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.
Filed under: Food Preservation
After the long winter divide, it is time to start preserving again. One of the first things ready in the spring: dandelion blossoms. The much maligned “weed” is actually totally edible: roots, roasted and charred for a coffee substitute tea, fresh young leaves to add to our salads, and blossoms for wine. Why is it considered a weed? I will never understand.
At least one of the benefits of harvesting yellow dandelion flowers is that they never reach the seed stage. I’ve never actually made or tasted the wine before, so this year it is a Grand Experiment. I found several recipes online that I cribbing from, but using what I happen to have on hand today to make it work. “Necessity is the mother of invention,” which makes me wonder about the greater implications on our society right now – not many Americans have experienced necessity. They find a recipe and go to the grocery store to fulfill all the bizarre celebrity ingredients (pomegranate juice?) rather than finding what’s in their cupboards and making a recipe to fit what they have.
Today I just got the wine started, so future posts will have to let you know how it turned out:
Picked a bag of dandelion flowers – anything yellow will do. Using a strawberry huller, I picked off the green ends (or at least, the majority of it) and ended up with about four cups of yellow dandelion heads. Let soak for a day and a half in about two quarts of water. Interesting, the soaked flower petals kind of smelled like a carrot. More appetizing than I would have thought.
Drained the water off from dandelion flowers into a bowl, and added with fresh water to total four quarts. Put into a large pot and added 6 cups sugar, the dandelion flowers again, a cup of chopped dried plums (remember when I did that last summer? see earlier post), 3 tbsp lemon juice, zest from half a Meyer lemon, and half a minneola Tangelo (juice squeezed out by hand into the pot and the rest of the orange slices thrown into the pot), and a pinch of cloves. Brought to a boil and let at a low boil for an hour.
Poured the liquid through a cheesecloth. Waited until the liquid reached less than 110 degrees using a cheese thermometer, and then added 2 tsp bread yeast dissolved in 1/2 cup warm water. Rubber-banded a cloth over top to let it sit overnight. Tomorrow, I will pour into bottles, cap, and let sit six months to one year.
Cross your fingers!
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!
Filed under: Food Preservation
Citrus (pineapple) sage on a pedestal
I have a citrus sage bush (also known as pineapple sage) that goes wild every couple months and threatens to take over my entire herb bed. No matter how viciously I prune it back, it still comes back with a vengeance. I use it judiciously in herb salads and as a spice, but it’s a beautiful, fragrant plant, and it makes delightful tea.
Herbal teas are so simple to make, it’s a wonder we don’t do more of it. All you do is take a whole mess-load of branches of the herb in question, put it in a brown paper bag, shake it up every few days to evenly distribute the air, and put it in a clean, dry ball jar when it’s completely dried out. I’m sure there are fancier ways of preserving the tea to keep the color better (my method makes it all turn brown), but the tea has nonetheless been effectively tasty.
It is an easy way to preserve nutrition and enjoy sunny flavors in the winter. And having glass jars full of herbs I dried definitely appeals to my inner witch.
Pear success.
The brother of our CSA farmers had a Bartlett pear tree that overproduced this year, so with their weekly newsletter, our CSA farmers offered us organically-grown Bartlett pears for $1.50/lb. Even though we are awash in dried plums, I thought I would add dried pears to our mix. 10 lb. of the pears were delivered with our usual weekly bushel basket of veggies on Tuesday, and in the refrigerator they ripened until yesterday.
The music of pear slicing and arranging on dehydrators was not as rhythmic as it was for the prune plums. The prune plums song was simple:
Cut the plum – keep the knife in as you turn it over – twist the two halves – drop the pit and the plums.
Cut – turn – twist – drop.
Cut-turn-twist-drop.
cutturntwistdrop.
The pears were all a little goofy. Some of them were odd-shaped, some had strange brown woody spots that even my heavy-duty butcher knife was resistant to cutting through. And the pear slices didn’t crowd together as neatly as the plums did — it took some geometric configuring. Luckily, G loved the architectural challenge of geometrically arranging the maximum number of slices on the trays. I cut the slices about 1/2″ thick. The music of the pear?
Chop in half – a cut to each side of each half – a cut to the back to remove a rectangular core – slice what’s left into slices.
Chop – cut – cut – cut – cut – damn woody spot! – slice – slice – slice – slice.
Chop – cut – cut – cut – strange one, this one didn’t have seeds on half – slice slice slice slice.
The 1/2″ thick pear slices dehydrated much faster than the plums. The plums required nearly 24 hours, all said and done — could be because I was able to crowd them into the dehydrator trays so neatly. The pears only needed an overnight, from top to bottom.
Dried pear slices for snacking or rehydrating in oatmeal this winter.
And now the cheese failure: I got this awesome mozzarella and ricotta cheese-making kit from New England Cheesemaking Company a while back and successfully made an excellent first batch of mozzarella. Unfortunately, I didn’t actually finish it before it went bad, and I was looking forward to trying it again. So, on a whim, I grabbed a gallon of fresh milk today at the co-op from a local dairy (Noris Dairy, the same dairy that will deliver dairy products to your door in the Portland-Salem-Eugene area like an old-fashioned milkman — rad!).
When I got home with my milk, I pulled out the kit and start following directions. In a small bowl, mixed the rennet tablet with bottled water to dissolve. In a saucepan, mixed the citric acid with bottled water, added the milk, and placed on medium heat. So far, so good.
The instructions called for the milk to be heated to 88 degrees. I pulled out the cheese thermometer from the kit, which is in a protective capsule. I opened the capsule, and out dropped…half the thermometer. Somehow, I broke it cleanly in half. Dammit! How am I supposed to tell when it’s at 88 degrees? I frantically started rummaging through the drawers, and found a meat thermometer — no, two meat thermometers! Both of them don’t even start the temperature range until 130 degrees, and by then, my mozzarella is toast. Luckily, I told myself, I’ve done this once before, so maybe I could guess approximately where 90 degrees by making my own marks on the meat thermometer, evenly spaced backwards from 130 degrees to 90 degrees. I pulled out a Sharpie and made a few marks on the meat thermometer.
Since this blog is entitled, “Cheese Failure”, I think you know how it goes from here. At roughly 90 degrees, I took the milk solution off the heat and stirred in the rennet/water mixture. It said to let sit 5-7 minutes, and then cut the curds into 1″ pieces. I let it sit 10 minutes, and my curds were still not cut-able. They were a fine granular mess. I tried to strain them out using a fine mesh sieve, and I got a baseball-ball-sized pile of powdery curds (if they can be called that). The recipes called for you to dunk the curds in hot water and knead them into mozzarella, but they never congealed or turned shiny and I lost a little more of them to the hot water each time I dunked them, until my pile was golf-ball-sized. At that point, I gave up and just ate what was on my hands.
It’s too bad my first blog on cheesemaking has to sound so negative, because the first time I made it, it worked just great. Lesson learned: don’t attempt to make cheese without a thermometer. The temperature really, really matters.
It’s the time of year to put things up. I like that saying: “put things up.” I imagine literally putting ball jars up on the top shelf with pride.
Today, I harvested all the tomatoes I could off the tomato plants. The large ones I put in the freezer bags with the others for eventual canning, and the small ones and cherry tomatoes I put in the dehydrater (great idea, Hil!) to be treats in sauces and salads later.
Meanwhile, all the liqueurs we put up in May/June after the wedding with all the leftover cheap wedding vodka were ready for straining. We’d made blackberry and cherry liqueurs. They’re pretty easy to make: dump fruit and a little sugar in vodka, put in dark place, let sit for 3 months, strain through cheesecloth. They turned out pretty good; a good way to preserve the flavor of that early summer fruit that I’m already missing. The liqueurs make good presents, or they taste great over ice or on ice cream. Most liqueur recipes call for more sugar than you need; be judicious.
I planted the first winter garden seeds last week as dusk fell: purple globe turnips, mixed siberian kales, gladiator parsnips, and meridia carrots. The turnips and kales have already sprouted. The parsnips and carrots haven’t, but the seed package did warn of “erratic germination”. Once I can take the tomato plants out, I’ll replace with garlic and fava beans, both of which can be planted in the fall rather than late summer.
For the first time ever, I am also putting seeds up for the winter, also known as seed-saving. So far, I’ve put up komatsuna greens seeds, basil seeds, a few pea seeds, and the sad results of my attempt at growing beans this year. I grew so few beans that they are only good for saving as seeds for next year. The good news is that those few that grew are absolutely beautiful: a lima-bean-sized black and purple speckled bean, a black coco bean, and a small kidney-red bean. Next year, my lovelies. I’m putting you up until then.
Filed under: Food Preservation
Zucchini, conquered.
The age-old question of gardeners everywhere: what do I do with all this damn summer squash?
Summer squash is the bane of my existence. It’s my least favorite vegetable — practically tasteless and always watery — but I get a ton of it in my CSA. (It’s a package deal.) Thursday night, I decided to put it away to worry about it later. While dinner was simmering, I took out the grater and grated two zucchinis we’d gotten from the CSA that were overwhelmingly large: about a foot and a half long and 3″ in diameter. One of those zukes had been staring at me every time I opened for the fridge for the past three weeks, making me feel guilty about ignoring it. “What am I going to do with you?” I thought helplessly, “You’re just too big!”
When I got a second one this week of roughly the same size and shape, I feared they had won. They reminded me of a large drunk girl I ran into on a dance floor at a wedding a few weeks ago. She was about a foot taller than me and was aggressively pushing her body onto everyone on the dance floor — for me, that was her ample breasts being pushed into my face over and over again. This was her way of trying to show affection, but it was like being in a mosh pit that followed you around. This zucchini was shoving its enormity in my face — what’re you going to with me, heh? It was so satisfying to take those big logs down to size by shredding them into little bitty pieces! Mow them down! Ha — take that!
Geoff’s favorite job is wringing out zucchini water, I swear. I shredded the zukes into a cheesecloth-lined colander, and Geoff twisted the cheesecloth over the sink to wring out all the extra water. Few seconds later, we had a nice-sized pile of zuke-shred ready for freezing in a freezer bag, and I pitched it into the freezer. We’ll pull it out later this winter when we’re finally feeling again like we’re missing zucchini fritters or zucchini bread again.
I think I’ve decided on my favorite Portland farmer’s market. Drum roll please…Lents Farmers Market, near I-205 and SE Foster. It may seem like an odd poster child next to the interstate, but I think it represents the closest thing to the farmer’s markets of yester-lore. Only a few stands, mostly vegetables, mostly small producers. Reasonable prices. A good place to go get a ton of whatever is in season that week for a discount. Exactly the kind of place a food preservationist likes to find herself.
My favorite way to shop at a farmer’s market:
1. Arrive as early as possible for the best selection. But, if you want to sleep in and enjoy that coffee or newspaper before you head out, take comfort in the fact that if you do get there towards the end, while you take a gamble that while some of the good stuff may be gone (eggs always sell out first), there’s a good chance you can get the last-minute deals: the price slashes as people try to sell out of what’s not selling well.
2. Make at least one slow circuit around the entire market before you buy anything. Look at what’s in season. Take a note of the prices of the things you’d like to buy and compare them. Look for something you’ve never tried before.
3. Have a set number of dollars you’re willing to spend, and make the various products and prices fit together so you get the maximum amount of goodness for your dollar — it’s a fun game!
4. Go back around the second (or third) time and make those purchases.
Today, I scored two big boxes of canning tomatoes for $7.50 apiece. It’s hard to guess how many pounds of tomatoes are in that box. Geoff guesses 30-35 lb. As he pointed out, one of those tomatoes alone is easily 1 lb. That makes the tomatoes approximately 25 cents/lb. SCORE! We are going to be enjoying these throughout the winter.
Box o' tomatoes!
This year, my tomato objective is, like last year, to can all the tomatoes plain and whole for using in any variety of winter stew and roast recipes, but without the hassle and literal pain involved with dunking tomatoes in boiler water and pulling the skins off with my bare burnt hands. Last year involved several hours of burnt hands and tomato juice everywhere, as we tried, but failed, to get into a nice, clean rhythm of dunking tomatoes in hot water, dunking in cold water, stripping off the skins, and packing into jars. I’ve heard that if you freeze tomatoes, the skins slip right off when run under water. It’s worth a try! Also, I like the idea of storing up a whole bunch of tomatoes and canning them all at once rather than in multiple waves, like last year. Today, I will take these two boxes of tomatoes and simply bag them and leave in the freezer for a big tomato canning binge, perhaps later in October.
The tomato plants in my garden, while proliferate in cherry tomatoes, have only produced a few large red tomatoes. Many green ones stare at me with hopeful eyes, hopeful that the first frost won’t render them green forever. Grow, little babies, grow!
Filed under: Food Preservation
It’s plum season! My friends AC-DC have a rockin’ 20-year-old Italian prune-plum tree in their yard that produces way more fruit than any normal person could eat, so for the third year in a row, I stopped by this weekend to pick plums to my heart’s delight. Italian prune-plums are perfect little purple eggs that seem to grow exceptionally well in the Portland area. I’ve hardly ever seen a wormy one (but have never had such luck with pears or apples).
The first year we made prunes — just chopped the plums in half and plopped them in a dehydrator overnight. They were delicious. Geoff finished them off within a couple months — so much for overwintering!
The second year I made plum preserves — also very good but not as much universal appeal. Not everyone liked them, and besides, how many preserves can one really eat in a year? We still have preserves left over from each of the past three summers.
Remembering how popular the prunes were last year, I decided to make them again — but this year, I’ll make even more so we can try to eat them through the winter. A huge branch had fallen from the plum tree this year, so AC-DC had already picked two huge canvas bags full of them that they let me take home (in exchange for some finished prunes, of course!).
When I got home, I dumped all the plums into the sink and washed them off. Cutting them in half for the dehydrator felt like visiting an old friend…yes, I’d done this a million times before two years ago. It only took a couple plums to become precise again.
Prepping and slicing the plums
Using a sharp knife, a swift cut down to the core using the natural inset butt-crack of the plum to keep the cut straight. Roll the plum over the long way with the knife in place until it makes a complete circle cut. Twist the two halves clockwise until they give way into two pieces. Place the pitless half face-down on the dehydrating rack. Pry the freestone free with my thumbnail in the other half and nestle it into the dehydrating rack close to its cousin. It takes about 10 minutes to fill up a tray. Dehydrator has 5 trays. We got our dehydator used on craigslist for $10, but you could also do the same thing in a low oven.
Plums crowded onto a dehydrator rack
Since it’s such a large piece of fruit to dehydrate, it takes several hours to completely dehydrate, 5-8 hours depending on a number of factors. I take them out of the tray when the fruit is wrinkled like a raisin and the skin turns from matte to shiny, or when you press your thumb down on the prune and it feels leathery rather than squishy. I’ve accidentally overdone these before and they turn out crispy and a little burnt tasting — what I learned from that experience is that it’s ok for them to be a little squishy.
After dehydrating and significantly smaller
These prunes are really good reconstituted in meat dishes, like lamb tagine or roasts, or eaten plain on the trail. They’re tangier than store-bought prunes, true dried plums — real food!
Prunes!
