Follow Up Friday - Cinamon Pears

I canned these pears at the end of the season in 2010. While I do not recommend keeping canned foods forever, I have just recently gotten to opening up the last of these jars. I decided to get one of the cinnamon stick jars out and open it up. I was quite surprised at the result. Let's just say they are definitely cinnamon pears. I used Penzeys Spices cinnamon sticks in the jars. One of the things that I love about their spices is their freshness. The spices are always packed with oils and flavor. In this case, however, that was not a great thing. I added one cinnamon stick per pint as recommended in my canning book. This ended up with pears that looked as though they had gone bad, but in reality they were just that filled with cinnamon.

As you can see from this after picture, the pears are almost the same color as the cinnamon stick. They had a hotness to them, kind of like red hot candies. If that is your thing, by all means please use a full stick of this wonderful cinnamon in your canning. I felt that it over powered the pear flavors and ended up tasting like I was eating the cinnamon stick. In the future, I think I will only use half of a stick in the jars or use powdered cinnamon. I love how the full stick looks in the jars, and perhaps a single stick in a quart would be perfect, but for now I will try to use a half stick in my pints. That does not mean that I am not enjoying these pears for their spicy hotness. I am, but I would like more of the pear to come through. Live and learn, and make notes for next time.

Apple Pie Filling

I hope everyone had a great Halloween and Samhain holiday. This year I made my first attempt at a more detailed jack o'lantern. I am pretty pleased, but I know for next year to simplify the design quite a bit. Too many fine lines results in me having to break out the toothpicks to hold all the pieces together. Luckily I have a super crafty husband who was great at hiding the toothpicks, so they are not super obvious in holding things together. I am sure glad that we made an attempt. Posting pictures of the Halloween pumpkin always start to set some fear into my soul though, and not for the usual reasons. My mind immediately turns to... yes Christmas. I start to think about all the things that I need to start work on to make sure that the holidays are homemade and happy.

But this is about apple pie filling.... so all those panic filled thoughts of crafting are out of sight and out of mind until I stop writing up this posting. Pie filling! It is a wonderful thing. There is nothing that I find more versatile than having this in my canning arsenal. I can use pie fillings for homemade danishes, pies, turnovers, crisps, cake fillings, pancakes, and cobblers to name a few. Canning pie filling can be a pretty easy and instantly rewarding activity. For doing apples the set up is a bit more complicated. I have a station setup with the washed apples on one side, cutting board in the middle. Once I peel the apples and take out the blossom ends, they get a quick dunk in the lemon juice and water bowl at the top of the cutting board. This helps keep the apples from turning brown and is mostly cosmetic. Once I have the apples cored and sliced, they go into the lemon juice mix again for a little while as I peel the next apple. From there the slices go into the big four cup measuring cup. After I fill the measuring cup generously, I dump any accumulated lemon water back into the first bowl and transfer the slices into the final big bowl. I know that it sounds overly complicated, but it works well for me and ensures that my pie filling looks great.

When I can my pie filling, I like a consistency of store bought. I know that many people do not like the extra thick goop that is in canned pie filling, but I quite enjoy that texture. In order to make sure that you safely can a goop filled pie filling, you need to use Clear Jel. Clear Jel is a specially manufactured corn starch that is safe for canning at high temperatures. If you use flower or arrow root, it will not hold up and from what I understand will separate out and create weird chunks in the filling. I follow the recipe from The Complete Book of Home Preserving from Ball. The recipe from the book has you use a base of apple juice for the filling around the apples. I find that cider gives the best flavor rather than straight up filtered juice. This year I used a combination of a gravenstein cider I found at Trader Joe's as well as the cider we bought on our apple picking trip. The cider is cooked with sugar, spices, and the Clear Jel. A quick tip on working with the Clear Jel is that it works best when mixed with the sugar before adding in the liquid. It makes it less clumpy and easier to stir with less clumps to break up. As the base liquid starts to reach boiling, the Clear Jel will activate, and small clumps of what appear to be burned filling will dot the pan. Don't panic! This is totally normal. Keep stirring constantly, and suddenly, the entire pan will be jelled up pretty solid. Add the lemon juice and then the poached apple slices. Bring it all up to heat and then can following proper procedures.

Now there is one thing I will say about doing this kind of filling... it is super thick! This viscous texture creates all kinds of interesting canning issues. It is virtually impossible to get out all the air bubbles. Try your absolute best. It is also more difficult to get all the filling up to a hot enough temperature to can with out siphoning issues. If the filling gets too hot it will scorch and not taste as great. Make sure you provide a generous inch of head space. Any less and it will be a complete mess. Every time I have done these recipes, for both apple and cherry,  I have horrible siphoning issues. It is imperative that you have towels down when they come out of the water bath. There is typically some of the filling that runs out of each jar and all over the place. I don't seem to have the problem as much with peach, and apple is by far the worst for some reason. Once the jars have sealed and cooled, I take the rings off and scrub down the jars and rings with lots of water and elbow grease. I also make sure to not use hot water as I do not want the seals compromised. Yeah it all sounds like a pain, but it is great to be able to crack open a jar when there is short notice and whip up something that seems rather impressive to last minute guests. The only other suggestion I have for the recipe is halving the amount of nutmeg. I am not sure if it is because we grind our own or if we just do not like a super nutmeg filled pie, but I feel the Ball recipe has too much. This year I halved the amount and am much more happy with the results. Happy canning! Hopefully you can give pie filling a whirl!

Fall Favorite - Apples

Fall is one of my favorite seasons. I really do enjoy this time of year mostly for the foods that are in season. Root vegetables, hard winter squashes, brussels's sprouts, and most of all apples. I love all kinds of apples, and I think that there is not a variety that I have tried that I have not liked in some way. Usually, every fall, my husband and I head up to Sebastopol, CA for their annual Gravenstein festival.  It is a great little fest, and I highly recommend it for anyone who loves apples and that small town feeling of a county fair. This year, however, we decided to try something different. This year we went all the way to Camino, CA for the Apple Hill Growers Association harvest weekends. We drove the two and a half hours from the San Francisco Bay area out to Eldorado county and the foothills of the Sierra mountains. Once there, it was a beautiful drive around the winding hills of the Apple Hill area. There were many different farms that had different kinds of activities and events. You can most likely find a farm out there that will fit the kind of day you wish to have.

Many of the farms had large tents with crafts for sale, pony rides for children, corn or hay mazes, and lots of food venders. We wanted a quiet day picking our own apples instead of prepacked boxes and jostling crowds. It took us a bit, but I figured out which farms I wanted to see. The first farm we wanted to visit was Sun Mountain Farms. We finally found this very small and picturesque farm after winding our way around the larger farms that had more for family type entertainment. Sadly, once we started up the driveway, we saw the dreaded sign: Sold Out. I quickly looked back at the map and picked Pine-O-Mine. We raced back down the road and found this farm. They luckily still had apples left to pick. They were a select grower and nestled amongst their tall towering pines were Granny Smith and Fuji trees; two of our favorite varieties for canning. We intended on only getting a few pounds to can as I am running out of empty jars, but we ended up with a half bushel from off of the trees there. Next we ventured to O'Halloran's Apple Trail Ranch. This was another cute farm that had apples pre-picked and sorted into large bins from cold storage. We got another half bushel from these growers. They had all sorts of varieties such as winesap, Rome, and golden delicious among others. They also had pears there, so we picked some of them up too. This particular farm also had pumpkins for ridiculously low prices. Our jack 'o lantern pumpkin was found amongst the sunflowers that dotted their pumpkin patch.

Yesterday was the start of working through the bushel of apples that we bought over the weekend. I love the delicate smell of fresh picked apples, and it was a delightful thing to wake up to that smell in our house. I decided to make sauce today with any of the marginal apples that could cause our good apples to spoil. Applesauce is a very easy thing to make, and it is a great way to use up windfall apples or those with some soft or bad parts to them. Just make sure to completely cut out the damaged parts and compost those pieces. If you are in good with your local grower, this is a great way to save money on your canning as sometimes you can get bruised and windfall apples for a much lower price than pristine apples. Just be sure to ask someone in the know as often times they keep these apples out of sight.

This year I chose to do the sauce in the slow cooker as I wanted to run a bunch of errands. Cooking it this way would free up my time for other things rather than attending a pot of bubbling apple goodness. I made a full recipe from my book; twelve whole pounds of apples were counted out. I made this sauce with a combination of Fuji, for softness and sweetness, and Granny Smith for a firm structure, sour under notes, and lower juice content. I peeled, cored, and rough cut up all the apples. Now I did not get rid of all the cuttings. Those go into a plastic bag in the freezer for later use making pectin for your canning next year or into apple syrup for pancakes. Don't let these things go to waste! Now many people like a totally smooth applesauce, in that case, do not worry about peeling or coring the apples. Just remove the blossom end of the apple and compost that. The blossom end has enzymes that can weaken the natural pectin in the apples. You can then just run the cooked down apples through a food mill right before canning.

The hubby and I personally like chunky applesauce, so the extra peeling and coring are necessary as a food mill is not an option. Once I had the slow cooker as packed to capacity as possible, I added a tiny bit of water to aid the cooking and a very scant cup of sugar. You can feel free to omit the sugar if you want an unsweetened sauce. I also added four tablespoons of lemon juice to help retain the color as well as for added acidity. This is one of those wonderful "set it and forget it" kind of things. I went about my day running errands and picking up around the house. When I would breeze through the kitchen, I would lift up the lid, stir, and chop up the apples in the sauce a bit. After quite some time, the sauce started to finally get saucy and cook down.

After seven or so hours on high, this is what I have. There are distinct areas of sauce and also quite a few big clumps. I could have let this cook longer and continued chopping up the chunks until they were the size I wanted, but dinner needed to be made and these jars needed to get into the water bath. Enter the immersion blender. If you do not have one of these things, I would highly recommend getting one. I never thought I would use one of these as much as I have, but it is a great way of doing many things that would otherwise be a total mess. I am looking at you soup recipes that say to blend them up in a food processor. Now the whole point of not running this through a food mill is that I want some chunkiness, so when I used the blender I only blended up certain areas. I made sure that, even though the immersion blender is a blast to use, I only pulsed it around a few areas.

From here you should taste your sauce. Add sugar if you need to make it sweeter. You can also add spices such as cinnamon, cloves, mace, or nutmeg. I typically choose to not add spices to my canned sauce because I can add it later if needed for a certain recipe. You cannot take it away once it is in the jar after all. Make sure that you leave a generous inch of head space for the jars. I did that this year and still had more siphoning out of the jars than I would like. Perhaps the slow cooker does not keep the sauce hot enough to avoid this problem, or it could be the chunks releasing more of their fluid during the processing. Some day I will figure this out. Twelve pounds made three full quarts and two pints. I also had a little left over for dessert that night. Hopefully this will be enough to get us through to next year... somehow I doubt it!

Canning Week!

Despite my lack of blog posts, this has not been an idle year for canning. I have done quite a bit, although, I have not done nearly as much quantity as last year. I have tried many different kinds of things in small quantities. I am hoping that by doing some small batch canning I can learn what I like to make and perfect things with out having to eat many, many jars of it. It was very nice when I had my canning partner living out here. I could do full batches of a recipe and split it. It was a good thing to try things at their full recipe to ensure that they had the flavor they were meant to have. Sometimes when recipes are cut, even though the proportions are kept the same, the flavors just don't seem to be quite as vibrant to me. It most likely is just be a personal "perception," not the true reality of the situation. So, in the spirit of trying new things and attempting to get over my want for large quantities of jars bumping around in the water bath, I tried several new recipes this year when the peaches were in season.

I love peaches, and since I missed apricot season this year due to all the traveling, I decided to make extra peach recipes to fill in for the missing favorite of my husband's. I am hoping this stop gap helps me stretch the few jars of apricot that I have left. Often times I can make a one to one substitution for peach jam. This especially works in cases of glazes made for roasted meats. Peach or apricot jam with some soy sauce and freshly graded ginger makes an especially tasty glaze for pork roast or pork chops. A quick filling for crepes, cakes, and jelly rolls, apricot is my go to gal! Peach, however is one of my favorite fruits, so I hope that I can see it into rotation in place of the old family favorite.

Aside from making several jars of plain peach jam, I added some new flavors. One flavor combination I have always enjoyed is peach and ginger. I particularly like peach ginger iced tea. It seemed only natural to try out this combination in jam format. I added candied ginger to a regular peach jam recipe. I mixed up the sugar and peaches, and I cooked the mix until just before the jellying point. At the last most minute, I added finely diced candied ginger. I hoped it would add some nice bite both literally and figuratively to the jam. I have yet to try it, but I will post a Follow Up Friday as soon as I do.

I also made spiced peach jam. I added cinnamon, cloves, and allspice to the jam for this one. I have to say that there is nothing quite like spiced peach jam on a freshly toasted English muffin for a cold morning's breakfast. The warmth of the spice profile on this reminds me of the spiced peach slices I would get in Amish country in Illinois. I tried this one right away as I thought it did not set up correctly. While the set is a bit soft compared to most of my other fruit jams, this is nothing out of the ordinary. My peach always sets a bit loose compared to other fruits. I guess the pectin of the over ripe peaches you get in California farmer's markets must contribute to this, but I would not trade the flavor of the fully ripe peaches for the pectin of less ripe ones.

A new addition to the canning recipes this year was one I found in a Martha Stewart Living magazine. I decided to try out her recipe for bourbon poached peaches. It smelled delicious, and the combination of vanilla and my personal favorite, Jack Daniel's whiskey, made for a good combination. I have not tried any of these yet, but I am looking forward to some peach pancakes. The excess syrup for this recipe tasted wonderful, and I wanted to try to cook it down into a pancake syrup. This turned out to be somewhat disastrous. With the high sugar content, and my patience wearing thing, I tried to cook it down way too fast. I ended up making essentially a hard candy that I then canned into jars. I did not realize the error of my ways until the next day. I tried tipping the jars over to see their wonderful syrup ready for pancakes, but it was solidified in the glass. It almost took a jack hammer to get my jars back, but with enough hot water and elbow grease, I was back to having usable jars.

In the end, I had four jars of wonderfully poached peaches and no jars of pancake syrup. I made sure to cut up the vanilla bean into enough pieces so each jar got one. I hope that this does more than look pretty; I hope it creates an intense flavor of vanilla. I could see this recipe being a great accompaniment to vanilla ice cream or any number of cakes whether they be chiffon, pound, or angel food. As soon as I get a jar open and a good opinion on the recipe, I will also post back with a Follow Up Friday.

I also canned some straight up peach slices and spiced slices. It is a nice change of pace for me to crack open a jar of these summer fruits when in the dead of winter. Having a slight allergy to citrus fruits means that eating seasonally can sometimes be an itchy affair. While I love citrus fruit and do eat it quite often, I can only indulge so much. I have a feeling these will as usual come in handy, especially with that margarita made from peach canning liquid recipe floating around the internet lately.

While peach canning season is most likely over for you all, I thought I would just show off what I was doing all those days when nothing was getting posted up on the blog. I have my work cut out for me this week. I, like everyone else I am reading lately, am headed into a week of apple canning. There is sauce and pie filling to be made. Someday, this will include fresh pressed ciders, but until we have a house this will only be a canning dream. I am also excited to try out a new jelly recipe that is apple based. If it turns out how I am envisioning it will, I will have another thing to reside in the half pints.

There is so much to do, and with holiday crafting on the horizon, I am trying to get as much into every day as I can. Things on the agenda today include weeding the garden plot, hopefully some personal sewing, as well as some holiday crafting... yes I really am going to start in October this year! Then there is the matter of preserving the bushel of apples sitting in the kitchen... For now though, I am off to the garden to make sure all is in order there. As usual, so much to do and seemingly no time to do it in.

Pickle Relish

I often make up my canning plans for the week when I am at the Farmer's Market. You never know what you are going to find at a steal of a deal. These cucumbers for instance were one of those fun surprises. I was headed out of the market after arriving rather late in the day when I spotted a stall with these wonderful cucumbers bagged up together. Sometimes at the end of the day, the stall owners will bag up produce that has not sold yet and offer it at rock bottom prices. I asked how much for the bag, and I was told one dollar. Sold! I am totally in for figuring out what to do with some extra cucumbers. I decided to try my hand a sweet pickle relish as we were almost out of our store bought jar.

One of the things I forget about pickles in general is to take into account the soak time. I made several false starts on this project, getting all the ingredients out and washing up my jars, then reading the instructions and seeing a four hour soak time. I think next year I will take a page from Ashley English and do my soak over night rather than having to wait around for it. The other thing I will consider is trying the cutting part in the blender. I did this all by hand, and I agree with my husband that the pieces may be too big. Lesson learned. I have read about successful relish being made in a blender, but I was rather leery at trying it the first time out of the gate. I cut up all my ingredients into as small as pieces as I could manage. It took a LONG time. Then, they went into the brine for a nice long soak. Finally the pickling brine was made up in the pot and the now drained and rinsed vegetables were added to the hot brine.

I got the recipe I followed out of my Mom's old Ball Blue Book from the 1960's. They refer to this as "cucumber relish" not sweet pickle relish. I did tweak the recipe in a minor way, cutting the turmeric way back because we are just not big fans of a super turmeric flavor in our pickles. I ended up with four nice jars of relish. I cannot wait to see what this stuff tastes like. It is as though we have bough the endless jar of relish since we still have not finished it, and it has been several weeks since I made the relish. I guess I will just have to take a jar with us on the camping trip and "field" test it on hotdogs fresh off the fire. Follow up on the flavor and things I would change or not change will be posted as soon as I get a good opinion on the results.

Mincemeat Minus the Meat

On Monday this week I went in for my first attempt at a mock mincemeat recipe. Mincemeat was something we got to have at Thanksgiving around our house. It was made out of the green tomatoes that were left over from the summer. It was a wonderful filling for a pie; green tomatoes that should not be wasted combined with dried fruits, lots of spices, sugar, and some suet. Since I could not find green tomatoes last year at our usual market, I made plans to make this pear version of mincemeat. After my canning plans were made, I ended up finding lots of green tomatoes at another market I have started to attend, but I thought I should stick to the pear plan.

One of the big advantages of doing this recipe is the lack of suet. Suet is a beef fat that would take the recipe into the realm of pressure canning, which, for now is not an option due to my lack of a pressure canner. Another added benefit was the use of pears. Some people love mincemeat until they find out it is made from tomatoes. I know there are tomato sensitive people out there, so this is much more crowd friendly. The dried fruits I used in this recipe were currents, golden raisins I dried in the dehydrator here, and some dried apricots that I finely chopped up. It made me feel all warm and excited for the family fruitcake this winter!

Next went in the spices. The recipe I used from the Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving called for cinnamon, nutmeg, and ground ginger. I debated exchanging the nutmeg for already ground mace, but I stuck with the nutmeg. I thought I should try the recipe as is for one year and then start tweaking. This recipe also called for brown sugar rather than a white sugar. This seemed to lend a nice warmth to the mincemeat. It smelled just like the holidays around the house.

Next came the peeled, cored, and cut pears. This took what seemed like forever. I wanted to make sure the pieces of pear were not too big as I will be making this into mini-pies for the two of us. Big fruit does not work that well in mini-pies. It works even less in the pocket pie mold I got from a kitchen store. After the pears were folded in, it was time to cook the mixture down. It made the house smell even better. This was one of the first recipes I have made for canning that I could not help but taste periodically during the cooking.

The taste was rich and layered. Everything a person looks for in holiday cooking was in that pot. I cooked it all down until it was a pretty solid mix with little liquid. From there I went to the canning process, and after 20 minutes in the water bath, I had four pint jars ready for pies, tarts, or pocket pies later this year. I am so excited by this recipe and cannot wait to crack a jar open. I decided to hide them in the pantry hoping that out of sight out of mind will work. I think that I will make up one of the mini-pies for a change of pace this year at Thanksgiving along with the usual pumpkin pie that I always make.

The clouds are rolling in fast for the storms we are expecting this weekend, so I should sign off and get my walk in before it gets too nasty. Then it is time for some Christmas gift making... yes you heard right. I am starting extra early this year in the hopes to get done in a sane and happy manner. Today is some experimentation with the computerized cutter in the hopes that a couple of projects will be easier with out having to cut all the parts by hand.... ah the wonders of technology. Well off to walk, craft, and cook.

Jars of Sunshine

Sorry for the radio silence on the blog as of late. I have been super busy with commitments and blogging has not fit into the schedule as I had hoped. The seasons have drastically changed here. We went from a super chilly summer into a couple of short lived heat waves after summer was officially over. Then, the temperatures around here dropped like a rock and the rains returned to the San Francisco Bay area. This weekend is supposed to be rainy just like last weekend. This rainy weather is not met with worry though as I have jars of sunshine to get me through the winter months.

A while back, one of my acquaintances blogged about buying a house and acquiring a new lemon tree. She was looking for things to do with all the lemons. She also was looking for some canning lessons. I traded her canning lessons for some lemons, and out of the trade came not only a great friendship, but also these awesome jars of strawberry lemonade concentrate. She had made some of this as well, so I had her notes to go off of for tweaking mine. I used the Ball book that I have for a recipe, and she got her's off of the internet somewhere. In her recipe, she said that the concentrate ended up being way too sweet even when watered down. This was good to know, so I cut my sugar levels by quite a bit. I like lemonade to be a bit sweet but not cloying by any means. I also strained my strawberry pulp, as Dan is not a big fan of the seeds in strawberries. This extra step took quite a while and also cut the yield I had on strawberry pulp by a bit.

I ended up with four pints, one from Dreah and three of my own, to take me through the winter. I had a little left over that I placed in the fridge and recently got out to test. It was quite good. The mix of the different types of Meyer lemon and regular lemons made for an interesting lemon flavor that was not too harsh. The strawberry flavor was a nice enhancer but was also not overwhelming. The sugar being cut down was also a good move as it was just the right amount of sweetness for me, and if someone else wants it more sweet, they can always add more to their glass. I think this could also be great as a daiquiri or margarita base if one wanted to use it that way or it could be cut with lemon lime soda or club soda as the Ball book suggests. Needless to say, I will be trying to get more lemons from my friend next year to make this one again! Now off to work on those perplexing socks I am trying.

Pumpkin Butter - First Attempt

One of the things that I used to really love about fall in central Illinois was the trips to the local apple orchard. When we were there, we would always pick up jars of their apple butter as well as a jar or two of pumpkin butter. For a birthday gift for Dan one year I even had it shipped out here for him - a much too expensive solution for our long term pumpkin butter needs. I decided to try my hand at it this year. Since it was a spur of the moment decision, I used canned pumpkin rather than doing it from scratch. From scratch is definitely a future goal.

I guesstimated out how much of the spices and sugar to use. In the end, it was not enough for our liking. Once I have the recipe down, I will share it with you all. I think that more sugar would have made this batch much better. As it was, the pumpkin flavor was good but not sweet enough for a butter. The cloves and cinnamon amounts seemed correct but having to use powdered ginger over fresh was also a big disadvantage. I am also contemplating replacing the fresh ground nutmeg with some mace to kick up the nutmeg flavor in the butter.

I mixed all the ingredients and put them into the mini-slow cooker that came with our big one. This mini slow cooker has always done a good job of keeping appetizers warm for parties, but would it actually cook down the pumpkin into a butter? We plugged it in after dinner, and I wondered how many hours it was going to take. The recipe I was working off of made it sound like this would take several hours - around 10 or so. I was wondering if this was just too long of a time or not, so I placed the lid with a vent on the mini cooker and watched a movie coming back to the pot to stir every now and then.

The mini slow cooker worked very well, actually too well. Too much of the liquid cooked off for our liking after only five hours. It made for an extremely pasty butter. I was slightly disappointed in the results and wished I would have watched the cooking better than I had. It also tasted good, but it was not an exact match for the one I was trying to mimic. A tasty first try to be sure but not the last try. I suspect that I will be making more of this during the fall and winter months.

From one can of pumpkin, I got two half pints of my butter experiment. Now I know that there are differing opinions as to water bath canning versus pressure canning, vs freezing of pumpkin purees. I decided on just freezing mine. I am very much a safer than sorry kind of person and tend to want to follow the guidelines on this kind of thing. One of the reasons they recommend only freezing pumpkin is the viscosity of the puree makes it hard for the heat to fully penetrate the jars, and with how thick this butter turned out, I believe them. Another thing that I have read is that pumpkins have a very inconsistent pH level and therefore it is hard to pin down processing times. Who knows? I not being a food scientist have decided to err on the side of caution and just freeze it.

Hopefully more experimentation will result in a recipe I like enough to share. Till then, let me know if you have any killer pumpkin butter recipes you think I should try.

Raspberry Jam - Hot and Not

One of my favorite things about going to my Uncle Glen and Aunt Chris' house when I was a kid was the raspberry bushes. Uncle Glen hosted a huge garden for the entire family on his farm, and many weekends out of the summer were spent there picking beans, sweet corn, beets, potatoes, zucchini, carrots, and apples. My favorite things, besides the gigantic pumpkins he grew for Halloween, were the raspberry bushes.

Boy do I miss those free berries! I splurged this year and decided to make some seedless raspberry jam for this year. There were raspberries on sale at the store, and I also picked up some more at the end of the day at the Farmer's market on Sunday. I washed the berries in small batches and then put them into a pot. I then heated them through and mashed them down with a potato masher. This made a raspberry slurry that exposed just how many seeds there were.

From there, I took a fine mesh sieve and pushed the raspberry puree through. This was a super time intensive but easy to do task. I was surprised that when I dumped the filtered juice and pulp into the pot for the cook up of the jam there were still some seeds present. They were super small, so I am not sure if they just happened to fit through the mesh or if I was a bit sloppy at some point and lost some seeds into the filtered juice.

I ended up with four cups of juice. I added three cups of sugar and the juice of a lemon to preserve the color of the raspberries into the cooking pot. I learned when doing this jam that it reached a solid jam state two degrees sooner than my usual jams. I am wondering if I would have pulled the cherry earlier if it would have turned out. Perhaps I just cooked that jam too much which turned it into the odd texture it is.

I ended up with three jars of jam. I put crushed red pepper into one of the jars to make a spicy and hot version of the jam. It is great for an appetizer when poured over warmed brie, baked under pastry with brie, or poured over warmed cream cheese and served with crackers. I hope that one jar of it is enough for this year. Two of the jars are plain jam, but one is going off to a friend. That leaves me one highly prized jar for myself. I am thinking about trying a recipe out of one of my canning recipe books that cuts the raspberries with apples to stretch the jam out into a bigger batch without using more berries. It sounds like an intriguing way to make this without the high cost. Things to ponder for next year, till then, I will be hiding this jar away, so I don't open it until I really need a pick me up.

First Day of Fall

I thought I should usher in the first night of fall with an apple pie, so yesterday afternoon, I grabbed one of the jars of Gravenstein pie filling from August and went to work. I made up some pie crust quickly and chilled it while I got some housework done. From there it was as easy as pie! ;) I rolled out the dough, popped open the jar, filled the shell, topped it off, egg washed the top, cut the vents, and added some rough sugar. I thought it looked just as good as a professional pie and tasted wonderful.

Last weekend, while my sister was visiting, I found some Concord grapes at the Friday farmer's market. They were super huge in size and very juicy. I picked up five pounds, so I could make both jam as well as some juice for later this year. It was interesting seeing people taste them at the market. Some knew what they were and expected their tart and sour taste. Others thought they were some kind of black sweet table grape. They were the fun ones to watch as their lips puckered up and comments of dislike followed.

I love these grapes for jelly. Here I have placed three pounds of stemmed, rinsed grapes and a half cup of water into the big stock pot. This mixture is brought up to a boil and then reduced to a simmer for ten minutes. During this time, I use my spoon to separate the skins and their flesh. This results in the green "grapes" that you see in the picture and the purple skins tend to sink to the bottom during this. When they sink, it is easier to see which grapes still need to be separated, so go after those next.

Once the mixture has simmered for the ten minutes, it should look something like this, a bright royal purple mess. There will be skins, seeds, and some still solid pulp. All of this will go into your jelly bag or jelly strainer. I let it strain for two hours, but there was still quite a bit of juice left. I stirred the pulp down in the bag for a while until all the juice was removed from the skins and uncooked pulp.

I measured out the juice and had the four cups that I needed. My Mom's old Ball Blue book is almost always right about the weight to juice conversion as it was here. I added the three cups of sugar to the juice and started my boil. I have read in some places that it would help to let the grape juice set overnight to be able to remove the solids that contribute to crystals that can form in the jelly. I skipped this step and did not see any form when the jelly was finished. To make the jelly, cook the juice and sugar mixture to the jellying point, or eight degrees above the boiling point of water.

This jelly did not have any foam form as well, so I got four good jars of foam free grape jelly. I was rather pleased. If you find foam on your jelly, skim it off quickly and start to fill your hot, sterilized jars. Fill to a quarter inch of headspace. From there take the jars and place them into your water bath, and process the jars for 15 minutes. Once the process time is over, remove the lid from the canner, turn off the heat, and wait five minutes before removing the jars of jelly.

I finished with four jars of the darkest grape jelly. It is a beautiful purple black. I like that we now have the final store bought jam out of the house. Grape is Dan's favorite, and I had not been able to find the grapes until this year. Now, with the smaller jars, we can hopefully finish the jelly before it goes bad in the fridge. Somehow, with homemade jelly, I do not see finishing them up as a problem.

I also made some grape jelly in the way my mom made it. In the hot, sterilized quart jars, add a half cup of sugar and one cup of grapes. Then, fill the jars with boiling hot water. I did find this to cause some problems. I am not sure if my mother used less sugar or if I just did not have the water fully boiling before adding it to the jars, but my jars had some residual sugar at the bottom of the jars when filled and also after the processing time.

I think the next time I make the grape juice, I will add the sugar to the pot of boiling water and make sure it is all dissolved before adding the liquid to the jars. This will prevent the crystallized sugar from forming at the bottom of the jars like it did this time. I cannot wait for this to finally be ready. This is one of those tastes of my childhood that I miss the most. I hope that I got the sugar to grape ratio correct. I am banking on the thought that my Mom did not use the full cup of sugar that the book says you can use.

Here are the jars after just a few days. It takes a few weeks for the juice to fully be extracted from the grapes that are canned inside of the jars. Once the juice is finally dark in color, it is time to enjoy. My Mom would crack the lids open and use them to strain out the juice from the spent grape pulp and seeds. I can barely wait to see if the juice is the same. I hope it is!