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.

A Few of My Favorite Things

When it's your birthday, you want to do the things you enjoy, right?

The only thing I wanted to do was pick raspberries.  I checked out the raspberry farm website, learned they were opening for the season on the 23rd, and figured today would be a great day to pick.  Particularly as they are closed on Mondays.  I made a date with my family, including my visiting in-laws, and we planned to be there right when they open at 9.

They were closed.

Apparently it had cooled down enough that the raspberry ripening schedule was off so, after a disappointing first day, they decided to close for another week.  I hadn't rechecked their website so I didn't know this and it seems my email address never made it to their distribution list.  Well, I must have had quite the look of chagrin on my face that they let us go in and pick anyway.  5 pairs of hands picked over 9 pounds of raspberries in about an hour.  And the fields are just getting started!

Once we got home, I shooed everyone out of the kitchen and got to work with the food mill.  I pureed enough to get the 5 cups required for a batch of seedless jam.  I do expect to enter this one in the Fair, and, since I won that category last year, the pressure is on!  (Or not.  I plan to not stress too much.)  So, for future reference, 7 cups sugar and a package of powdered pectin.  After that I pureed another 6 cups and made 6 pints of raspberry syrup.  We haven't had that in ages. After all that we still had 2 quarts of berries left over!

Oh, did I mention that the day started with the doorbell ringing and there was our mason with more veggies, about to do a last little bit of work on our retaining wall?  He'd brought celery, eggplant, cucumbers and tomatoes.  Always welcome!

And, since I'm working Thursday, I picked up the farm share today.  And it was a LOT.  I came home with 1 quart sungold tomatoes, 1 quart plum tomatoes, 1 quart green beans, 8 banana peppers, dill, cilantro, 20 leaves of kale, 1 cabbage, 1 head of lettuce, 1 bunch of scallions, 2 head of garlic, 8 red onions, 12 other tomatoes, 2 pounds of cucumbers and 1 pound of patty pan squashes, 2 spaghetti squashes, 2 eggplant and 8 bell peppers, and I didn't even bother with the blackberries, husk cherries, flowers, parsley, or basil.

It was abundantly clear when I got home that if I didn't start canning immediately I would not be able to fit everything into my fridges.  So I made a batch of mild garden salsa:

2 quarts tomatoes, seeded and chopped

2 cups green peppers, chopped

2 cups scallions, chopped

2 poblano peppers, chopped

1/4 cup vinegar

1/6 cup sugar

2 T. Kosher salt

1 bunch cilantro

The cilantro was added after everything else was cooked and the immersion blender used to make it a little more thick and less chunky.  It was then canned immediately:  5 pints, 10 minutes in the canner.

Next I took some rainbow carrots which my parents had brought (from a farm near them we all adore) and the green beans and made Rainbow Pickles, which were the rainbow carrots and green beans prepared using the pickled carrots recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving but without the hot peppers and using dill sprigs rather than the heads.

Lastly, I got the broccoli from last week and the potatoes and garlic from this week's share and have everything ready for dinner.  Which I shall not cook, it being my birthday.

Foraged in Stages

As I think I've previously mentioned, this has been an excellent year for berries in our area.  Everywhere I go, I find some sort of berry or other.  So far it's been blueberries, elderberries, and blackberries, with a few raspberries thrown in for good measure.  It is much more fun to go on a walk when one can stop and eat a few berries!

However I have also wanted to make blackberry jam.  But I never get enough at one place to make that possible.  So I have been going on lots of walks, carrying ziploc bags or little berry baskets, and getting a few here, a few there.  I have lots of blackberry areas staked out, and would give more berries time to ripen and go back.  It's paid off; I accumulated and froze 2 quarts of berries and, yesterday, got about 1 cup more.  Time to make jam.

I pulled out the food mill this morning and ran everything through.  The yield was 5 cups of seedless blackberry puree, just enough for a batch of jam with the powdered pectin.  Somehow it made 9 cups of jam, which was a surprise, as the recipe indicated I'd only get 7.  Whatever!  The 8 year old, who helped get a lot of the berries, got to lick the pot for breakfast.  How great is that?

The 8 year old and I also got 3 pounds of elderberries while we were out yesterday, from that same wonderful shrub I'd found before.  More were ripe this time, so it was easier.  Yesterday I smushed them with an immersion blender and ran them through a jelly bag, getting 1 quart of juice.  Today I mixed that quart with 4 cups of sugar and made syrup.  I ended up with exactly 3 pints, divvied up into 12-ounce and 8-ounce jars.  I used Hank Shaw's recipe - he has terrific recipes for foraged foods.  (As an aside, I'm hoping to go to his book tour stop in our area this fall.)

Two foraged canning projects in one day!  Crazy!

Springtime at the Whole Foods

And they have my favorite grapes!

We've already established that I have an attraction to foods that are only in the stores for limited times, right?  One of those foods happens to be Muscat grapes, which are just so amazingly tasty and beautiful I have to buy lots of them when I see them.  Which is now.  I bought about 6.5 pounds yesterday and at least 2/3 of that have been eaten!  (Not entirely by me...)

Another thing I finally got brave enough to buy was a package of kumquats.  I see them all the time and decided that I should not be so timid.  My Brasilian friend says that the ones she used to have in Brasil were much sweeter than these, though.  So, after struggling through a few I decided I would candy the rest.  I cut them all in half and simmered them for 20 minutes in a simple syrup (1 cup water, 1 cup sugar) and then put them in a jar.  I did not process it, but it sealed anyway from the cooling of the syrup.  It'll go in the fridge, along with another jar of just the syrup, in case we want to make creamsicle sundaes or something.

Root Beer Syrup with a Twist

I went for a walk in the woods today, keeping my eye out for foragy-type things.  I have it in my head right now to find locust tree flowers, but I am always looking for morels after a friend found some in his backyard recently.  (Talk about envy...)  What I came away with is sassafras root.

Using Hank Shaw's recipe for root beer syrup, I made a batch.  I did not have any burdock root, and I'm still a little shaky on what burdock is, so I figured I'd proceed without it.  In his cookbook he says that's fine.  However, at the last minute I discovered I don't actually have peppermint extract in the house.  If I'd saved the wintergreen berries I'd found last weekend I could have popped those in but, no.  So I used a peppermint candy.  Close enough.  A little extra sugar won't hurt, right?

The other change is that I'm attempting to can it, like other syrups, rather than just store it in the fridge.  So I put the syrup in pint jars (4) and processed it for 10 minutes in the boiling water canner and let it rest for 5 before removing it.

We had an opportunity to use the syrup: 4 T. with seltzer was just right.

I also brought home a few leaves so will try drying them in the oven overnight to make file powder.  Not that I've ever used file powder, but it might come in handy someday.

Licking the pot suggested that it tastes pretty much like root beer soda, and that is a good thing.

I Think We Have Enough Raspberries Now

Yes, I did go and pick more raspberries yesterday - enough to make 5 cups of puree and give the kids a few to eat. The raspberries are winding down, it took a little longer and I gave up before I had a full 4 quarts of berries.

While the syrup recipe calls for 6 cups of puree, it's an easy conversion to whatever amount you have. 5 cups of puree, 8.3 cups of sugar, and 0.2 cups of lemon juice were brought to a boil and then simmered, stirring constantly, for 5 minutes. This made 5 pints of syrup. These get processed in the boiling water canner for 10 minutes. I left about a half-inch of headspace in each jar; the recipe didn't specify so I guessed.

This morning I made pancakes with applesauce in the batter. I'd never done that before, now I wonder, why not? They were so yummy! One of my jars from yesterday hadn't sealed so I needed to use it first - I still have 8 jars in my inventory and I'm sure I will be making more.

A Mess of Raspberries

Today was an eventful day. I got off shift at 8 am, got home around 12:15, and gathered up the troops to go raspberry picking. There is an organic raspberry farm near us and, in the 3 years I've been going there, I have never seen the raspberries so plump or plentiful. All the rain, I guess. Anyway. It took me less than an hour to fill a huge bucket, and the kids helped with little buckets. In total, we picked 7 pounds of raspberries, but that included 1.5 pounds for our friend's children who participated in the picking. So we brought home 5.5 pounds.

"Mom? I'm only going to help pick if you make me a pie. Please? I want a pie."

So I made a fresh raspberry pie. Baked a frozen pie shell for 12 minutes, filled it with fresh raspberries, and topped it with a thick sauce consisting of 1 c. sugar, 3 T. cornstarch, 1 c. crushed raspberries, and 1/2 c. water, boiled until thick. The pie then was refrigerated until after dinner. And it was GOOD. Mmmm.

On to the canning! After some soul searching and discussion with the family, we decided we had enough jam. *gasp!* However, I had just enough left to make raspberry syrup. Out came the food mill, which made a big mess, but got me exactly 6 cups of puree. And a lot of leftover seeds (more on that later). I decided I didn't have time tomorrow so I would tolerate some solids in my syrup, and started stirring. I looked away for 1 second (or so it seemed) and it boiled over! What a mess - much, much worse than the food mill! And, (this is the worst part, since I hate wasting things), I lost probably 3/4 c. of syrup. Drat!

The final yield was 3 pints, 2 12-ounce jars, and 1 half-pint. Plus a little extra which we will likely use for breakfast.

The leftover seeds were forced into a bottle and white vinegar was added, maybe we'll get some raspberry vinegar out of it. We also brought out a bottle of vodka and added some of the pulp to it as well. Another experiment. The rest was frozen in case any of these experiments are successful or there are others out there who know what to do with seedy raspberry pulp. Do you have any suggestions?