The last owners of this house surrounded the property with rosebushes, of all stripes and colors. My particular favorite has been an exceptionally sweet-smelling one that is red and white striped (I’ve nicknamed it the “Candy Cane” rosebush in my mind but I don’t know the varietal). It’s already begun its second blooming sequence in the beautiful Rose City, and so inspired, I decided to attempt to preserve the seasonal delight of rose fragrance by making rose petal jam. I took recipe inspiration from several other blogs and posts after a quick Google search and hobbled together my own quadruple-sized recipe with what I had on hand:
- 4 cups rose petals (Notes: I did not bother removing the white part as some recipes recommend and it tastes just fine. The roses are untreated – no chemicals to my knowledge since my tenure in this house of two years. 4 cups of rose petals was just half of a small mixing bowl that I’d picked off our bush, after rinsing, plucking petals, and removing bugs and spiders.)
- 3 cups clean-tasting untreated Portland tap water
- 1/2 cup organic lemon juice
- 4 cups sugar (I had 3 cups organic cane sugar on hand and 1 cup maple sugar)
- 3 more cups Portland tap water
- 1 package Pomona Universal Pectin
After rinsing the petals and rescuing two spiders, I blended the rose petals with a hand stick blender with the lemon juice and water, which made a watery, clumpy concoction. I hand-stirred in the sugars.
About sugar and pectin boxes: I hate teeth-aching, throat-burning, super-sugary jams and jellies. This recipe uses about 1/3 the sugar called for in other recipes – I was only able to do this because I was using Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which doesn’t require the massive amounts of the sugar the typical Sure-Jell type pectin packets require. Pomona’s looks more expensive in the store per box, but each box of Pomona’s actually does about 4 batches of jam, while each batch of Sure-Jell or what-have-you does only one batch, so it actually works out cheaper, too!
In a small saucepan, I heated the additional 3 cups of water with the entire package of pectin (since I am making a quadruple batch here) and the 1/2 cup water + 1/2 tsp calcium mixture as described in the pectin box directions. The box directions didn’t include ratios of pectin and calcium water for rose petal jam, so I erred on the jellier side and calculated the batches based on 4 tsp pectin and 4 tsp calcium water. There was only actually 11 tsp of pectin in the packet and extra calcium water, but I just threw caution to wind and used the whole thing. I haven’t done this before, and although I was whisking constantly, it looked pretty lumpy, but as it reached a boil the lumps began to dissolve more and it turned more glue-y.
Once it had reached a full roiling boil, I added it to the rose petal mixture. The resulting mixture had a great clingy and congealed texture, like a good jam ought. Poured into sterilized ball jars, processed in a hot-water bath for 10 minutes.
Green tomatoes and tomatillos
Last weekend, I finally convinced G it was time to pull up the tomato plants and harvest whatever was left there. Like all gardeners, he kept hoping the green tomatoes would yet ripen, but it was getting to coat weather in the mornings. Ain’t gonna happen.
I pulled up all 10 of the tomato and tomatillo plants and piled up what was left for making green salsa. I found this great recipe on a fantastic blog called Farmgirl Fare. She said you could double it, but I quadrupled it and mixed in tomatillos with the green tomatoes. Then realized I didn’t have enough onions or cider vinegar. I grabbed some more cider vinegar from the store and added it in while the mixture began to heat up, and then unfortunately overcompensated with too much cider vinegar! It turned out really tangy, but definitely edible. It is more of a relish than a salsa, as the recipe would suggest.
Last time I made green sauce, I found it was really good mixed with lots and lots of grated cheese and pre-cooked rice and leftover veggies, then baked in a casserole. Easy and tasty.
In other green news, the broccoli, cauliflower, and romanesco have begun rolling in from the CSA. All of a sudden today, I realized, Crap! I haven’t used up any of those brassicas that I put up last year! From my weekly CSA newsletter I learned last year that you can lightly steam broccoli, cauliflower and romanesco florets (brassicas), put them in a freezer bag, and freeze them for later use. Easy-peasy. I was overflowing with brassicas last October, so I mixed all the florets up and froze two gallon bags, never to use them in the winter or spring as I had intended.
They were looking pretty sad, stuffed at the bottom of the freezer drawer, crusted together in freezer-burn ice. The green broccoli heads had turned black, and the cauliflower had turned a yellowish off-white. Ain’t gonna happen again!
The only way to salvage them was to cook them into something unrecognizable, so I made a huge batch of cream of brassica soup: Saute lots of onion, leeks and/or garlic in butter. Add all the brassicas cut into florets and a potato cut into chunks with enough liquid of 4:1 stock:white wine to cover the veggies. Simmer until potato is soft and puree with a stick blender. Add half as much cream as white wine with lots of salt and pepper. It turned out very good and I don’t taste any freezer burn. I mixed in the freezer-burnt brassicas with a fresh cauliflower and leftover from last week’s romanesco that I’d steamed and put into the fridge: all three levels of freshness.
With all the space now left in the garden, I moved into Phase 2 of my first attempt at a winter garden. Supposedly, I can grow veggies year-round here in the temperate Pacific Northwest climate. We’ll see if I have a green-enough thumb! In September, I planted turnips, kale, parsnips, and an overwintering carrot called Merida. All four seeds have come up and are on their second set of leaves now. Slow going.
Last weekend, in place of the tomato/tomatillo plants, I planted garlic cloves and fava beans. Fava beans are supposed to be excellent winter cover crops, plus they can be dried and preserved like any dry bean. Cool! As of this weekend, I’m not seeing any green yet. My attempt at planting plain old dry beans this year didn’t turn out so well, so I attempted an inoculant, using a homemade recipe of 1:9 molassas:water I found somewhere on the internet. I dipped the fava beans in the molassas water and let them soak for about 5-10 minutes before planting, then dumped the molassas water into the dirt.
Here’s hoping that this IS going to happen!
