Walk Without Flinching

So. How are you then? Me, I've been on an extended pout and am quite ready to see the back of summer, if not 2010 in its entirety. You know those times in your life when people you otherwise sort of enjoy say things like "God doesn't give you what you can't handle" or "Even the darkest clouds have a silver lining" and you kind of want to punch them except you don't because your sainted charm school instructor might well rise from the dead and haunt you, thereby resulting in even less sleep then you've recently enjoyed? You know those times? That.

The less said the better.

In between pouting and the occasional dainty tear poised ever-so-fetchingly at the corner of my right eye, I've spent a good amount of time this summer trying to feed my family in ways that won't kill them. Oh, yes, that's right. You haven't heard. I say "not kill them" instead of "not kill him" because we now have in hand the Girl's allergy assessment and blah blah blah, it turns out she's nearly as unfeedable as her father albeit in a slightly different way.

Because nothing thrills me as much as solving a problem in a way that involves as many trips to the library as possible, my recent list of check-outs reads like someone with a very troubled constitution, indeed. With allergy-free and celiac-aware publications hitting the shelves at what seems to me to be a rapid pace - perhaps it is less so to people with more experience in these matters than I - there is plenty from which to choose for guidance. One would think that there would be no trick at all to ridding oneself of troubling foodstuffs. At home, anyway. Let's not talk about restaurants for a spell, as we're not really speaking at the moment.

Vegan and vegetarian cookbooks are near useless for their reliance on wheat and soy products. Gluten-free resources often feature bean flours and nightshades heavily, both of which are very strictly limited for us. I found one book I adored, only to discover that it called in nearly every recipe for an ingredient that is priced upwards of $27 a pound. Then there are the recipes that sound wonderful but turn out to take not unlike library paste (which, now that I think on it, probably has a wheat binder and therefore cannot be eaten by at least two people with whom I live).

Interestingly, among the cookbooks most useful in retooling my kitchen and dining table weren't intended specifically for special diets at all. Jamie's Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals, in particular, was helpful for reminding me that simple is better and there are few - if any - of my family's problem ingredients in fresh food, humbly prepared. Likewise, Everyday Food: Fresh Flavor Fast: 250 Easy, Delicious Recipes for Any Time of Day, helped me retain the notion that a decent, healthy meal prepared and served sometime this century (even when I've had a bad day at work and tonight is riding night and...) is not necessarily an impossible mission. No need for special or shockingly expensive ingredients, no need for deprivation, and no need for substitutions when a bit of redirection is possible and even desirable.

Hey, is that a silver lining I see?



P.S. If you're looking for a bit of inspiration for simple, seasonal meals, I recommend these for clear and concise directions and a refreshing lack of jargony references to specialty products:

Guests Merry With Your Cheer

My sister and her family are coming to visit this weekend. Among the routine logistical back-and-forths, the plans have involved a long Facebook thread about what we'll eat while they're here and where we'll buy it and how it will be prepared and whether or not I'll bother pleasing anyone but the two of us.

This kind of selfishness will surprise no one who knows me even a little bit well. It also has some precedent when applied to my sister and myself. We're the duo that, once upon a time, flew clear across the country to visit with our father's sisters and spent the entire long weekend with them eating pancakes at this very specific place and having dessert at that very specific place and so on (that we were young at the time and somewhat in their care comforts me in that it means we come by our obsessions honestly). Among other memories, I carry with me the yogurt and berries we ate at some posh hotel (the only breakfast we could afford), the peach daiquiris our grandmother served (it was the last time I saw her before her death less than two months later), the picnic lunch our aunt packed for the plane ride back to Philadelphia (shrimp & cream cheese spread on mini bagels which lasted until we just barely cleared the runway in San Francisco).

Some years after that trip we sat together in our parents' kitchen with the man that she would soon marry. Why we were there and our parents were not I don't recall, but I do remember what we ate. Brie and roasted garlic (hey, it was the 90s), a pesto made with half spinach and half basil (it shrunk in the micro), smoked salmon. That my future brother-in-law loves my sister was abundantly evident because knowing him better now I can say that there's no way on earth we'd get away with putting that array of foodstuffs on the table these days.

She'd like to do a bit of canning while they're visiting so I'm hoping to cue up some brandied blueberries or blackberries. That's an easy choice because we won't need to monitor a jelling point or whatever and can thus accommodate the distractions our collected five children will no doubt visit upon us. We'll also visit the local farm market, the merits of which she's listened to me extol for years now. I'll buy a couple chickens to grill and maybe some peaches to make into soup. Friday night I'll grill some cheese (yes! it's true - man, I love this stuff) and wrap bacon around jalapeños from the plants out by the old stone wall. We'll open the olives that are already marinating and the red onions I mixed up earlier this evening. Collectively, they'll be the perfect foils for a hot, humid Philadelphia summer evening.

When my sister comes to town.

There's a Lesson Here Somewhere

If one is of a mind to do a bit of canning and looks around online for help and resources, it does not take long before one realizes the broad spectrum of humanity that takes a like-minded interest. You’ve got your homemaking traditionalists, your survivalists, your back-to-the-landers, some latter-day hippies and crunchies, gardeners experiencing scope creep, foodies (who overlap, but do not totally align, with slow foodies), locavores (ditto), organic-interested activists, and so on. Oh, and hobbyists. I think that last one is mine, although I have much in common with most – if not all – of the others and it helps to understand that there are no hard lines in between and that many of us move in and out of various canning circles as we go about our business.

Anyway, my point is that many of us come to the canning thing with something of an agenda beyond getting through the winter. And, like opinions on canning safety, there are divergent viewpoints on the value of other methods of “putting food by”. Some folks include drying in their repertoire (I dabble – dried cherries are an awfully nice thing to have around but can’t for the life of me understand the appeal of, say, ostrich jerky) and many canners also keep a freezer. Some folks love their freezer (or dehydrator) and cannot imagine why on earth someone like me would stand in summer’s heat over vats of boiling water. For me, striking the right balance between frozen, canned and dried items is a particular pleasure, akin to solving an only-slightly complex puzzle the rewards for having done so give on.

One of the many displays of canned goods on offer at the Monticello gift shop. Yes, I take pictures of canned goods displays. I can't be the only one. Oh, I am?

I keep a separate freezer that when spring rolls around is nigh on empty but begins to fill again as the growing season marches on. Except when we’re away on vacation and a massive summer storm runs through town, downing trees and power lines and we don’t have electricity for four days and my sister-in-law (who is lovely and wonderful in every way) does her level best to save everything but in the end the entire business is a loss. You ken that I’m not speaking hypothetically about this, yes? We returned home, with many frantic phone calls and texts in between, to find it all gone – the meats and berries and grains and soups and…all of it. So we’re starting from scratch (ha!) just as summer begins to – pardon me for this one – heat up, harvest-wise.

Canning I’ll still do as I have a standing order for dilly beans and I have a few wants of my own, but I think this is a great opportunity to re-examine the freezer and its prospective contents. More beef is definitely out – we likely wouldn’t have finished what we still had for quite some time anyway what with the allergies and all. More chicken? Fish? We’ve got a bead on a source for responsible salmon (as opposed to the kind that drinks all your whiskey and then steals your car keys?) so that might be doable.

The path remains to be discovered. There are a lot of open questions to address regarding our changing palates, energy use, how and what we want to eat and what’s available to us from which to choose. While we work through the issues, I’m more grateful than ever that we’ve kept our toolbox, so to speak, well-populated. In my work, I deal in a concept called “business continuity,” an idea that turns the negative connotations of redundancy and multiple back-ups on their heads and recasts them as necessary components of the organizational ecology. If I’ve learned nothing else this week, I realize that I’ve brought the concept home in a way that I hadn’t quite realized. This summer, more glass jars and freezer bags. I've got a system to back up!

By Any Other Name

While a great many ugly realities may be laid squarely at the feet of economic globalization there is one positive for which I am of late unrelentingly grateful. My workplace, populated as it is by an extraordinary collection of émigrés to the U.S., has provided me a number of escape routes for dealing with Brainiac’s allergy situation and his attendant sudden inability to eat darn near anything. When my colleagues and I are not breaking into spontaneous choruses of We Are the World after staff meetings, we’re sharing lunch and recipes. It’s not at all unusual these days for a man born in China to show up in the cafeteria with homemade pierogie or, say, for me to bring extras of my latest batch of pho to pass around. Of course, in the way of multiculti knowledge share, we each add our own special touch to whatever dish is on offer. I regularly scandalize my Indian-born colleagues with my insistence on preparing chana masala in a slow cooker and those pierogie are more often accompanied by a bit of lime pickle rather than fried onions and sour cream.


I’m not making as much pho these days what with the whole beef-free thing going on and all. There have been frustratingly large numbers of other dishes that are also no longer on the family menu and I confess that it’s been getting me a bit down. (Someday I will tell you about the tears – copious – that resulted from the salad I now call the Chickpeas of Death.) In sharing my misery, loving company as it does, with co-workers the other day I realized that I already had access to all the knowledge I needed for dealing with the challenge of feeding my husband in this, our new normal. Knowing that most cultures do not eat the volumes of beef, pork and wheat to which we’d become accustomed, I merely had to make the leap from the abstract to the personal. So I did what anyone in that situation would do…I dug my spoon into a friend’s wheat-free, soy-free, and meat-free lunch, declared it delicious, and demanded the recipe.

Which is how I came to be buying a large sack of sabudana - known to me as tapioca – at my favorite Indian grocery. The dish shared with me at lunch that day turned out to be 100% allergen-free (at least for Braniac – given the presence of peanuts your mileage will seriously vary on this point and may actually come to a screeching halt) and amazingly delicious for someone whose only exposure to tapioca was via puddings from a long-ago childhood. As with the aforementioned peirogie and chana masala, I expected that I would not follow the directions precisely but would likely filter them through my own culinary baggage/heritage. Even executed in my own Western-style kitchen, I expected deliciousness and just the thing for feeding to a man who is tiring of borders, culinarily-speaking.


This is not my sabudana*. This is what my sabudana was supposed to resemble - little individual grains of chewy, nutty, spicy goodness. What actually appeared in my pan to was translucent, gelatinous, quivery, alien, and not generally good looking. We all agreed the taste was excellent but...no one could bring themselves to eat all that much of it. I texted news of the failure to the friend who gave me the recipe in the first place and she diagnosed too much water, too much oil and too-coarsely ground peanuts. So, put us down as work to be done.

In the meantime, I'll be in the conference room, working on my very best Cyndi Lauper impression.

* (This is not my picture and I don't know from where it came originally. If it's yours, let me know and I'll take it down or give credit, whichever you prefer.)

The Way to His Heart

Over the years of my parenting I’ve been asked from time to time how it came to pass that my children will sit at a dinner table and discuss their feelings on the kale vs. chard debate or with what trinket did I bribe the Boy to loudly, and in ear shot of his football team, remind me to buy extra beets at the farm market. I’m always pleased and proud to be asked because it was always one of my goals to raise my little humans into big humans who have broad palates, the ability to conduct at least rudimentary cooking operations, and an appreciation for what has cringingly become known as “real food”. I like that, more or less, this is exactly what they’re becoming. Sure, there’s a bit of strangeness going on in what we have come to refer to as The Cheese Rules. And the Girl’s assertion that she is a “half part [sic] vegetarian” who likes cheeseburgers, bacon, shrimp, and pork lo mein but that's it is, I admit, I bit odd. She’s only six and we forgive her a few eccentricities.

I cling to success in this area largely because many of my other parenting goals (see also: screen time, cheerful tidiness, and WebKinz purchases) have gone unrealized. Even as I pat myself on the back, though, I know the truth is that I have been lucky. My family is food-secure, I’ve always had a (more or less) well-appointed kitchen at hand, my children were born and remained allergy-free, and we adhere to no religion-based dietary mandates. It’s not that hard with such advantages in place to raise kids who appreciate a broad menu. You might say it’s been a piece of organic, whole-wheat, fair trade, ever-so-slow, artisanal, shade-grown cake.


For those who are at this very moment reaching for kebab skewers and their little Marsha voodoo dolls, try to contain your glee when I share that the glorious run of household food simplicity has come to a screeching halt. A wheat-free, dairy-free, beef-free, soy-free, legume-free, pork- and tomato-free halt more specifically. And not because of the kids. It’s my all grown-up and heretofore presumed to be food allergy deficient husband who has thrown a wrench into the kitchen works.

Although the verdict is that these allergies are "probably" not fatal, it's not a risk I am willing to take. Provisioning and cooking for my loved ones is among my primary pleasures and I'd really, you know, rather not kill them. I’m learning new techniques, new ingredients (Teff? those Ethiopians are on to something!), and new recipes while he adapts to a future that will be somewhat lower than expected in burgers, Scotch, and salsa. A number of my easy weeknight standby dinners – chana masala or stir-fry, for example - are, quite literally, off the table. There will not be as many canned tomato products this year, but darn skippy we're upping the applesauce. Meanwhile I'm taking another looksee through Fancy Pantry for as yet untried sauces and condiments to liven up our revised roster of available foodstuffs.

Things just got a bit more interesting. If you need me, I'll be in the kitchen working out a decent chocolate chip cookie recipe.

Thy Kindness Freezes

Not long ago I mentioned to a pal that I like to include cleaning out my freezer as one of my spring household re-boot chores. She seemed startled by the admission, as well she might since I am not known around town for my housekeeping prowess. The words “casual” or “breezy” could be applied in this regard and I have not the slightest grounds to argue. Anyway, apparently freezer sorting wasn’t on her spring tidying list (perhaps because her freezer never gets out of order in the first place) but she was a trooper in listening to my recitation of the reasons why I do what I do: the inevitable forgotten package of snow peas, now more grayish than green, the three utterly shriveled and now unusable bananas which had originally been intended for pancakes, a bag of last springs asparagus trimming that I was 100% sure would end up as soup. Well. They’re all gone now and me and my freezer feel lighter than air and ready to take on the next year’s gleanings.

The only thing I couldn’t reconcile, I told her, was a lone bag of cranberries left over from the fall. One bag really isn’t enough to play with in any kind of fun way but, as far as I knew, the cranberries would keep a while longer. Keep or toss, I wanted to know. While my meager tendencies toward thrift and orderliness battled, she calmly walked to her own freezer, took out a package of cranberries and held it up as an offering. “Want them?” she asked. “I won’t use them and will just keep them until they need to be thrown away.” Score! (Aside: this is why you should always share the minutiae of your life with friends and internet. You never know when someone will give you a bag of cranberries in response.)


Two bags of cranberries is enough to make a smallish amount of very delicious chutney, which can be canned or refrozen in a labeled and dated container so you know what it is when the memory of having made it inevitably fades (which it will, even for you young and chippy types). Even more fun, a perfectly lovely chutney can be made with the little bits of whatever else you encounter during freezer cleaning. A cup of raisins? Check. A few tablespoons of candied ginger? Oh, my, yes, yes, yes double check. Some chopped jalapeno? I didn’t, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t.


And that’s one reason I adore making chutneys. There are no real requirements, no chemical reaction to prompt and pray for, virtually no rules outside of minding your sugar and acidity in the event you plan water bath processing. My recipe originally came from my dear college friend Kate, with whom I now speak only twice a decade or so but for whom I would gladly and with no questions asked traverse the world if she called out of the blue and requested it of me, and she in turn learned it from someone named Sabra. That’s what it says at the top of the dot-matrix printed page (hello, old Mac SE and your adorable double-floppy arrangement!), “Sabra’s Cranberry Chutney”. Sabra’s version tends toward the more tangy and sweet, while over the years I’ve cut the vinegar and ancillary fruit but upped the spice and citrus. That’s the way of chutney, friends, and I recommend it heartily.


This time I used those two bags of berries, the juice of the last orange (no more oranges until winter comes again – this last one wasn’t looking to hot but was just fine for juice), some raisins, chopped candied ginger, two cups or so of sugar, and about a half cup of leftover rioja from the night before for an added peppery kick. Cranberries cook down easily and thicken well. Too well in this case, so I added another half cup of o.j. on the back end and called it good. If I wanted to be more authentic I’d have added some vinegar or something pickled, but I’m not totally wedded to authenticity here and I like the final product so that’s that.


Now, as I said, this didn’t make a lot – three cups, maybe. It can be canned and processed in a hot water bath, if you’d like and, if I went that route, I’d have done it in quarter pints and processed just in a largish saucepan - no need to fire up the ginormous canning kettle for such a wee bit of processing. I’d say fifteen minutes after return to full boil ought to do it and there you go. For my part, I placed two well-marked freezer containers back into my newly cleaned and tidy freezer to await use.


And what use might that be?

No Noble Thing Can Be Done Without Taking Risks*

Show me someone who blogs about having done a bit of canning and I’ll show you someone who’s been anonymously scolded for real or imagined safety infractions. Home canners do, or should, pay attention to the latest guidelines, of course and I, myself, have reminded folks from time to time that the old ways are just that - old, as in former - for a reason. The problem is that defining “guidelines” as the word pertains to canning is nearly as futile as defining “risk”. Add to the mix variances in resources, facilities, and skill and you’ve got the makings for a world of experts, few of whom are shy about proclaiming the rightness of their own thoughts on the subject. Here are mine:

Risk is a tricky thing. Home canning has an inherent degree of risk (although we’ll do well to remember that likewise does consumption of commercially-produced foods) which has been mitigated over time with new research on food borne pathogens and corresponding technological improvements. That’s the upside. The downside is that, with every advance in safety knowledge, a whole bunch of people feel that the heretofore-regarded-as-safe activity in which they’ve engaged for years has been unjustly maligned. I confess that I feel this way about water bath canning plain tomatoes (no longer recommended, although I still do it with older varieties) and I’ve had more than one e-mail from folks who share their opinion that old mayo jars were good enough for grandma so they’re good enough now and that however many untold dollars are saved practicing this economy. Then there’s great and mighty Martha Stewart herself, who advocated for sealing jam with paraffin (admittedly for her own use only) not all that long ago, a practice now discredited.

Where does this leave us? Ultimately, I do not think that canning risk is different from any other. I do things all the live long day that are pretty darn dangerous – driving, sitting at my desk, grilling the family dinner – but the fear I might bring to these activities is tempered into mere caution with the application of knowledge and experience.

And there’s my bottom line: there’s nothing to do for risk but learning more and canning more. For those that would assume that someone is being foolhardy for one of those previously mentioned real or imagined infractions, I recommend further the understanding that no two people are going to be on the same place with regards to risk. For every person I’d love to convince to give up the mayo jars, there are two who would rather I not water bath my tomatoes. The mayo jar people have the weight of experience on their side since they’ve been at it for years and I call upon knowledge. I know the guideline and I know why it was issued, so I can react accordingly in my intent to disregard. It’s all about knowing where you are, being confident in what you know and getting on with it.

That’s the making. On the eating side, my feeling is that there’s less wiggle room. With luck, following good canning procedures will result in only good food on the shelf. That’s not always the case, though, and knowing what to look for when the time comes to open a jar is key. The jar shouldn’t be more than a few years old, for starters. Goodness knows that I find some ancient thing tucked in the waaaaay back of the cupboard more often than I’d like to admit and I’m not as good with labeling as I ought to be, so, you know, see also: cobbler’s children and shoes. Don’t eat anything that you cannot state when it was made and/or how long you’ve had it. Like the jar of mango jam I just found – I haven’t made mango jam in years and years.

Likewise, don’t eat anything for which the lid is weeping or oozing, or if there’s any strange looking unidentified stuff around the seal. Does the food look and smell as you expect? There will be some natural degradation of color, but generally the food in the jar should present as if it were put there yesterday – not a foolproof test since many nasties are odor- and colorless, but one to which attention should be paid regardless. Pass by anything that doesn’t appear to have been canned according to guidelines (er, see above for more on that point). See the jar up there? The apples were sealed without adequate liquid and, now that I think about it, I don’t know where these came from or how/when I got them. They’re outta here.

This pre-eating checklist seems cumbersome and scary, but it’s not. Experience and knowledge gets it down to as natural as when opening any other product. With the experience and knowledge comes the confidence to make and stand by your own canning decisions. Since I started canning in the first place to exert some control over my food supply that is entirely the point.

* Michel de Montaigne, French Philosopher (1533-1592). Monsieur de Montaigne also said, "He who fears will suffer, he already suffers from his fear" which also applies, don't you think?

Thank Goodness I Canned: Pickled Hot Peppers

We use a lot of pickled jalapenos here. They’re good on pizza, nachos (one of my quick dinner standbys and one that can be made in a fairly healthy manner, by the way) burgers and sandwiches of all kinds and for adding a bit of a jolt to grilled meats and kebabs. The canning brine (I use a very standard 2 parts vinegar, 2 parts water, 1/2 part kosher salt) can likewise be used in marinades, drinks (yes! Really!), as a stir-in for plain rice or potatoes, or to punch up the flavor in all kinds of otherwise insipid dishes.

A few evenings past I arrived home feeling snacky and cocktailish and in absolutely no rush to get to the usual weeknight dinner routine. Perhaps it was the planned meal of leftovers that proved less than inspiring or maybe seeing the sun for the first time in at least a week was the cause, I don’t know. Either way, I wanted to capture a bit of languorous leisure before jumping into the post-workday fray. Trouble is, we’re down to not all that much on the shelves at the moment (which is why I planned on serving those uninspiring leftovers in the first place). Just as I was closing the refrigerator door and about to issue a dejected sigh, I spied what I’m fairly sure is the last jar of pickled jalapenos. There were possibilities in that there jar.


A bit more scrounging brought up some chevre, a lonely scallion and a box of Triscuits which Brainiac must have bought because I know that I didn’t. No matter. With these three ingredients, I had the makings of a simple and much-welcomed zippy little nibble. With more forethought, a bottle of vinho verde would have been chilled and ready to provide a perfect mineral counterpoint. Without the benefit of such planning, a cheeky Mike's Hard Cranberry served the role well enough. Together, the crackers and Mike's, enjoyed with my equally worn-out husband, were exactly the home-based Happy Hour we didn't know that we desperately needed, no matter how much it had been wanted.

The full recipe for the cheesy pepper snacks can be found at the Hot Water Bath Facebook group. Come on over - we'd love to hear your favorite uses for pickled hot peppers, too. Do tell!

Maintaining My Amateur Status

Despite the post of my Mid-Winter’s Lament a few weeks back, I didn’t until just this week really understand just how much of prior years’ canning we’d been using. Sure, the jars were piling up, but since I’m not one of those canning types who catalogs and indexes my output – which is strange, considering how much of a control freak I am in nearly every other aspect of my life – I don’t have any kind of metric or tracking tool against which to check our usage. If I don’t know that I made, say, 40 quarts of applesauce last fall and I don’t know that I just opened number 39, I have no way of knowing that I’d better slow down with the counting on having more around. Clearly, I’ve got what we business-minded types call a process gap, one that is only just now making itself known.


I opened the last jar of tomatillo salsa last night and nearly forewent adorning the dinner burritos because, hey, it was the last jar and you can’t just use that on anything. The aforementioned applesauce is actually long gone and the peaches are not far behind. For plain old tomatoes, I’m down to a few pints which, given the cold winter’s impact on domestic tomato production, I am treating as part of my 401(k). Blackberries? History. Brandied apples? No more. Preserved lemons? The way of the Dodo. Spiced honey? Holiday gifting took care of that one. I still have plain cherries, raspberry jam and one jar of tomato salsa. There’s also a jar of apple butter (which I don’t even like and cannot remember what possessed me to make it), a quarter pint of pickled jalapenos and a few more half-pints of pickled mushrooms. That’s it, that’s all she wrote after years and years of canning activity.

Even if I don’t keep records of pantry inputs and outputs, it’s not hard to understand what happened. Life and stuff, that’s what happened. Leaving aside blights and weather and the price of whatnot, my rate of canning slowed as the children grew and developed lives of their own at the same time as my professional life ramped up a bit. Since I am disinclined to use my small amounts of leisure grocery shopping for basics (shopping for party food or stuff to put into jars is completely different, although I don’t do much of either for other reasons), well, here we are.

Since we have, quite literally, been dining on past years’ productivity and industriousness, if I am ever again to enjoy meal-related leisure I need to get back to work, canning-wise. True planning is difficult to do this far in advance because we never know how weather, bugs and diseases will affect crop production. It's all well and good to commit oneself to 50 pints of peach ketchup but no bets should be made until the crop is in hand, so to speak.

It wouldn't do at all to set your heart on the peaches only to find out that, this year, you're more gifted in the hot pepper area. Better instead to focus on ideas - maybe you could use more jam or sandwich enhancers or fruits suitable for side dishes. Focusing on concepts allows you to bop and weave with your canning - you'll get your jam, but maybe it'll be blackberry instead of strawberry. Pickles might end up as green cherry tomatoes rather than hamburger dills. See what I mean? Bop and weave right around whatever the garden, the weather or your mood throws at the affair. For my part, I'm focusing on finished items rather than ingredients - salsas over plain tomatoes, brandied fruits over plain berries, for example, things I can use more or less as-is without further massaging after the jar is open.

We'll see. It's clear that I need to do something in the way of planning and this is pretty much as far as I'm willing to go. I don't know what I'll put on the pantry shelves this year, but I do know it'll be something great.

Ludite No More - See Hot Water Bath on Facebook

Progress is a beautiful thing, no? A girl can struggle to keep up, what with all the horseless carriages around, and those fancy typing machines. Life moves so fast these days!

In keeping with this amazing time of ours, I decided to check out this Facebook thingamadoodle all the kids are raving about. I even made a Hot Water Bath group to record all our collective home food preservation fun.

Seriously, through. Susie J suggested nearly seven years ago that I start a canning-related message board, a recommendation that thrilled and terrified me in equal measures. Now that these crazy youths are willing to do nearly all the work for me at a time when home canning seems to be undergoing a modest renaissance (could it ever be as cool as knitting? Sewing? ), well, the time seems to be right.

I'll still be here, with canning, cooking, cocktails and documentation of my fascinating life's minutia. While I'm doing that, I hope you wander over there. See you?

A Piece of (Red) Cake

Is there anything that you buy, convinced in the moment of purchase that it is 100% a needed and rational purchase, only to arrive home to discover that - damn and blast! - you already own, say, 8 or 10 identical specimens?

Brainiac had this thing a while ago when every time he left the house he came back with a set of queen size sheets. Because I am, myself, a somewhat eccentric person, I didn't say a word until one day I was putting a newly cleaned set away on top of the pile (we never got to the bottom) and the whole of the linen closet collapsed on my head. So I managed to get him to stop buying and only last year managed to divest us (thank goodness for the preschool rummage sale and its needed donations) of seven sets, leaving us with four - two flannel, two sheeting.

Somewhere in the middle of the sheets he had a thing for lamps and bought five in the space of six weeks or so. And I - because this is not a bash Brainiac post - once went through a very regrettable velour tunic phase, ending up with nearly a dozen. Then there's my completely irrational need to purchase each and every magazine featuring a lemon cake and, really, there are only so many recipes for lemon cake.

So. When it came time to produce the birthday cake to complement the Girl's Chinese Dragon-themed party, I was reasonably confident that I had enough of Wilton's red paste to execute the iconic dark red, black and gold design because red icing paste is one of those things that I buy whenever I find myself within a mile or two of a Michael's.

Turns out that I emptied a jar of paste - using the remaining 2/3 of an ounce - along with a drop of black getting to the red I envisioned in my head. A quick (albeit messy rinse) and the jar ended up in recycling, accompanied by my realization that I have never seen one of those jars completely used up. My first jars (lavender and daffodil in color), bought 14 years ago, are still good and quite full even after multiple uses. My mom has jars that are probably not much younger than I. So, you know, that's a lot of red.


(A note on the design: a colleague prepared for me a Chinese New Year-related design that he suggested would be considered good luck for a birthday cake. My attempt to reproduce it came to a bad end almost immediately and thus we ended up with something described by the one person in attendance who might have been relied upon to know the difference - a five year old boy - as "a tiny bit Chinese looking but not really." To this I smiled and asked if he'd like an extra big piece. He did.)

Later that weekend I prepared to make the cupcakes I promised to the Boy's class as part of their Valentine's Day celebration. I told him I'd make any kind of cupcake he desired as long as the recipe did not require a special shopping trip. After a week of snowbound togetherness, his sister's birthday party and holiday weekend company I was in no mood for special acquisition errands and set him down with a pile of cookbooks. Some time later he wandered into the family room, where I sat with a glass of wine and a novel involving oddly modern-minded Dukes and the maidens they love.

"Red velvet!" he declared, smiling and pointing to a recipe from a 50s era church cookbook. I looked, noticed the buttermilk requirement and shook my head. Allrecipes to the rescue with a perfectly doable, no-shopping required alternative, provided by the McCormick company.*

The result, after dipping well into a second jar of red paste:


Adorable, even pre-iced. And very delicious...and a bit like crack to the child who is generally deprived of food color of all types (I am a soft touch when it comes to the combination of holidays and Childhood Magic). I only needed 24 for the classroom, teachers and assorted helpers so was delighted to keep a few back, purely in the interests of research. Thinking to make a batch to take to work, I wasn't sure I really had enough red to pull it off. Turns out, I have nothing to worry about.

Nothing at all, with three jars of red left to plunder. Red velvet for everyone!


* As delightful as the folks at McCormick no doubt are, I feel compelled to mention that I did and do not actually possess any of their own brand of red food color. I used paste I already bought (see above) and used much more than the equivalent of the one ounce of liquid called for in the recipe.

Not So Much With the Sage

So when weather forecasts started suggesting that this weekend may be a wee bit snowy in my part of the world, I thought that the time was right for a small canning project. Nothing like applesauce, God forbid, or peaches but rather something more on the order of, say, Lemon Sage Wine Mustard. Yes, a few jars of a little something that I could set aside for gifting, that would kill a little snow storm time and which required only that I hit the local grocery for one teeny thing since I had the rest on hand already. No problem! I figured I'd stop by Wegmans on my way home from work, pick up the sage and Look! Out! World! canning would ensue.

Right. Having grown up in Western New York, where blizzard planning is a minor religion, I forget that it's not really possible, the night before any amount of snow is expected in my adopted hometown, to go grab something quickly. I swear, thousands of people had nearly the same thought as I at exactly the same time I could not get near the place.

For some reason, one never hears of the last minute insulin pick-up, or batteries for the oxygen tank or whatever. No, it's always the bread and milk. I like to have these things on hand, too, but certainly can go 24-36 hours without. What gives? Whatever, I'm sure that entire dissertations have been written on the subject by greater minds than my own. In the end I I gave up in favor of a quick stop at the library for romance novels and thus have no sage.


We ended up seeing about 14 inches of snow over about sixteen hours (for those of you who use the metric system of measurement, this is about 98 gazillion metres). So, no mustard. Instead I spent the day reading (hi, Jill Shalvis!), drinking a serviceable wine and eating candy hearts. Not bad, all things considered, even if the canning didn't happen.


Tomorrow brings, assuming adequate road clean-up, a birthday party, a New Orleans Saints victory parade and accompanying game of some kind, and very likely more wine.


What a great weekend.

Mid-Winter Canning Lament

canning season gone

spring seems so far away now

empty jars stack up

Sugarplum Fairy, Somewhat Late

Some months ago I received a lovely e-mail from a women named Molly who said she wanted very much to send me some POM Wonderful pomegranate juice. Just because. I shrugged my shoulders, thought "why not" and replied that she was certainly welcome to do so - I adore pomegranates and their juice alike - and said that she should not engage in any breath holding regarding posts because 1) am pretty lazy about posting obligations, perceived or actual and 2) I was as likely to make jelly or pour the juice over a turkey or somesuch before I did anything as straightforward as actually drink it. She wrote that she thought that was just fine and several days later I took delivery of a box of these.*


Isn't that just the cutest?


Pomegranate jelly was among the first of my canning experiments way back in the distant mists of 2003. I recall it as successful, although I ended up with way more jelly than I could have used at the time. These days I'm sure that I could make better use of the output and decided to, with the gift of the juice, revisit the project.


Making jelly from juice is really the only method I'm willing to tolerate. I simply do not have time to mess with crushing and draining fruit, worry about clarity, measuring and blah blah blah. Not when it's possible to make a year's worth of jam in less than two hours or go the juice route with similar achievement. There are lots of good, wholesome, natural (and -ish) juices on the market these days and I don't feel any need to drain anything from anywhere into whatever else when it can be successfully avoided with nothing traded in exchange. (I have similar feelings about manual vs. automatic transmissions. There may be benefits to the former, but with the availability of the latter, why would you?)


So, juice is really where it's at, jelly-wise. Not that I actually made the jelly. No, friends, as 2009 wore on and on (and...) and I became enmeshed eight weeks we call The Holiday Season it became clear that no there would be no jelly making. So I looked to glazing the Christmas turkey (please, do not get me started on why there was no roast beef this year - telling the story now can come to no good) and felt little to no guilt about keeping those cute little bottles waiting. I knew the glaze would be great because pomegranate anything is always great and skipped merrily along having absolved myself of any and all jelly-making responsibilities. I started dreaming about POM reductions with shallot and thyme or maybe sparked with Sichuan pepper. There are zillions of possibilities when it comes to these things. Including drinking, as it turns out.


Flash forward to Christmas Eve. Brainiac had just bought an enormous bottle of vodka (and also one of rum, since he could not remember which went into egg nog and there was no way he was going back to the liquor store just as the merriment countdown began so best to stock up on everything possible while the moment was at hand, right?) and my sister-in-law was coming over with her son for our customary Chinese food and Christmas cookie dinner. The day had been a delightful one, full of wrapping and singing and baking. Feeling celebratory, I cast about for a specialish cocktail that we could enjoy together. I remembered the planned glaze. Turkey? What turkey? I had some POM and a tanker truck's worth of vodka. In the face of such festivity there is only one thing a girl can do to make judicious use of such resources.


Behold the official cocktail of 2009-2010 twelve days of Christmas (literally so, having finished up the last bottle sent by my good friend Molly just the 6th, the Feast of the Epiphany**). Each of the sweet little bottles held enough juice for three martini-ish cocktails which, with sugared rims and iced cranberry garnish, kept me and mine in tremendously good spirits right up until the last carols were sung on Epiphany.** Does this cocktail have a name yet? What about the Sugarplum?

Neither I nor the nice folks at POM couldn't have known back when that the contents of that little box would end up being such fun. It just goes to prove that, sometimes, the most obvious thing to do with juice is to just go ahead and drink it.

* See what I did there? Not for nothing do I make my living as a compliance professional in my non-blog life, engaged in keeping my employer aright of various federal laws, regulations, statutes and whims. In keeping with recent handwringing relating to a certain type of blogger (female, mom, etc.) preying on the trusting good natures of innocent Internet-goers everywhere, I have now informed you that I am in receipt of free stuff and you are able to adjust your expectations of my further statements on the juice accordingly. I'm so glad we had this chat.

** This is the day when observant Episcopalians everywhere drain the bottom of their glasses, look about, and say, "Can we please take these decorations down already?"

*** I swear, that cooper tray doesn't look nearly as tarnished in real life as it appears to be in that pic. No, really. I'm a terrible housekeeper in many ways but polish is one thing that I am on top of. I need me some Photoshop skills, it appears.