Easter Treats

In the few days leading up to today, I was busy with work but also with baking. First, as a lunch box treat, I made Easter-themed Linzer cookies. In order to do this, I needed to get tiny little cookie cutters. Even with them being so small, the cookies needed to be a fairly large size to accommodate the challenges of asymmetric cut outs. Many of the rabbits broke, but here are some of the ones that made it:

The fillings were blueberry jam and strawberry lavender jam.

Today, in between Easter baskets, video games, an egg hunt and a walk to the grocery store, I made Puits D'amour (wells of love) out of quick puff pastry (butter, flour, salt and water, folded and rolled many times), lemon curd and meringue. Since they ended up being more oval than round, I took that as serendipity. They are egg shaped, after all.

Happy Easter!

BACON.

Today I converted 4 pounds of bacon into about 7 cups of bacon jam. I used this recipe from Martha Stewart but, since I was scaling up, made a few changes:

1. Instead of just coffee, I used half coffee, half bourbon.
2. The vinegar was about 1/3 sherry vinegar and the rest was cider vinegar.
3. I used a mixture of yellow and red onions.

I decided not to pressure can these, partly because I only had jars of varying sizes and so there is a lack of consistency. They will be stored in the fridge and freezer instead; eight jars in all.

Squeeeee!

Seedless Red Raspberry Jam

"Other" Grape Jelly

Rose Hip Jelly in the "Other Jelly" category

Happy Donna!

Green Eggs are Local Eggs...

...and local eggs are fresh!

If you grew up in Rhode Island, as I did, you likely remember that jingle. Except it was brown eggs. From Rhode Island Red hens. To this day, when I buy eggs I hear the jingle in my head and I always buy brown eggs. Even when there is a choice. I'm pretty sure my sister is in the same boat.

One of the nurses at work got chickens. Not just a few. She got a whole flock. They started producing eggs a few months ago and now she gets 10-15 eggs a day. The other day, she brought in a dozen as a thank you for another nurse who did her a favor. This got me thinking, so I arranged a barter. One jar of jam (strawberry rhubarb) for a dozen eggs. Cool deal!

This morning we had our first locally produced eggs for breakfast. The shells were thicker and harder. They smelled more...eggy. They tasted great! We are converted. I'm thinking there will be more bartering in our future!

Crazy Work Week

This has been a particularly stressful week at work - the emergency department launched a new electronic medical record system 4 days ago, going almost completely paperless in one fell swoop. And it wasn't just our pediatric emergency department, it was the entire group: 3 departments on 2 separate campuses. People have been very patient and supportive of each other, and I'm so proud of everyone for making it work.

Yesterday was the last day in which food was provided around the clock for staff. Food always makes things easier. So today I'm going in for a support shift followed by a clinical shift and I'm bringing 3 jars of jam and some stuff to serve as jam vectors: crackers, pound cake, and so on. I've selected 1 pint of blackberry jam, 1 pint of spiced plum jelly, and one half-pint of the cherry/peach/apricot jam.

Wish us luck - now that the company's support staff is no longer on site, it gets harder for a little while!

Every day is Jam Day

One of the advantages of having a wide variety of jams in the house is that we get to have something different every day. The other day it was toast with cream cheese and the Carrot Cake jam. Today I had toast with chive/onion cream cheese and the Cranbanero. Our 3 year old likes Nutella with Blackberry jam, while my husband prefers peanut butter with some kind of berry jam. Today it happened to be Blackberry as well. The 7 year old is not as into jam as we are and opted for cinnamon toast instead.