Happy Birthday, Miriam

Here's to counting fun with the color of the cotton candy stains on your teeth and friends with forks and years with candles and love with cakes. xo

Dilly PIckles

If flowering dill weren't so dern tasty when it's floating in a spicy brine, I'd put the stuff in vases all over my house. That yellow of the flowers is nearly the color of paint covering the walls of our living room and man, I cannot get enough.


Where was I? Oh yes, PICKLES. Usually I'm more of a refrigerator dills sort of a girl, thanks to the expert tutelage of my friend Gerik, but we really wanted to complete this trifecta of canning projects with something more savory. Tomato sauce seemed a bit risky and we'd heard mixed reviews of canned salsa, so with little hesitation we picked up this hefty bottle of vinegar at the store and mixed it up with several shades of carrot and bean.





Keeping with our habit of beer pairings, we sipped a dark porter whose name I can hardly recall. I swear that at the time the beverages were clouding our minds just enough to numb the swell of our ankles and dull our sense of time's passing, not enough to get sloppy in our sterilizing and incubate the makings of botulism. Promise.


In the end, this was probably our least successful of the three recipes, mostly because we lacked the foresight to anticipate how beautiful purple carrots when bathed in hot brine would turn the whole mess violet! Also, we should have erred on the side of stubby vegetables instead of tall ones because while processing them in boiling water, we lost some brine out of the jars. Now the tips of some of our vegetables protrude above their liquid, which is no way to craft a crunchy pickle. Worst case scenario, they'll grow mold. We were really too tired to worry much about it at the end of the day. Total cost for 8 quarts of pickles? $9. If they're inedible, we'll live.

From this insane project I believe we gleaned a few lessons:

1. Jam is best made in small batches to ensure you can get a nice pectinated result.
2. A dishwasher is not for chumps. It is one of modernity's conveniences and comes in handy for washing jars.
3. Refrigerator pickles are probably easier and just as tasty as canned ones. While living in California with year round produce, canning pickles may be actually unnecessary.
4. Three canning projects in one day is a bit of a stretch, but doable.
5. Holiday weekends are perfect settings for crazy projects.

{High Five!}

Strawberry Fig Jam, with break for Hot Dog

Phase two of what I have coined Canaganza ushered in the red period of our day: Strawberry Fig Jam cooked while sipping a Rogue dry hopped red ale.



We subbed figs for rhubarb in this stage when we failed to locate the rhubarb patch at Berkeley Bowl West, and the combination certainly made for some nice photo ops. Ruby red against plumesque purple was just a photo waiting to be taken. Then I had a little affair with the part of the recipe that instructed us to combine 10 cups of sugar with all that fruit to let it mellow for an hour. Sugar is rather photogenic, in my defense.



Cara's help was instrumental for this part because she not only chopped strawberries, but also juiced all the lemons. You may or may not know that the hero that juices the lemons is contributing the most important part to any jam making project. In the end, we maybe could have used a few more lemons for our monster batch of jam because it's a little on the saucey side. Then again, I don't really mind the saucey side.


After that we had to let it cook for what seemed an eternity, so we broke for a hot dog snack and a root beer float out back. It was exactly what the Preservation Doctor ordered, a Top Dog with everything.



And before we knew it, we were ladeling the hot jam into sterilized jars like professional jammers. Next up: Dilly Pickles.

Peach Butter with Cinnamon and Vanilla Bean

I mentioned I was out collecting mason jars, but did I mention why? I don't think I did. This labor day weekend, Miriam and I opted to labor over some of late summer's bounty and put it up over 12 odd hours in her cozy kitchen. It was the perfect thing for a three day weekend. One day to gear up, one day to do it, and one day to recover from all the hard work. Maybe we're insane, but we undertook three separate projects to do in one day. Which means that by the end, we'd made more than fifty jars of preserved food to gaze upon with self satisfaction. If that constitutes insanity, then you'd better lock me up. I'd do it again in a heartbeat...but give me some time to get through the stuff. There is a lot of food in my cupboard now waiting to be slurped, spread and crunched upon.

We bought a box of peaches from the Temescal Farmers Market, 50 cents a pound for the bruised ones. Even these were of such high quality that we squirreled away some of them fresh while we were busy cooking down the rest.


Here are some photos of the festivities. I'm going to post them in stages, so that no one has occassion to be overwhelmed. To keep things light, we paired a nice beer with each phase of the process. For the huge batch of peach butter, we selected Anderson Valley's Summer Solstice Cerveza Crema. The beer was light but flavorful, a good combination to savor over the three hours that pot of butter sat on the stove. Waiting for spoon-coating consistency can seem an eternity and so it was important to keep our hands full of cold beverages.



Next up: Strawberry Fig Jams

Adventures, of late

I've been withholding a minor detail of my state of mind from you people. I have what you might call an elephant in every room right now. He's really terribly enormous and invasive and he seems to whisper, always, the things I should be working on. Drawings, research, letters of recommendation. It being August, it is the beginning of application season, for those of us who dare to apply for graduate school. And this year, of course, that means me.

But last week Miriam had the good idea to take a bike ride out to the furthest point west, in the East Bay, to the port of Oakland for some exploring. It was a great way to ease my mind against its tendency to become overwhelmed and subsequently useless, but also a good time to just pedal and think and formulate. It had been too long since I'd visited a place unknown and it made me want to hop in the car and just drive somewhere new. Maybe with my next visitor, I'll enforce this plan.

Here are some of the parts of our journey that were best suited for a quick picture:










I'm a kid in a candy store, when it comes to industrial landscapes, because they offer such intense contrasts in color and texture. I wish I had a nicer camera, for times like this more than ever, because some of the lines get a little muddy with further distance. The scale is harder to convey, but in case you were wondering, those white cranes behind the shipping containers are bigger than anything with moving parts you've probably ever seen.

Full of Beans

Check out the texture on these beans that Bert brought us. He's learning lots in the way of roasting coffee, and shared a miniature batch of French roast with us last week. Grinding them up for brewing in the French press, they dissolved into papery, oily little flakes before my eyes; like some precious metal, they actually sparkled a little. The whole pot felt very ceremonious, delivered in that hand stamped tiny bag. It was a nice treat, a step above our usual fare.



I've been feeling like an especially lucky person recently. Bert brought us coffee and gave us a really amazing old Indian cookbook. Miriam gave us surplus heirloom tomatoes and quince jam. And Karrie gave me recently TWO lovely bottles of bitters out of the goodness of her heart. Whatever I did to have such generous friends, I do not know, but I'd like to become that sort of friend myself one of these days.

Today though, I'm happy to count these blessings and put off repayment until tomorrow.