jam, marmalade is actually a pretty easy place to start. It's a bit time consuming with all the slicing of peel, but there's no messing with pectin or skimming foam or any of that, so it's a decent first time jam. And if you are in Charlottesville I noticed that Retail Relay has some specials of citrus right now. While your at it, grab some lemons, because lemon curd is divine, in fact, it might just be my favorite jam...

Apple Factory

On Sunday the kids and I made an impromptu visit to one of the local apple orchards. My intention was to pick a few apples. Just a few. We weren't dressed for apple picking, not shoe wise or many it's freaking cold out here wise. So just a few!
Ha! While I boosted Evie up to a branch where she could twist off a few Fuji's for her bag, Briton filled his. FILLED. SO not a few. And then as we were paying I noticed that they had scratch and dent apples, perfect for applesauce, at a great price and I though, "hey, we eat a lot of applesauce around here, why not" And so I bought half a bushel. I'll tell you the truth, I didn't actually know what half a bushel was going to look like. It's one of those terms that you hear but never quite know. I remembered though that my parents once brought home a bushel of apples for apple butter and we had A LOT of apple butter that year, so I knew half was probably a better way to go. As it turns out a half a bushel of apples is about 25 pounds. Which added to the 16 pounds that my son picked in about half a second meant that we have quite a few apples in our kitchen.
A fair number are good for eating. They are small and firm and sweet and just right for snacks. But most of them needed to have something done with them, so I've spent the past few days maxing batches of applesauce, apple butter and last night, an apple pie, and there is still a large bowlful staring at me every time I walk into the kitchen. "Boil me, puree me, make me into jam!" they say. My stove top has spent the week cluttered with my big preserving pot on one burner simmering apples, my largest stew pot on another cooking down the applesauce or apple butter (which, if you didn't know, is really the same thing, only the apple butter has been cooked down further. So if your applesauce ever gets a little too thick, add some more cinnamon and jar it up!) The foodmill, a bowl for the skins and an assortment of spoons for stirring, smooshing and tasting trailing off one either side of the cooktop.
I think I'll have to do one more round of applesauce, if I can find some more jars in the basement (where do all my jars go? Oh, right, they end up holding bugs and marbles and spools of thread. Hummm....must get more) and then we can use the rest on baking projects and to make a batch of apple squash. Briton has been angling for some more Grimmbena since our last batch ran out. Maybe I'll pull some blueberries out of the freezer and make apple blueberry this time. yumm...

What's your favorite thing to do with apples?

Garden Clean Out Chutney

I've had it on my list to make chutney all summer long but somehow it always got pushed aside by jellies, jams and sauces, not to mention everyday cooking. But finally, finally, I got around to it yesterday and now I have two lovely jars sitting in our pantry waiting to be eaten up throughout the winter.

I haven't always been a chutney person. When I was doing my student teaching, my mentor teacher gave me a jar of kumquat chutney for Christmas. It looked beautiful, but I had no clue what to do with it, particularly on our ramen noodles for dinner budget. It sat in our fridge for ages, eventually getting stirred into some kind of stew I believe, before it went bad. What a waste. But hey, I was young and clueless.

When Briton was about two I fell in love with Indian food. Hard. I'd had curries before, but mostly of the homemade and basic variety. It wasn't until we were living in Dublin, where curry take-out is the norm and fantastic Indian food can be found cheap in almost every neighborhood center that I really discovered it, and chutney.

And then our supper club had a burger extravaganza and one of the offerings was a lamb burger with goats cheese, good mustard and sweet-savory chutney (try it! you'll never look at a burger the same again!) and I finally got what all the chutney lovin was all about.

It's a good thing I finally got around to making some then, eh? I'm calling this Garden Clean Out Chutney because most of what's in it was what was left when I ripped out everything from three of our four beds. But I could also call it Pantry Clean Out Chutney, because it also has some strange-o things that I pulled out of the back of our shelves (chili spiced mango from Trader Joe's anyone?) After reading a bunch of recipes though I think you can use pretty much any combination of fruits, veggies and spices that you have hanging around, but here is what I made:


Garden Clean Out Chutney

4 cups diced green tomatoes
1 cup diced green apples
1/2 cup raisins
1 small jalapeno, finely chopped
1/2 cup chopped dried chili spiced mango ( you could just dried fruit, but then you want to add chili powder to taste)
2 cups apple cider vinegar
1 cup packed brown sugar
1 tsp ground ginger
1 T salt

Mix all ingredients in a heavy bottomed pan. Simmer on medium until everything has muddled down and reduced by about a third. Pour into sterilized jars (this makes about 2 pint jars, I used 1 pint jar and one of my tab top jars because I needed an excuse to get down my Wide Mouth Jar Rubber Box and have a laugh) and process as you would with jam.

Can-o-Rama

This weekend, in between painting the front of the house (picture soon! Still finishing the second coat!) Organizing Briton's Birthday, playing board games, finishing up another back to school sewing project and hitting the pool, I canned. A lot. I didn't really intend to have a canning bonanza, it just that, well, while one thing was cooking away, I'd start flipping through my books and think, "oh I have everything to make that too!" and away I went.

Most of the things I made were based on recipes from the River Cottage Handbook no. 2:Preserves, which is one of the best canning books I've ever seen. For most recipes it offers ideas for variations or explains how to substitute pretty much whatever is ripe in your garden or the farmers market at the moment. So instead of making the Hedgerow Jelly with crab apples and mixed wild berries, I used apples and blackberries from the Fruit Share I ordered from a local CSA to make probably the yummiest jelly ever. I know Will will argue and say strawberry is still the best, but I really think this might be my new favorite. I also made Passata, a roasted tomato, onion and garlic puree that you use to add to soups and stews and a vegetable bouillon mix from the squash, carrots, parsnips and shallots we had in the garden (including one giant carrot that Briton pulled up) and parsley from the farmers Market. The figs I had started for drying weren't, unlike those from the neighbors tree, holding together, so I finished off the mashing and turned them into fig jam.

I've still got some chutney in the works and want to make another batch of Passata, and if I can get enough seed pods from my Nasturtiums, I'd love to try to make Nasturtium Capers. But the thing that was the biggest hit this weekend was a batch of Plum/Apple/Pear Squash which Briton is calling Grimmbena. Ribena has been a staple in our house since Briton was two. It's a juice concentrate, or squash, made from Black Currents and is the go to drink for kids in the UK. Sort of like their TreeTop Apple Juice. It's handy for us because you just keep it in the cupboard and pour a little into a glass of water when you want some juice. Which means it doesn't take up any room in the fridge. Great for us since we have limited refrigerator space. So when I noticed the recipe for whatever fruit squash, I couldn't resist. The kids picked out super ripe plums and apples at the farmer's market and I had some pears form the fruit share so we chopped them all up, added some water and let it cook away till the fruit was mushy. Once it was strained and the sugar was added and we had it bottled up we tried it out and wowzers was it yummy. Addicting yummy. I need to go back to the farmers market for some more plums and apples and make more yummy.

Grimmbena (Or Plum-Pear-Apple Squash)
Translated roughly to US measurements from The River Cottage Handbook No. 2

2 pounds of plums
1 pound of apples
1 pound of pears
4 cups of sugar
water

Chop up the apples and bears roughly, leaving pips and skin. Cut the plums in half, you can pull out the stones but you don't have to. I didn't!
Add 2 and a halfish cups of water and bring slowly to a boil, cooking until the fruit is very soft, about 45 minutes. Strain through a jelly bag and colander, or if you don't have a jelly bag, use a tea towel that you have scalded in hot water. Let it drip for several hours until the juice is drained away from the pulp. Bring the juice back up to a boil and then add the sugar, stirring just until it has dissolved. Pour immediately into bottles and seal. Use 2-3 tablespoons of concentrate per 8 oz of water.

The recipe claims that just by bottling it up hot it will keep for several months in a cool, dry place but that you can process it in boiling water if you want to keep it longer. I reused a glass bottle and put the rest in a jar, sealing them both up while it was hot and leaving it at that. I'm sure we'll use it up fairly quickly. However, for the next batch I'll pick up some good bottles and do the whole processing thing. You can really use any fruit for this that's ripe. Harder fruits need 1 3/4 cup of water per 2 pounds of fruit, softer fruits need 1 cup of water per 2 pounds of fruit. The sugar can really be adjusted to taste, just remember that this is a concentrate, so you'll want it stronger than if you were drinking it straight.

Saintly Figs

Ok, maybe saintly isn't the word for them, consecrated? Except they weren't actually growing in the cemetery, so maybe not that either.

I love old cemeteries of any kind. I find them peaceful and beautiful with their overgrown plants and their hard to read gravestones. One of my favorite places in the world is a tiny cemetery tucked into a hillside int he Wicklow Mountains. In college, Will and I used to take out lunches to one on the University of Oregon campus and sprawl out on the shady grass between the tombs. But to combine an old cemetery and a fig tree, well, now you're talking!

Last summer one of our neighbors turned me onto a fig tree that overhangs into a nearby cemetery. It is growing in a garden next to the cemetery who's ground is much lower than that of the level of the graves, making the upper branches easy to reach and the figs easy to harvest. Perfect, except by the time I learned all of this last year, the figs were all but gone and I was only able to bring home enough for a few mornings breakfast. This year I was determined to get up there when the tree was bursting with ripe fruit.

This morning Nigella and I set off for our walk with a big basket and crossed fingers, and boy did we hit the jackpot. Because I know that there are other who pick from this tree (the owners have given full blessing, they don't like figs - crazy people!) I only took the fruit from one of the many branches. But even with the one branch limit, I was able to fill my basket up with fat, firm fruit, perfect for a second batch of my grandmothers dried figs. Heaven. Of course, after I'd finished picking and was attempting to hold the leash and basket with sticky hands, I realized that some dude had been sitting under the next tree over reading to himself while I chatted to the fruits I was picking about how pretty they were. So now there's one more person in Charlottesville who thinks I'm nuts.

The last batch turned out exceedingly well. The figs were smaller to start with the the variety that grew on my grandmother's tree, so the dried figs are only about half the size, but they taste almost exactly the same, and I've already worked my way through a third of the batch, which doesn't bode well for my plan of having enough dried fruit to get me through the winter. But hey, a few more early morning tromps through the cemetery and I might make a dent in the amount of figs we consume throughout the year.

My garden is coming to the end of it's season and I have to say I learned a lot about growing vegetables in Virginia. Corn, for example, will need to be planted in a more sheltered area (as seen in the total destruction of the main crop during the microburst, whaaaa) The number of tomato plants could easily be doubled, or tripled, if I want to make sauce. The sauce I made a few weeks ago was delicious, really and truly yummy, but it only made one large jar, which we finished off last night in a lasagna. Kale is crazily hardy, if only I can find something to do with it. Pumpkin vines whithered in the heat while squash and cucumbers went bonkers. Next year I'll want more pepper plants, more herbs and probably less carrots since I'm the only one who really likes them anyway. The popcorn was a hit, the beans went out of control and were all ripe at the same time, so next year I'll plant them in succession.

I'm puttering with the idea of pickled squash, or maybe canned squash if I can get my hands on a pressure canner for a few days. and Evelyn and I made a jar of grape jelly this weekend using the grapes from Will's "vineyard". One jar because, well, his vineyard is two and a half (the half is so little it didn't produce any grapes this year) young plants. That and Evie discovered that Nigella really likes grapes, so a good third of what we did manage to grow went to the dog.

It seems weird that, technically, the summer is almost over. Or at least the gardening part of the summer. Not that there wont be more canning to do in the next few weeks. In fact, the rest of August and September will probably see our pantry fuller than it's been all summer, starting with a fruit share that I've ordered for tomorrow and carrying on through the rest of the peaches, plums and apples. But school begins for both kids next week, my boy turns eight (EIGHT!) tomorrow and despite the heat, my mind is starting to think fall. Now if it would only cool down enough to actually feel like fall...That, would be fantastic.

Ter-maters

When Will and I were in college, we had this monster, MONSTER vegetable patch in our way overly large for two college students yard. And when I say the thing was big, I mean it. Right now our garden is plenty big for the four of us (which doesn't stop me from making plans to expand it) and I'd guess that it's a third the size of the space we planted back then. I'm not sure what we were thinking. Actually, Will was thinking I was crazy and just went along for the ride and I had - no surprise here- dreams of growing most of our food. It hadn't occurred to me to get chickens at that point, probably good since we were poor as dirt and couldn't even splurge on things like, say, tomato cages, so building a chicken coop would probably have been beyond our means a bit, not that we wouldn't have done it anyway.

Because we were experimenting in pretty bare bones gardening, our cageless tomatoes were held up, sort of, with some sticks tied together with yarn. Not much help. By August the tomato patch, which was oversized, even by our garden's standards (I had started tons and tons of tomatoes from seed because I had heard it was hard to get them going, and then they all lived, and I couldn't stand the thought of killing any of my little plants so, yeah, there were a lot) was a giant tangled jungle of brandywines, sweet one thousands, yellow pear and beefsteak tomatoes. We couldn't possibly eat that many tomatoes. Not even if we'd had them for breakfast lunch and dinner. I wanted to preserve them, somehow, and sauce seemed too complicated with all the warnings about botulism and spoiling and the need for a presser canner, which, given the fact that I didn't have tomato cages, was not high on my priority list of things to buy.

In the end, I dried them. I took all the screens off our windows, hosed them down and filled them up with slices and halved tomatoes, stacking them inside the barbecue that we got at a garage sale for $5 and which almost blew up the first time we used it (scared us off of gas grills for years!) My reasoning was that the barbecue would help collect the heat, covered in black who-knows what as it was, and I could close the lid each night to keep the evil raccoon that lived under our house from eating my garden largess.

Surprisingly, it worked. I had stacks and stacks of sun dried tomatoes. Most went into baggies and then into the pantry, some were packed in jars of oil, and for the rest of the year we ate sun dried tomatoes in and on and with, just about everything. Not a bad way to dine for a couple of starving students.

I've never gone that crazy with tomatoes again. It was too much work to keep up with the harvesting and drying. And besides, we use our grill too often these days. But I did plant eleven plants this year. Most of them heirloom varieties that came in a mix from Southern States Seed Exchange with a few garden center romas thrown into the mix. Despite the heat of the summer, it wasn't until last week though, that any of our fruits were ripe enough to pick. But suddenly we have tomatoes coming out our ears. And isn't that always the way, you wait and wait for that first garden tomato and then all of a sudden you have more than you can handle.

So far I'm not drying them, although I have a scheme that involves Will building a solar dryer like the one my grandmother had in her yard. But that really hinges on how bold I feel about harvesting the figs off of two trees down the road (the owners are away in France all summer, last year I took some here and there, but for this to work I'd need tons. On the other hand, they are just falling to the ground up there...) In the meantime, I've decided to try making sauce.

I still don't have a pressure canner, but after perusing many, many recipes, I think I've come up with a plan that will produce a good sauce without killing my family. Batch number one is in the works right now, cut into chunks and roasting in the oven (no oil! Oil is bad it seems in terms of canning) making our whole house smell wonderful. And if at the end of the day, it doesn't taste good enough to jar up, well, I've still got another basketful of ripe beauties waiting for some other recipe, and several more that will be ready tomorrow.

And now that I think about it, we do need to pull off all the screens to paint.

Tea With Jam, Jam and Bread, Jam and Bread

I had an unconventional college experience. I mean, even setting aside the fact that I went to school at the University of Oregon which is, in itself, just plain unconventional, I still did not have what most people would consider a "normal" time in college.

For starters, I wasn't a party girl. I tried it one weekend and decided that was enough for me. I could see how it would appeal to some people, but it just wasn't my thing. And there was the fact that Will and I have been together since my sophomore year, knowing pretty much right away that this was it and treating our relationship as a permanent thing. We were regularly mistaken for married graduate students even though I wasn't yet 21 because, well, we were doing things like gardening in our back yard and saving up to buy a better car together. Well there was that year where we lived next door to the guy who lived in a dumpster and who shouted at us whenever we threw our garbage away. We were more like normal college students that year. After all, we had a futon, a crappy TV and cast off pots and pans like all good college students did back then. But really, we weren't very good at being "college-y".

And on top of that, my parents lived in the town we went to college in because my dad was getting his PhD in the same department where I was getting my BA. Most people would probably hate that, but as I said, I wasn't the type to show up to class hungover, so I didn't really worry about running into my dad in the halls. Besides, I could store some of my junk in his office now and then. And get him to take me out to lunch.

My parents and I have always been close and when they lived in Eugene, I think it made us more so. We lived our separate but connected lives, eating dinner together on Sundays, borrowing lawnmowers (I still owe you for that lawnmower we broke dad!) and making jam.

The three years that we all lived in the same town together my dad and I got into the habit of making blackberry jam in the summer and apple butter in the fall. Although I watched my grandmother make jam during my childhood summers at her house in California, it was really those blackberry and apple canning days that made me into a canning kind of girl. Blackberries grew like weeds around Eugene, filling up every ditch and field and alley that wasn't regularly plowed under, and even many of those were filled with their brambles. Dad and I used to haul old boards along with us on our expeditions and throw them down over the thorny bushes so we could climb out to the centers of the bushes where the berries grew thick and remained untouched by more causal pickers.

Will and I were spoiled, I realize now. We lived stable lives, we had family there to call on when we needed to be told that yes, we should go to the doctor for that nasty cold or no, you shouldn't paint the trim on your rental house when it's below 35 degrees because the paint wont stick. We had a place to go for real dinners and all sorts of tools for our various projects (we were project people even then) And although we ate our fair share of ramen and Pasta-Roni, we also had a cupboard full of jam to gorge on when there was nothing else in the kitchen. In fact, one of my favorite after class snacks was a slice of bread smeared with butter and a big spoonful of blackberry jam, which is what I'm eating, right at this minute.

My friend Tara has a thicket of blackberries at the end of her road and picked a bucket for me this week despite the horrible heat because shes a lovely lady. So while I washed the dishes I also stewed up a pot of blackberry jam. That sounds very exciting, as if I were whizzing around the kitchen mulit-tasking, but really, jam is that simple folks. Especially berry jam. You mash up the berries, you add sugar and pectin, you boil it for a minute or two and you pour it into hot, clean jars. I was especially tickled to make this jam because the rings for my thrifted wire bale jars arrived in the mail today so I got to use the pretty jars for some very pretty jam.

And funny story, I've been picking up these jars here and there but couldn't find a place to buy the rings. I also didn't really know what the rings were called, or for that matter, the jars either. After some dead end searches online I finally found that these are a type of wire bale jar and the rings are, hilariously, called "wide mouth jar rubbers" now I know this is very 7th grade of me but that name has been cracking me up ever since I ordered them. And much to my potty humor delight, the box they came in does indeed say Wide Mouth Jar Rubbers on the front. I'm keeping it on the window sill, just so I can have a little giggle every time I do the dishes.

Pickles!

The summer that I was pregnant with Briton, I went preserving crazy. I made strawberry jam and mint jelly and rose jelly and crazy I don't even remember what went in there chutney. I dried and bottled tomatoes and froze corn. And I made pickles. Actually, I should say I tried to make pickles. After reading through my preserving book I took myself down to the farmers market to stock up on pickling cucumbers. While I was there I chatted with the sweet little old ladies that ran the OSU Extension Office stand about the ins and outs of pickle making and went home, I thought, totally prepared. And to be honest, I'm not sure where things went wrong. They looked like pickles, they smelled like pickles, but they tasted, blah. Just really, really, blah. No crunch, no bite, no taste. It sucked.

So I've never gone down the pickle route again. Until I was poking around in the garden this weekend and discovered that my cucumber plant had exploded. No really. Last week I went poking through all the vines and leaves of my whole garden looking for signs of something, but didn't find much other than some good looking bok choy. Yesterday I thought I spotted a bean from the window and went out to investigate. I found, not a bean, but TONS of beans. And three enormous cucumbers. And corn! Still to small to eat but still, CORN! Feeling around under the potato plants revealed that the soil is packed with two inch diameter spuds. The carrots are starting to look like carrots. Not that I expected anything else, but still, it was exiting. But back to the cucumbers.

We planted Asian cucumbers this year from seeds bought from the Southern State Seed Exchange. From the descriptions, they were similar to the English variety that we love, but grow better in this hotter climate. I kid you not when I say that last week they were less than two inches long so it was kind of a shock to find them over a foot just seven days later. And while we love cucumbers on sandwiches and in salads, three huge cucumbers seemed a little excessive. Which got me thinking about pickles.

I dug through my big Stocking Up book, weighing a few different recipes (I can't remember which I used last time) read a few others I found in books on my shelf, and ended up winging it a little since none called for such a small amount of cucumbers. This makes, in fact, just one, tightly packed mason jar. Which is just the right amount for us. Or maybe not. Because these turned out great. Crunchy and a little spicy and just right. I'm still a little in awe. I didn't really think it would work. But I can see them disappearing faster than pickles usually do in this house, which has led me to do a little fantasizing about all sorts of things I can pickle. Maybe some of those beans. Or watermelon rind which I've never had but always wanted to try. Or Jerusalem artichokes. Can you pickle Jerusalem artichokes? Because I've got a bunch of them growing in the flower garden.

Anyway, if you have a spare pound or so of cucumbers hanging around the house, give it a whirl.

Fresh Packed Dill Pickles
Adapted from Stocking Up


1000 g of water
50 g of kosher salt
1 1/4 pounds of cucumbers, freshly picked and cut in spears
1 cup apple cider vinegar
1 1/2 cups water
1 T kosher salt
1 tsp pickling spices
1 T mustard seed
1 small bunch of fresh dill

Make a brine out of the first two ingredients and soak the cucumber spears in it over night in the fridge. The next morning drain the cucumbers and pack them tightly into a sterilized, hot jar with the mustard seeds and the bunch of dill. In a saucepan, bring the vinegar, water, salt and pickling spices to a boil and pour into the jar until it's almost full. Cap with a lid and set it in the fridge to chill. Since these aren't processed, you have to keep them in the fridge. But I would guess that you can put the jar in a pot of boiling water and process for 15 minutes or so. That's part of the next adventure. Along with the beans and the artichokes.

Oh yeah, and happy solstice everyone. Nothing says the first day of summer like pickles, right?

Full Cupboards and Excitement

And the jam is done.Phew. Let me tell you, 15 pounds (well, really 12, we ate or froze the rest, but still!) of strawberries makes a lot of jam. On a whim I picked up an extra set of 8 ounce jars when I bought the pack of 12 ouncers I intended to use for the jam and a good thing because I used all but three up. So we now have a very full (almost groaning) store cupboard in the basement with rows of deep red filled jam jars. Which is a satisfying thing.

I decided to go ahead and go the pectin free route this year, just to see. The test batch seemed to please everyone, it was sweeter but still very good. The much bigger batch turned out much the same. I used a combination of lemons and grapefruit for this one because I was worried about getting enough natural pectin for that many berries and you can kind of taste the difference. It's consistency is just the way I love it, thick enough to be jam, thin enough to blob and spread on bread without pulling things apart. One of my issues with the pectin variety is that I think the jam comes off too thick.

I think, however, in the end, I prefer the brighter strawberry flavor of the low sugar pectin based jams. If I had to choose between regular pectin jam and using citrus however, citrus would win hands down. Both use an enormous amount of sugar. It shocks me every year to add THAT much sugar to something that already seems sweet and perfect, but hey, you gotta do what you gotta do. Strawberries aren't fresh in February, so jam it is.

Here's the recipe although I'll warn you that this takes a VERY big pot and it foams quite a bit (which was ok because we mixed the foam with ginger ale to make a yummy drink- even yummier with a little vodka thrown in!) but you can pare it down easily to a much smaller recipe. In case you're not insane, like me.


Strawberry Jam (Pectin Free)

12 pounds of Strawberries, hulled and sliced at least in half
12 (yes 12) pounds of sugar
8 lemons
4 grapefruit (basically one citrus per pound)



Squeeze the juice into the pot with your strawberries and drop in the peels. Mix in half the sugar and let it set overnight. Pull out the lemon and grapefruit peels and add in the rest of the sugar. Put over high heat and bring to a rapid boil, stirring all the while, for about 6 minutes then reduce to simmer until the jam is set, skimming off the foam as you go. How long it takes to set varies according to how much fruit you have and how ripe they are. You can tell if jam is set by dropping a few tablespoons on a plate and putting it in the freezer for one minute. The surface should wrinkle when you push against it. If it doesn't, it's not ready, keep it a cooking.

And have I told you that a wide mouth funnel is an absolute must? Well it is. I went for years without one and have no idea why. It was, maybe, a dollar and made filling the jars so much easier. In fact, I would have had absolutely no mess at all to clean up except for the fact that while the jam was in it's hard boil the kids came roaring through with a lacrosse stick and a broom and I had to chase them down and explain, again, that that was probably not the best thing to do while mommy is dealing with boiling hot sugar, and some of the foam boiled over while my back was turned. Yuck. But really, get the funnel. It's awesome.

OK, so now that's out of the way I can get to the exciting news.

So after little chicklet # 1 didn't make it through the night, the other two eggs failed to hatch. Turns out you aren't supposed to move the eggs close to hatching time. Oops, and we thought we were being so clever by cleaning out the coop and nesting boxes in preparation for the hatch. (come on lady, that's not exciting! I know I know, I'm getting there)

Once it became apparent that we would have no chicks and still had two very broody hens, we decided to go the adoption route and snuck four little day old chicks from a nearby farm under the sleeping hens Monday night. All day yesterday we made quiet checks to see if the mamas were down with the switch. We caught a few glimpses of little feet so all seemed well.




This morning Evie and I went up to check on them and found the four little puffballs hopping around in and out from under their mamas wings. So freaking cute. No really, who can resist a chick. I want to carry them around with me in my pockets but I don't think the hens would like that much, so I'll leave them where they are. Although I'll probably have to go look at them again, just because.