Keeping Currant

One of the types of plants that we put in the front garden, which is an edible garden, were several red currant bushes. This is the first year the berries were plentiful. Enough to make a batch of jelly.

The first thing I noticed is that while I was preparing the juice it smelled similar to crabapples. Almost a little cinnamon-y. It's also very pink, which made a nice bright red (think Kool-Aid) jelly. One batch of jelly used 6.5 cups of juice, 7 cups of sugar and a box of pectin, and made about 10 cups of jelly. 

Also today, I made mulberry jelly from the juice of the berries I picked from our tree in the backyard. Four cups of juice, 3 T. of lime juice, 5 cups sugar and 1 box of pectin, made 12 half-cup jars and one 12-ounce jar. This is a good start to this year's gift stash!

Jellied Plans

The farm share sent along a bunch of mint. I don't use fresh mint a lot in my cooking, maybe I should, but the first thing I thought of was making mint jelly. I haven't made any in years, because both of the kids stopped eating lamb and that's generally what we would serve it with. However, the kids are spending a lot less time eating at home, so I thought making a batch would be nice. 

Mint leaves were steeped in 4+ cups of water for 10 minutes, then the resulting tea was combined with 5 cups of sugar, 1 package of powdered pectin, and 3 drops of green food coloring and one cup of blue. This made just under 6 cups of jelly.

My red currant plants finally started producing and I have enough to make a batch of currant jelly this year, which I will do when I harvest the rest of the berries. As I do with mulberries, I extract the juice and save it for when I have enough volume. So far I have 5 cups, I need 6.5 cups so I'm close. I also have about 5+ cups of mulberry juice, but I currently have 10 jars of mulberry jelly and 4 jars of mulberry syrup in my inventory so I'm not sure what to do about that. Maybe gift stash?

Mulberries, Fava Beans, Farm Shares and Crisps

We got a new farm share this year. Last year we didn't get a CSA because the farm we'd been at for over a decade suffered from drought and chose to not offer the CSA. I missed it. This year it became clear they weren't going to restart the CSA program, so I needed to find a new farm.

There are several farms that deliver shares to our area and I found one, Siena Farms, that delivers to the ice cream shop in the next town which we visit often. Conveniently, we can buy ice cream when we pick up the veggies! A small share weekly seems to be just enough for us. We started with some good salads and are moving toward sautéed and stir fried vegetables with various proteins. Tonight will be shabu-shabu, as I have carrots, napa cabbage, shitake mushrooms and garlic scapes from the farm. 

Today I'm blanching some fava beans although I have to decide what to do with them, maybe marinate?
But at least they'll be ready to eat. 

Also today, I made a batch of mulberry jelly. This wasn't the best mulberry year, because we had some rather windy storms come through so a lot of the berries got shaken off before I could get to them. Not to mention, I am always competing with the birds, squirrels and chipmunks for berries. I got just enough to make 9 cups of mulberry-lime jelly.

Last project of the day is a berry crisp - for the 4th the youngerchild made a chocolate cake that was decorated with whipped cream frosting and berries in an American flag motif. There are a lot of berries leftover, even with me making raspberry-blueberry muffins this morning and us all just eating a bunch. So I tossed the rest of them with cornstarch and sugar and made a crisp that I'll bake for dessert. 

Fair in the Rain

We went up to the Fair two days ago, the weather was rainy but not super windy. It was the little bit of Hurricane Ian that reached New England, I guess. Generally, I prefer to be at the Fair in the rain because fewer people go so it doesn't feel as crowded. 

From the canning perspective, I won first place for sauerkraut and for tomato (pizza) sauce, and second place for the mulberry jelly, raspberry jam, and salsa verde. I didn't bake anything for the baking competition, but I did spend Friday baking a cake for the elderchild's birthday. More on that later.

One of the most fun parts for us is seeing the rabbits, and this year we spent some time watching the judging of some larger rabbits. There are these little stalls with wire doors that flip up so the rabbits are put in one side and the judge takes them out the other side and examines them. The rest of the rabbits, though, are all trying to get out of the stalls, and so every so often a rabbit's head pokes up above the stalls and a person has to hurry and push it back down before it jumps out. It's like whack-a-mole, but gently and with rabbits. It was so funny to watch!

After about four hours, we headed home, and I spent the rest of the afternoon frosting the cake I'd made and making chile rellenos for dinner.

Ah, the cake. The elderchild requested a red velvet cake like the one on this season's Great British Bake Off (the technical challenge). I looked up their recipe and, after making a run up to Saugus to get 6" cake pans which I discovered I needed right when I was about to start preparing the ingredients, followed the recipe to the letter. It SANK. I'm not sure why. So I cleaned up, went back out to the store to get more red food coloring and cocoa, and used a different recipe, which worked. And tasted really good, I might add. I did use the frosting from the GBBO recipe, which tasted great, but it was so runny. I had to put a skewer in the cake to keep it upright while I tried to frost it. There was a lot of cursing. 

Ultimately, the cake tasted fantastic, even if it was not as smoothly frosted as the ones on TV. 

Happy Birthday!

Do Over

Yesterday's batch of mulberry jelly did not set. I think the pectin was old, which is a direct result of me not canning very much. It was my last box, so I'll be refreshing that supply soon.

In retrospect, there were a lot of "odd" things that should have tipped me off. First of all, there wasn't any foam after the hard boil. Then the jars took much longer to "ping" than usual. The jelly wasn't really setting on the spoon, either.

When I realized the jelly was runny, I put all the jars in the fridge overnight. This morning, I had gooey syrup. Not jelly. So I reprocessed them, using low-sugar pectin, more water and sugar, and a little lemon juice. All the correct signs were there to indicate that it worked this time. Oddly, I ended up with one less jar.

While I am sad that I wasted all those lids, I do think the Great Canning Lid Shortage of 2021 might be over. I found lids in the hardware store when I was buying jars, and they're no longer listed as out of stock on Amazon. I did buy a few boxes when I saw them yesterday, but I still have a lot of the Bernardin ones I got before. Because I haven't been canning much. Which, hopefully, will change.

Mulberry Jelly

After a few trips to the mulberry tree I had enough juice to make a batch of mulberry jelly, which I did this morning. I decided to put aside 2 jars for the fair, and the rest of the jelly is in 4-ounce jars so I can get started on that gift stash. While I was picking berries yesterday, a chipmunk sat in the branches and gave me its best angry face as it chittered away at me. It was adorable. 

This is the first batch of canning I've done in quite some time. It's not been a convenient year for picking berries yet. Our usual strawberry place had 2 days of picking, on weekdays, and then it was too cool for the berries to ripen so they didn't have any more. They do have cherry picking but, again, it hasn't really worked out that we can go as a family. I'm not sure what's going to come from the farm share in the next few weeks, I haven't seen any mention of strawberries from them, either. We still have so much jam from previous batches that I don't need to make much. I'll just have to keep an eye out for what's available. 

Mulberry Tree Visitors

The mulberry tree in the backyard, which I can see from this desk, is laden with berries for another year. In just this morning alone it was visited by a pair of cardinals, a pair of orioles, blue jays, robins, chipmunks and squirrels. This afternoon I also paid a visit and was rewarded with a solid pint of berries (currently being made into juice) and the many angry chirps (cardinals) and squawks (blue jays) of indignant birds. I am surprised that the chipmunks would rather run up and down the branches instead of eating the mostly ripe berries that fall on the ground but I am not a chipmunk so apparently I just don't understand. 

It's unclear at the moment what I'll do with this juice, but maybe I'll make a batch of mulberry jelly to start the gift stash for the year. And also to enter in the fair.

Admitting Defeat

My mulberry tree has been super productive these past few years. Since I still have a lot of jelly from last year I decided to make syrup instead. I have picked several batches of berries and juiced them, setting the juice aside to make the syrup in one big batch. Well, between the storms that have not given the berries a chance to ripen or knocked off the ripe berries before I could get to them and the birds, chipmunks and squirrels that eat them even before they are ripe, I don't think I'm going to get any more. 

Squirrel, hanging by its back feet

So today I mixed the roughly 8 cups of juice with 10 1/2 cups of sugar and made syrup. Seven pints plus a 4-oz jar for my gift stash. The fauna in the yard can have the rest of the berries.

Mulberry Jelly and Oat Milk

One of the things we have been trying is oat milk, for various reasons. It's not bad. But it can be expensive. So I thought I'd try to make it myself, which is easy, except for the straining part. Basically, you blend 4 cups of water and 1 cup of oats in a blender and strain it. I'm using my jelly bag. The hard part is that the pulp blocks the fluid from draining through the bag so I'm stirring it every so often to get it out of the way. The disadvantage of doing it at home is that it isn't calcium fortified but we can make more of an effort to get our calcium in other ways, I suppose. I am now thinking of things to do with the leftover pulp, once it has been dried. Maybe granola bars?

Also this morning, I made mulberry jelly with 4 cups of mulberry juice, 3 T. lime juice, 5 cups of sugar and a box of pectin. This made 7.5 cups of jelly. Now the birds can have all the berries on the tree they want!

So Many Strawberries!

Last night I made strawberry shortcake with a quart of the berries we'd picked the day before. It's always popular and because we eat it so quickly it's hard to get a photo. This time I remembered to take one before we ate. We got another quart of berries from the farm share today which are already mostly gone!

My mulberry tree is really doing well this year and just today I got half of the mulberry juice I need to make a batch of mulberry jelly. I will likely do that over the weekend as I am working tomorrow.

Today I'm making bread. I managed to (finally) find bread flour in the stores again, and so now I'm making plain bread, just bread flour and all purpose flour, my starter, salt, sugar, milk and water. No teff, or spelt, or sprouted wheat flour (although I quite like that last one). Instead of an egg wash, I'm using water sprayed on just before baking. I did forget to get it started last night, which would have allowed it to ferment overnight and for me to be done much earlier. I woke up this morning, remembered that I hadn't made the dough last night, got it started by 8 am, so it's had all day to ferment and then about 3 hours to proof before baking. It's in the oven now. 

In Between Storms

We've had a lot of thunderstorms come through here in the past two days, and whenever the sun has made an appearance I went to the mulberry tree in the yard to pick berries. I must have forgotten how many cups of juice went into a batch of jam. I thought it was eight. Actually, it was four. So after a few days I had just about eight cups of juice, enough for a double batch of jelly. The tree is rather prolific this year.

Normally I don't like to double up jam and jelly recipes because then, if the mixture is too deep for the diameter of the pot it might not gel. Eight cups didn't seem too huge, though, so I simmered the mulberry juice with 1/3 cup lime juice and sliced fresh ginger (about 1.5 inches of ginger root, sliced as thinly as I could manage without a mandolin). To this I added two boxes of powdered pectin and 9.5 cups of sugar. All told, it made just over 13 cups of jelly. I strained out the ginger pieces when I poured the jelly into jars. Most likely, I will enter this one in the fair. It's time to start thinking about that again!

Flowers and Berries

This year the mulberry tree in our yard has been fairly prolific. In three picking sessions I got enough juice to make a batch of mulberry jelly. Since I didn't see the lime juice in the fridge right away, I grabbed the key lime juice instead. I think it makes it even better:

4 cups mulberry juice

3 T. key lime juice

5 cups sugar

1 package powdered pectin

Makes 7 cups plus a little more.

The other thing I'd been toying with was the idea of a rose jelly. Not rose hips, just an extraction from the petals. I have scarlet creeper roses in my yard and picked enough to make 2 cups of infusion. Now, the issue here was that I didn't want to add lemon juice because the rose flavor is pretty subtle and easily overpowered. Cooking also causes the rose essence to evaporate or something. So I added some tartaric acid for the acidity without changing the flavor. Why tartaric? I didn't have citric acid but I did have tartaric acid for cheese making.

2 cups rose petal infusion

1 tsp. tartaric acid

4 cups sugar

1 package liquid pectin

1 T. rosewater

I tossed the rosewater in after the jelly had its one minute hard boil so there would be that rose scent and flavor preserved. Into each jar, I added 2 fresh rose petals. This made 4 cups of jelly.

Prizewinners!

We went up this morning in the rain to spend the day at the fair. In addition to all the canned goods I entered, I decided to make cupcakes to enter in the baking competition. I am on a carrot cake kick so I made carrot cake cupcakes. I had to enter a plate of 6 of them.

When we got to the fair we immediately went to drop them off and check out the canned goods section. I did quite well, with first place for: soup, sauerkraut, and sweet relish. Second place for: the collection of three jellies (the ones with the wine that I banged out in a few hours the night before I had to take everything up), other pickled vegetable, Concord grape jelly and apple jelly. Third place for the strawberry jalapeño jam. Honorable mentions for: wild blueberry jam and ginger peach jam. Only three entries did not place: salsa, mulberry jelly, and apricot ginger jam.

We wandered around the fair for a few hours while we waited for the cupcake judging. We checked out the rabbits, cows, pigs, sheep, and goats. I got nose-booped by a calf named Bella. We watched a little bit of the junior cattle show and visited the beekeepers exhibits. I held a 1-2 day old chick. Ate a bunch of fair food, ran into a few people we knew and shared a table with a few we didn't (but know now!). And we got back in time to watch them judge the cupcakes. We felt it was a very good sign that one of the two judges didn't want to give up the plate with my cupcake on it! And, at then end, I'd won first place!

Now I'm home, working on a beet and goat cheese tart for dinner with friends. And there are more of those prizewinning carrot cake cupcakes for dessert!

Better Year

It's shaping up to be a better year for fruit. We've had a lot of rain, and now the sun and heat are making things sweet. While I don't get a lot of strawberries from the front yard, after 5 trips to the mulberry tree in the back I extracted enough juice to make a batch of mulberry jelly. Just like before, I used 4 cups of juice, 3 T. lime juice, 5 cups of sugar and 1 package of powdered pectin. I think I may set aside jars of this for the fair. Now I can let the birds have the rest of the berries; whenever I went to pick they'd sit in the higher branches and squawk at me.

We're hoping to go strawberry picking tomorrow, bright and early. Well, I am hoping to go picking. I am bribing the family with gigantic muffins so they'll get up and come with me.

Also today, I'm making bread so by later tonight I should have three fresh loaves. I'm still managing to make that commitment; I truly haven't bought a loaf of sandwich bread since February of 2016. That makes me very happy.

Getting Back into a Groove

After a slow winter and spring, mainly due to my general overwhelmedness, I'm finally starting up with some projects again. The farm share yesterday came with a large Napa cabbage and, after consulting with my friend, we decided it would be better if I made it into kimchi and then split that up. So this morning I started the brining process for the cabbage and tonight I'll get it set up to ferment.

Also today, I started a batch of yogurt. I was going to do that the other day and then discovered that the milk I'd purchased for it went bad because I'd waited too long. So now that's going until this evening as well, hopefully the yogurt I picked for a starter (Green Mountain Creamery Greek Yogurt) is a good choice.

The mulberry tree in the backyard is covered in berries this year and for the past two nights I've managed to pick enough berries to extract a cup of juice each time. Two more harvests like that and I'll have enough mulberry juice to make a batch of jelly. My strawberries in the front yard are few and far between, I am still competing with the chipmunks to get them first. And I still have to find some sort of netting to put over my peach tree to keep the birds and squirrels out. I'm hoping the chipmunks can't or won't climb that high...

Great Day at the Fair!

Dill Pickles, Apple Jelly, and Sweet Pickle Relish

It's a really cold day for the Fair, but that didn't stop us from heading up there to see how I did with all my canning entries. I'm so pleased to report that I won a ribbon in every class I entered. There was even some consistency in that 2 of the items were also entered in the Fair last year and they won the same place each time. I am also pleased that my friend Roxanne won lots of things, too, including the gift basket category; her basket was just beautiful. And she won not just in canning but in baking as well - cookies and cake!

Mulberry Jelly

Strawberry Jam

Bread and Butter Pickles

Blueberry Jam

Bee and Farm Updates

Close up of bees with capped cells (pupae) and larvae

First, the bees: I pulled out a comb again today - I really took my time and was able to get a good look at one of the combs. While I couldn't see any eggs, I certainly could see larva and capped cells. I took a few photos and was able to study them later to make sure there weren't any mites or anything bad. I also wore only the medical gloves as I'd felt too clumsy with the gardening gloves, that seemed to go fine. Whenever the bees would get agitated, I would stop and stay very still and the bees would eventually settle down. I don't think I crushed any trying to get it all closed again, either. I consider that a win.

Second, the farm: today's share consisted of 1 bunch each of komatsuna and collard greens, one head of spring garlic, 6 garlic scapes, 1 bunch scallions, 3 heads of lettuce, 3 quarts shell peas, 1 quart each snap and snow peas, 35-45 fava beans (but someone who didn't want hers gave me her share of favas, too, so I picked 82 pods), dill and cilantro and 1 pint of strawberries, if you could find any. I picked very few berries, less than a cup I think.

Honey in the upper left, just a bit!

When I got home, I shelled the favas and the peas while sitting outside and enjoying the breeze. The favas were blanched and are waiting to be made into baghali polo (rice with fava beans and dill) and the peas were cooked tonight with chopped garlic scapes and then finished with salt, butter and dill. For dinner we assembled our own salads: lettuce, carrots, mulberries (from my tree), strawberries, Hakurei turnips, sliced meats (chicken, pork, or sausages) and the cooked peas. I used more of that champagne vinaigrette which works really well with peas.

Finally, Mulberries

As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been hoping to make mulberry jelly, exclusively from my own tree. Well, I managed it, but it took about a week to get enough mulberries to do it. Every time I got a bunch of berries, I juiced them and saved the juice. As of tonight, I finally managed to get 4 cups of juice.

The mulberry juice was mixed with 3 T. lime juice, 1 package powdered Sure-Jell pectin, and 5 cups of sugar. Processed the usual way, this yielded 7 cups of jelly. I'm setting aside 2 jars to enter into the Fair, in the "other jelly" category. Two years ago my Rose Hip Jelly got an honorable mention in that category. So far, I have 2 entries set aside - this and the strawberry jam.

Crazy Amount of Strawberries

Bright and early this morning my family went strawberry picking. Some of us were more chipper about it than others. It was a gorgeous morning and in a very short amount of time we picked 17 pounds of strawberries.

Yes, 17. I've done this before. But because of the weather these berries were not going to last even 24 hours. I had to get them "processed." Today.

In 8 hours I made: 1 batch strawberry jam (which is better than the previous batch so I think I'll enter this one in the fair, not the other), 1 batch strawberry margarita jam, 1 batch strawberry rhubarb jam, 1 batch strawberry jalapeno jam*, 1 batch strawberry lemon marmalade, 1 batch strawberries with sugar for another shortcake, a chocolate shortcake for said strawberry shortcake, a pie crust, set aside the strawberries and rhubarb for the filling (I'll roll out the crust and bake the pie tomorrow), washed some for eating now and refrigerated the rest (about a quart) for smoothies tomorrow.

Also, I picked whatever mulberries I could off our tree, as there is a storm coming through and they're all going to get knocked off anyway. And my husband and I assembled new patio furniture.

I am officially exhausted!

*There are a couple of people in my life who love the strawberry jalapeno jam so much that whenever I make a batch I set aside a jar for each of them. Not that it lasts long. One of these friends can eat the entire 8 ounce jar of this jam in 5 minutes. Straight. Just with a spoon. I've seen her do it.

Permanently Stained

Our mulberry tree is in full production mode, and I'm hoping to be able to make a batch of something without having to resort to the tree on the corner of the block. It'll take a few trips, I think, as I was able to get 3 cups of plump berries today and there are still tons more waiting to ripen. My husband and I have decided we don't really like the texture of the berries in jam, so I'm trying jelly instead. 3 cups of fruit, simmered and crushed with a little water, made 1 cup of juice. I need at least 3.5 cups of juice. I'll be doing this again in a few days.

If you think this looks bad, you should see my jelly bag, which is now rather purple. Despite soap.