Strawberry Jam. So simple you should learn some Hawaiian while you make it.

Mmmm...splattery goodness. Maika'i

Back by the Chesapeake where I grew up, strawberries have long since been picked or baked by the unrelenting sun, but here in the Northwest, they're going strong. This year, I was lucky enough to get enough from the home garden to make a batch of jam without curtailing my daughters' grazing. Like most foods I really love, jam is pretty simple to make. So simple, that maybe you can learn some Hawaiian while you do it. Here's a dictionary to help you.

Dump the following into a big steel stock pot:

• 11 cups  of  berries (hap-hazardly & half-heartedly smash 'em down prior to measuring, but whole-heartedly ku'i da buggas with a potato masher once they’re into the kettle)
• 4.5 cups of sugar

I brought this up to a low boil while distracted by other tasks, so it coulda been done faster, but longer only means more time for everything to come all miko (your dictionaries tend to speak of salt with this word, but I've heard it used to convey the idea of something marinating, sitting together while flavors blend and soak through), which I think for jam means a better chance of it coming pa’a, and not all he’e.

Speaking of which, it was around this time that I added 

• Pectin (powder kind) - 1 regular and 1 of supposedly no-sugar-needed [given my results, maybe you should add another]

Then I let it boil quietly for a little while longer, until one time when I took out the spoon, the sugar-red clung well enough, and I began putting out the jars.
Did I mention that I was sterilizing jars in the canner this whole time? No? Well I was, but not to turn around and plop them back in the boiling bath for processing. My grandmothers sealed strawberry jam with molten paraffin, using a can with a bent-rim spout to pour the wax onto the jarred jam; the can sits in a small pot of hot water, so that drips won’t burst into flame.

The yield is 7 pints, maybe a little less. There was not all that much foam to scrape off the post-pectin boil, and some jam managed to find its way onto the kettle, the jam-pouring big measuring cup, the spoon, the counter, my sweatshirt, and some other place that I will only discover weeks from today. So the yield would be a solid 7 pints to a cook whose frugality extends to actually being neat.

Now, 7 pints of jam is a pretty small amount, but it came from a 3rd-year patch of my own planting, so I’m pretty happy. A day’s easy picking from 27 square feet, give or take, mellowing and softening in the fridge for a couple of days, working toward miko, and now it’s jam. Not a bad small side project for a weekend.

How was this jam? A little he'e, to be honest, but I couldn’t be bothered to do more than throw in whatever pectin was at hand, and it didn’t end up as syrup, at least. A day in the fridge before serving helps, and it’s possible to make a sandwich with it, which satisfies the kids’ main criterion. If your own requirement is to have a thicker jam, the  find another recipe, or throw in another pack o pectin, and maybe more sugar,...whatever works.

The flavor, on the other hand, is ono. I have no idea what variety the berries are, but they are medium sized, and red to the core, no pulp, all juicy. Mmmm. If you’ve been comparing recipes, you’ve noticed that I don’t use as much sugar as some people, because my tongue likes a tang, but it’s plenty sweet.

Spring Garlic

Garlic pokes up through colder ground and shorter days than a lot of its garden compadres. Even in my yard's procrastinating Spring, only a day after Equinox, the vee-creased shoots are ankle high. This is in a new bed enriched with fireplace ash, maybe a hundred or so plants. There are a few odd rows here and there in the yard, and of course a few heads I missed last fall sprouting green tonsures.


Contrary to the Fall-planting orthodoxy, I pulled up and split up some of the volunteer knobs, replanting willy nilly just a couple of weeks ago. Others I let be until a hankering for scallions or scapes, maybe an autumnal bulbil, brings me back. Freebies for the rest of the year, with the extra spice only disorthodoxy can summon.


Meanwhile, inside the house, the cloves awaken. As soon as the mature heads are pulled from the soil, garlicians struggle to make them last as long as possible. A cool dry garage and some jars of olive oil did the trick this year. At least until the Solstice, when even under roof and Winter's cloudy grey, the cloves hear the call of the lengthening days and begin their six-month stretch. Either I've selected better keepers or I was lucky this time around, because by this time in previous years, all the dry stuff had long since decided to be a new plant.

The last of the dried cloves, just now sprouting, don't inspire foodies. They're yellowing and getting a little soft; the only crisp part is a green shoot through the heart of each one, reaching out the top for light. Meanwhile, at the other end, octopodic roots begin to reach out, hoping to get their tentacles into some soil. Some people would plant them, others (under the thrall of Autumnist dogma?) would waste them, or at best relegate them to the compost. 


But being frugal, I use them up. Sliced, each piece is an eye with a green pupil, a look I like. Then again, doing nothing more than peeling them (easy, at this late stage) and tossing them in whatever happens to be in the works works as well. A recent desire to cut out the chemicals and other afflictions of canned beans, I've been buying them dried, and cooking them in a crock pot. A head of past-prime garlick cloves added to this gestation is a fine and nearly effortless addition. I will end this entry with proof, in the form of another of my so-simple-it's-not-even-a-recipe recipes:

Crocked Garlic and Beans

• Clean and rinse 1 pound of dried beans
• Peel however much garlic you want
• Put it all in a crock-pot with water
• Turn it on
• Wait

While you are waiting, decide whether you want to add anything else. You'll have hours to think of extra ingredients, such as: beer, salt, schmaltz, celery,... You should probably stop obsessing about bean cuisine right about now. It's unbecoming of simple staples, which have humble souls that are put off by high-falutingness (but tolerant of flatusness). Just let 'em cook until you are satisfied with their mushiness. And turn whatever epicurean inspiration that might strike toward something to go with your crock o beans. 

 

Gleanings

V8, anyone? Disclosure: the 8 includes an earwig and various fungi.

Sunday, as many people prayed to Jesus or for grid-iron victory (usually both, where I grew up), I devoted myself to cleaning the Summer's fading cultivations. Turns out that I was right on time, because that night it frosted hard, but I was blissfully ignorant about meteorology other than it being a great day to be in the garden. As they all are.

The pitiful other row of tomatoes came out last week, but this time round I went after the hoop house (there's a post about that somewhere). Maybe a third of a milk crate of pale fruit, some of which can be coddled to ripeness, but the rest destined to be a fake apple cobbler. Or something.

So now the hoop house is planted in spinach and lettuce and again cocooned in its plastic. Other beds are pretty much cleaned up, too, and in the process I've gotten the last carrots, penultimate beets, the tenacious tribe of coriander still on the stalk, and all the other leftovers that populate the Fall garden. Not the beautiful fine fruits of Summer, some of it so slug and bug-eaten it gets flung, but I try to waste not. 

Slowly working my way down the rows and round the beds, I glean also lessons for next year. Like, I'm the only one who east scarlet runner beans, and all the string beans except for Potomac got tough this year. Or, if I don't cut blackberry soon, it'll reach critical mass and become a monstrous task by Spring. If not Winter.

Harvest time is all about the gathering. Sheaves reaped, families around tables, communities around festivities. Amber waves become tides of food, a pulse of nutrition that will work its way through the populace.

Gleaning is more private. Humbler yields fill the gleaner's bag, and there is an individual acuity required to locating and recovering remnants; patience is a virtue, but sharpness of eye and mind is even better. The very fact that you are approaching a field already harvested means that a few people may each get to go home with a meal, but a big group would go home with a pittance apiece.

Another humbleness hovers like a dusty cloud around gleaning. Some people would never stoop so low. Gleaning puts you with the birds and the rodents, picking up leftovers not even worth the effort of decent society. "Reap" is a word of Anglo-Saxon origin, while "glean" is Celtic; our English speaks of old social orders still. At least neither is Latin. 

So for this year, the gleaning is about over. Only melted molded blackberries hang on the vines. The pondering over lessons gleaned can continue inside by the fire all Winter.

Garden 1 - 11

Garden posts 1 - 11 appear at the blog Mojourner Truth. The numbered posts are all from this year (2011), but there are others that are earlier and have no coherent title strategy.

You can find them here, if you want.

Garden 12: The Harvest Touch

For every fruit and vegetable, there exists lore on when to pick it. For most, there are competing versions. One grandma knows a melon is ripe by the sound of of a thumb-thump. Another by the tendrils of aroma reaching out to her nose. Someone else notices the brown of the stem or a slight give to the flesh around it. 

I collect these nuggets of wisdom, and have found some to be true (others, not), but that's mostly the anthropologist in me, collector of ethnobotanical tidbits. As a gardener, I've come to rely on pretty much one indicator for anything I'm picking: it'll come off easily when the time is right.

For once, I'm not trying to be a smart-ass. Fruits and vegetables really do just let go when they're ready. The blueberry falls off in my hand, the zucchini snaps free with a quick twist. You have to know how to pick it--tug at the zucchini and you're likely to get the whole vine--but as long as you have that trick down, the ripe ones come off easy. Most of the time, the technique has to do with bending the stem backward, which makes it snap without tearing off a section of branch. Thumb pushes on that little elbow of a tomato stem while your hand pulls the fruit in the opposite direction, and the ripe globe falls into the basket of your fingers.

The un-ripe fruit clings. If it is not ready, a gentle touch won't make it come. Forced harvest ends in plants peeled and split, scarred and open to attack by fungi and bugi. The apple lands in your palm with a big spur that could have yielded again next year. The berry loses its grip, but tastes sour, and maybe whips back at you with a thorny cane as drupe comes loose. Plants resist impatient reapers. This is why machine-harvested produce will never be as good as that gathered on an idle amble by a sentient being.

The sweetest tastes come from the softest touch. A single finger caress. A gentle twist. Maybe growing the crop took hours of digging and seeding, waiting and weeding, but the best pick lasts an instant, and the fruit of your labor sites in your hand, ready to be eaten and enjoyed, prepared or shared.