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.
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.
Filed under: Local Food
My fridge is full of good intentions and they’ve taken the form of seemingly self- multiplying cucumbers, squashes and eggplants. But I’ve got a 4 month old, school has just started for my 9 year old, Kes – and my husband too, and I’ve gone back to work after spending the past 4 months lazily gazing at baby toes through a haze of sleep deprivation. The reality is that after 3 hours of sleep and a full day of work I’ve really not been able to figure out how to turn fifteen pounds of fresh, local, organic summer squash into a family-pleasing meal by adding farmers-market cheese and cucumbers, while holding a squirming baby on my hip. Its much easier to make mac n’cheese for my daughter and a bag of popcorn for myself – or whatever else you can eat with your left hand while breast-feeding and helping with homework.
We have made strides at breakfast at least. I purchased old fashioned oats from Bob’s Red Mill. I have no idea if they’re local oats, but at least BRM is a local company. We even had lunch there once. They’re certainly not as tasty as the pre-packaged kind that comes with sugar and seasoning. They require a lot of cinnamon and local organic butter to cut it for me. My husband still requires some prodding and convincing – and several spoonfuls of Xylitol to eat them. Kes certainly won’t give up her pop tarts for the oat mush. At least not yet. She does have this rather odd obsession with honey that I might be able to leverage into oat-consumption.
Whenever we go to the farmers market on the park blocks Kes ends up parting with the bulk of her spending money at the honey stand. She likes to take her sweet, gooey purchases and make ‘syrups’ with them by adding various random ingredients like cinnamon and flower petals. As a side note, she has also acquired from the same farmers market stand multiple bees wax candles shaped into various animals and mythological beasts which now reside between the stacks of fading squashes in our fridge to ‘keep them from melting’. They stand guard over the honey-syrup experiments which pool in reused gelato dishes perched delicately on top of uneaten cartons of cherry tomatoes.
I have some vague hope that these forays to the farmers market, and perhaps overly-permissive misuse of my refrigerator, will foster a love of local agriculture in my daughter as well as an adventurous fondness for cooking – in spite of the repetitive mac n’cheese meals.
Hoping to further expand on the honey in-road, I signed us up for a morning of apiary education and honey tasting sponsored by our local slow food group and hosted by the Community Bee Project at Zenger Farms. So after enforcing the oats on the family, I packed up Kes, the baby and Gramma E on this sunny September morning. and we were off to learn about bee-keeping.
Zenger Farm is an odd and lovely little place. Apparently the lot was acquired by the City some years back for the wetlands habitat that remains across the lower, northern half of the property. The upper half was covered in brambles and suffered frequent vandalism and was becoming a liability to the city, when a man whose name I don’t remember offered to keep the upper half mowed, occupied and to run education classes in return for being able to farm that land. Thus Zenger Farm was born and they currently hold a 50 year lease on the property. Friends of Zenger Farm runs educational programs like cob building and organic gardening classes as well as summer camps for kids. The actual farming is done by a variety of folks.
One of our 3 guides, Laura of 47th ave farms, seemed to have the lions share of the crops out there. She began farming 12 years ago on a double lot on 47th ave in the Woodstock area and has been leasing or borrowing different patches of ground to grow her CSA ever since. It was only this year that she actually purchased farm land in the central valley. Laura gave us a quick tour of the fields, the chicken cooperative, the beetle row, the tomato green house, the immigrant gardens, the childrens garden and the worm bins. Marc from the Xerces Society was there to provide a very lively and entertaining talk on local, non-honey bees. I had no idea that there are tiny green bees that live in the ground. He showed us how to make bee houses from bamboo and a live female bumble bee he caught earlier to share with us. His enthusiasm for pollinators was infectious. I resolved on the spot to make bamboo bee houses – with my left hand while holding a squirming baby on my hip.
Our third host was Wisteria, the former executive director of Zenger Farm and a member of the Community Bee Project. There were also several other folks involved in the project there – including the very knowledgeable Tom who has been keeping hives for 25 years. The Project meets one Tuesday a month and is open to anyone interested in backyard beekeeping. You can come and learn from experienced keepers, volunteer with the Project’s hives out at the farm and share in the honey haul. We discussed everything from colony collapse disorder, to watering the bees. I really wish I had the time to join in. Its a lively group.
I have to admit I did have some mixed emotions being there. I felt a bit like a fraud among the slow-fooders, several of whom apparently also were already keeping bees and had packed along some amazing luncheon fare. I not only had the secret guilt of my popcorn dinners to deal with, but I had also had not put two and two together and somehow failed to realize this was a potluck gig – an organic local slow food potluck gig. Oops. Well, Kes took it in stride and scaled several apple and plum trees – with permission from the farm folks – to provide Gramma E and me with some snacks. I also tried my hand at picking some plums. Just as I reached my hand up into the fruit-laden bowers, a huge, gigantic, shiny and overly-protective wasp leapt onto my arm and proceeded to sting me repeatedly. I squealed in pain. The slow-fooders are watching now. What do I do? I can’t kill it. They’ll think its one of the honey bees that are disappearing at an alarming rate. A precious pollinator. Oh the irony. I brush it off and run. It follows me. “It’s a wasp!” I shout at my fellow bee enthusiasts by way of excusing my behavior as I run squealing by. So much for bee keeping.
In spite of the wasp incident and the lack of potluck offering, I was still feeling satisfied that I was there learning things I’d wanted to know, enjoying being out in the sunshine, watching my daughter climb trees and chase chickens, making up for the mac n’cheese. I was inspired to keep on in the local food and urban farming quest.
This evening the naps seemed to align in just the right way that I was able to take my cutting board out in peace and revel in my renewed inspiration. This was a very good thing since there was not room for even one more cherry tomato in the fridge. I hauled out my CSA squash and onions and farmers’ market garlic and potatoes from our yard. I set my pan a sizzling with local butter and started a chopping. I managed to whip up an almost all-local dinner of mashed potatoes, corn-on-the-cob, salad and squashes. It was the salad that was the foreign- laden offender due to a dressing of olive-oil, liquid aminos, lemon and avocadoes. (If I were to get one Kingsolver-type exemption, it would be avocadoes). Our meal was fresh, vibrant, local, organic dripping with summer. I felt a warm and fuzzy glow as I set this all out for my family. Especially as I realized all we had eaten that day had actually been mostly local. I resolved to find hazelnut oil to replace the olive and to finally do that food inventory I’d been meaning to, and prep food for the week on Sunday.
And I delighted in this peaceful Saturday meal with my family – that is until Kes found a second bug on her plate. The second was a large, fat, wormish type thing that seemingly had been fried up with the squash. The first had been a cute little green caterpillar in the corn. The caterpillar was easily dealt with as I set aside that particular piece to be boiled separately and promised that the offending ear would be mine alone. But this fat whitish worm was not so cute. It immediately caused panic on either side of me. “C’mon guys, its farm fresh, you have to expect a few critters along with the veggies. And it’s a local bug.” The protest continues along with gagging. “They eat bugs all the time in other parts of the world.” More gagging. “I have two-bite brownies for desert if you finish everything – except any bugs or worms of course”. Still more gagging. “Jared can you set a good example please?” The shear horror on their faces. How large that fried worm seemed as it was flung onto the edge of my empty plate. A thorough examination of the remaining contents of plates was conducted to look for any half-eaten worm bits or additional worms. None were found, but that was obviously to be the end of dinner. I half considered actually eating the worm myself to try to prove a point – “See guys, its yummy. Not that there are any more. Keep eating” – but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
Local eating is obviously not for the faint-of-heart or stomach. However – that won’t stop me. I am resolved to keep at it and we’ll get into a fuller swing I’m sure. I’ll just have to remember to more thoroughly inspect the veggies – and let others pick the plums.
www.xerces.org for info on building bee houses and planting pollinator attracting plants.
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!
Here’s some info on a documentary we are looking into showing at our film series. I appreciated their simple steps to shift spending as well as some encouraging words to talk to super
In the course of creating Broken Limbs, filmmakers Guy Evans and Jamie Howell discovered their own purchasing and eating habits were transformed. It is important to note, though, that shopping habits formed over a lifetime are not changed overnight, but one small purchase, one meal at a time.
Think of it as a treasure hunt. Read labels, ask questions. Then consider these questions:
- Was it hard to find local or regional products? Did you have to go out of your way?
- Did you buy anything you wouldn’t have otherwise?
- How did the cost compare to what you might ordinarily have purchased? How did the quality compare?
- Did you make any discoveries about your own habits, good or bad?
Extend your range: A natural extension of this exercise is to seek out foods that offer you a higher level of information about how they were produced.
Organic Apples? Free range chicken? Grass-fed beef? These are all examples of foods labeled with communication in mind. It doesn’t matter what you believe in or approve of, only that you momentarily raise your conscious awareness of where the food you buy is coming from and how it is grown.
Vote with your wallet: In the movie Deborah Kane of the Food Alliance pointed out that a produce manager will make changes in a produce department when about 10 people ask, “Because they figure if 10 people go to the trouble to ask, 100 others are thinking the same thing.”
In addition to actually asking, if you would like to see more local, regional or sustainably produced foods on the shelf, one of the best ways to send that message is through the buying decisions you make every day. Make no mistake, America’s businesses are paying attention to those votes.
Filed under: Local Food
Driving home from our thought-provoking weekend at the coast cabin, I was reading out loud from “The Long Emergency”, the book I’m reading about “the converging crises of the twenty-first century.” Seriously scary stuff, but I have found more than one argument I disagree with, which gives me hope.
In this particular passage, he was discussing the homogenization and McDonaldization of American food and the apparent lack of regional specialties, such as they have in the sparkling white wine in Champagne, France or that sharp cheese in Parma, Italy. We tended to murmur in agreement, and yet, we were driving into the town of Tillamook, possibly the best-known specialization in Oregon: Tillamook dairy products. Grass land in Tillamook County is just worth more than in even neighboring counties, just from the efforts of the Tillamook County Creamery Association.
Inspired, we decided to stop by the Tillamook store and pick up some local “specialized” dairy products — to date, we have only found Tillamook’s squeaky cheese curds and garlic cheddar cheese in their store. Unfortunately, it was a frickin’ zoo. An entire store full of many Oregon-made food products, a great start to our new Northwest diet…and a 1/4 mile line just to get to the cash register, overweight tourist families blindly lurching about, and a crowd like Ikea on opening day. It’s great to see an Oregon cheese store so popular, but sheesh – who can stand that kind of crowd?
We ducked in, did a bewildering round about the store, and quickly escaped back out the same door, sadly without cheese but relieved to have personal space again. Walking back through the mall-sized parking lot to the car, we saw across the street a little seafood store with a sign touting FRESH seafood.
We walked in the little seafood shack door and the shop was completely empty. The lone employee said hello as soon as we walked in. We asked about the house-smoked salmon (wild, not farmed) and the Dungeness crab (cooked every morning, alive and walking mere hours ago) and bought a pound of each. As she was cleaning our crab, a fisherman walked in carrying blue net bags full of fresh oysters and steamer clams. Oh baby! I think our jaws literally dropped open. “Fresh from the ocean!” he said to us with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile that spoke of a successful day at the sea, and settled up with the gal behind the counter: 65 3/4 pounds of fresh catch. On his way out the door, he grinned to the gal and said, “You keep sellin’ ‘em, and I’ll keep diggin’ ‘em!”
We added a dozen oysters and two pounds of clams to the order. With an additional bag of Kettle chips for each of us for lunch (fried in Salem, OR in a LEED-certified building using solar and wind power…but potato provenance as yet unknown) and a chunk of local smokey Rogue blue cheese (we did get specialty cheese, after all!) the total came to $37. Not bad!
By the time we got home again to Portland, we had already eaten the potato chips and smoked salmon but we were still starving. Geoff put the clams in a steamer basket and steamed them a few minutes until they popped open while I melted butter (Noris creamery near Salem, OR) in a small saucepan with smashed garlic (from our farmer’s CSA) and lightly simmered it with an equal part white wine (St. Josef Gewurtztraminer, near our old house in Oregon City). A slice of bread from the bakery down the street (flour provenance unknown) finished the meal.
This was our first conscious attempt at eating more local foods after our inspiring commitment to do this as a team this weekend — we weren’t really prepared to be 100% local (no bread) and we haven’t set the ground rules of our diet yet, but this was a bang-up first meal!
New resources discovered:
Fresh Seafood NW: local seafood market across from the Tillamook Creamery in Tillamook, OR on Highway 101. 503-815-3500. www.freshseafoodnw.com.
Kettle Chips: I emailed them to ask the provenance of their potatoes.
Bread: I just remembered that I heard from a semi-reliable source that Grand Central Bakery buys their wheat from the Goldendale area. I emailed them to ask about it, too.
Rogue Creamery, Tillamook Creamery, Blue Heron Creamery: All Oregon-made cheese! Mmmm!
