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.

Figured It Out

When I made the dilled beans, one of my jars broke. I wasn't entirely sure why. Today, I was making bread and butter pickles and had a jar break again which is a bummer but that led to me finally understanding what is happening.

Since I've gotten my new stove the burners are much hotter. So if I put the jars on the counter next to the canning pot, the heat from the burner radiates out the side and gets the jar hotter than boiling water. So, when the jar is placed in the canner, the temperature differential causes the jar to break. This doesn't happen with jam, only pickles, because with pickles the jars have to sit while I get them all filled before I pour in the liquid, so they have more of an opportunity to get hot. 

Now that I know, I can change my workflow to avoid this. 

I did end up with four pints of bread and butter pickles, using cucumbers from the farm share and from my garden, plus a Hungarian hot wax pepper for a little heat. The kind of heat that doesn't crack jars, at least.

Thunder Clouds

As I drove to get the farm share today, I saw big white fluffy clouds on the horizon. I wondered if I might get rained on. The answer was Yes, and then some...

I'm not sure why this is, but I'm always picking green beans whenever I get caught in a thunderstorm at the farm. Today was no exception. The share was for unlimited beans, and I wanted to can some dilly beans, so I continued to pick, soaked through in the heavy rain, with thunder all around me (thankfully I did not see any lightning) as I gathered as many of the smaller, more tender beans I could find and some dill flower heads. Ultimately I had enough for 3 pints of dilly beans.

Which are now 2 pints. One of the jars cracked in the canner and the bottom fell off. Whoops. 

Serious Disappointment

Ever since the new oven arrived and I discovered it had a convection function (I'd forgotten) I had been planning to make macarons and try it out. My theory was that my barely functional gas oven couldn't maintain a stable temperature and that convection was required so the heat would be drier. Today the elderchild and I made a small batch of macarons. Everything was going fine. Until it wasn't.

Note: every single cookie cracked. All are stuck to the parchment.

My best guess is that the parchment I bought was just... crap. There is no other way to describe it. I had cheap parchment before, and then I bought a batch from Amazon that was great and worked perfectly. So when it was time to buy more, I went through my order history and ordered the exact same product. That was somehow completely different when it arrived. I'd had heard this complaint about Amazon recently, that other vendors were reselling products on Amazon that were not the correct product and not of the same quality. This is why, in the past I had not purchased toilet paper and other sundries through Amazon; mainly because the reviews for various products indicated that they were also subject to the same bait-and-switch.

Anyway, you can imagine our disappointment. We can't even pry all these broken macarons off the paper without the paper coming with the cookie. It's ridiculous. Every single cookie was ruined. Every. Single. One.

Setting aside all the work involved, almond flour is not cheap.

I have ordered King Arthur Brand parchment. And if it arrives being anything other than King Arthur Brand parchment, I will send it back. 

*TINK*

That's the sound I hate to hear when I have the pressure canner going. It means something has gone awry!

For New Year's Day, we were coming back from skiing and a friend had purchased a goose with a plan that she would cook it at our house after we got back. THAT plan went off without a hitch. She found a terrific recipe for roast goose, complete with a gravy that was just OK until the last ingredient was added - minced goose liver. Then the gravy was phenomenal. And I'm not usually a gravy fan! (I'll admit, I had eyes on that liver so I could add it to the paté I'm making soon but, I agree, the gravy needed it more.) We saved all the bones to make stock and I set aside some chopped up meat in the freezer to make a different soup variation...Turgoosuck. Well, maybe the name still needs a little work.

Last week I took the bones out of the freezer and made stock. Four quarts of stock, to be exact. And I set them aside until I had time to can them. See, to make the soup, I need turkey, duck and goose stocks, and I can only really make one at a time. But I've been busy, so I haven't had the time I needed to can them. Until today. And only because the youngerchild is sick and wasn't in school and so isn't doing the usual afternoon activities. So. I took the stock, which was cold, skimmed off the fat and poured it into four quart jars. Which were also cold. I put cold water in the pressure canner, left the top off, and heated everything up together. This seemed to be going fine. Then I put the lid on, and continued to heat everything up until it started to vent steam. After it had vented steam for five minutes, I heard it.

TINK.

Sadly, I know what that means! I turned off the burner, undid the canner and, sure enough, one of the jars had snapped at the bottom. The TINK was from the jar pieces hitting each other in the canner. I had to take everything out, rinse out the canner, and put in new water. Which, now that the jars of stock were hot, had to be heated up before I could put the jars back in. Once everything seemed to be the same temperature, I put the jars (three of them) back in and am trying again.

So much for trying to be clever.

Also, I'm making duck stock today, and will can this as well. Then, all I'll need is time to make the turkey stock and then I can devote an afternoon to making soup. Turgoosuck soup. Durkeese? Gooduckey?

Problem Solving

Let's talk cookies for a minute.

I love to bake cookies. I used to always bake cookies for my friends. In college, as I had access to a kitchen, I had a deal: if you bought the chocolate chips and the sour cream, I would bake you a batch of cookies. I did this all through medical school as well. When things got hectic as I became a parent I ended up baking less and, when we moved to this house, I was never able to get the cookies right, so I gravitated away from baking those basic, lovely chocolate chip cookies everyone wanted.

Over the years since we've been here, I've chipped away at some of the problems that were making my cookies come out wrong. They were too flat, too crispy or too cakey. I was aiming for "just right," which seemed impossible. I changed the recipe from the one I liked with the sour cream to the traditional one on the packages of chocolate chips. I bought a thermometer for the oven so I could be sure the oven temperature was correct. I even learned more about baking and still, they weren't perfect.

Yesterday I was inspired to bake cookies again. I took a look at the recipe and, using my pastry school training, thought critically about the recipe. It calls for baking soda. Baking soda needs acid to work and there really isn't a lot of acid in the recipe. There was acid, certainly, in the recipe that calls for sour cream, but I wasn't using that one anymore, and I couldn't figure out where the acid was coming from. So I decided to add 1/4 teaspoon of baking powder.

And that, my friends, is what finally made the difference.

Also yesterday I made a batch of the cheese bread I like so much, using Legion and this time getting the liquid content under control. I did the same thing, using 8 ounces of Legion and reducing the flour and milk accordingly. They were perfect! 

Last Batch of the Season

Of caponata. Maybe?

I had three small eggplants, a green pepper, and five tomatoes from the farm which got converted into caponata today. These, plus onion, celery, capers, olives, vinegar, lemon juice and sugar made 8 cups. When I first got the recipe from Roxanne, the amount of vinegar was listed as 1/4 cup. In the book, it says one cup. That seemed like a lot, having subsequently tasted the end result. So today for one batch I only added 1/2 cup, and I tested the pH to make sure it was acidic enough to can. Which it was. I think these 8 jars will be part of my gift stash.

I Don't Think I Can Blame the Oven

I tried.

I tried to make brioche this weekend. The right way - making the dough and letting it sit overnight in the fridge. Everything seemed to be going well. The butter incorporated, the dough felt right. But this morning when I went to punch it down, it looked either dry or frozen. Dry is bad, frozen is potentially recoverable. I moved the dough to the other fridge.

This afternoon, it looked about the same. I brought it out to the counter and divided it. I wanted to make the classic little brioche à tête - a larger ball with a smaller ball sitting on top. They were rolled out, stacked, and proofed. When they were ready (and they did proof, so whatever happened last night wasn't too bad), I brushed them with an egg wash and baked them.

The little "heads" promptly fell off. Some fell completely off the pan and were lost, others just fell to the side so the resulting breads looked like BB-8's lying on their sides. They split on the sides, too, but not the tops. That may be a sign of underproofing or that my oven wasn't hot enough. Or both.

The rest of the dough became cinnamon rolls that will get reheated and iced in the morning for breakfast. They will taste just fine, but they don't look right, either. I'm rather disappointed. Some of it may be the oven but I think more of it is technique. Apparently I need to work on this some more.

How to Disguise Bactrim

Bactrim Suspension is nasty.  Artificially cherry flavored with a strong, long lasting aftertaste of medicine.  Unfortunately, sometimes it is the only option.  There are no chewables, and the tablets are LARGE.  So if your kid can't swallow the tablets, what are you to do?

Dose 1:  Straight.  A disaster.  Total meltdown.  Finally took it after threatening to take away the video games.

Dose 2: Mixed with some Nestle Quik.  Smelled chocolatey, did not affect the flavor a whit.

Dose 3: Crushed up 2 snack sized KitKats and mixed the Bactrim in.  Child actually smiled while eating it.

Dose 4: Mixed with 1 T. of strawberry mango jam.  Got it in, but barely.  Required spoon-feeding.

Dose 5:  Back to the KitKats.

Dose 6:  Made a smoothie with yogurt, honey, orange juice and banana.  Not bad.  Took too long to drink and we were about to miss the bus for school, left half behind so took half a dose straight (with a lot of fussing).  The second half of the next dose was mixed back into the smoothie, that will be Dose 7. 8.

Dose 7: Mixed with melty pumpkin ice cream.  Had to resort to the no video games threat again.

Dose 8: Back to the smoothie.  Had to add more honey and a little cinnamon.  Drank it really, really slowly.  Finished it, but barely made the bus.  Lots of fussing.

Dose 9:  KitKats.  It's Halloween, so we have lots.  No fussing at all.

Dose 10:  KitKats again.  Choosing the path of least resistance.

Dose 11: Mixed with honey; 1 teaspoon of honey to 2 teaspoons of medicine.  Not horrible, better when we also added some warmed milk.

Dose 12:  Baked into the last pancake in the batch.  Made the pancake pink.  As long as it was slathered with maple syrup, it was OK.  "The best so far," child said.  I cannot find any information about whether or not the antibiotic loses potency when heated.  I might ask a pharmacist.

Dose 13:  Mixed with a mashed up Reeses cup and Milky Way mini.  There wasn't anything to absorb the liquid of the medicine (no wafers!) so ultimately got a piece of cheese and dipped into what was left.  Weird.

Dose 14:  Last one!  Warmed milk, added the Bactrim and a generous spoonful of honey.  Somehow, this small amount (about 4 ounces) took half an hour to drink.  Warm milk and honey without the Bactrim goes down in approximately 45 seconds.  Even Dose 11 went down faster.

I did ask a pharmacist the baking question, she was going to look it up and call me back and I never heard anything more.  I guess there isn't any data out there about efficacy.

Ultimately, I think the KitKats were the easiest and most successful of the attempts to get this into my child.  Without even knowing it, we found something that absorbed a lot of the liquid and overpowered the taste enough to make it tolerable.  However, I do not advocate having 4 snack sized KitKats every day one is on a medication.  Hopefully this is the last time we will have to do this, and that my child will be more motivated to swallow larger pills.

Hoppy Beer, Day One

We've been meaning to find time to brew a batch of beer in which I could use the wild hops I found last fall.  Time just keeps getting away from us.  Finally, we got the kick we needed to get started; my husband's work is having a homebrew showcase in a month or so.  We'd like to enter this beer.  We hope it's worthy.

After a lot of discussion with the proprietors of the brewing supply store my husband came home with a kit for something called "Hopehead Pale Ale."  To that we plan to add our own hops during the second rack, which will be next week sometime.  Today we steeped the grains, boiled the wort, and it's currently cooling enough to pitch the yeast.  Then it will ferment for about a week before we move to the second rack.  Initial SG appears to be about 1.042 with a potential alcohol of 5.5%.

I felt badly about throwing away all the steeped grains, and I thought about making horse treats with them.  A quick search online suggested they made a good bread.  The only problem with this is that my yeast must have been old so after mixing all this damp grain with flour, sugar and yeast and kneading and waiting, it didn't really rise.  I thought maybe I could bake it anyway, like a quick bread, but that was an epic failure.  Next time, I will either make sure I have new yeast, or just make dog and pony treats (both are possible, recipes are different).  There are enough dogs and ponies in my life that they can at least enjoy whatever I come up with.

In other news, I made strawberry-chocolate chip pancakes this morning and now we only have 1 quart of berries left.  Since this bread didn't work out, I think I will make strawberry muffins and give some to our neighbors when I return their plate which arrived last weekend with cookies on it. 

Well, That's...Um...Different...

See that tiny little hole?

Violet season is upon us and I had gathered 2 cups of violets and infused them in 2 cups of hot water, then set aside this pint of dark blue infusion until I could make jelly.  This morning I added 1/4 cup of lemon juice, half a package of powdered pectin, and 2.5 cups of sugar and made 6 4-ounce jars of violet jelly for my gift stash.  That isn't the different part.

My canning pot has sprung a leak.

Really.  I have never worn out a pot before.  That's just crazy!

I guess I'll be making a trip to the hardware store today for another one...

Rats!

It's the first batch of soup in ages, and one of the jars broke in the canner!

I really hate it when that happens, it's such a mess to clean up.  But I still have 13 pints of beef and barley soup anyway.  I made it basically like the last batch but left out the wine and the tomato paste (and the last minute veggies) and used extra celery and carrots (the carrots, at least, are from the farm share).  I also had leftover "Slow Cooker Osso Buco" in the freezer to add, so that replaced the tomato paste.  The other part that was different was that I didn't really cook the barley before I put it in the jars, since that way the barley would cook up but not thicken up the soup as much as previous batches.  This was processed in the pressure canner for 75 minutes at 10 pounds of pressure.  I am pretty sure I heard the jar break at the beginning of the processing time.  At that point, there is just nothing to do but wait until it's all done and deal with the mess.

The freezers are progressively getting emptier.  Which is a good thing.  I've been slowly working on this for a while because we've been having technical difficulties with our ice maker and so have had to defrost the kitchen freezer once already.  I discovered all sorts of things hiding in there so made a plan to start using up what I have.  Then I can start fresh when things go on sale and I'll have space to put it all! 

What a Mess!

In today's farm share:  3 pounds of beets.  Add that to the beets I already had and I really needed to can some beets.  They take up way too much room in the fridge!

Since I have a bunch of pickled beets, I thought I'd try pressure canning them.  I used the standard recipe from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving and had 4 quarts' worth.  But one of the jars cracked in the canner, which was an unpleasant surprise.  It cleaned up surprisingly quickly, and since the jar broke cleanly I was able to salvage the beets and put them in the fridge to eat now.  I think I know what happened, too.  I ran out of boiling water when I was filling the jars and, in the time it took for me to boil more, the bulk of the jar cooled too much.  Then, when I put it in the canner, the water it went into was too hot and so the jar cracked along the base.  The bottom of the jar just split right off!

Strawberry Margaritas, Take Two

The strawberry margarita jam didn't set, even after a few days.  I'm getting a little tired of this; it only seems to happen with the liquid pectin.  Maybe I should move to powdered pectin and move on.  Regardless, I opened all the jars today and put 7.5 cups of jam in a pot.  I brought it to a boil, added 22.5 T. sugar (3 T. per cup of jam), some more lime juice, and another package of Certo.  This boiled for the requisite one minute and yielded 8.5 cups of jam (Magic?  No, it's just the extra sugar...)

This batch will set, I know this from playing with the jam in the pot - it set on the spoon, on the sides of the pot, and in a little bit I put in the fridge.  It hasn't lost its margarita-y-ness, either.  

Triple Berry

This morning I picked a pint of mulberries. They aren't at the peak of ripeness yet, but I figured it would be OK for jam. I crushed these with about a half a cup of blueberries, added 2 T. lemon juice, 3/4 c. sugar, and half a package of powdered low-sugar pectin. Then I added the contents of those last 2 pints of strawberry jam and boiled it all together. 2 pints and one 4-ounce jar are currently processing. I'd made this triple berry combo before and it is yummy, so definitely worth making again. And this concoction seems to have gelled. That's good, too!

Second Attempt

Last year I made 2 consecutive batches of strawberry jam and we noticed that some set and some didn't. I wondered if the distinction was the batch - slightly smaller pot, utensils maybe not dry, or something - but couldn't tell. So I paid attention the other day and noted that the second batch, in the slightly smaller pot, didn't set up. But then I noticed that 2 of the other 4 pints didn't set up either. So I have no idea what's going on. But there is a way to make them gel.

Tonight I boiled 4 pints of jam with another package of Certo, 1 and a half cups of sugar, and 4 T. lemon juice. I am keeping my fingers crossed that this will work. If it does, tomorrow I'll take the other 2 pints and mix them with some mulberries and blueberries (if they don't get eaten by then) and make a new batch of triple berry jam. We do, after all, have a lot of strawberry jam variations so can handle losing a couple of pints...