Summer Tastes

One day a week, usually on the weekend, I take a big chunk of time to do some project. Since it’s mid July and there was no late freeze, there was but one thing I could do last weekend. Drive to Stonewall, Texas, and get freestone peaches and fresh tomatoes. Day trip! So my project started this way:

There were 40 peaches.40 tomatoes. 8 jalapenos. 10 onions (none of which made me cry – I have epic powers of resisting onion). Some other stuff. All in all, I canned 11 quarts of peach salsa (and Jeff and I have already eaten one). I used the recipe I used last time. It was the only type of peach stuff I canned this time. I didn’t really think my tiny kitchen could handle more than one recipe – although it’s amazing what I can fit in there. Besides, the peach salsa was inarguably the best stuff I made two years ago.

I nearly ran out of jars. I think I only have three left, and they’re quart jars. I think I might make pickled okra in those, since I just got a heaping large bunch of okra from my mother-in-law’s garden. Honestly, after getting over the initial fear of OMG CANNING NO ONE DOES THAT I  discovered I really kind of like preserving food. It’s not that hard (unless you go the pressure canning route), and it’s sorta fun to make a huge batch of something. Still, though. When I tell people I actually make jam and can stuff, I often get a remarkably shocked response. Not many people do this, it seems.

Yeah. Me. In a kitchen. In my Slow Food apron my aunt Miriam gave me. With sterile equipment. And a gallon+ of hot salsa. And a hot stove. In July. In Texas. In a kitchen without air conditioning. That’s why my whole face is red. It’s not why I need a haircut, however. That’s because my hairdressers keep disappearing or quitting the profession, and I really can’t stand finding new ones.

You like how I made my sink into a counter with a baking sheet and a towel. Necessity IS the mother of invention!

Food is wonderful. And one of the best things about peach salsa – it’s really pretty when it’s done! The taste of summer.

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!

Cooking with Canning

I mentioned in my last post that I’d finished up using almost everything I canned last summer (just in time for this summer). I used my few cans of tomatoes, my salsa, my peaches very sparingly since I had so few.  It was a lot of work just to make a shelf’s worth of canned goods, so the fruits (haha!) of my labor were parceled out to worthy projects:  a warm pot of chili just as winter started, a small and rich batch of tomato sauce a couple of weeks ago, a peach crumble, some peach ice cream.

When I cook something I canned, I use all my special ingredients – usually things I get specially from other places, like my Dad’s basil and oregano.  I use rosemary and bay leaves from my mother-in-law. These things teach me about the importance of ingredients, when you see it grow or put the work in to preserve the food. I learned long ago, from I don’t know who, to not waste food. I scrape bowls when I cook. I keep my leftovers. I learned to use up my food in the order in which it goes bad.  I’ve never been wealthy, so I guess I learned a lot from watching my pennies at the grocery also.

Farmer’s markets are great, and I will always go to them, but really, it is my dearest wish to have garden. With lots of sun. And lots of stuff I eat. My backyard has now decided to add 2 kinds of purple flowers and some weird bush to its usual crop of rocks and trees, but it leaves much to be desired. And it’s not my house, so I just can’t bring myself to fix it up really nice when I know it’s a temporary arrangement.

Jeff’s mom has mentioned her garden will be growing asparagus, tomatoes, carrots, green beans, radishes, black beans, okra, thyme, dill, basil, thornless blackberries, elephant garlic, eggplant, onion and garlic chives, bunching onions, 1015 onions, butternut squash, acorn squash, bell pepper and cayenne pepper.  I copied that from her email to me.  I hope she knows I’m raiding her garden. I think she planted some of it because she knows I like it.

Apart from cooking and clearing my stores, I got a bug to make jewelry the other day. It was an exhausting day of work, and I was frustrated, and I am not a calm and patient sort of a person. I get anxious and tend to, um, get overexcited about things. I am somewhat … opinionated, I guess you could say. And when I get particularly overwrought, I end up at the craft store, whatever’s closest. Last week I ended up at Hobby Lobby looking at findings and fabric stiffener.  This being a brand new craft, I’ve been teaching myself about what happens when copious amounts of felt glue are applied to fabric and beads. This could get messy.

Hope you’ve all had a fun week. I’m going to do a fair imitation of posting twice this week. Watch out!