The Generosity of Strangers

We spent a week recently on Lopez Island, part of the San Juan Islands in the Pacific Northwest. We rented a cottage near the ferry terminal, brought a car and a lot of groceries, and had fun exploring the tide pools for nudibranchs and other sea life. With the exception of the ferry itself, it was a relaxing week. 

On one of our walks, we noticed a sign across the street from our cottage: "Yellow Plums. Pick 'em and Take 'em." We followed the signs and found a single tree laden with yellow plums. We waved to the owners, who stayed in their house, and picked a bunch. They were delicious. 

I took enough back to make a small crisp. I didn't have all the ingredients (like sugar or flour), but I had butter, and maple sugar oatmeal packets, so I mixed those up and sprinkled that over the top. For serving, we had some maple syrup to drizzle over the top. 

How nice of those people to share!

Another 5 Pounds

Today I pulled out a stepladder and picked another 5 pounds of peaches off the tree. Most are good sized peaches, some are quite small, and they all need a little time on the counter to ripen. Fortunately, I had some already ripening in the house, so those got put to use today to make a batch of jam.

Four cups of diced peaches, 5.5 cups sugar, 2 T. lemon juice and 1 package of powdered pectin. Since I didn't have a lot of half-pint jars, I filled 2 pint jars, 2 half-pint jars and one half-cup jar. Each jar got one or two maraschino cherries in it, depending upon the size of the jar. If I get enough for another batch (I should) I'll add some crystallized ginger. Once I get all the batches of jam done, I plan to start canning the peaches in syrup. One of these two batches will end up going to the fair, we'll just have to see which one is better.

The rest of the peaches that were reasonably ripe are going into a crisp for dessert tonight. Yum!

Gifts from Nature and Neighbors

If it seemed in my last post that I had a lot of things going on, well, they just multiplied!

Continuing the theme of an epic year for fruit, my neighbor's apple tree, which they had in recent years pretty much given up hope of saving, had so many apples on it that one of the limbs broke off from the weight. She offered me as many apples as I wanted, so I got about 9 pounds yesterday and proceeded to simmer them with water to make apple juice. I let them strain overnight in the fridge and the plan is to make apple jelly and maybe applesauce with the leftover pulp. Which I would have done today except for the peaches.

At work today there was a bag of peaches with my name on it! The nurse with whom I swap jam for eggs had been picking peaches at a friend's house and very kindly thought to bring me some. There were enough little peaches to make a batch of jam (since I didn't have almonds I added a teaspoon of almond extract after the hard boil, but each jar does have a maraschino cherry - homemade, of course) and a small crisp. I will bake the crisp in the morning for breakfast, right now the peaches have a little sugar and lemon juice on them and are waiting for the topping.

Also today, I picked up my farm share. I still have a quart of green beans left over from last week, and picked another 3 quarts. I think I might try pressure canning them, in case they taste better than beans in the metal cans. Hopefully I can get to that tomorrow, in between checking on the bees and making all the apple jelly and sauce. And kimchi. Did I mention I started a batch of kimchi? No? Well, that too. 

Now We're Getting Fancy

As I said yesterday, I've been playing around with spruce tips because of this blog: Forager|Chef.  You should really check it out!  Anyhow, today I was able to make the spruce tip ice cream I'd hoped to make.  The instructions are on his blog but, essentially, you make an ice cream base, cool it to room temperature (which took half the morning), blend in the spruce tips and then filter the whole thing to get the little pieces of spruce needle out.  This mixture then goes into the ice cream maker.  I set my ice cream maker to soft-serve and it ran for about 25 minutes.  At that point it was the correct texture and I put it into the freezer to set up some more.

The next thing I did was make a rhubarb crisp, as that is the recommended pairing with the spruce ice cream.  I baked it this afternoon and, after we made dinner, I put it into the warm oven to reheat.  When dessert came around, I scooped the spruce ice cream on top.

It's a complex collection of flavors:  the tart rhubarb, the sweet crisp topping, and the floral-earthy ice cream.  The ice cream is more "spruce-y" than the sauce I made yesterday, but that was OK because the rhubarb crisp was a stronger flavor as well.  The 10 year old was not a fan - although I think more turned off by the rhubarb than anything else.

Now I have a tub of spruce ice cream in the freezer, just waiting to garnish some other tart thing.  Looks like there will be more experimentation in the future!

Limited Ingredients, Small Kitchen

We just got back from skiing for several days.  It's become an annual tradition for school vacation week.  Five of us (sometimes more) share a condo with a small kitchen.  It's always a little iffy about how well stocked the kitchen is in terms of pots and pans, sugar, spices, and utensils, but we make do.  Making our own meals saves us so much time and money and then we know what we're getting and that we're going to like it.  Generally, we go grocery shopping for the whole week before we get anywhere near the resort, figuring (correctly) that the groceries get more expensive as we get closer.  I don't usually plan meals that far in advance but, for this, it's necessary.  Generally there isn't an outdoor grill, so everything has to be made in the oven or on the stovetop.  Here are some of the go-to meals:

spaghetti or some sort of pasta with sauce made from lamb, garlic and cilantro with a salad;

burrito night, which involves ground meat, enchilada sauce, shredded cheese, guacamole (basically avocado, cilantro, and garlic - see how efficient that is?), sour cream, rice, salsa and a can of black beans.  We ran out of tortillas so some of us just had burrito bowls;

BLT night, so more lettuce, toast, bacon (the rest gets used for breakfast or, in this case, a little went into the black beans);

and this year I tried something new:  chicken cordon bleu.  I had chicken thighs, but they weren't boneless, and sliced cheese and ham that we had for lunches.  After I boned the thighs, I wrapped each around a little cheese and ham and then just baked them.  Sure, they would have been better with bread crumbs and a little white sauce, but they were pretty good as is.  As an added bonus, because I couldn't bear to throw out those bones with all that meat on them, I made a batch of chicken soup.

Leftover Chicken Soup

water

chicken thigh bones with some meat attached

salt and pepper

chopped up baby carrots

leftover rice (from burrito night)

leftover green beans (from CCB night)

Make the stock from the bones with salt and pepper, remove the bones and keep the meat.  Add the leftovers and heat through.  Reheat when ready to eat.

We decided that in the entire history of that kitchen it was probably the first time someone made soup from scratch in it.

Before baking

Dessert was another thing that required some ingenuity.  Some members of our party impulse-bought a bag of frozen berries.  We didn't need them for our oatmeal because we ran out of oatmeal long before we ran out of fresh fruit.  Since I didn't want them to go to waste, I attempted a crisp.  But again, no oatmeal.  Barely any sugar, for that matter.  No flour.  I did have Cheerios and butter.  We crushed the Cheerios and cut in softened butter with knives and put that over the berries that were in a buttered dish and sprinkled with 3 packets of sugar.  This was baked at 375 for 30 minutes and served with a little ice cream.  Unusual, but tasty in a breakfasty kind of way...

After baking

Forageberry Crisp

Today we returned from our annual camping trip and, this time, I was armed with a very handy book!  It was a gift from Lisa, and I used it to identify some berries I didn't really recognize.  When we arrived and found our campsite was full of blackberries, I hit upon an idea.  I would collect every type of edible berry I could find and make a crisp or cobbler out of them when we got home.

Mostly I found blackberries.  Wild, small, tart blackberries.  I also found similar berries on a ground cover bramble - a different type of blackberry, it seems.  And I found Juneberries, blueberries, huckleberries, elderberries, partridge berries, and a single teaberry.  (It's a little early in the season for the teaberries (aka wintergreen), after all.)  I also ate a couple of bunchberries but, like the partridge berries, they were tasteless so I decided to leave them out of the final baking.

Once I got everything home I washed and sorted and got rid of any that had gotten squishy over the weekend.  Then I put them in a little 7 x 4 pyrex dish and made a wee little crisp.  It was pretty seedy but tasty!
 

Ahead of the Curve

It seems I have started a trend.

Over the past few years I have felt very strange standing on the corner of the off-ramp, picking mulberries from the tree. There have been curious looks and even the occasional unsettling yell from a passing car. Which I have tried to ignore.

This year, I have noticed I'm not the only one going to this tree. I've seen an older man, just standing there eating berries. He looked happy. That's nice. Today I drove past the tree and saw a young woman picking berries as well. I'm glad - there are enough for all of us.

Yesterday I took the kids and we picked white mulberries from the trees at the conservation land. We even saw a painted turtle on the sidewalk and debated what to do about it for a while before a man joined the conversation. He picked it up and put it back in the woods. (It scurried away. Scurried. I had no idea turtles could move that fast on land!) Then we picked more black mulberries. I combined them and made a crisp. Actually, I made 4 little individual crisps in ramekins and the rest in a little dish. Here's the topping (it's only half of the recipe - if you use the full recipe it's enough for a large corning ware dish):

1/2 stick butter, softened
1/2 c. rolled oats
3/8 c. flour
3/8 c. packed brown sugar

This was cut together with a pastry cutter and sprinkled over the mulberries which had been mixed with a little sugar. Baked at 375 for about 30 minutes and then kept warm in the oven until we were ready to eat. Topped them with a little bit of heavy cream and they were gone in seconds!