Beginning to stir

The heading of my latest list is, in case you can't see: Things I'm Going to Can This Year.

Ahem.

This should come as no great surprise to those who've been reading my blog since last canning season. They know that for the months of August, September, and October, canning was the topic of this blog, and that was that.

You must understand. Last year was The Year I Learned to Can. I'd never done it before. I approached the challenge with appropriately maniacal fervor. Yes, for three months of last year, my kitchen was a cannery. My stove became a jam-splattered mosaic. My countertops were chopping blocks and cooling racks. My dining room table became a Can Labeling Checkpoint, lined with proud brigades of jars awaiting their long winter repose in the cellar. My husband became temporarily confused and distant, tentatively venturing onto the first floor of our house only occasionally, waving away the clouds of fruit flies to calmly address his wife. (Having been married only three months, he must've wondered what in the hell he'd gotten himself into, with me.)

For the sake of my marriage, my home, and my friends, this year will be a less fanatical canning encounter. For one thing, I have a job. That helps. For another, well... let's just say there's about forty half-pints of jam still in my cellar, and I'll leave it at that.

This year, I am planning it out (evidence above). I hope to have two or three weekend-long canning parties with myself, and bang out a couple after-work batches of pickles, and call it a summer. So, there are lists taking shape. There is the rummaging, the dragging out of canning books and recipes I used last year. And oh yes, the sweet dreams of that pair of tongs in my hand...

Last night at Barnes & Noble, I just happened to find myself in the cookbook section (right), and just happened to find myself staring deeply at the canning section, and just happened to pick up Well Preserved. I opened the front cover and couldn't put it down. The layout is just beautiful, the photos, and the recipes are the sort of unfussy-but-interesting ones I love. Strawberry Mint Jam, for instance. Cranberry Ketchup.

Strawberry picking season begins next week, and I can hardly wait. Canning is joy, and I can scarcely wait to hold those tongs and fills those jars with their bright innards.

The fruit flies and jam splatters can wait, though.

Come on in my kitchen

It's become a series: canning dates with girlfriends. We pile up boxes of canning jars on the table, handily dispatch hapless fruits into burbling pots on the stove, and spend all afternoon fogging up the windows in my kitchen.

We did this last month for the first time, churning out seventeen jars of strawberry jam in the space of a day. Because you can never have too much strawberry jam. This time, with a team of newly minted canning enthusiasts, we tried something more ambitious: blueberry jam, and a double batch of the now-infamous peach salsa.

By the stroke of twelve, we were hard at work.

Kate, bringing the next generation of canning enthusiasts into the world. (This is how we mash the berries, mash the berries, mash the berries...)

Teamwork. Nice!
Karli shows off her tong technique.

And in between, we snack, and wait.

I love doing this. For one, it's good incentive to scrub off my Jackson Pollack of a stovetop and clean the kitchen. In canning season, I have the bad habit of letting the spilled jam, errant tomato peels and peach drippings build, and build... until the season is over and I can mop, knowing there will be no more jam on my floor until the following summer. This strategy worked well enough last year, until the day I set out for the stove, from the sink, and found my feet cemented in place by the build-up of gunk. I exaggerate, but only a little. This season, you will always be able to tell the color of my kitchen floor. And that's a good thing.

Also, there's a menu to devise. Nothing fancy, just some things to munch on in between stirs of the jam-pot. Saturday, it was applesauce muffins, blackened green beans with onion dip, chips and salsa, and miniature clafloutis, to be blogged tomorrow.

It's the simple pleasure of sharing a kitchen with friends that's the best. Canning is fun, but it's also work. Having the dramatic retelling of a love story (or a traumatic haircut experience) as the soundtrack for the day, we hardly noticed the work. The mountain of peaches before us vanished within minutes, the dishes were all washed, dried and put away without my notice. Many hands make light work.

And in the end, we had eight jam jars, and eight pints of salsa to show for ourselves. And next month's session of homemade ketchup and bread-and-butter pickles to look forward to.

When a woman's in trouble
everybody throws her down
You look for your good friends, none can be found
You better come on, in my kitchen
Cuz it's gonna be ragin' outdoors.
~Crooked Still

Making progress

Armed with the gifts of a canning funnel and special mason-jar tongs, (thanks mom!) and The Joy of Cooking's All About Canning, (thanks Jen and Corrine!), my third canned food project went pretty smoothly. All it really is is a set of procedures to learn, and once you've repeated them enough they become habitual. Heat, fill, seal, repeat.

Getting the apple butter to the point where it was more than just brownish slurry was an adventure. I had two different recipes for oven-baked apple butter, one advising cooking at 200 degrees for 10 hours, and another advising cooking at 350 for two hours, with regular stirring. Two hundred degrees did not work. After eighteen hours of that (and leaving my oven on overnight, joys) I edged the temp up to 350 and was done after an hour. Aside from leaving me with an incredibly sticky, blackened baking pan, the whole thing was pretty easy. And tasty! I've been eating slices of Farmers Market wheat bread with butter and apple butter all week for lunch. Not the healthiest, maybe, but damn is it good!

These guys are probably going to be Christmas gifts, hence the labels and pretty fabric. I love giving food for Christmas. I've done Winter Squash Butter, Cilantro Almond Pesto, Irish Stout Gingerbread, Harvest Nuts & Seeds. Homemade Dog Biscuits. Raspberry Pear Preserves. Every year it's something a little different, always warmly received.

This weekend, my friend Kat is coming down, and we're going to turn my kitchen into a salsa factory. Tomorrow is the Farmer's Market. I'll probably purchase somewhere in the vicinity of thirty pounds of tomatoes, good lord, for our salsa-making exploits. After processing the pickles and applesauce I plan on making later, I think I can officially consider myself "over" my canning anxiety.

All it took was a crammed freezer to turn me into a canning addict. I'm hooked.

Tawny

Sorry for the radio silence this week. I spent all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday patching through a last-minute flurry of interviews and edits on an article that has lingered, somewhat ominously, over my desk for a month. So nice, yesterday, to hear pleased words from my editor, walk outside and let out a giant Paaaaahhhhhhhh...
I felt like one of those self-inflating life rafts.

I've been barely keeping up with the garden, these past few weeks. Really, just keeping up with the harvesting, and trying very hard to keep up with preserving. I'm doing pretty well, but I just got the September issue of Bon Appetit, in which there are all sorts of interesting transitional recipes, AND I'm realizing I've eaten zucchini three times a week for a long time, AND right now I have gorgeous heads of bok choy, mustard greens, and napa cabbage in the garden. Poof. How did that happen? While I was hacking away at deadlines, the crops I planted the first week of July just grew... and grew.

Meanwhile, the flowers...

And canning-breaks. I'm sure some freelance writers go see a movie when they're feeling burned out, but not I. Tuesday night I turned a $5 case of day-old 'maters (yeah, I still have to buy some 'maters, to can...) into seven quarts of stewed tomatoes, and 6 half-pints of tomato paste. 
Last year, I figured out a big canned-tomato short cut. Instead of doing peeled whole tomatoes in water (the PEELING, the ploppy JAR-FILLING...) I started just throwing washed, cored tomatoes into my giant three-gallon pot, mashing them layer-by-layer as they cooked. My pot will fit a whole case of tomatoes this way. Then, I let it heat up to a boil, and stir until all the tomatoes are soggy and broken-down. Then, I throw in a heaping tablespoon of garlic powder, salt, and lots of dried basil, oregano, and thyme. I can seven quarts' worth of this tasty slurry-- a nice, full water-bath canner makes me happy-- and process for 40 minutes.
But meanwhile, I let the slurry continue cooking down, at medium heat, another hour or so. I let it cook and cook and cook, until it thickens down into tomato paste. And then, at a quarter to ten, I can the paste in half-pint jars. 

A lot of times, the economy of canning seems a little uncertain to me, especially when I'm canning purchased produce. But even taking into account the $3 boxes of canning jar lids, this little project was definitely a frugal enterprise. A 28-oz can of grocery store tomatoes is, what? $1.19 on sale? Yuppers.

Swiss chard, arugula, scallions.

So, as the summer assignment crush finally fades away, I am deeply looking forward to getting back to outdoor pursuits. Walking around the yard yesterday, after I unplugged, I was amazed at how late-summer tawny everything is looking. The birches always lose their leaves early; the New England asters are inching up above the top rail of the back fence; the goldenrods are swingin'. My neighbor Jody has beach ball-sized pumpkins looming orange under the slumped mildewy leaves in his garden. Wednesday, I dug up one of my Kennebec white potato plants, and was AMAZED. Last year, my potatoes yielded so poorly, and the taters were rubbery and oddly sweet. This year, just that one plant yielded 12 pounds of potatoes-- three of 'em were damn near guinea pig-sized. WOOT.

It's a good season to be heading into, indeed. 
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Canning with friends

A harmonious kitchen-mate is a hard thing to find. Yesterday, my neighbor Jen and I spent the day canning as if we'd spent every Saturday canning, our whole lives. I knew when to back off, she knew when to jump in with the tongs. We ate muffins with the bits of jam that were left in the bottoms of my jam pots last week. We played board games while we waited for the water to heat, the steam to start, the processing to run. She beat me at Othello, and I'll try not to hold it against her. When Corrine could spare a minute, she joined us too, and we'd sit at my table drinking tea and sharing easy conversation.

Altogether, it was a thoroughly fun, soul-filling afternoon.

And now I know how to pressure-can. (Insert evil laugh here.) Watch out world, I've got a whole month before the Farmers Market closes!

Homemade roasted red peppers.
Vegetable stock. Isn't that a beautiful color?


Pete, sleeping in my fabric. This is a typical level of cuteness for so-called Mr. Magical.

The Puppy Frolic

God, that second-to-last picture just slays me. Look at those jowls flap! 
Del has been having a pretty good summer. He's enriched our life so much-- even when he wants to hang out by the kitchen window and watch squirrels while I am trying to get dinner made and beans blanched and zucchini shredded, all at once-- I remember this. After dinner is play time. Play time is Patrick's domain, because, call me a wuss, but I find even a very gentle and loving dog like Del scary in play mode. He snarls and huffs (at the toy, not at us) and jumps up with his very big toothy mouth fully engaged. He makes himself as wild and wolf-like as possible, for about three minutes, before he's spent his playtime energy for the day and goes back to his preferred armchair. I stand back and grin from ear-to-ear.
Such a good boy.
August is shaping up to be pretty busy for Patrick, which is good, because it's shaping up to be canning time for me. It's incredible-- and admittedly slightly baffling to me-- that I get nostalgic for the sight and smell of simmering-down tomato sauce. But I do. It'll be awhile before I'm canning garden tomatoes, as they're finally starting to blush, bit by bit-- but of course, once you pick that first ripe one off a plant, the rest of the cluster seems to ripen overnight. 
In addition to tomato sauce, paste, puree, bloody mary mix, salsa, and stewed tomatoes (phew!), I want to can a ton of bread and butter pickles, escabeche, hot sauce, roasted red peppers, and veggie stock. So I'm a little impatient to get going here, a little over-eager for chilly fall nights home alone canning and listening to Radio Lab. Man. How funny that that is my idea of a good time. Someone should make an introvert meme like this for canners.

I'd love to hang out, but I have to go sit in my house and can things...
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Refashion #8: Cantaloupe cardigan

It should be obvious: I'm really getting into this refashioning business! Those of you who saw me through the Great Canning Frenzy of 2008 know that when I set my sights on something, I don't stop until I've throttled the living snot out of it. Last summer, I didn't just learn to can. Oh no. I started modestly enough: applesauce, bread and butter pickles, a little tomato sauce. Pretty soon I was fastidiously compiling recipes, buying pectin by the quarter-ton, and inviting myself over to my parents' friends houses just long enough to load their unwanted canning jars into my car, slam the trunk and drive away. I exaggerate, but only a little.

But this post isn't about canning, it's about refashioning. It's about how, in the space of six weeks, I've doubled my bobbin supply, halved my fabric supply, and purchased no less than six different kinds of elastic. Oh, and three new books, eighteen spools of thread, snaps, a zipper foot, and a covered button maker.


That's where this project began, right there with the instant the covered button kit touched itself down into my cart. Visions of sweet little flower-covered buttons danced in my head, thanks in no small part to one Amy Karol.

This is the first project I've done where I actually used two thrift-store items. (Ooooh, do I get extra refashionista points or something?) The sweater (obviously), but also the fabric I used to cover the buttons and trim the bottom of the sweater. It was a cotton/spandex-blend skirt from American Eagle, and let me just say emphatically that after 1+ hours hunched over the thing with my seam ripper, I am never de-constructing an American Eagle garment again! Triple-seamed madness. Yeeps.

The covered buttons were ridiculously easy to make. And exciting. So exciting I felt the need to dance back and forth several times between my craft room and Patrick's studio saying, "Look, honey, covered buttons!!!" I'm sure he was thrilled.

ANYway, this is the before shot, just for reference:

(The funny red line down the middle is my tailor's chalk.)

Don't worry, pretty soon this phase will wind itself down and I'll move on to my next fixation. Any guesses? Paper mache, maybe, or mosaics? Candle dipping? Welding? Your guess is as good as mine!

A cellar full of food

It is baffling, and somewhat disturbing, to know that I did all this in just a little over two weeks. When I decide I want to master a skill, I go at it with a single-mindedness that first surprises and later worries those who don't know me well. Like the summer I decided I was going to learn how to do a cartwheel, and spent most of my time with my hands on the ground and my feet in the sky. This is just what I am, never gonna change. I will say, though, that this has been an extraordinarily efficient way to go from Novice to Grand Canning Diva in no time at all.

And I'm not done yet. On Saturday my venerable neighbor Jen is coming over to unravel for me the mysteries of steam-pressure canning. With boiling water you can do acidic things just fine: pickles, fruits, and tomatoes. But if you want to, say, can jars of roasted red bell peppers, you need steam pressure. Roasted peppers are on the docket for Saturday, along with homemade veggie stock. (Ooooo, aaaahhh.)

On a different note, I was really excited to reclaim these shelves in my basement, and start using them again. Lots of old houses have sturdy, narrow shelves in the basement, where the resourceful lady of the house used to keep her canned goods. The precedent resourceful lady of my house was Anna Waldron, who lived here with her husband Frank until 1936. I can't take jars down to my cellar without thinking about her, smiling to know even though we're separated by almost a hundred years, we have something in common. We both put our canning jars on those shelves.

The Queen of Tomatoes

Either my friend Kat or myself would've been completely deserving of this title after spending all day in my kitchen on Sunday. We had nearly fifty pounds between us, jars aplenty, and, well, maybe it's safe to say, a little too much ambition.

We were going to make salsa. And sauce. Oh, and chutney, relish, and sweet-and-sour sauce, and if we had any left over, we'd just do quarts of canned whole tomatoes in water. Just. The thing about canning, I've learned, is you need to be suspicious of any tendency your mind has to assume something will be quick and easy. With canning, it's never quick. It's wonderful work, meditative and slow. It's eternal and calming. But not quick.

The sink was full of tomatoes all morning. I think the water looks really cool in this shot:
Front burner: tomato sauce nearly boiling over. Back burner: salsa simmering down.
This is Kat, expertly applying the prescribed amount of salt to a huge vat filled with tomatoes, apples, and onions:
Said vat:
Here are some jars on my dining room table. This wasn't half of it, either. We ended up with seven quarts of sauce, four quarts of salsa, seven pints of relish, seven pints of sweet-and-sour sauce, eight half-pints of chutney, and five quarts of canned whole tomatoes.

My pal Kami over at G's Blue Eyes has a wonderful post about how autumn kicks domestic instincts into overdrive. Reading her blog, I couldn't help but think that's what must be at work in my head. I've hardly got my dishes from yesterday washed, and I'm already poring through the canning book, scheming up what I'll do with the rest of my week. Blueberry jam? Roasted peppers? Apple juice? The urge to provision the nest for winter is irresistable, joyous. Summer's sweet, hot days beg me to slack off, quit the house and go for a hike or a swim. But autumn calls me back, and I come, easily seduced by the temptations of a cozy house and a hot stove.

I've always been a sucker for a hot stove.

Canning fever

We've been getting reports of a mysterious illness sweeping the Southern Tier. The symptoms are varied but unmistakable, and seem strange and often baffling to all those not affected.

A telltale sign: hoarding vast quantities of fresh produce in one's car.

The desire to have a perpetually simmering kettle on the stove:

The legions of jars colonizing any horizontal surface available:
G's Blue Eyes seems to be suffering from a similar affliction. What can I say? It's September in Upstate New York. Everything is in season. If the Farmers Market was open every day, I'd probably be there everyday, lugging misshapen bags of vegetables back to my car like a deranged gerbil, obsessively stockpiling food for a famine that never comes.

Likely, I'll have the good fortune of never facing a real famine. But the end of the local produce season will come all too soon. By the time we hit Halloween, the tomato vines will be hanging from their cages like torn fishnet stockings, blackened by frost. The only thing still producing in the garden will be the venerable kale, all else will be dead or dormant. It's that stark vision that drives me, I think, motivating me to capture as much of the summer as I can before it's all gone. It's preserving the flavors and the colors of the growing season. Would it be going too far to say canning is like edible scrapbooking?

Ok, maybe. But that's what it felt like to me, today. Biting into a September pickled beet will bring me back my hazy summer afternoons, and hopefully make the winter a little more bearable.