stopping time, moving forward

tart cherry preserves - a taste of my childhood!

Ugh. Once again, where has the time gone? Well. I have been making things and taking photos all this long, hot, dry summer. I just haven't taken the next step of culling and editing photos and posting. I also feel like I've barely been keeping my head above water with the making.

Part of it's the heat; look at the grass in that top photo - little straw-twigs! This summer was a prolonged battle of attrition to try and keep the garden alive. It was more work and money than it was worth and eventually I threw up my hands and said, "I give up."

It was the right choice. And now that some more seasonable weather has returned (three good drenching storms in a 3-week period), I feel like I've had a little more time to gather myself and get things done. So I sat down yesterday morning and culled a bunch of photos to put together a couple of posts.

I found tart cherries at the U District Farmer's Market (thanks to a tip from my awesome neighbour) and made preserves - well, more of a low-sugar pie filling, really. I was only able to get 2 lbs of cherries, so these won't be shared, because after you remove the pits, the 2 lbs have pretty much become 1 lb and it's just not enough!! These are for turnovers or eating on English muffins this fall, and reminisces about the mature tart cherry tree I grew up with. (More on that in a moment.)

blackcurrant preserves!

At one point this summer, I walked into Ballard Market and there were flats of blackcurrants for just $10. I took one and went through the laborious process of picking all the bits of stems and flower ends off them - and then I made delightful blackcurrant jam. I have given lots of these away already, sharing the bounty, but there should be a few left at the holidays. I also baked the leftover preserves (when I ran out of jars to pack them into) into a completely heavenly vegan coffee cake (I had some stress this summer and my doctor ordered me off dairy - it took about three weeks for things to level out, and I started getting creative with the vegan baking). 

And now, back to that little note about the cherry tree of my childhood. I've bought one for my own garden: a Northstar. It's supposedly self-dwarfing, only growing 8-10' tall and wide, able to be netted and harvested without a giant ladder, resistant to cracking and brown rot, and when mature, producing plenty of fruit for a family of four. We only have two in our family, but I definitely eat more than my fair share of tart cherries - as a child and teen, these were the only fruits I would eat to the point of allergic reaction: when my grandparents visited and my grandpa brought jars of tart cherry sauce, I'd eat it all day ... until I broke out in hives on my wrists and inner forearms. I'd take a cold shower and put on calamine lotion before bed ... and in the morning I'd start all over again - no regrets!!

And where will we put this tart cherry tree? Well, we'll put it in our new garden that we're going to build ... in our new home. Cass and I have become homeowners - finally! - for the first time in our lives. I expect the tone of this blog will shift toward more decorating, gardening, and home repair/upgrade projects in the future, but for now we're living in boxes as we can't start moving until Tuesday.

And maybe the new home will be just the prod I need to get back into the swing of things here. Let's hope so - because Pacific Rain has been languishing this summer!!

so I can find it later: cherry almond smoothie

Tonight I went looking for the recipe for this smoothie and couldn't believe I hadn't posted it on my blog! How inconvenient! So, even though this is more than a mite out of season, here it is - I think I'll have it for dessert later, yum yum.

This is my current favorite smoothie at my favorite Seattle vegan spot, Chaco Canyon. After sampling it for the first time this summer, I came home and immediately started tinkering, trying to figure out the proportions so that I could recreate it myself. Since I started making my own almond milk on a semi-regular basis, I have all this ground almond pulp left over. I read that it could be used in smoothies and immediately remembered: oh yeah, cherry-almond smoothies! Yum! I love the zero-waste aspect of this: some of the almond milk goes into the smoothie, and the leftover almonds do, too.

Without further ado:

Cherry Almond Smoothie

1/4 - 1/3 c almonds (or almond pulp/meal)
2 smallish handfuls frozen pitted dark sweet cherries (so, just over 1 c?)
1 c almond milk
1 banana
1 Tbl maple syrup (I like Trader Joe's dark grade B syrup)

Place the almonds (or ground almond pulp/meal) in the blender. Add a bit of the almond milk, and grind up the nuts a bit. Add the cherries and the remainder of the almond milk and blend. Add the banana and maple syrup and work your way up to high speed to get a smooth, thick treat!

The last time I was at Chaco, I swear there was a bit of a cocoa flavor to this, as well - it was like drinking a Cherry Garcia shake ... but vegan! Holy smokes! I'm going to try adding a bit of cacao and see if I can recreate the effect.

italian renaissance

Growing up, Italian food was, like, the height of seductive cuisine in my world. In any TV show, people who were dating, people who were celebrating anniversaries, people who received promotions ... went to an Italian restaurant. Same with movies. As far as I knew, there was nothing more romantic or intimate or special than an Italian restaurant. Maybe French - but in films and on TV, the French restaurant was a place for experts; you had to speak the names with a French accent, and the waiters were always intimidatingly superior (pace francophiles, I'm talking about a child's impressions of pop culture 25 years ago here). People were obsessed with balsamic vinegar and arugula, every fancy cook with a cable cooking show would whip out that pasta machine and I'd feel a sense of awe and desire - heck, even as small child, one of my favorite toys was that play-doh expresser toy. Man, I loved that thing! 

These days, though, you don't see a lot of hype about Italian cooking. It's everywhere, it's comforting ... probably fewer people have the time for the intensive prep work of making things from scratch. The exciting new areas of cuisine lately seem to be other Mediterranean cultures - and points east. Freekeh. Quince. Preserved lemons.

I've been wondering if it's about time for Italian food to make a comeback as a trend.

Certainly, in my own kitchen, I've been making more pasta and pizza this summer than in many summers I can remember - and yes, entirely from scratch. We even have the fancy pasta machine now, but I don't seem to have the strength to change the settings on the thickness so I only ever use it if Cass is here to help me. Most of the time, I roll my pasta by hand, with a simple, solid wood, French-style tapered rolling pin that I bought at the hardware store for six or seven dollars (seriously, sometimes the simple, basic model is the best - I love the control the taper gives me, letting me pivot the pressure and work one bit of dough or crust at a time).

Tonight, it's fava bean agnolotti with a rich, creamy curry emulsion from The French Laundry cookbook. You can click the link to go to the recipe - it's on epicurious! The guys at my favorite produce stand down at the Public Market (aka Pike Place Market) had fava beans last week and I was terribly excited to see them. "Probably the last of the season for us," they told me, and admitted that the beans were a little past their prime - and should be cooked 1-2 minutes longer than normal. Since these are probably my last taste of favas until next spring, I wanted to find a nice way to showcase their flavor; and grinding them into a pasty filling also seemed a good way to deal with the potential issue of woodiness of overripe beans. I had fun folding the pasta into a new shape (for me), and breaking out my new fluted pastry wheel to make those pretty pinked edges (another one of those cheap, hard-working basic tools, we bought the fluted wheel at Mrs. Cook's for less than $8) that are so classic.

Sometimes, it's just so satisfying to stop what you're doing and spend a whole afternoon kneading eggs into flour, rolling out dough, and carefully forming perfect bites for a special dinner. And to boot, while I was waiting for the dough to rest, I squeezed in a good research session - the limited time was just the motivation I needed to overcome some procrastination/intimidation that's totally been holding me back on putting a grant proposal together. I guess even the quiet ritual of making pasta is a comforting influence, for me!

foraged 2014: huckleberries

As the summer berry picking season winds down, there are a few treats still in store: we've been picking huckleberries.

For some reason, I was so excited about the huckleberries this year that I kind of froze; I couldn't actually decide what to do with them. So, I put three jars up in a kind of sweet pickle, and then I made some eight or nine half-pint jars of barely-cooked jam. More like a preserve; in fact, I hadn't originally planned to add any pectin or anything at all, but the berries started producing masses of juice as they cooked (even the slightest bit), that I figured I'd better thicken it up a little. So I added some pectin and sugar - not much, though - and stopped cooking it while the berries were still intact. That way, I figured, some of these jars could be scooped into a pie shell, or folded into hand pies, smoothed over a tart or just ... 

over a toasted, buttered English muffin. For breakfast. Every day since last week. Yum!

summer in a glass

Got some things a'brewing in my kitchen - literally! This tall drink of beautiful is a riff on the cider recipe in Yvette Van Boven's Home Made Winter cookbook. The original, which is brewed in a bucket at room temp for 8 days, then aged in the fridge to build up bubbles, uses 6 1/2 pounds of grated apples, water, sugar, and spices. For this batch, I used 6 pounds of apples and 1/2 pounds of red and white currants, generously given to me by a friend who is blessed with some seriously heavy-yielding currant bushes in her garden (are we jealous yet?). Seeing as Van Boven says it's okay to just grind up the entire apple - seeds, stems, cores and all - and seeing as the mixture is later strained - twice! - I actually just put the bunches of currants (with their stems) through the food processor when I grated the apples, and figured I could strain out any organic bits later.

Now, a confession: the color wasn't quite this brilliant watermelon-hue on its own. As I'd just been reading an article about how the appearance of food really does affect our perception of it, I took my cider (which was naturally just a slightly-rosy amber color) and stirred in about 1 teaspoon of beet powder. That's right: dried, powdered beets. One teaspoon turned four liters of cider this gorgeous color, and didn't add even the faintest whiff of earthiness to the flavor.

These bottles have been ageing for a month or so in the fridge; they should be drunk by mid-September, though I'm thinking of holding on to them just a week longer and doing some kind of to-do to celebrate the equinox with friends - and this bright, crisp, berried taste of summer.

Currently, the bucket's host to the early stages of our next cider - apple-blackberry! I won't bother trying to adjust the color on that one; it's already a gorgeous deep purple.

a shifting sense

Lately, it seems, I've got autumn on the brain. Seattle's basking in the heat of August - the most reliably warm and dry month of the year - but I find my nose picking up the scent, here and there, of ripe decay, the richness of fruit melting into soil, and I can feel myself on the alert for the spicy incense of rotten leaves and the first hints of smoke from nighttime fires.

I've a few kitchen projects going on today, and they're all rather nice, little, simple things, the kind of things that require more sitting time than working time - and which make a girl feel rather accomplished at the expense of a minimum of effort. Nice, that. First, I'm experimenting with a new bitters (for drinks), using rowan berries (the very ones pictured above) as a bittering agent - it was a bit of a lightbulb moment a few weeks ago, when I was thinking about the intractable bitterness of these berries. If they turn out well, I'll recount the whole process on the blog later. For now, here's a pretty picture of rowan, in my harvesting basket, in a lucky photo that looks rather lovely and picturesque. And autumnal!

And below, those bounteous late-summer beauties: dahlias. My mother-in-law sent us home from the mountains yesterday with three cut-off plastic milk jugs, each stuffed full of dahlias. I made three arrangements for our house, and two big ones (in quart-size mason jars) for my neighbours. I snuck out of the house in my nightgown, a towel still wrapped around my wet hair, and left the jars on their porches, a sweet surprise for this morning. I've since added a brilliant, hottest-pink spidery dahlia from my own garden to the arrangement on the right, tucked just above the ginormous dinner-plate one. I love all their orange, coral, and purple brilliance. So happy, so carefree, so saturated with color.

A new postcard to show you tomorrow; I'm off to attend my haul of huckleberries, picked by the side of a mountain lake yesterday. Ah, perhaps it's not so autumnal, not yet. Just me, as ever, leaning into this, my favorite time of year, that shifting late-summer/early-autumn.

week of jam, day five: alpine blackberry, two ways

Ah, alpine blackberries. So tiny, so sweet, so floral, so much harder to pick than those Himalayan monsters that run rampant everywhere in the northwest (I like those, too, though; those are the ones I grew up eating, and they will always be a quintessential flavor of summer, for me). They're ripening early this year, too; normally we don't pick them until August, but we went up to Index two weekends ago to pick the thimbleberries and found ripe blackberries (and huckleberries - also ahead of schedule!) and picked a couple pints. I made two kinds of blackberry jam: a plain one (with just a little dash of rosewater at the end, to play up the floral notes in the berries), and then blackberry-sage. I used to love blackberry-sage tea as a younger adult. I haven't had any in years, but I still think of the flavor combo fondly. So, I packed up a few jars of the blackberry jam and set them in the canner to process and then went out to the garden and picked some fresh sage, washed and chopped it, and stirred it into the remaining jam in the pot. This decision meant I had to run my hot water canner for an extra 10 minutes (on an 85-degree day, ugh!), but I think it was worth it. Now we have his-n-hers blackberry jam for late autumn - I always like to eat this in November! =)

And yes, I did get up at 6:15am on a Saturday morning to water the garden and take pictures of jam in early morning sunlight! I've been sleeping so little lately, it's kind of awful. I'm getting bags under my eyes from it - but it's so hot at night and so bright so early in the morning that I just can't get a good rest. I seem to wake up at 3am every night now, too. Sometimes I go drink a glass of water, sometimes I get up and go to the bathroom, sometimes I just pet the cat (who, for some reason, hasn't let the heat dissuade her from sneaking into bed sometime in the wee hours of morning and snuggling up into my hip ... I'm kind of glad of it, actually; knowing that we're reaching the end-of-life for her means I want every last little furry snuggle that I can get).

(Here she is enjoying the handwoven, 100% wool rug I picked up at a charity event and cleaned ... clearly, just so she could play with/on it. It's her favorite place to sleep, chase her tail, roll and loll, and of course...those fringes are fun to attack!)

week of jam, day four: blackcap raspberry

I just realized I hadn't posted yet. Seattle's experiencing a real heatwave right now and I am feeling the effects - lethargy, crabbiness, man! I do not like it when the temps are over 80 degrees! And yes, I know, I know: 80 degrees? That's ridiculous! It's so much hotter everywhere else in the world! But here's the thing: do you know what the standing record is for number of days (continuous) with temperatures over 80 degrees in Seattle? Fifteen. Fifteen is the RECORD. It just doesn't get that hot here - and after living more than a decade of my life in this city, I'm glad that it doesn't.

Incidentally, the meteorologists are saying we might be starting a hot streak to break that record right now. We're already at day six. Ugh. As the temps rise, I'm glad I finished making jam earlier this week (oh yes, I still have MORE to share with you), and won't have to fire up the stove and heat the canner anytime soon. Which brings us to today's batch o' jam: blackcap raspberries. We've been growing these berries for a couple of years now, and they are finally starting to settle in and really take off, which is exciting! Blackcaps are native to the northeastern United States, and the nice thing about them is that they can grow and fruit in part-shade. We have a lot of shade in our back garden, so it's exciting to see these guys thriving and their fruit harvest starting to really amp up, despite the lack of light. (But oh, that shady back yard is SO NICE in this heat. Yes, at this time of year, every year, I am thankful for the grove of doug fir that blocks the sun to the south, and the hemlock and stand of cedar which block the sun to the west. I don't have nearly the garden I'd like to have at this house because of  all the shade, but it is ever-so-nice in the summer - and lovely to look at any time of year, of course). Of course, unfortunately for me, one very round, very fluffy squirrel, has also discovered the blackcaps. Every morning, I have to chase him out of the thicket, the little rascal. Stop eating my raspberries!!

But back to the jam. (Sorry - the heat-addled brain is so easily distracted!) So, what do blackcaps taste like? Kind of like a mild raspberry, and kind of floral - in fact, I added a little rosewater to the mix when I made this jam, to play up that quality.

I've got a few more to share with you - I'll try and remember tomorrow, but the thermostat is going up to 90 (wah!), so I might be busy wilting!!

a summer libation (hold the booze)

Oh man. It's a hot summer night and I want something cool and interesting to drink. Something that comes over ice. Something that involves bitters, or maybe an herbal-infused simple syrup ... but then, it's so hot out and I've been feeling kind of on the verge of dehydration all day from the heat, you know? And I just know that if I have any alcohol at all tonight, it's going to leave me feeling fuzzy and limp, and I might even wake up with a tinge of a hangover - yuck, no thank you!

So, I give you: the Virgin Dark & Stormy. It's easy as pie to whip up: in a glass with three or four ice cubes, combine one bottle of strong ginger ale (I like Reed's Extra Ginger Brew), the juice of one lime, and - here's the neat part - about 1 Tablespoon of molasses, to simulate that deep sugarcane sweetness of rum. I recommend starting with less molasses (closer to 1/2 Tbl) and working up to 1 Tbl or more, adjusting the flavor to your taste.

When I'm making an alcoholic Dark & Stormy, my favorite rum to use is Cruzan's Blackstrap Molasses Rum; it's deep and dark and earthy and herbal. So, when I mix up one of these, I use blackstrap molasses - and a heavy hand with it. It gives that same earthy quality to the mix that I like. And if you're not abstaining entirely from alcohol, try adding a few drops of bitters (orange or lime bitters would be great), just to give it an extra interesting kick!

week of jam, day three: thimblequest 2014!

Now for my absolute favorite wild berry: the thimble berry. Growing in patchy sunlight, with big fuzzy maple-like leaves, thimbleberries might be the most delicate of all the wild berries up here. They're mostly seeds and fuzz, not much juice, fall apart almost as soon as you pick them, and crush each other in whatever particular vessel they're being gathered. As a result, I can't wash these berries before I cook them (the secret's out! Are you grossed out?); if I did, I'd wash away half of the juice. So, we pick them carefully, removing all debris as we go, and then we pick through the berries again as we put them in the pan. But no water is involved.

This jam is also incredibly seedy. It's basically a seed-compote! I suppose if I really wanted to make a beautiful jelly, I could put the mix through a food mill or pass it through a sieve and make maybe one jar of perfectly smooth preserve, but I don't. It took a lot of picking to gather enough berries just to make the eight tiny 4-oz jars (every year, we call our thimbleberry picking "thimblequest," for the hours involved!) of thimbleberry jam I have tucked away in my pantry to last me through this year.

How does it taste, though? Like the brightest, tangiest raspberry you've ever had in your life. Delicious, and so worth that extra effort!

week of jam, day ... two?

whoops! Sorry about that; I got the photo taken before dark, but I didn't manage to stay awake long enough to post last night - in fact, it was still light out when I fell asleep (sometime around 8:30pm). Such a long and productive day yesterday - garden work, painting, etc.

Welp, we'll just have to extend Week of Jam by one day then, won't we? Today we have an apricot preserve, an easy way to put up and save some apricots that most definitely would have gone bad before we got around to eating them. This is another simple one: just wash apricots, pit them, and cut into quarters. I used about a pound and a half of fruit (maybe two pounds?). I placed the quarters into a pan with the zest of one lemon and about 1 teaspoon of lemon juice - apricots are so tart and zingy anyway, I didn't want this preserve to be too tart! I added the seeds from one vanilla bean and a couple Tablespoons of sugar. I cooked all of this together over medium heat until the apricots had mostly broken down (be careful! The apricots break down into a creamy mash that can stick and burn very easily - you need to stir this one frequently as you make it). I left some chunks because, well, why not?

Then I added another 3/8 cup of sugar, with about 1 1/2 Tablespoons of low-sugar pectin, whisking it in rapidly to incorporate into the hot mass - and cooked for a few more minutes before checking the set and canning/processing.

We like to combine apricot preserves with dijon mustard to make a tangy sauce/glaze that we brush over pork tenderloin before roasting the meat in the oven, a recipe picked up from one of Martha Stewart's "Everyday Food" mini-mags years ago. Any leftover glaze is used as a dipping sauce for the sliced tenderloin. Paired with some roasted asparagus, wilted spinach, or steamed green beans, it's a quick and easy weeknight dinner - in short, I know exactly how we'll be using these preserves!

week of jam, day one: strawberry

Yeah, I think I may have enough jam made (and to make) to do an entire week of jam posts. I might also be getting a little sick of jam, as a concept, already - ha! This was the first batch, the batch that kicked it off: our little strawberry patch is really taking off this year. It's nice to see our little garden investments start to pay off, and the back yard start to function like an old-fashioned homesteading garden, with gooseberries, currants, elderberries, strawberries, raspberries, and huckleberries - in addition to veggie beds, kitchen herbs, and the [floral] cutting garden! I already made another batch since this one, and have another bowl of strawberries in the fridge just waiting to be made into a couple more tiny jars.

I don't really have a recipe for this: I wash and halve the strawberries (if they're large), put 'em in the pot with some lemon zest, lemon juice, and the seeds of one half of a vanilla bean. I add a little bit of sugar (for this batch, which only comprised about 2 cups of fruit, less than 1/4 cup of sugar) and cook the fruit gently until it all breaks down. Once that happens, I add a bit more sugar with some pectin stirred into it, cook and check for gel set, and then process in my water bath. The proportions are pretty loose: I use less sugar than recipes call for, and a bit more pectin, and it all works out somehow. I think jam is kind of like pie crusts and biscuits and other things - eventually, you just kind of have a feel for them and you kind of lose track of precise measurements.

I like using lemon zest, lemon juice, and a bit of vanilla bean with fresh strawberry jam; there's something about this combination that really screams, "fair food" (as in, "state fair food" - slap it on a warm, fresh scone and my husband swears it is just like getting a scone from the Fisher Scones stand at the Evergreen State Fair). I'll tuck some of these jars away and they will be forgotten, just you wait and see. He never keeps track of what I put up, and doesn't bother pawing through the cupboard. Then, one morning in early autumn, on a week when we're tired and he's frustrated with something at work and wishing he could just stay home and sleep in, I'll get up early and make a batch of scones and pop them in the oven before I hop in the shower. I'll jump out and catch them just as they finish baking. He'll wonder what the timer is for and what smells so good - and I'll bring him a piping hot scone, slathered with sweet summery strawberry jam, and it'll make everything better.

the reddening

In Czech, the word for the month of June is "červen," "the red month," because it is the month in which red things bloom and red fruits ripen. July is "červenec," "the redder month" because even more fruits and flowers are blooming. I'd say what we've got going on in the garden right now fits the bill, though not everything is red. Our strawberries are finally lighting up their slightly-shady garden spot with ruby jewels, the roses are getting ready for their second round of blooming, the black raspberries are ripening, the poppies are actually fading, the dahlias are starting, and the anemones and lilies are fattening up their buds. A time for everything; now is the time for ripening and bounty.

preserved 2014: candied angelica stems

There now, isn't that a pretty sight? And one of my favorites, too: candied angelica stems. I planted two more plants last year, so I could harvest this year - and lucky me, I planted them in a partly shady area. This plant seems to like a bit of shade, and it definitely likes a good drink of water, which makes it an easy plant to grow here in the wet and gloomy Pacific Northwest.

I have a tendency to grab these when I want something sweet, but I'm trying to save a bunch for my fruitcakes this year (so I made two batches - the second one is still drying). A longer version of this recipe can be found in full here, in last year's post. It's a simple, if time-consuming, process. The stalks are harvested before they turn purple at the base. Leaves are removed and they are cut into lengths (whatever you like! I usually do between 3 and 5 inches. They are soaked in cool water for eight hours, then drained. Bring water and baking soda (1 tsp baking soda per quart of water) to a boil; add the stems and cook for five minutes, then shock in an ice bath. Once cool, drain the stalks and peel the outer layer of skin and strings and discard. Bring a simple syrup (equal parts sugar and water) to boil on the stove. Add the stalks and cook for about 3 minutes. Allow to cool, uncovered, on the stove. When completely cool, cover and place in the refrigerator for two days. After two days, remove the stalks, and bring the syrup back to a boil for 5 minutes. Remove from heat and return the stems to the syrup. Allow to cool, uncovered. When cool, cover and replace in refrigerator. After two more days, take out the pan, remove the stalks, and bring the syrup to a boil for a third time. This time, add the stalks and cook for 5 minutes. Remove from heat, drain the stalks, and place on a baking sheet (or this year, I'm using the drying racks of my food dehydrator) and allow to stand for about 4 days until they are mostly dry. Pack into a jar and store away from heat and light.

first fruits foraged 2014: salmonberries and strawberries (of the frais de bois variety)

Ah, last night! I'm sorry! I was scrubbing chair cushions and the front walk, managed to squeeze in my workout before Cass got home from work, started dinner while he went out for a short 15-minute session on the elliptical, then he came back and we ate and I was asleep maybe 30 minutes later. Woof! Such a day!

Today, not so much. The cool mornings make it hard to get up the motivation and I admit, I'm having one of those days when the unemployment situation really gets me down. It's hard to keep one's chin up. But let's not talk about that. It does no one any good and I'm doing my very best to keep myself cheered up today.

Instead, let's look at these beautiful ruby-red berries, shall we? I thought today merited a two-fer, seeing as I missed yesterday's second post (but I *did* take more pictures - and more today, too; if my improvised plan for dinner tonight turns out tasty - and not gross - I'll share the recipe tomorrow). The top is salmonberry jam. Not a lot of salmonberry jam, but a few jars. I also put one 12-ounce jar in the fridge for Saturday's panna cotta, which we'll serve with the alpine strawberry/wild strawberry/frais de bois (whatever you want to call it) compote below. There really is nothing like an alpine strawberry: they're tiny, and just packed with an unbelievable amount of natural sugar. They make a nice contrast to the panna cotta (which is slightly sour, owing to the inclusion of buttermilk in the recipe), and such a nice taste of the wilds. This is a big half-gallon jar. I actually canned and processed the strawberries this year, since we picked them two weeks before the party and I didn't want to risk the berries - or the compote - going off before the big event. I've been storing them in the fridge, though I suppose there's no real need to. I just feel weird having canned something with so very much space left in the jar.

Alright. More tomorrow! I will continue to be dutiful and get back on top of things around here! Keep your fingers crossed that dinner isn't a disaster - sometimes, when I experiment, it's not successful. I hope, based on the number of hours I've already put in today, that this isn't one of those times!

project 52:36

ink and acrylic on watercolor paper

prints available here

Last week's card was inspired by a little bit of obsession. One day, while doing a bit of internet research to check up on the contents of a salad I'd enjoyed at a local restaurant and was recreating at home, I stumbled across a description of a meal at the Willows Inn on Lummi Island, here in Washington, which had incorporated something called an "apple caper," a pickled immature apple bud. Intrigued, I did more research - into the Willows Inn tasting menu from last winter, scanning for photos and description; into apple capers and uses of immature apple buds, looking for recipes (or, at the very least, precedents); reading up on Blaine Wetzel, chef at the Willows Inn, looking for a cookbook. This idea possessed me for more than a week, and spilled over into my card as well. The card started with an illustration of those immature buds and the center of my obsession (the name, "apple caper") front and center. I worked the brief description of the apple caper from the original blog post into the background, though it has been blurred, obscured, interrupted, and even overwritten. Over this is a line from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding" that I think of often - and especially when I discover something new right under my own nose:

           And the children in the apple-tree

           Not known, because not looked for

           But heard, half-heard in the stillness
           Between two waves of the sea.

I did eventually find a recipe from a woman who was lacto-fermenting green crab apples to make a kind of South Indian pickle, modeled on the traditional mango pickle. I used her salt and acid proportions, selected my own spices, and a jar of apple capers is currently fermenting and pickling in the sunlight on my window sill for the next two weeks. If they turn out okay, I'll post a recipe and process here - in case you, too, are gripped with the apple caper obsession!

I'm addicted to roasted strawberries!

I think I have a problem. No. I'm pretty sure I know I have a problem. I've eaten ... um ... I think I've eaten almost four pounds of strawberries in the past three days. All of them roasted.  Oh my gosh, you guys, these are so delicious!

I used this recipe from Dimity Jones of Three to One. It's very simple, just mix up 4 tablespoons of brown sugar and one 1 tablespoon of balsamic vinegar for every pound of strawberries you're going to roast. Wash strawberries, pat them dry, then cut off the green tops and toss them in the sugar mixture. Place them in a single layer on a non-stick baking sheet (I just laid down parchment, since my baking sheets don't have a nonstick coating), and place in a 250° Fahrenheit (120° Celsius) oven for 2 hours. And that's it - no stirring needed. Just walk away, enjoy the tantalizing smell that fills your house, and then eat these delicious berries!

I actually think Dimity Jones' recipe makes a bit more sugar/balsamic than you need. I used about 2/3 this much sugar/vinegar for my second batch. I got less syrup out of the deal, but I don't actually feel like I need to eat that much brown sugar - you know?

The strawberries hold their shape through the baking; when they come out, they're soft, and the seeds are sticking out a bit, but they aren't totally mushy.

And how do they taste? Like strawberry jam. Warm strawberry jam. Soooo delicious. You've got to try this.

sugarcoating

In this year's second installment of preserved flowers: candied lilac blossoms. I never realized you could candy lilacs; honestly, I always thought they were poisonous! But then I saw Chelsea's post about infusing drinking water with lilac blossoms, and that got me thinking. A little digging turned up plenty of recipes for candied lilacs - and the process was the same as one uses to candy other flower blossoms or petals: a dip in egg, and a dip in sugar, then allow to dry.

A few tips for the lilacs:

I did go out and buy dried egg whites to make these. Dried egg whites will be a bit less gelatinous when you mix them up, and that's ideal when coating delicate flower blossoms - you just want the thinnest coating of egg white. I also read that using dried egg whites eliminates any risk of salmonella, so that's a nice bonus. I found a little tub of powdered egg white at the home cake decorating store near my house for $13; it was a bit more than I'd been expecting, but oh well!

I also made superfine sugar for this, by running regular sugar through my coffee grinder for a few seconds. I think this step is important, too: just like the powdered egg whites, finer sugar means you can get a smoother coating of the blossoms (so that the shape and color of the blossoms won't be overwhelmed by a coating of thick crystals).

Otherwise, it's very simple to candy lilacs, though it's time consuming (I must have spent about 7 hours candying two and a half pans of lilacs over two days): rinse and pat your blossoms dry and remove blossoms from the stems/bunches. Using a pair of clean tweezers, dunk a lilac bloom into lightly beaten egg white (or reconstituted powdered egg whites). Tap the blossom lightly on a paper towel, twice, to remove excess egg white. Next, tap your blossom (face down) into a bowl of superfine sugar 3 or 4 times. Sprinkle sugar over the back of the bloom, then pick it up again (still using your tweezers). Tap your tweezers against the side of the bowl about three times, with some pressure, to shake excess sugar loose from the bloom. Place on a tray or pan lined with paper towels, face down, to dry overnight. A heavier coating of egg white will require an extra day to dry.

Once dry, carefully remove the blooms from the paper towel - they may stick a bit; gently work them loose, being careful not to break the petals (if you do break one, you must eat it! Darn!). Store in an airtight container in a cool, dark place (exposing the blooms to light will cause their fragrance to fade faster). They will last for some months, though the scent and flavor will fade over time  - so, ideally, use them soon after making them!

How do they taste? They taste just like lilacs smell. It's marvelous! Cass says they taste a bit like peeps, with a floral finish. (I've never had one of those marshmallowy treats, so I can't vouch for this, but two of our friends exclaimed he was right, so there might be something to that observation!) They're delightful, and delicate. Imagine them sprinkled over a cake with other flowers - or cupcakes, or floating atop a floral cocktail, or garnishing a panna cotta (this is what I want to do with them!). =)

pickled cherry blossoms

Last year, I pinned pictures from Gardenista's lovely DIY post about how to make traditional Japanese pickled sakura, or cherry blossoms. They looked so beautiful and sounded so interesting, but I found her post after the cherry blossoms had fallen for the year, and I wanted to remember to try it again when I got a chance this year. I almost missed my chance - again! But one afternoon, late in the cherry blossom season, as I looked out and admired my neighbours' gorgeous cherry tree, covered in pink blossoms, I suddenly remembered those photos. I immediately called them to ask if I could come over and pick some blossoms to pickle. They laughed, "yes, of course you may. Please take as many blossoms as you would like!" (When we first moved in to this house, our neighbours were so surprised to see me using a sewing machine that they would stop and ask (through the open kitchen window) what I was making every time I hauled it out. After more than three years together, they no longer are surprised by anything: there are new portraits being painted out on the deck all through the summer, traditional marmalades and pickles being made all through the year, I set racks of calendula blossoms out to dry in the sun ... they're used to it all now! (But they still laugh!)

So, the next morning, I hustled out to pick a big tub of blossoms, as I read we had a week-long storm due to set in by mid-morning. The best flowers to use are ones are not fully-opened yet, so that their perfume has not faded. You can include the stems and even some of the young leaves, though I didn't want to remove leaves from my neighbours' tree, so I only picked blossoms.

 First they had to be soaked overnight in cool water to kill any bugs that might be in them and release any dirt or detritus...

... and then they had to be gently set out to drip dry (above).

After that, it was time to get ready to salt. The proportions in Gardenista's recipe are loose: you put a layer of salt in the bottom of a vessel, and start putting in blossoms, adding generous handfuls of salt as you go (she estimates that you should use about 1 cup of salt per gallon of blossoms).

It looks like snow, doesn't it? So pretty. Then the blossoms are gently weighted: I fit a plate in on top of them and added a jar of pie weights, to press them into the brine created by the salt. Then the entire bowl needs to be placed in a cool, dark place for four days. Mine went into a cupboard that buts up against the uninsulated back wall of our house; it's always cool in there, no matter what I do in the kitchen!

After four days, you pour off the brine and then pack the blossoms (which have considerably less volume at this point!) in a bowl with enough umeboshi (or "ume" or "ume plum") vinegar to cover. This was the only challenge in the process: I went down to Uwajimaya and they were entirely out of ALL umeboshi vinegar! We tried a few other import shops before I finally found some at Central Market in Shoreline. Whew! I didn't see that coming! Lesson learned: acquire your ume vinegar in advance, kids!

The blossoms are weighted (again) to keep them submerged in the vinegar and go back into the cupboard (or other cool, dark place) for three more days.

Then it's time to dry! Gardenista stipulates that the blossoms should be spread on a bamboo rack to dry. Lacking that, I realized I could use the trays from the food dehydrator my parents got me for Christmas. (Perfect! Thanks, Mom!)  To keep bugs from getting into them, I draped flour sack towels over them, so that air could still circulate around them.

The blossoms are supposed to be dried for about 24 hours, until they are a little leathery and not wet anymore. I went for about 48 hours (it's so damp here in Seattle)!

And here's the final result! Aren't they pretty? And how do they taste? They're salty, but also kind of fruity, and they have a lovely cherry floral quality (yes, like almond extract!) that fills your palette.

The blossoms are packed in salt and stored in the refrigerator. Gardenista says you can also let some of the blossoms dry out completely and grind them with salt to make sakura salt. I'm going to do that - I even have some Himalayan pink sea salt that I can use, so that it will all be a lovely pink color!

delicious

Okay, okay. So, it seems like the past year or two, I've been seeing photos of sandwiches involving toast, avocado (mashed or sliced), a bit of goat cheese, and/or a fried egg. Now, the egg part is out for me (allergic - waaaah!), BUT toast + avocado actually sounded like an interesting proposition for a brunchy-type of meal. Especially for someone allergic to eggs. I mean, an avocado is kind of like an egg - it's savory, it's kind of fatty, it can have a kind of smooth velvety yet toothy texture ... okay, okay, I know - it's really NOTHING like eggs, but when you absolutely cannot have an egg, you start casting about for alternatives eventually.

Anyway.

So. Avocado!

So last week, I finally jumped on the bandwagon. I didn't really have any leftovers I could eat for lunch. I did, however, have some sourdough rye bread, some really nice blue cheese (this is kind of a mild one, with a nice grassy/saltiness to it), and an avocado.

I mashed that avocado up with the juice of one lime, about 1 Tbl. of fresh thyme, and a good bit of salt and freshly ground black pepper. The pepper and thyme were my attempts to make this not taste like guacamole. Not that I have anything against guacamole - I LOVE guacamole - but I thought it might be weird with blue cheese, you know? I mashed it all together with a fork and slathered it thickly on freshly-toasted slices of rye and topped with the thinnest slices of the blue cheese.

Magic.

Pure magic.

Believe the hype; this is as good as every blogger, pinner, tumblr-er and other denizens of social media would have you believe. SO GOOD.

Next time we have some kind of brunchy-type party, I am totally serving this as one option. Maybe with a pea shoot salad on the side? I think that would be kind of perfect.

Yum.