Homemade Strawberry Jam

Last weekend I ventured out to Sweet Berry Farm in Marble Falls. Through mid May (this was pretty much the last possible week) you can go there and pick your own strawberries. Starting about now they have blackberries. In October they will have pumpkins. I’m in!  So after an hour or so in the sun, two of us managed to fill a couple of boxes with ripe strawberries.

You may remember that two years ago I canned some peaches. Er, a lot of peaches. Even though I haven’t done any canning in a while, when my husband told me about a pick-your-own-strawberries place near Austin, I felt suddenly inspired. You see, there are few things in life I love more than strawberry jam. This started me thinking. Self, I said, what if you made your own jam? Would that not be awesome?

Picking the strawberries was just the first part. I took them home and watched a movie, chopping off the stems and the squishy bits. My hands ended up so red I thought they would never come clean. Strawberries also have a lot of citric acid, so I think I pickled my hands really well too. My fingers didn’t feel right for a while.

But eventually, I had altogether a gallon of strawberries, several boxes of low-sugar pectin, a whole lot of 1/4 pint and 1/2 pint jars, and some honey.  First, there was the mashing. Then there was the cooking. Four cups of strawberries, a cup of apple juice, a box of pectin and a cup of honey. Sterilize the jars.

Pour the jam into jars.  Clean up the jars. Process the jars. Set out to cool. Clean the equipment. Repeat 3 more times.

And in the end?  11 pints of jam, all of which set, and none of which is still liquid!  That’s pretty exciting. If some of it had not jelled, or something else catastrophic had occurred, I would have been very upset. It takes a while to pick and prepare a gallon of strawberries!

I tasted the jam tonight. It’s perhaps not as sweet as what you might buy in the store – strawberries are tart and sweet, and my jam really tastes like that. I didn’t add any processed sugar, only honey, so it doesn’t have that jell-o consistency of store-bought jam. It’s not quite preserves, not quite jam. It is very tasty, though, at least I think so.

Since it made way more than I imagined, I will be giving a few jars away. I can’t promise anyone a darn thing about it, nor vouch for every jar being the exactly the same. Still, if you’re a fan of strawberry jam, and you’d like some, let me know. You can probably have some!

Baby fuzzy chicks

3. So I fundraised yesterday. The event was wildly successful, and screamingly well organized, and people seemed to like it and feel warm and fuzzy. We (the we of work) are glad. Glad that it went so well, glad that we encountered no Acts of God, glad that we can now collapse for a few moments into tired but happy heaps. We had an actual performance this year from an out-of-town guest, the inimitable Anna Deavere Smith. I’d watch a video of hers or two if you have a moment.

2. Also. I went to a nearby farm Saturday. There were chicks at the farm. Two hens. A rooster. But like many people, I’m a sucker for the fuzzy baby animals. There were also goats, and the beginnings of beautiful squash. Ah squash season, how I love thee. The farmer promised he is growing an African squash that is similar to, but better than, butternut squash. I do not believe this is possible, but I am intrigued by the possibility.

1.  I bought garlic scapes and a kohlrabi at the farm, neither of which I’m entirely sure what to do with. I think the kohlrabi will be turned into cakes with yogurt and mint sauce. I want to turn the scapes into pesto with walnuts. Jeff thinks they should be bread pudding. Perhaps there will need to be more scapes.

0. Surely there’s time for a nap now?

Comparisons, Emptiness

I’ve been back from Colorado for a week. Upon my return, while doing simple things like grocery shopping and dog walking, I became uncomfortably aware of an incredible cacophony assaulting my eyes and ears. It was, of course, no more than the noise and motion of a city surrounding me once again. I had rather expected the silence where we went to be deafening, but instead it just made more room for the sounds of birds and wind and water.

But before we get to the rest, I was meaning to give you a comparison, ask you all if you thought my quilt was a good representation of aspens. I was up in the heights among them again so I took a picture. If you haven’t been around aspens, they grow in groves at very high elevation (7000+ feet, I think). These particular ones were sunning themselves across the road from my cabin near the Continental Divide. I like aspens no matter the weather – they seem very graceful to me – but I did miss hearing the sound of the wind fluttering the leaves.

Again, it seems, my idea of peace will be tied up in an aspen grove, in the mountains, near running water. That very sort of quiet and happy memory, of sun and wind and water, is what prompted me to create my small quilt in the first place. It’s a good memory to have sewn.

High altitudes slow you down. They remove the distractions of cell phone and internet, for we had no signal, no cable where we were for a few days. Altitude also requires that you move rather slower than usual. Not an altitude for jogging if you usually live at sea level. At 10,000 feet, if you’re a flat-lander, you might very well run out of air before you finish an entire sentence.

I wish my camera had a better light sensor, because I’m always amazed at the colors I see in the forests and desert. I never feel as if I capture how the colors look to my eye, although I want to bring them home and find fabric that reminds me of them. The wash of reds and oranges and browns in a scrubby bush that grows along a river. The rust and deep green and silver of evergreen forests. The sudden inner pink sparkle of a rock split in half. The striations of limestone and sandstone where it has been cut away for a road. The gold and orange of dried flowers waiting for spring.

In large or empty places like northern Colorado and southern Wyoming, often cameras fail to capture the sense of where you are. You are left instead with occasional geese and bighorn sheep and moose–and good luck convincing them to be photogenic!  But at least they are subjects that will agree to fit entirely within your viewfinder, when the mountains to your right steadfastly refuse to captured in their entirety.

After my train trip through the Midwest, I mentioned my love of not only seeing the place I’m going TO, but also the places that are between me and there. The long road and I have always had a bond. I have seen an obscene number of the highways of this country. I have seen many small byways as well. I do not love them all, but I’m happy to visit most of them at least once.

I’d still prefer a train ride.

It’s hard, coming back to life, to maintain a sense of where I was, and how my shoulders decided not to live up there near my ears for a while, amid the busy day-to-day of everything. I envied the three who owned the cabins in which we stayed for their lack of distraction. I wondered if I could do that. It’s peaceful, yes. Would it become too remote without benefit of all my wires?  Would I become bored?  Does the constant sound of the wind over the mountains drive you crazy after a while?  I have no real idea what it would be like, so it’s all romantic notions, since my life is so far removed from there.

But it’s definitely nice to visit sometimes.