Flowers and Love

I’m personally a big fan of traditional blue/purple iris, but this one is just stunning. It’s been fun to see what all the colors in the yard are. Evidently, Walla Walla had a famous Iris breeder for a lot of years, and many yards here locally bear the results.

Yup, right now everyone seems to be living in peace and harmony. We’ll see how long it lasts. No one has gotten stuck in a fence this week.

We managed to trim the feet of Elmo, the one goat who we will keep (as a gift) from my friend whom the other goats are on loan from. Elmo (recently renamed Molly) was a rescue and her feet were way overgrown. Trimming feet is definitely a two-person job, and we’ll have to do it every week for a month or so, removing a little bit more each time, until they are back to normal. She took it pretty well.

The young sheep are growing fast! Soon it will be time to ween them.

Ratatouille – summer in November

Yup, I grew everything here except for the garlic.

I was home for a visit to northern California back in the 1990′s, during the height of summer, and my step-mom was making ratatoullie, a French vegetable stew. Not one to eat many vegetables at the time, I reluctantly tried some, and it was a revelation. It was SO good. Nothing like vine ripened tomatoes and fresh basil to make all vegetables taste fantastic. I was sold, and have been making ratatouille in September, during the height of the warm weather vegetable glut, ever since.

The trick to making sublime ratatouille, rather than just good ratatouille, is really good tomatoes and cooking most of the vegetables separately, only combining them at the end (ala Julia Child). Generally, the order is Eggplant, Zucchini, Peppers, Onions, Tomatoes, or EZPOT (ala some random reality show episode on Food Network). Cooks Illustrated also has a ratatouille recipe where the eggplant and zucchini are roasted instead of sautéed. Play around and see what you like.

The best part of this recipe? It freezes beautifully. Portion it out into quart freezer bags, thaw in the winter, add a small can of cannelleni beans, diced red potatoes or small pasta of your choice, some chicken or veggie stock, and you have a healthy flavorful soup to help counteract all of the holiday eating. It’s also great as a pizza topping.

Ratatouille

• ½ lb. eggplant. Note that the smaller Italian or Japanese eggplant are less bitter and do not need to be salted and drained, as is often recommended for the large globe eggplant.
• ½ lb. zucchini or other on-hand summer squash
• 2 (about 1 cup) green and/or ripe bell peppers
• ½ lb. (about 1 ½ cups) storage onions (i.e. not sweet)
• 2 cloves garlic, or more to taste
• Olive oil
• 1 lb ripe tomatoes. If you can’t get vine ripened ones, you are better off substituting a 14 oz can of diced tomatoes rather than the tasteless ones available in winter.
• 3 tbsp minced fresh parsley (or 1 ½ tbsp dried)
• 2 tbsp chopped fresh basil (or 1 tbsp dried)
• Salt and pepper to taste

Dice eggplant, squash, peppers and tomatoes into 1/2 to 1 inch dice. Peel and seed tomatoes if that is your preference (I personally don’t bother). Coarsely chop the onion. Mince the garlic.

Skim the bottom of a dutch oven with about 1 tbsp olive oil and heat over medium-high heat. Saute the eggplant until lightly browned on all sides, 3-4 minutes. Remove from pan.

Adding more oil, saute squash until lightly browned on all sides, 3-4 minutes. Remove from pan.

Reduce heat to medium. Adding more oil, saute peppers and onions until cooked through, but not browned. Add garlic and saute briefly until fragrant, about 1 minute. Add tomatoes and cook until they have released their juices and some liquid has evaporated, about 5 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. (Start with 1/2 tsp salt and 1/4 tsp pepper. Add more to taste).

OK, this is not the best picture, taken with a flash, post pot luck. But this did get frozen, and I will be feasting on it in January.

Return eggplant and squash to pan, along with parsley and basil. (The original Julia Child recipe calls for layering the squash and eggplant with the tomato/onion/pepper mixture for a total of 5 layers. The goal is to help each vegetable retain its individual flavor. I find this too fussy. Do so if you wish. I just stir it all together). Simmer, covered, for about 10 minutes. Uncover, and continue to simmer for about 15 minutes, being careful not to scorch the bottom.

Ratatouille is great served hot or cold, with a nice slice of crusty bread. This is a great pot luck dish for summer gatherings. If you want to try this recipe roasting some or all of the vegetables, simply toss veggies/whole garlic with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roast on a foil lined sheet pan in a 450 degree oven, stirring ever 10 minutes or so, until vegetables are tender. It should take about 30 minutes depending on the size of your dice. Then combine and add your fresh herbs.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we’re miles away from summer ripened tomatoes, and could use a big dose of vegetables in our diet. I’ve been enjoying cooking for my husband for the last two weeks, and the scale is reflecting all that good food.

Deervastation

Peas. This was early on in the nightly buffet. It got much worse.

Note to self. When running down to Walla Walla to sign some important papers, and leaving in a hurry after trying to take care of the abundance of produce sitting in buckets, in the root cellar, and still on the vine, DON’T LEAVE THE GARDEN GATE OPEN when you leave. I was gone for about 36 hours. When I returned, just at dusk on September 27th, I could SEE the deer’s ears sticking up on the far side of the flower bed. Insert many expletives later. Insert yelling at deer, who then proceeded to throw itself into the net fence trying to escape, ripping out most of the staples on that side.

Chinese cabbage, which I think I planted 4 times this year, as it succumbed to various bugs, critters and weather. It was just NOT meant to be.

After doing make shift repairs in the dark (while listening to the deer, down in the trees, snorting at me in protest – seriously!), I returned in the morning to survey the damage and make further repairs. It wasn’t too bad. Mostly just the snap peas trimmed off. Phew.

My lettuce was SO beautiful this spring that I thought I'd try for a fall crop as well. Nope!

Ahhhh, but never underestimate the effect of fresh garden produce on motivation. The deer, despite my best efforts, have managed to get into the garden pretty much every night since. Beautiful broccoli that was just starting to head? Toast. Gorgeous cauliflower just ready to harvest? Now totally missing its leaves. Lettuce just getting large enough to harvest a few leaves? Seriously pruned. Snap peas just starting to flower? Now only foot high stems. Spinach that I was able to harvest about 6 bags off of earlier? Now very very small. Kale, chard, cantaloupe, cabbage…you get the idea. I reorganized floating row covers onto the spinach, carrot and lettuce, crops that are cold hardy and might recover (though they will grow slowly now that the weather has cooled) when not constantly chewed on. I gave up on the broccoli, cauliflower, kale and cabbage (boy my deer do love the cabbage family). They surprisingly left the tomatoes totally alone! I think I am FINALLY keeping them out, after repairing a tear in the fence that I would have had a hard time crawling through. My deer, evidently, also do the limbo.

This was a purple cabbage. "Was" being the operative word here.

We had our first frost on October 7th, down to 28 degrees. Warm season crops that weren’t covered (cucumbers, melons, squash) were sacrificed to the deer and the gods of fall. Honestly, it really wasn’t that hard to say goodbye to the summer squash. Enough already. I’ve made every zucchini recipe I have. Twice!

Radicchio, just starting to head. This one wasn't a big deal, as I had decided not to harvest it anyway. Very few people in Spokane know what to do with it. Deer DO know what to do with it.

So, trying to accepting defeat gracefully, I set up my last farmers market table on the 12th, with a whole lot less produce than I had anticipated, and a slightly bitter taste in my mouth. But it was a great chance to say goodbye to some wonderful customers and vendors. It’s been a great season.

Only one thing to say about this. "Bastards"!

Now, if I could just get through processing all of these peppers (and apples, and pears from a neighbor’s abandoned tree, and Italian plums, and the last of the tomatoes). The end of the garden is easier to accept when there is still so darned much work to do.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we’re miles away from making friends with “Bambi”, but are looking forward to lacto-fermented hot chili sauce this winter!

Summer in a Jar

As the temperature drops, and that unmistakable crispness fills the air, the urge to squirrel away food for the winter kicks into overdrive. Our long wet cool spring put most warm season produce 2-3 weeks behind this year, which means we’re playing roulette with the ripening tomatoes (red) vs the first frost (black).

One variety of tomato that never disappoints me is Principe Borghese, an open pollinated (not hybrid) Italian paste tomato perfect for drying. Territorial Seed claims Principe is a determinate, but I have not found that to be so (it will keep growing and putting on fruit until frost). The tomatoes are larger than a cherry but smaller than an egg, and have a distinctive pointed end. They begin to ripen pretty early, and are one of the few tomatoes I have found that still taste pretty good when picked green (in anticipation of a frost) and ripened indoors. Good out of hand or in pretty much any recipe that calls for tomatoes, these tomatoes really shine when dried. (This is also the variety mentioned in Animal Vegetable Miracle – and I am happy to announce I was growing them before I read the book.)

Quite a few years ago now, my mother-in-law bought me a Nesco American Harvest food dehydrator as a gift. I use it all the time. Mangos on sale? Dry some for snacks! Celery in the fridge ready to go off? Chop and dry for soups! Bought a bunch of parsley in February, and only used 15%  of the bunch? Dry the rest. Stored garlic starting to sprout? Slice, dry, and grind for your own garlic powder (outside, please)! These work horses are well worth the investment, and you can get a decent one for around $60.

Taking a picture with your left hand while squishing tomato seeds with your right...YOU try it.

When looking to purchase a dehydrator, the two biggest factors besides price are an adjustable thermostat (you don’t want to dry herbs at the same temperature you dry tomatoes) and a fan (I have an old one I inherited from my Father that just has a heating element, and it does not work nearly as well).

So far this season, I have dried about 2 1/2 quarts of Principe tomatoes, and have a few more trays to go (depending on how much longer the plants crank out ripe fruit before we get a frost). These dried beauties are great in soup, on homemade pizza, added to sautéed greens, or turned into sun dried tomato pesto (make it and freeze in ice-cube trays now while you still have fresh basil).

Drying tomatoes is simple.

1. Wash and remove stem. No need to peel or core.
2. Slice in half.
3. Use your thumb to squish out most of the seeds/goo. This helps remove a lot of moisture and makes drying time go much faster, but is not technically necessary. These tomatoes have a membrane that runs from stem to end, dividing the chambers in half. If you slice directly through this membrane and don’t see any seeds, pierce the membrane with a knife. Otherwise when you squish them, seeds will  shoot out with surprising velocity onto you, the wall, your glasses… you’ve been warned.
4. Put tomato halves onto the dehydrator racks cut side up. It’s OK if they touch a little bit, but don’t make a solid sheet. Air needs to circulate.
5. Dry at 135 degrees for 6-8 hours, checking every so often and rotating racks to ensure even drying. Finished tomatoes should be dry to the touch but still a little flexible, not crispy. Drying time will depend on your dehydrator, the humidity, and the size of the tomatoes you are drying.
6. Store in air tight jar. They will last at least a year.

When using on pizza etc., pour boiling water over the tomatoes to just cover and let stand for 10-15 minutes to rehydrate a bit. Summer in a jar for sure!

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we must admit, after 4 batches of now frozen roasted tomato sauce (4 lbs tomatoes each), 3 quarts of cooked down canned tomato sauce and 10 pints of diced canned tomatoes, and about 20 lbs of tomatoes still sitting in my root cellar, I may actually welcome jack frost when he comes.

This Ain’t No Eastern Maple Syrup

Here's what I needed for my set up. Taps, tubing, hammer to place taps (they don't look like they will fit, but the tree is flexible and they do) and 5/16 drill bit (which I happened to already have).

Sometime last fall, I ran across a reference to making a tree syrup (ala Maple Syrup) from the sap of Boxelder trees. I’ve always wanted to try my hand at making maple syrup. I love the idea of a readily available free sweetener, just out there in nature waiting for me to come along.  However, I figured it was a bucket list item that was going to go unkicked, as Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum), the tree from which maple syrup is made, does not grow much west of eastern Kansas.  So when I heard about boxelder syrup, I was stoked.

5/16 inch hole, 1 1/2 inches deep.

Boxelder (Acer negundo) IS a type of maple, and is common throughout the United States. Often considered a trash tree, as the wood is soft and the trees are fairly short-lived and prone to splitting, it grows in wet areas, and will reseed readily if conditions are right. Our property here has three large trees (that no doubt were planted), and a variety of smaller ones grown from seed that found the right conditions to germinate.

After doing an extensive internet search, ordering the book “Backyard Sugarin’“, and ordering taps and tubing online (commonly available in every eastern hardware store this time of year, but not so much here in the west), we were ready to give it a try. I shunned the traditional set up with metal taps (called a spile) and metal or wooden (or plastic) buckets, and went with the more modern approach.

Not a bad set up for tapping a few trees. The glass bottles are heavy enough that they tend to stay put. Probably not the best set up if you were tapping a hundred trees.

My taps are 5/16 plastic (a smaller diameter, which is supposed to be healthier for the tree). I am using food grade tubing to run from the tap to a one gallon glass jar on the ground. No worries about hanging the bucket from the tap and having it get heavy and pull out of the tree. No extra expense of buying buckets. No disposable sap bags. (Just what the world needs, more plastic bags. Ugh. No.) I already had the glass jars from my wine making experiments, and they were empty this time of year. Their small opening should help keep debris from falling into the sap. Perfect!

From the moment my trees were tapped, the sap was flowing.

General advise is to only tap trees that are 10 inches in diameter or larger, and to tap them at about chest height on the sunny side of the tree (southeast, south, southwest). Drill hole so that it angles slightly up, and if using the 5/16 taps, only drill in about 1 1/2 inches. You can move the drill in and out to remove any sawdust, and if the sap is flowing, it will quickly push out any remaining residue. Really large trees (more than 20 inches in diameter) can take more than one tap. Timing is everything. The weather should be above freezing during the day, but below freezing at night, which generally means late February through April or so, depending on where you live.

I taped a total of 6 trunks today (one tree is four large trunks), and within about 4 hours, I had about 4 gallons of sap. WOW! The sap will need to be boiled down…a lot. One gallon of sap yields about 4 oz (or 1/2 cup) of syrup. Maybe less, as boxelder sap is not as sweet as sugar maple sap. The boiling off process is generally done outside, as putting that much moisture into your house will take the wall paper off the walls. You can also just drink the sap, which I tried today. It tastes like spring water with a distinct but subtle hint of grassyness.

I’m scrambling to figure out how to store sap until I am ready to boil it, and working on designing a cheap evaporator set up using a metal hotel pan (think steam table pan – wide and shallow – lots of surface area for evaporation). I’ll post again with that design and how the resulting syrup comes out. But I wanted to get this posted, because if you are interested in trying this, NOW is the time.

This four trunk tree now looks like something out of a weird hospital experiment. Note the sap volume. This was taken a few hours after the trees had been tapped. I love it!

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2011, where we do actually have some wallpaper we would like to remove, but think we’ll boil our sap down outside anyway.

Hooray for Apple Season

A tree full of these beauties makes me feel rich!

I am living in apple paradise. How many times have I moved with boxes collected from the local grocery store, only to see “Washington Apples” on the side? Greenbluff, less than 20 minutes from my house, has a great selection of apples. We drove through one of the major Washington apple growing regions, Yakima, a few weeks ago, and saw wooden boxes of apples the size of a small cabin.  

I tend to forget how much I like apples. I eat them until about March, or until I can only find apples imported from Chile (I try not to eat food from thousands of miles away, or from other countries if I can help it). I generally move on to strawberries in about March and don’t look back from the fresh fruit glut until September. Then, the new apples start to come in, and I fall in love all over again.  

I’ve been making a habit of buying one of every type of apple I see but am not familiar with (not the gala, fuji, delicious and granny smith found at your local mega mart) and trying each one in an effort to discover a new favorite. Unfortunately, five minutes after my purchase, I can’t remember which apple is which, so it’s not doing me much good. But it IS fun.  

Our new property came with three apple trees. Two were almost bare this year (one had 5, the other 2), but the third tree was loaded. The one with five is definitely some version of red delicious, identifiable by the five “bumps” on the bottom, an apple I’ve always found quite boring to eat (give me a honeycrisp or a pink lady any day). Don’t know what I will do with them when the tree does produce. I’ve been busy making apple sauce, apple-plum sauce (I also have a LOT of plums), and apple butter from the overload of my mystery apple that breaks down quickly when cooked. Talk about locavore. My kingdom for an apple press.  It’s been on my list of wants for years, but the $500 + price tag for a good one always stops me.

What to do with the “one at a time” apple purchases? Make single serving apple crisp, of course. I have inherited an interesting collection of recipes from old boyfriends over the years, including a long simmered spaghetti sauce, supposedly authentic Buffalo New York chicken wings and “Wacky Cake” and “Chicken in Bug Juice” (i.e. cheap wine) from my husband’s Mom. This recipe comes from an ex-boyfriend’s Wisconsin Grandmother, and I have been using it for 20 years. A silver lining if there ever was one.  

Apple Crisp  

• 4 cups tart apple slices (I just use whatever I want to try out – it all comes out good, even if they aren’t the best baking apple, and I do not peel my apples. Mixing several varieties makes for a better flavor)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 3/4 cup flour (I use whole wheat to boost the nutrition and make me feel less guilty about the butter)
• 1 1/4 cup rolled oats
• 1/2 cup (one stick) cold butter (if unsalted, add a pinch of salt to the recipe)
• 1 tsp cinnamon
• 1 tsp nutmeg

Preheat oven to 375 and grease a 7 x 11  or large round casserole pan.  

Mix all ingredients but oats in a food processor until mix looks like wet sand. Add oats and pulse until mixed but not pulverized. Layer apples in dish and top with crisp mixture. Bake for about 30 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm with vanilla ice cream for the ultimate in indulgence.  

I make the topping ahead of time and freeze it in a zip lock bag. I find that the original ratio of apples to crisp is a little heavy on the crisp side for my taste (and waist line). When making a single serving, I slice one apple into a small greased oven proof baking dish, top with a handful of crisp topping, and bake in the toaster oven for about 20 minutes.  

Feel free to play with ingredients. Substitute almonds, walnuts or pecans for some or all of the oats. Trade out allspice for nutmeg, or try pumpkin pie spice (generally a mix of cinnamon, ginger and clove) instead. You can’t go wrong. 

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where it must be officially fall, because the apples are ripe and the house smells like cinnamon.

Huckleberries For Michael

Like a blueberry...sort of.

You’ve heard of the popular children’s book “Blueberries for Sal”? Well, this is about “Huckleberries for Michael”. My husband grew up in and around Missoula Montana, an area of the country known for huckleberries. These small blue fruits, related to blueberries, have defied cultivation, and have a huge following in areas of the country where you can find them. They currently go for about $40 per gallon at area farmers markets, primarily because it can take two people way more than an hour to pick a gallon of huckleberries. These sweet fruits make you work for it, no question. 

When Michael was growing up, he and his Mom used to go out huckleberry picking, freezing the bounty for use in huckleberry pancakes and muffins throughout the winter. One of our earliest wild food adventures was huckleberry picking in Montana before we were married. Now that we’ve moved back into huckleberry country, trying to locate a place to go picking was a clear priority. Except that good huckleberry patches are a closely guarded secret, kind of like where to find morel mushrooms. 

That said, while cleaning out an old shed on our property, we found a hand written sign saying “Fresh Huckleberries For Sale” and an assortment of small wooden berry boxes. We knew that there must be some bushes nearby. And there are, though we have several additional potential sites to check out. 

These caterpilllars, unidentified, were everywhere on the bushes. They didn't seem to be doing much damage.

As you may have guessed, I am the “foodie” in the family, though Michael readily admits that I’ve “ruined” him from his bachelor diet of frozen pizza, ramen, and canned soup. He’s a good sport, always game to go along, but it is me who plans trips around where to eat and insists that we go to pick peaches NOW because there may not be any by next weekend. So I was a bit surprised with Michael’s enthusiasm for going huckleberry picking. He was planning his weekends around when the fruit might be ripe. 

Not a huge haul, but enough for a taste of the season.

And finally, we did indeed go huckleberry picking. The crop this year, at least where we were, was pretty sparse. We were able to pick almost a quart. Enough for some pancakes and muffins. I wasn’t even going to write about it, as the pickings, so to speak, were so slim. That was before I caught my husband standing in the kitchen with his nose in the jar of the last of the fruit. He was inhaling deeply and had this dreamy look and a contented smile on his face. The smell, he said, reminded him of some of the best times of his childhood. He simply loves huckleberries. 

Huckleberry bushes as far as the eye can see, and one happy husband.

And THAT is what I love about food. It’s not just about sustaining our bodies. It’s about sustaining our spirits, about getting outside on an end-of-summer day with the dogs, about remembering times when we felt safe and joyous as only a child can be in anticipation of huckleberry pancakes. 

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where our fingers are stained purple with huckleberry juice and we’re not tellin where we found them.

Beanie Weanies

This old nest box, measuring about 12 x 18 inches, was the perfect bean planter

I love it when a plan comes together! Arriving in the Spokane area in early June, there really wasn’t much I could do garden wise (which is pretty much a crisis for me). But I wanted to had to plant a few things. What, besides tomatoes (which is everyone’s answer), did I really love from my garden? And what did I really want to be organically grown? Green beans! (Green beans used to be on the Environmental Working Group’s list of the Dirty Dozen produce items, in terms of pesticide contamination - now they are #16.) 

So I took an old chicken nest box (built-in fertilizer) from the old chicken coop (now converted to a garden shed), threw in some sifted dirt and some broken down leaf litter, added four branches at the corners, tied together at the top, and planted some pole beans. I had no idea if there would be time in the season for them to mature. But I already had the seeds, so what did I have to lose? 

The first of the harvest

And now, I have beans. Not enough to freeze like I usually do, but enough to have a few meals. I attribute this largely to the fact that every time I went out to see the plants, I said “hello beanie weanies”. They like to be talked to, don’t you know. 

Below is my favorite way to eat green beans, modified from a recipe for “skillet green beans” by Cooks Illustrated. They taste best (I can’t explain why, but it really is true) if eaten with your fingers. 

Skillet Green Beans 

• a bit of butter and a swirl of olive oil to equal about a tablespoon
• pinch salt
• 2 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 tsp all-purpose flour
• pinch red pepper flakes
• 1/2 tsp dried thyme leaves (or 1 tsp fresh)
• 3/4 lb green beans
• 1/2 cup chicken broth
• squeeze lemon juice

Heat butter and oil in skillet over medium heat. Add garlic and salt and brown garlic slightly (30 seconds to 1 minute). Add flour, red pepper flakes and thyme. Then add green beans and toss to coat. Add chicken broth, toss again, cover, and cook until beans are tender crisp, about 4 minutes. 

Uncover, stir and cook an additional 4 minutes or until most of the liquid has evaporated and you have a nice sauce coating the beans. Taste for doneness. If they need more time, add a bit of water to the pan and continue to cook until beans are at the desired doneness. Off heat, squeeze on a shot of lemon, salt and pepper to taste, and parmesan cheese, silvered almonds or bread crumbs if desired. Eat with your fingers if at all possible.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from a big garden this year, but enjoying the bounty one bean at a time.

I Can Put Up With a Few Pricks!

Beautiful bountiful blackberries!

I have occasion to travel to Walla Walla Washington, and while there a few weeks ago, I could not help notice the HUGE banks of wild blackberry bushes along the creek at Rooks Park. It was going to be a banner year for blackberries.

I returned last week and on a still cool Tuesday morning at 7:30, armed with long sleeves,  long thick pants and a five gallon bucket, I got to work. I was serenaded by bull frogs, startled by a great blue heron lifting off, and generally given a variety of weird looks by the local walkers, joggers and bikers. The berries were JUST getting ripe. Ungloved fingers were necessary in order to judge ripeness (unripe berries, even when black, don’t release easily; overripe berries squish in your fingers).   

Bucket O' Berries. Yum!

 While picking, I also spent some quality time getting branches untangled from my hair, pulling the occasional thorn from a finger and wishing I had remembered to change into closed toed shoes (insert colorful language here). Blackberries are thorny mothers. I picked for three hours (it’s hard to stop when there are SO MANY), working my way up, down, and into the brambles. And all the while I kept thinking, “Where the hell IS everyone? These are NOT cheap at the store. This is beautiful tasty free food.” Perhaps I didn’t get the memo that it is not cool to pick blackberries, as they are considered a weed in the area. Oh well. More for me!

Later that day, home with my bounty, I decided to make Blackberry-Apricot jam. I like combining seasonal fruits into jam, and blackberries and apricots seemed like a good combination. To read some canning books, the world will end and everyone will die of botulism if you should ever stray from a tested, printed, blessed by the National Center for Home Food Preservation or your local extension office recipe. And honestly, this is generally good advice. People don’t follow directions (or even read them). I listened to a talk show/call in with canning questions the other day and a woman could not figure out why her water bath canned green beans would not stay sealed after a week or two. (You should never water bath can non acidic foods – fruit is naturally acidic. Her cans would not stay sealed because they were releasing gas and pushing the tops off as they rotted in the jar. Yikes!)  

Got to love this color combo

That said, there is no reason why you can’t mix and match jam ingredients, other than running the risk of the mixture not jelling properly. I get around this issue by using a low/no sugar pectin. Using the packet insert that came with the pectin, I looked up their recipes for Apricot jam and Blackberry jam. Apricot = 6 cups chopped fruit, four and a half cups sugar, 2 tbls lemon juice. Blackberry = 5 cups of crushed fruit, 4 cups sugar.  Therefore Apricot-Blackberry jam equals 3 cups Apricots, 2 1/2 cups Blackberries, 1 tbls lemon juice, 4 1/4 cups sugar. Simple enough.   

Baxter, my BIG tabby, decided he really needed some attention. I'm hel-ping

I also canned 3 pints of berries in their own juice with a little sugar (for yogurt topping on some winter’s day) and froze almost a gallon of the berries with nothing added (freeze on a cookie sheet individually before putting into a zip top bag to avoid one giant frozen wad).

I still had apricots, so also made a batch of brandied apricot jam with vanilla. This one I did the old fashioned way, with no added pectin (thinking that the more “cooked” flavor would go well with the brandy and vanilla). Traditional jam is made by cooking the jam until it reaches the magic jelling point (which can take a while and is likely directly proportional to how much jam has splattered onto your stove, floor, and counters. I had to mop the floor when I was done).

Baxter decided I was spending WAY too much time in the kitchen and it was time to pay attention to him instead. When I didn’t stop what I was doing, he jumped up onto the counter and placed himself on the Ball Blue Book page explaining how to test for the jelling point. Guess he showed me (and made me realize perhaps why a commercial kitchen is required to be in a separate building from the home dwelling. No one wants cat hair in their jam)!

It’s probably good I don’t live in Walla Walla. If I did I’d be out there now, still picking.

Miles Away Farm Blog © 2010, where we’re miles away from a store bought blackberry, and our fingers are stained purple.

Can she bake a cherry pie…?

Pie (and a few sweet) cherries from Green Bluff U-Pick

Ah cherry pie, how I’ve dreamed of you. And I’ll have to keep dreaming, because there simply were not enough cherries to make pie AND jam, and the jam won.

First, some back story. When I moved to southwest Colorado, I had dreams of an orchard. I diligently researched what varieties of fruit trees would grow in zone 4, consulted with the local extension office on varieties, and ordered bare root trees, including both sweet and sour (also known as pie) cherries – along with many other species. And over the course of nine years, I proceeded to kill four, count them, four sour cherry trees. This is not to say that I planted four sour cherry trees at once and they all died, it is to say that I kept replacing the dead sour cherry tree with a live one four different times. I never understood if it was soil, location, water, gophers, spring frost or what, but it was just not meant to be.

So I was very excited to move within a quick drive of Green Bluff, the Spokane area’s U-Pick mecca, and was eagerly anticipating cherry season. The season has been late this year due to weather. The annual Cherry Pickers’ Trot was on July 15th, and I had seen the trees loaded with cherries the previous week when up for strawberry picking, so I figured showing up on July 21st wasn’t unreasonable. Wrong I was. It was as if a hoard of locusts had descended. Spokanistanians love their U-Pick. The season was late and EVERYONE had been waiting and waiting. Once cherry season was declared, it was everyone for themselves. I spoke with a local grower, and he said normally the cherries last a couple of weeks. Not this year. Thankfully, there were a few pie cherries left, high up in the trees. I managed to pick about four pounds.

This is when I learned my second important lesson. Having never actually picked cherries, since I was busy killing trees instead, I had no idea that they are actually quite a bit of work to pick. Especially the sour cherries. If you pull on the cherries themselves, they come off, leaving the stem and pit (still attached to the stem) behind. (This DOES make prepping them later a breeze.) You have to get ahold of the stem, and pull…hard. The stems are rather attached to the tree. This is not a quick and easy process, while sweating in the heat at 3:30 pm, perched atop a ladder. The local neighbor’s black lab did come out to check on me though, and once he could see I was crazy but OK he quite logically retreated back to a spot of shade.

Six cups of jam and a handfull of dried cherries later...

So, 4 lbs of pie cherries and a pound of mixed Bing and Rainier cherries later, I was ready to head home with my hard one prize.

I also had this interesting observation about myself. While talking to the grower, I asked him if he had a hard time with birds eating the fruit, and we discussed starlings and robins and yellow jacket wasps (which will pierce the fruit and were a big problem for him last year). At no time did I ask him, “so, spraying any nasty pesticides I would want to know about”? Somehow, it felt a little like saying “so, nice pants you got there…your underwear clean”? I realize it is my right to know, and I should have asked, and really, in this day and age, maybe I should even expect him to advertise his horticultural practices without my having to ask. But somehow, it just felt kind of rude. Next time, I’ll be more brave (or grab a pair, as a friend of mine would say!)

Not sure how to make Cherry jam? I just follow the insert on the Sure Jel package (I use low sugar pectin because I like to have more fruit than sugar in my jams and I often have “issues” when making jam the “old fashioned” way). For a great post on the process of making sour cherry jam, check out this Food In Jars blog post.