Canning Fresh Summer Strawberries

Oh, I have been busy in the kitchen.

One flat of strawberries, some fresh lemons and lemon juice, a bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, and a bottle of Chardonnay have yielded a delectable collection of treats. From top to bottom we have berry wine jelly, red wine jelly (both great with cheeses or as glazes for meat), quick strawberry lemon marmalade, and natural strawberry jam, and along the sides is strawberry lemonade concentrate, which I made more tart this time around because it was sickening sweet last year and required the addition of a lot more lemon juice when you mixed it up to drink.

And I still have two quarts of strawberries left.

All the recipes come from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. They are super easy and most take less than 30 minutes (once you're in the swing of things) with the exception of natural jams, which take longer because you have to make applesauce first and then cook the whole batch longer because you don't use pectin. That recipe probably took 90 minutes from start to finish. The easiest by far is the red wine jelly, which is just a bottle of wine, a little lemon juice, fruit pectin, and some sugar. It takes about five minutes to whip up the mixture and 15 minutes to process.

I hope you're taking advantage of the local fresh produce in your area! Get out to the farmer's market or the farm itself and then get cooking!

Read more...

Pears, Plums, and Grapes, Oh My

A half bushel of pears for $8? Yes, thank you very much.

These made some fine jars of halved pears in light syrup, pear jam, carrot cake jam (with carrots from our garden), and ginger pear preserves. All that and I still have a ton left!

And how about some ripe purple plums?

Despite having yellow flesh, the jam made from these plums turns a beautiful violet when you cook the pulp with the skins.

Free grapes? Don't mind if I do.

Gorgeous, aren't they? I wonder if I can get a vine or two to grow from seed in my own yard. We shall see. In the meantime, I wanted these luscious grapes to join cranberries to make some preserves I couldn't wait to try, however I cannot find fresh or frozen cranberries anywhere. *Sad face.*

Read more...

Just Peachy

What do you do with a 1/2 bushel of Red Haven peaches from the farmer's market?

You wash them. You blanch them and peel them.

You slice them and spilt them.

And you make canned peaches.

And peach jam.

And peach salsa.

And then you wonder what to do with the remaining 22 peaches, realizing that you cannot bring yourself to peel anymore of them today. Perhaps some pie filling or some zesty peach barbecue sauce?

I've been busily canning this summer, and in August and September, of course, it gets frantic. Besides peaches, I've processed blackberries, raspberries, grapes, and tomatoes, which I made into bruschetta.

We've also started getting a great crop of green beans and are thoroughly enjoying the eggplants, which have twice been made into eggplant Parmesan and will be made into the same two or three more times before the cool weather slows the garden down. We've had a very productive purple bell pepper plant, but I've realized I don't use a lot of them, so I may just plant red next year, which are called for in a number of canning recipes.

I've decided to wait to harvest any carrots until it gets colder as I understand cold weather makes them sweeter. Can't wait until the boy can help me pick those.

We still have a lot of green tomatoes and sweet peppers that aren't ripe. But we'll figure something out for those. I've learned a lot this year and have refined my gardening plans for next year. Fewer cherry tomatoes (just one plant is really enough), same number of eggplants, some plum tomatoes, more broccoli (and more room for it!), replant the red onions, maybe some red potatoes, and I believe we will try again with the cucumbers, but perhaps not the squash, pumpkins, or melons. They take up too much room then die of powdery mildew. Not worth it.

Read more...

Apple Time

Michigan apples. Ah, Michigan apples. You may be smaller and duller than those fancy waxed apples shipped from Washington in trucks coughing exhaust into the crisp October air, but you are oh so sweet and unassuming, perfectly proportioned, and humble enough to be useful. You call out to me, "Turn me into applesauce and apple pie!"

So I do.


And here's a little Robert Frost for your Friday reading pleasure . . .

The Cow in Apple Time

Something inspires the only cow of late
To make no more of a wall than an open gate,
And think no more of wall-builders than fools.
Her face is flecked with pomace and she drools
A cider syrup. Having tasted fruit,
She scorns a pasture withering to the root.
She runs from tree to tree where lie and sweeten.
The windfalls spiked with stubble and worm-eaten.
She leaves them bitten when she has to fly.
She bellows on a knoll against the sky.
Her udder shrivels and the milk goes dry.

Read more...

Labor, Plans for More Labor, and an Announcement

This is how I started off my Labor Day weekend on Friday: canning 8 quarts of tomatoes (one is missing from the picture because I can only fit 7 in my canner, so the last one was processing all by its lonesome), 5 quarts and 1 pint of peaches in honeyed syrup, 9 jars of blueberry jam, 8 jars of raspberry jam, 10 jars of salsa, and 8 jars of crushed tomatoes. They join jars of strawberry jam, strawberry rhubarb jam, cherry jam, cherry jelly, and cherry chutney to form a pretty respectable store of preserved fruits and vegetables, all from local Michigan farmers. Once fall arrives and the apple harvest is in, I will put up applesauce and apple pie filling. I may even make mint jelly, not because I really have much use for it, but because I have mint.

A close look at this picture and you may notice a sort of watered-down-mustard colored door behind the shelves. You're not seeing things. It's there. You see, in our basement there are three rooms, but for some reason there are five doors within about a five-foot radius when you stand at the bottom of the steps. Zach turned this door into pantry shelves. Another door is our DVD shelving (which is a bit more stylish and completely full).

This morning I told Zach about my big plans for turning part of the backyard gardens into tiered raised beds in which to grow more of our own produce. He's on board. Excellent! Now I simply need to find the time to go price lumber and compost. It will be a lot of work moving plants and hundreds of large rocks, but I need the exercise anyway.

Now for my big announcement. No, I'm not pregnant (thank goodness). I had an epiphany Thursday while driving home from Grand Rapids. I get most of my best ideas while driving to and from my Grand Rapids office once a week. My muse was working overtime this past week, probably because she knew that come next week I will be carpooling with a friend and our conversation will likely drown her out a bit.

One of my many ideas involved my blog. I realized that when I started this blog, I envisioned it as a place where I could write shortish essays about things that interested me but would never warrant actually being published anywhere, partly because of their brevity and partly because they would largely be centered on me and my life. So I called the blog Stuff No One Would Publish. As I work in publishing, I thought this was sort of clever.

But over the past two years it has morphed into something slightly different. I do occasionally post a more thoughtful entry (and those are some of my favorites to look back to) but I also post a lot about things I do. Hobbies, mostly. And driving home from work Thursday I realized that my blog needed a new name. My lovely idea was The Consummate Amateur.

But just throwing a new header up top doesn't work, because the web address would have to remain the same. So I've started a new blog, which will really be this blog but under a new name and with a new address. I know this causes some annoyances. If I'm on your blog roll (which would make me super happy) you will have to change the address and name. If you follow me here (also makes me super happy) you'll have to start following the new blog.

I will keep Stuff No One Would Publish up and link to it on the new blog in case you ever want to look back at my old posts. But I think the new name really epitomizes what this blog is all about. And it's shorter.

I'm posting this exact same post on The Consummate Amateur to help smooth the transition. I really hope you will join me there!

Read more...