Jelly Fail and Jelly Lessons

Pepper jelly

I am not an expert canner. I do a lot of water bath canning - at least, “a lot” statistically speaking. Most people don’t can at all anymore, so I’m on the upper part of the curve by default. In my circle, there are still a fair number of women who “put up” a significant portion of their family’s food every year. These women count their canning jars by the gross - I count mine by the dozen. My best estimate for my current supply is eight dozen - two thirds filled, one third empty. 

Nonetheless. Canning is a regular part of my kitchen activity. I can at least once a month year round, thanks to the Gleaners’s Pantry, and in the high season I might can once a week. This week, the Gleaners’s Pantry offered up beautiful peppers, and so I decided to make pepper jelly. 

Pepper jelly is an under appreciated condiment - it’s delicious and beautiful both. It makes an excellent Christmas present. At the end of the day, though, it’s jelly. And I’m not good at jelly. Judging by the number of websites devoted to helping people master jelly and/or fix jelly gone wrong, I’m not the only bad-at-jelly canner our there. 

Jelly, it seems, is rather finicky. Jelly requires a level of kitchen precision more often associated with wedding cakes or soufflés. By which I mean, I guess, the willingness and ability to closely follow a recipe, including actually measure all the ingredients and being in possession of a thermometer.

I have a thermometer - I’m both a nurse and a cheesemaker - but I cannot, for love or money, closely follow a step-by -step recipe. Therefore it follows that my jelly often refuses to gel. Today’s pepper jelly seems to have done just that.

While I was searching the internet for reasons my jelly might have failed to gel and for ways to repair a failed jelly, I learned a whole bunch of things I did not know about jelly. Most of those things only served to reinforce my suspicion that I may be congenitally incapable of the precision and consistency required, but in the firm belief that the information may be useful to others, I offer some of the tips I learned here:

- when removing the jars from the water bath, try to keep them vertical. Set them down gently. Any jarring motion or departure from the vertical can interfere with gel formation.

- leave the jars alone for two full days. It can take that long for the gel to firm up. Really!

- try putting a jar in the fridge. Cooler temps can help. 

If none of this works, you can open the jars and re-do the entire process. But holy mother of god, the instructions for determining what went wrong in the first place and how to correct it read like a third-year chemistry exam. Apparently, gel formation relies on a complex interplay of the variables Acidity, Pectin, and Temperature. Hence the whole following recipes thing. 

Here’s a list of sites that provide detailed instructions, but to be honest, my favorite advice is “call it syrup and move on with your life.” 

http://www.creativesavv.com/2012/06/what-do-you-do-when-your-jelly-doesnt.html?m=1

https://foodinjars.com/blog/canning-101-how-to-save-runny-jam/

http://www.pomonapectin.com/jell/

Canning Party (Recipes)

lemon curd

mixing up Ukrainian refrigerator pickles

making dilly beans

Yesterday I invited a couple of girlfriends over to do some communal canning. It was a beautiful fall day and I enjoyed showing my friends around the homestead. After a few drinks and some snacks, we got down to business.

One of my friends was a total canning novice, and she chose dilly beans as a good place to start. I think that's a good choice - easy vinegar based pickle, delicious, pretty. I made lemon curd because I had a serious surplus of organic lemons from the Gleaner's Pantry. Lemon curd is not just yummy, but also very attractive and I'm thinking it will make a good addition to any Christmas packages I send out this year, should I get my shit together and send any.

My other friend is Ukrainian, and was making two of her mother's recipes. I was very excited about this; my mother's family also comes from Ukraine, but a few generations back, and as far as I know no family recipes have survived from that time. The three of us had a great time in the kitchen, and we decided to make it an annual event - the September canning get-together.

Nastia's Refrigerator Pickles

4 kg pickling cucumbers sliced in fourths lengthwise, and halved if long

4 Tbsn minced garlic

1 C. salad oil

1 C. sugar

2 Tbsn mustard powder

2 Tbsn yellow mustard seeds

2 tspn ground black pepper

1 C. 9% white vinegar (available in Russian grocery stores; or 2 C. regular white vinegar

Mix all ingredients in a large non-reactive kettle; let stand 3 hours at room temp. Then pack into large glass jars and refrigerate up to 2 months. 

These pickles are so delicious we couldn't stop eating them immediately, but now, a day later, I can say they are much better than they were even 24 hours ago. Unbelievable. I will be making these every year. 

Nastsia's Eggplant Preserve

3 Kg ripe eggplants (about 8), chopped in large (2") dice

1 Liter tomato juice

1 Tbsn salt

1 C. sugar

1 C. salad oil

1/2 C. 9% vinegar (available in Russian groceries; or 1 C. regular white vinegar)

Salt the eggplant well and leave to sit 1/2 hour in a colander; then rinse well and combine with all the other ingredients. Boil 20 minutes, then ladle into sterilized wide-mouth pint jars and process in a water bath 30 minutes. Cool and make sure jars have sealed. 

NOTE: this is Nastia's mother's recipe. The Blue Book Canning Guide states that eggplant, as a low acid vegetable, MUST be pressure canned. Some sources say that acidizing the eggplant with vinegar makes it safe; other sources DISAGREE. To be totally safe, process in a pressure canner.

Lemon Curd

Juice of 8 large or 12 small lemons; about 1 full cup

6 eggs plus 2 egg yolks

2 C. sugar or more to taste

3 sticks (3/4 lb) butter

in a large sauce pan, mix first three ingredients. Whisk until well blended. Over medium heat, whisk in butter in small pieces until incorporated; keep whisking occasionally until thickened; about 6 or 7 minutes. Ladle into sterilized 1 C. quilted jelly jars and place on sterilized lids. Process in a water bath just to seal; about 5 minutes. The high acid of this conserve makes it safe as long as the jar seals well. Will keep for many months. 

The Fermentation Files (Daikon Kim chee and Grape Leaves)

There is a reason I haven't been posting much lately, but I don't care to go into it. Suffice it to say that I have a frustrating, time consuming, but in no way life-and-death situation which is sucking up a lot of my brainpower. Hopefully, this situation will resolve itself one way or the other soon, and life can get back to normal.

In the meantime, Preserving Season waits for no woman. The Great Trade I was going on about last week (Mother of All Trades (?) and Trade Network Update) has morphed into the Pretty Good Trade, but I'm happy about it. Basically, it's a crate of produce, and I get to fill it however I want. That crate isn't here yet, but there is still lots of vegetables coming in the door.

My sister passed me a bag full of daikon radishes and turnips. I like both of those sliced thinly and drizzled with lemon juice and salt, but not in those quantities. So I made kimchee. I have made kimchee a couple of times before, but only cabbage kimchee (detailed instruction can be found here:Kim Chee Situation (Food Storage Update)). Luckily, I save all my old Saveur magazines and I found the one with an enormous section all about kim chee. Basically, daikon kim chee is made the same way as cabbage kim chee, but with sugar added.

My other bonanza of the week was grape leaves. I love grape leaves, both for making dolmas and other wrapped foods (try wrapping fish in them), and also for their high tannin content. Adding grape leaves to kosher pickles will keep them crisp.

My daughter Rowan is babysitting this week for a friend who just so happens to have one of the most amazing small-homesteader type properties in the city of Bellingham, which is saying a lot. She is only renting the property, but whoever originally laid out the half acre did a fantastic job. There are some seven fruit trees - apples, plums, and cherries - sixteen blueberry bushes, a long row of raspberry canes, a truly impressive enormous asparagus bed, four 4x16 foot raised beds for annuals, and two gigantic grapevines.

These are the best grapevines I've seen in a home garden in this area, ever. Not sure of the varieties (alas) but both of them are covered in bunches of large grapes, which are just beginning to turn color and to soften. And did I mention they are huge? Each of them covers an arbor about twenty feet long by twelve or sixteen feet wide. And one of them has grown up into a large maple tree to a quite surprising height. Right away I asked if I could pick some leaves.

"My grapevines are your grapevines," said the gracious friend. So I filled a shopping bag. I decided to pickle them for use further on in the year. You CAN lacto-ferment grape leaves, but I decided to play it safe and vinegar pickle them. Here's how I did it:

Use a sharp knife or scissors to trim the grape leaves of their stems. Set aside leaves that are too small or ripped. You can use these in making fermented pickles, or feed them to your rabbits, if you have any. We do, and they loved them. This is a rather tedious task when you have a shopping bag full of leaves. The glass of wine you see in the middle helped out with that. Stack the leaves to be pickled with their stem-ends together.

Boil up your jars in a big kettle. When jars are sterilized, remove them to a clean towel. Take small stacks of grape leaves - about six or seven - and use tongs to dip them in the boiling water. Hold for about twenty seconds. They will wilt and turn brighter green.

Drain the leaves by holding them up and shaking them slightly. Roll the stack into a cigar shaped bundle and tuck into your sterilized quart jar (you may have to tuck one end under to make them fit). Each jar will fit about five of these bundles. Fill the jars with a basic brine (1/4 cup salt and 1 cup white vinegar to a half gallon of water), leaving 1/4 inch headroom. Add several twists of lemon peel, if desired. Place on sterilized lids and process in a water bath for fifteen minutes.

These make one of the prettier preserves. If I were making them for gifts I would use the quilted pint-sized jelly jars, the ones that always end up as water glasses in our house.

The Fermentation Files (Wild Pickles)

I've tried lots of different methods of preserving food in the past four years. I've learned about canning (see last post) and dehydrating; about root cellaring and fermenting. Even the more mundane, mainstream methods - such as freezing - have involved a fair amount of learning. From picking out a chest freezer to buying a half steer, from learning how to wrap home butchered meat for the freezer to discovering how to freeze strawberries without turning them into mush, I found that even freezing isn't quite as straightforward as you might think.

I learned that there's really no reason to buy one of those silly five tray electric dehydrators - it only does what your oven or the dashboard of you car on a hot summer day can do, but slower and less efficiently. Drying is a wonderful way to preserve small, whole fruits like berries and tomatoes, but it's a major hassle to make fruit leather or something like that. I haven't tried jerky. I don't actually like jerky very much. Drying therefore has played a minor role in my food preservation arsenal thus far, but I'm glad to know how to do it right, in case I ever get a truly bumper crop of tomatoes, for example. Also, the kids love dried apples and pears to take to school in their lunches, and I have a pear tree that pops out pears like nobody's business. Dried pears - organic ones - cost somewhere in the vicinity of an arm and a leg, so if you have organic pears falling all over your backyard for free, it seems a shame not to dehydrate a few.

Due to an accident of fate (Mold Monster Update), I now have an excellent cold storage area - a closet with an uninsulated, exterior wall. That is where I keep my dry goods for long term storage (buckets of beans and rice, etc) and where, in season, I store winter squash, apples, and roots.

My relationship with wild fermentation is ongoing... I have had some successes and some failures, just like anything, I guess. My favorite type of wild fermentation is sourdough, and I have become, if I do say so myself, a hell of a breadmaker (Fun With Sourdough). Attempts at Kim Chee and sauerkraut have yielded mixed results (The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing)). And Brewing has been been an absolute, unmitigated failure

(New To Farm Life: Cider Season). I will try brewing again - I just can't let the process of making hard cider defeat me.

Next up in fermentation: kosher dills. I believe I may have mentioned once or twice that we love pickles around here. We do, we do indeed. And I always make a good quantity of pickles - bread and butter pickles, canned dills, pickled asparagus, dilly beans, hot peas, beets - all kinds of vinegar based pickles. I haven't tried crock-cured lacto-fermented kosher dills yet.

But they are, of course, the very best kind of pickle. When I was a child holding on to my mother's hand and peering into the deli case of a real Jewish deli in New York City, it was the pickles that caught my eye and what I would always plead for. They were enormous - great green zeppelins - and so wonderfully sour. A giant pickle was, for me, a better treat than a stick of candy.

Let's hope for the best - I had a terrible time finding enough pickling cukes this year, but finally I scored enough to make it worthwhile, about four pounds. At a garage sale a while ago, I found a marvelous three gallon glass lidded jar, and that's what I used for my pickle crock. A neighbor supplied the grape leaves - they are in there for their high tannin content, to keep the pickles crisp - and the onions and garlic. I'll let you know how they turn out in a week or so!

Fermented Foods: Fermented Pickle Recipe

Wild Fermentation :: Making Sour Pickles

Making Fermented Pickles and Sauerkraut

Kim Chee Situation (Food Storage Update)

The title of this post is a song title. A song that my talented then-fifteen year old daughter made up to commemorate the day a jar of kim chee exploded in the car. Full lyrics can be found here: The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing). Isn't she just amazing?!

One might think an event like that would put me off kim chee forever, but strangely, it hasn't. I guess the siren song of fermented cabbage is just too seductive to resist. Last year's kim chee - my first foray into lacto-fermented foodstuffs - was okay, but definitely a little too sweet. This year I made it with only the barest whisper of sugar, just enough to encourage things to get rolling.

Here are all the ingredients arrayed on the counter. The awesome gigantic red clay mortar and pestle is a recent score from a downtown thrift shop (Christmas 2009, Thrift Store Edition). Five dollars, and sturdy as a brick outhouse. I already have a good mortar and pestle, of course, a marble one which was a long ago gift, and I will certainly continue to use it; but this one is five times the size. The old one is good for a few cloves of garlic or crushing some whole spices, but this one will work for major jobs like making mole or... crushing the spice paste for a large batch of kim chee!

The other ingredients are:

- one large savoy cabbage, roughly chopped (got it at the last saturday Ferndale Farmer's Market of the year. Sniff!).

- one medium yellow onion, sliced to ribbons

- two bunches green onions, chopped into one inch lengths

- half a head of hot Korean garlic, also bought at the farmer's market

- branch of ginger (I'm not using all that ginger, only about two inches of it).

- hot red pepper flakes

The cabbage was put to rest for about four hours in a strong salt brine (one tablespoon salt per cup water) and then squeezed out and placed in my biggest mixing bowl.

Then I crushed the garlic, ginger, red pepper, and a touch of soy sauce into a rough paste in my new mortar and pestle. This part was fun. If you are feeling annoyed or upset about something, or just tense in the shoulders, it's very therapeutic to bash the hell out of things. But even if you are feeling fit as a fiddle and happy as a clam, it's still fun. Put on some music with a good bass line and thump away.

When you like the look of the spice paste - or your arm is tired - scoop it up in your hands and rub it into the cabbage. Mix it up gently. Make sure every bit of cabbage has a little bit of spice on it. Then pack the cabbage into a large glass or ceramic jar. Make sure there is plenty of room, you don't want it to be crammed in there tight. Put a lid on it, but loosely.

Here is the kim chee sitting on my kitchen altar to ripen. Every day, I turn it over once or twice. Every other day I loosen the lid to let gas escape and to get a whiff of the lovely bubbling stinky fermented smell of it. The kim chee will be ready to eat in four days, but you can let it keep going pretty much as long as you want. Just refrigerate it after the first three or four days.

In my house, I am the only one who likes kim chee. If that's true in your house as well, you might try to make less kim chee than I did (that's a half-gallon jar in that picture). I imagine I'll be eating kim chee all by my lonesome well into winter.

Clearly, I spoke too soon when I said I was done preserving for the year (Canning Wrap Up (Green Tomato Chutney)). Not only did I make kim chee this week, but I also used up a serious milk surplus by making and canning about two gallons of cajeta. All those little jars on the top shelf are full of cajeta, as are the two half-gallon jars on the bottom shelf. The small jars I will probably give away for christmas presents and the large jars are for us. I know a gallon of cajeta sounds like a lot, but you would NOT believe how much of this stuff my husband eats. It goes in his coffee every morning, and he like a ratio of about 1:4 cajeta to coffee.

I am more or less happy with my pantry. In addition to cajeta, there are several quarts of cucumber pickles; some pickled beans and asparagus; several quarts of pear sauce; a few pints of homemade ketchup; and, of course, the green tomato chutney. That's the homemade, local side of things. As you can see, I'm not a purist about that. Costco has also provided many of the items in my pantry, from the fifty pound sack of rice to the crate of soy milk.

I believe, at the moment, that we have a good three to six month supply of food in the house, and that's pretty good. In addition to my dry goods pantry above (50 pounds of white and brown rice, 50 pounds of pinto beans, 12 pounds of pasta, crate of canned tomatoes, ten or so pounds of mixed dried pulses, canned tuna, flour, sugar, salt, etc) there is also the chest freezer and the cold storage. Right now, the chest freezer has one whole goat in it, as well as a few pounds of beef and pork. But I have already paid for a quarter steer and a half hog, which are currently being cut and wrapped. So in a week or so, the freezer will be full to bursting. Also in the freezer are the last of the berries we picked this summer. Not many left - a few pounds of blueberries and a quart of raspberries.

The cold storage has a dozen assorted large winter squash and a big box full of apples. I need a better cold storage system - right now it's just the cupboards out in the shed. This works fine for October and November - and most years, a lot of December as well - but if there's a real hard freeze everything out there would freeze. For now, I just make sure we eat everything up by the end of November. For the long term, I would like to dig a real root cellar.

Going into the cold season, I like to take inventory and make sure we are stocked up. It's not like we are isolated here - we are on a state highway and only ten miles from town - but even so. The weather here is more severe than I was used to in Seattle. Though we are only 100 miles to the north, it turns out that makes a pretty big difference. Add to that the fact that we are on a high, exposed hill that gets the full blast of the wind off the water, and it starts to become a little nervous-making. This year is a strong La Nina year - so I read in the papers - and that means more snow and extreme winter weather than usual. I remember very well the winter of 2008, when we were snowed in completely for a full week.

Of course, preparing for a winter like 2008 requires more than having enough food on hand. There's also the question of what to do when the power goes out. That, however, is for another post. For now, I'm satisfied with my kim chee and my pantry and my half-full tank of propane.

Canning Wrap Up (Green Tomato Chutney)

Now it's October. We are still enjoying lovely, sunny weather, which is very nice, but it's definitely fall now. The leaves are changing, the garden spiders have set up their webs all over everything and are beginning to lay their egg sacs, and the harvest is basically over. There will be apples, of course, but the garden is done for.

At the swap meet last weekend, I acquired a grocery sack full of green tomatoes. Having never had so many green tomatoes before, I looked for ways to use them aside from frying them in cornmeal batter (yummy, but not really so very healthy). Everywhere I looked, I really found only one solution: Green tomato chutney.

Chutney is kind of a weird food. Who really eats a lot of chutney? I mean, growing up, there was always a bottle of Major Grey's Mango Chutney in the fridge, and I did like that stuff. I still do. But a tablespoon or so was about my annual consumption. I don't think I've bought a bottle in at least five years. I do enjoy Indian food and actually cook it fairly often, but I just don't put chutney on anything. I make raita, usually (yogurt sauce).

Plus it's a weird word, isn't it? chutney chutney chutney chutney.... Anyway.

I found a recipe and cooked up some green tomato chutney. It's pretty simple, just chopped green tomatoes, chopped onion, raisins, sugar and vinegar and a little salt. I added garlic and hot red pepper flakes, just because those two items improve everything, right? Then you simmer it for a few hours until it is almost jam-like. And you know what? I like it! It's good! It's tangy, sweet-and-sour, jammy and delicious.

But what do you DO with it? You can't just eat it with a spoon! Although to be honest I remember doing that very thing as a child with the Major Grey's. I could give it away as Christmas presents but I canned it in quart jars. I'm all out of smaller jars. Merry Christmas! Here's a lifetime supply of chutney for you! Does this mean I'm off the Christmas card list?

So if anyone out there has some ideas about how to use green tomato chutney, let me know, wouldja? I think it would taste good on a toasted cheese sandwich, and I'm thinking it might go well on a baked potato. Maybe as a small side for pork chops. Anything else?

Turn the Page

I was out of town for three days, and when I got back, it was autumn. The temperature dropped twenty degrees and a chilly, saturating rain fell for 48 hours straight. Mud, which we haven't seen in months, manifested itself and the dogs tracked it all over the house. The pears on the pear tree swelled in the sudden moisture and began to fall. When the clouds blew away and the sky reappeared, it was a cold blue that did not seem at all the same as the soft summer sky of just a week ago.

The earliest leaves (the vine maples) had just begun to turn when I left on thursday last. Now, the big leaf maples have started to look yellow and ragged. Driving to my sister's house today, I noticed that the hills south of town have - as a whole - changed color. They now have a rusty tinge and have entirely lost the fresh green of young leaves. School starts tomorrow - or it was supposed to; the teachers went out on strike.

Summer blew by so fast this year. Summer was cram-packed. We went to Mexico for 3 weeks (Remote Post, 7/4/10 (Mexican Fireworks));then Dad came to stay for 3 weeks. I took the kids to Mom's place for a long weekend (Where I've Been....) and then I went to my brother's for another long weekend. And all of a sudden, that was it. It was over. Everything is suddenly all mushrooms and slugs.

Well, I should try to remember, it's only September 6th. Around here, September is usually a very nice month. It could easily get hot again before the autumn rot sets in for good. I hope so. I am just not ready for the endless damp; for the mold and the mildew; for the dark grey days that last a mere seven hours; for the rain that never stops and the mud that could swallow a cow without leaving a trace.

I am not ready for Hecate to take over the world. I am not ready for Persephone to sink into the earth and become Queen of the Underworld. I am not ready for the Dark Mother to make the Earth deliquesce like a pumpkin rotting on the porch three weeks after Halloween. I never even made up the household altar for late summer harvest.

That's probably why I feel unready. I have neglected the sacred calendar this summer. Suddenly I feel a very strong urge to go clean the living room and decorate the altar with the last of the the zucchini (which I picked an hour ago) and the first of the pears (likewise). It is still only the middle of blackberry season - I should get out and pick enough for a couple of pies. Likewise blueberries. There is still plenty of time to go get a bunch more blueberries.

Also I haven't done hardly any canning this year - asparagus in April and pickles in July was about the extent of it. I need to find a cheap source of many many tomatoes and can up a shitload of sauce. No wonder I feel out of sorts and off kilter. I really AM unready, in the literal sense. My pantry is virtually bare, at the very season when it should be bursting with abundance. I haven't done the labor appropriate to the season. I am nervous and unhappy because some part of my brain is shouting at me "you are all going to starve!"

Okay, so I have my work cut out for me. Re-establish the sacred calendar. Clean and sanctify my altar. Get some fucking food in the pantry. Celebrate Demeter amply, lest she transform into the hag of famine. Placate. Placate.

Dad and Pickles

My Dad is visiting from Tucson. He's been helping me today (read: sitting in the kitchen and offering advice while I) make pickles and cheese. It's been a while since Dad has been up to the farm, and a lot of things have changed. Unfortunately, I can't really show Dad around much, because he is several years post-major-stroke and hemiplegic. He is more or less confined to a wheelchair, and my property isn't very wheelchair-friendly. The house is ok, the grounds, not so much.

Dad has always been one of my major inspirations for wanting to be a homesteader. When I was a child - before the divorce - we lived on a small "hobby" farm and had dairy goats and chickens, and Dad put in a fairly serious garden every year. After I bought my first house and my Dad came to live with me, he helped me plan and execute a pretty serious garden every year. He occasionally brewed beer and mead, and even today he continues to grow a decent garden (better than mine) and do some preserving every year down in that hellhole he calls home. But the main thing my Dad did which made me want to homestead is play a game with me. We called it the Self-Sufficiency Game ( The self-sufficiency game (love you, Dad)).

While I have nowhere near achieved self-sufficiency, nor do I expect I ever will, it's still a fun game, and even more fun now that I have an ACTUAL five acres to play it on instead of a theoretical five acres. In essence, the self-sufficiency game has morphed into my real-world full time job. And it's just totally peachy to have my Dad here for a few weeks, playing the game with me again, just like we used to do sitting around the kitchen table in my house on a Seattle city lot years ago.

Today, I went to the farmer's market and made a trade with my usual trade partner, Veggie/Oil Man. I traded 3 dozen eggs and a half-pound of cheese for nine ripe peaches, a bunch of onions, some chives, seven heads of garlic, and several dozen pickling cucumbers. The peaches we are eating out of hand; the onions and chives are just general groceries; some of the garlic is being saved to plant; but the cukes and the rest of the garlic have been turned into pickles.

We adore pickles around here. I pretty much can't make enough pickles. The cukes today made three quarts of garlic dills and two quarts of bread and butter pickles. Way back in April I pickled some asparagus, and later on I'll pickle beets and green beans, too. All in all, I expect to pickle some fifteen quarts. We'll eat them all by October or November.

The Alchemy of Cabbage (A Little Knowledge Can Be a Good Thing)

we bought some kim-chee in a jar

wrapped it up and threw it in the car

but before we got too far

Oh God, what's that smell?

Have we driven into hell?

I don't think this bodes too well....

We got a kim chee situation!

it's lacto-fermentation!

stinking up the nation!

cancel the vacation!

- rock song made up by my daughter Rowan. Based on real-life events, as they say.

Lyrics notwithstanding, I actually love kim chee. It's not something I thought I would ever make at home, but all the books I've been reading about food preservation talk about lacto-fermentation (think sauerkraut and kosher pickles) as an indispensable technique. There is really a lot that is very cool about fermentation. It's the only common preservation method that actually increases foods vitamin content. It's basic kitchen-alchemy. Along with brewing, wine making, sourdough leavening, and the milk-preservation arts (which encompass everything from yogurt to kefir to Parmesano-Reggiano), lacto-fermentation feels like witchery.

In the best sense of course - women's magic, true old fashioned feminine wisdom. Passed down from grandmother to granddaughter (or re-learned when the generational chain gets interrupted, as it has for most of us). Not-so-secret knowledge of how to make good food that keeps the family alive and healthy. Beyond food magic, of course there are the traditional feminine mysteries of midwifery, herbal lore, sewing and the fiber arts. Horticulture. Storytelling, history-remembering, child rearing, nursing the sick and smoothing the way for death. All essential, all capable of opening up into a lifetime of study and practice.

I'm a generalist kind of person - I'll never be a specialist of any kind. I love to dabble and explore. I adore beginnings, and find it delightfully easy and fascinating to achieve a certain basic level of competence in just about anything - but I hate persevering after it starts to get hard. I'd so much rather move on to the next thing.

This has always been interpreted to me as a character flaw. In our culture, enamored of specialists, I guess it might be. Obviously, we need specialists! Specialists of all sorts. But I think we also need generalists. We need people who have a wide knowledge base, who know a little something about almost everything. People who can make up a story AND cook a balanced meal AND deliver a goat kid AND kill a chicken AND pick out a tune on the piano AND knit a pair of socks AND make a decent half-sour pickle. I'm an utter generalist, but even I have an area of expertise, and it's in the kitchen.

I love being a kitchen witch. I love developing a store of useful, practical knowledge and elaborating it into art. I also, of course, like to eat. I like the feeling of knowing my family can depend on me to put food on the table - healthy, nutritionally balanced, delicious food - day after day. I really really like the process of learning about all the food related arts I've been learning about these last few years. I like being a competent housewife, goddammit.

In the old days, the knowledge of preservation often was quite literally the line between life and death. But even without being quite so dramatic, imagine the difference between a long, northern-European winter with plenty of wine, beer, raised bread, pickles and cheese - or with only cold roots and rusks. I imagine people could make it through to spring on roots and rusks... but would they want to?

I know this is a big extrapolation from a gallon of kim chee, but I am very certain that MY house will be of the former variety in these long northern winters, not the latter.

And I'm proud of that.

Back to Work

Beets

I haven't really taken any time off "work," of course - a homemaker with a farm and three kids during the first week of school? Take time off? Ha ha ha ha ha ha don't make me cry.

But I had slacked off the preserving a bit. Well, not if you count cheesemaking, I've been making cheese about twice a week, which is a lot. I guess I only slacked off the vegetable preserving. Wait a minute. This week I actually picked, processed and froze twenty pounds of blueberries. And we picked about the same amount of tomatoes from my tomato-for-eggs trade. I don't know what I'm talking about. I haven't stopped at all!

Blueberries in the chest freezer

Maybe I just mean it's been a while since I got out the canner. There we go.

Canning tomatoes is a big fat pain in the tuchus. And messy! After about three hours of work - not counting the picking - washing, chopping, stirring, and forcing the pulp through my food mill, I realized I was only going to get about two pints of tomato paste. That's just silly; it isn't worth it. So I added a quart of half and half and some chicken stock and we had the best tomato soup EVER. Still have lots of the orange sungolds to eat.

Today I canned beets. The ones I made last year were straight pickles, no sugar. Then I tasted some of my friend's canned beets and decided they were way better with sugar. Rowan got a lesson in canning - and also in improvising. After we had the beets all peeled and chopped and the jars sterilized, I realized we didn't have enough white vinegar to make the brine. So we went over our options: substitute another acidifier or go to pressure canning instead of water-bath. Our other available acidifiers were various other kinds of vinegars (balsamic? I don't think so. Sherry?) or lemon juice. We decided on lemon juice. I'll tell you how it turned out in four to six weeks.

Canned Madness

If a person were to page back in this blog all the way to July, he or she would find a picture that looks almost exactly like the one above. In that post I was bragging about how much canning I'd gotten done already, so early in the season. I planned to ship off delicious christmas presents to all my relatives and friends, joining that respected club of women who make their own preserves and generously hand them out. Thrifty, crafty women. The two most exciting packages that arrived at our house in the Christmas season when I was young were the ones from my grandmother, full of delicious pickles and relishes, and from my mother's friend April, full of jewel-toned homemade cordial, of which I was allowed only tiny sips. This year, I was going to be the sender of such tempting treats and the receiver of all the imagined admiration.

But I have this thing with the mail. My siblings will be nodding along at this point. It's a hereditary thing in our family to be utterly incapable of dealing with the postal system. Mom used to let the mail sit out until the mailman stopped delivering it. I should have known myself well enough to know that making the preserves was the easy part: wrapping and boxing and gathering addresses and shipping was the impossibly unlikely part.

So now I am putting up this picture of the current contents of my preserves shelf for two reasons: to prove to everybody what an industrious soul I truly was this past growing season, and to solicit help in figuring out how to get rid of all this crap before the next growing season.

Not Bad For July

The U-pick raspberries are starting to open, finally, and today I took all the kids and went picking. It was really too hot to pick berries, and there weren't a whole lot of very ripe ones yet. Not quite the quality I want to freeze, but fine for jam. Two quarts and six pints. Last saturday, there were pickling cukes at the farmer's market at 12 for a dollar. So I got five dozen and they made eight pints, half dill, half bread and butter. Add that to the dozen pints of strawberry jam and the innumerable cups of rhubarb sauce, and I am feeling pretty industrious! Oh yes, and the cajeta, of course.

But man, I am really, really glad that I don't live in the days when my family would actually depend for survival through the winter on the food I was able to preserve in the summer. Canning is hard work. And dangerous. I dipped my little finger in boiling water the other day. Boiling jam is even worse, it sticks just like napalm and keeps on burning. I am just not a lady who likes to work quite that hard.

I am working hard enough, thank you. Right now, for instance, I have two goats I gotta go milk, and I really don't want to.