O, my Darlin’ Persephone

About a million years ago, a boy and I were in a coffee bar, chatting and dreaming and whatnot when I spied out the window a strange sight. High up in a tree there was a single scarlet pomegranate. No sooner had I commented on it that the boy ran outside, climbed atop a car, and plucked it from the tree, proffering it to me once back inside.

I’ve had a fondness for pomegranates ever since. (The boy, not so much any more.)

Huge heaping piles of them are for sale this week, and I couldn’t resist. I bought a couple without even knowing what I would use them for. Eatin’, perhaps. But then I ran out of marmalade and the serendipity express pulled into town yet again. Pomegranate marmalade. Whaaaaaaaaaaat? Yes. It was a moral imperative.

And it began.

I headed back out and grabbed another fat juicy pomegranate (large and heavy for its size, just like Alton Brown always warns us to pick), a couple of gigantic lemons, and a net bag of Clementines. I thought that their tender rinds and seedless sweetness would make for a lovely complement to the tart power of the pomegranate, a fruit strong enough to keep a chick underground four months out of the year.

Behold the power!

And I like lemons, so…lemons.

I revisited the Three-Citrus Marmalade recipe from Foodinjars that I used previously with awesome results. Then I tweaked.

The food/science guru, Alton Brown, tackled pomegranates in his Food 10 from Outer Space episode of Good Eats, in which he says to submerge the fruit in a bowl of water before dismantling it. It works. Fer totes.

Alton is right (as usual)! No gross juice clean up…

…and fingers that are pruny but unstained!

To release the juices (sounds dirty…) of the pomegranate aryls (that’s what those things are called, yo), I boiled them up and crushed ‘em a bit with a masher, then ran them through the food mill. Seriously, that thing has been one of the best kitchen purchases ever.

Millin’ the ‘granates

After a few hours of dripping the milled ‘granates through a jelly bag, I got about two and a half cups of pomegranate juice. Here’s the deal: about 20 ounces of fresh pomegranate from the sweat of my brow (not seriously – that would be grossly unsanitary) cost me about eight bucks. The same amount of pre-squozen juice runs about $12.00. At least four dollars saved. Plus, it’s less fun to just open a bottle.

The Clementines proved problematic.

I tried to skin them like I did the oranges and grapefruits and lemons, but the skin was too thin and it peeled right off, pith and all. Problem. But, like I told my students when the projector bulb blew, a problem is just an opportunity for creativity. So I busted out my trusty zester and zested off wee thin strips of Clementiney skin.

They don’t look skinned so much as they look Wolverined…

It looked so gorgeous, I did the same to the lemon and vowed (yes, vowed) that it would be my marmalade prep tool of choice from here forward.

See? Gorgeous thin ribbons of wonderfulness.

Clementines are seedless. Apparently the growers are sort of Mafioso about keeping it that way, even suing bee keepers who live near the Clemmy groves to keep their flocks away, ensuring no cross-pollination with seeded citrus.

Their seedlessness helps with the prep. Instead of painstakingly supreming them, I simply cut them in halves and squeezed them thoroughly, pulp and all. Much easier than supreming a grapefruit, but with a bag of Clemmies, you have to do this many, many times.

Six cups of juice all total, plus a good deal of the zest ribbons. I boiled it up with sugar and went through the whole cooking, canning, preserving routine.

Almost four and a half pints!

The result was wonderful. Tart and sweet, a ruby red jam with orange and yellow streamers floating in it. Ah. It’ll be great to revisit it in four months when Persephone heads back to earth.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

Resisting Tentation

We don’t get the crisp, leaf-changing Septembers that happen more northernly. We get hot, humid, dog days until it stops. Well, this week, it stopped. There was an actual nip in the air some mornings. It got down into the SEVENTIES! (Chill, yankees. That’s cold here.)

It made me want to make something fall-esque. And easy. But I couldn’t make up my mind, so I went out seeking inspiration. I passed up the gorgeous selection of pumpkins — that’s too fall. Plus, pumpkin everything is already EVERYWHERE!

I know. It’s a meme I found online. But seriously: pumpkin chai latte, pumpkin coffee, pumpkin scones, pumpkin bread…and that’s just at Starbucks!!!

Strawberries abound, but they’re always in season. Frankly, I’ll trade that in for all the multi-colored foliage in the world. But the apples were out. I smelled them as I walked past. Like in those old cartoons. The aroma vapors wafted over and seduced my nose over to them and filled my sinuses with inspiration.

Apple butter.

As a kid, that was my favorite spread. I loved the stuff. Even the old store-bought Bama apple butter in the cartoon-printed glasses that you could collect and drink juice from later. How awesome were those, by the way? Just wonderful. My favorite things in the world to drink from.

So I grabbed some Galas because, well, I love Gala apples. Just the right combo of texture, taste, and crunch. Plus, I’m a fan of the “if you won’t eat or drink it plain, don’t cook with it” adage. But I wanted a blend of apples, so I browsed. Honeycrisp? Nah. More for eatin’. Jonagold? Nah? Not my favs. Granny Smith? Nah. For pies. Then I came across…Tentation.

There weren’t many of them. They took up a skinny bin in the middle of all the other varieties. They looked a bit battered. A little sad. But they smelled like apple-y heaven. Tentation. The name said it all. I couldn’t resist. And so I bought some.

It’s no secret that I love the recipes from Food in Jars. Marisa comes up with some miraculous stuff. Since I had a Lazy Sunday of grading projects in store for me, I figured that I could deal with a lovely batch of her applesauce and then apple butter blorping away on the stove.

9:30 a.m. It begins.

First things: prep the apples. I like to half them then scoop the seeds out with a melon baller. Quite efficient and not much waste.

Chop in half…

…melon ball…

…for minimal apple carnage! This is ALL the leftovers from my 8 pounds of apples.

After that (according to Marisa), quarter them and simmer them with water or apple cider. Remove the skins when they’re soft enough, then simmer until they’re the texture you want.

While the apples were simmering, Big Dog was intrigued by the smells. She likes her some apples.

Apples, please, mama?

(later…)

After about two hours, the apples were soft and lovely and perfect. I know that the recipe calls for fishing out the apple skins with tongs, but that smacks of effort, and effort is the thing I avoid on Lazy Sundays. So I pulled out the trusty old food mill and ran it through and spiced the result with some Ceylon cinnamon (shout out to Penzey’s Spices!) and grated half a nutmeg into it. A scant one cup of sugar and sweet apple perfection.

Easy peasy removal of skins. Plus, the pups got the apple leavins as a consolation prize for being banished outside.

In fact, that stage of the recipe tasted so amazing that some of it ended up in a pint jar just to be applesauce for me before letting the rest blorp away into glorious apple butterness.

(much, much later…)

4:00 p.m. update: Almost apple butter. It’s getting denser and caramel-colored. Still smells like heaven. Perhaps it’ll be finished by the time I go to bed…

6:10 and it’s done. Check this out:

Tastes astounding, looks like baby spew.

I filled about 3/4 of a quart jar. Yes, it’s all for me. No, I didn’t process it. I promise that it won’t go bad. In fact, it’ll probably be gone within the week. Or by the end of tonight if I can’t resist the Tentations. Or the Galas.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

Batten Down the Hatches!

It’s Hatch Chile time here in Texas. Earlier than the rest of the country, apparently. That’s the trade-off for triple-digit heat.

They are dirt cheap. DIRT CHEAP! 97¢ a pound. Are you kidding me? I couldn’t help it. They needed to be cooked and baked and roasted and, of course, canned.

Pretty, pretty pepper (and blurry…)

Two things made up my mind: their dirt-cheapness (versus Dr. Nancy’s info that plain ol’  jalapeños cost $2.79 for a pack of FOUR peppers way up in Canadialand) and their sweet, spicy tastiness that I discovered quite by accident.

I had grabbed a couple on a whim when at my local HEB grocery because they looked to be the perfect size and shape for a recipe I found for Black Bean & Sweet Corn Stuffed Peppers. And they were sweetly hot and smoky and perfectly nom.

Ignore the messy plating. I had some issues transferring it…was purty in the cooking vessel.

This pepper needed to be jellified. Many ways. This morning, I jumped out of bed (figuratively) and ran (again, figuratively) to buy scads of the Hatches.

First: a double batch using the three-pepper lime jelly recipe, sans lime and avec only the Hatch peppers. The plus side is that these lovely peppers are such a gorgeous color — ranging from pale chartreuse (look it up) to a rosy Kelly green — that you don’t need food coloring.

Bubbling and boiling merrily

Not that I’m so inclined. Not a big day-glo green pepper jelly fan.

A couple of notes:

These peppers have only a few seeds, but MAN, they were potent. I had to stop a couple of times because I inhaled while de-seeding and, well, just don’t.

Also, these suckers FOAM. I’ve never made a jelly with so much foam!

Mad dog! Mad dog! GRRRRRRR!

Just make sure to scoop it all away. All of it. This will assure you a lovely crystal green jelly worthy of any occasion.

Pretty, pretty jelly!

Off to roast some of these suckers for a new and different jelly now.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

Hannibal Lecter and the Supremes

More rain. More people complaining about the rain. Hello, people? Must I force you to revisit Facebook posts from this time last year in which we were all whining about how hot it was and where was all the rain?

I like the rain. Gives me a calm day to put stuff in jars.

You know, a calm day after I had to drive into rainy-weather traffic to fetch the lids and pectin that I was lacking. After yelling my way through the rain-slicked streets filled with inconsiderate, aggressive, or just plain ignorant drivers (including one who repeatedly swerved and blocked intersections but who sported a “Namaste” bumper sticker – in his case, I believe that would translate into “the douchebag in me bows to the douchebag in you”), I made my way back home and let RouBarb’s gentle old lady dog out to “tinkle,” subdued my Little and Big dogs with chewies, unloaded an online rant so as not to cook angry, and started sterilizing jars…and let the jamming begin. Again.

Om…many jars to fill…

I already have three new half-pints in the fridge from a spur of the moment attempt at lavender-rose jelly. The poncy antique roses bushing up on either side of my kitchen window were flowering lovely dark red blooms with a spicy scent. Cramoisi superieur, they’re named. I picked them and steeped them with some lavender, then cooked that up with sugar and pectin and threw that in a few jars:

Lovely, herbal, green-tasting jelly.

So I’m flush with sweet, fruity jams and these herbal jellies…but out of marmalade. Food in Jars has a fabulous recipe, which earns her a shameless plug. Love her recipes. And like she says, you can’t feel like Maggie Smith while drinking a lovely cup of Earl Grey without some homemade marmalade.

But here’s the thing about making this marmalade. I feel a bit like Jame Gumm. Remember him? The serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs? Read on. You’ll see.

First, God bless Texas for so many things, but right now for abundant fruits and vegetables. And being able to drive to the store in the middle of winter. And for very cool Tervis tumblers filled with icy cold Diet Coke.

Yee haw!

Here are my lovely citrus fruits. Two grapefruit, four oranges, and three lemons. See them shudder? They know what’s coming.

“It puts the lotion on its skin”

And here they are, skinned. By me. “Buffalo Bill.”

(Chill. I really only shaved off the zest with a vegetable peeler.)

Only I’m not making a suit out of them. I’m going to julienne those skins, carve up the citrus, throw fruit flesh and skins in a pot with sugar, boil them up, and stick them in jars.

Out of their skins, they move to the supreming stage. Isn’t that a great verb?

To supreme.

I supreme, you supreme, we all supreme. In foodology, “to supreme” means to separate fruit from its membranes. Food in Jars kindly provides a great link to a how-to, as well as a great pic of it on her blog. This gives me a reason not to painstakingly take and post pics of the supreming process, and instead to skip to the already supremed fruits.

The carnage!

(Incidentally, this stage reminded me of a line I heard while watching A Lion in Winter this morning while having coffee. Queen Elenor lectures Prince Richard on killing for survival, not being an assassin. Richard responds with, “I never heard a corpse ask why it suddenly got cold.” Great stuff. Love this movie.)

And (also skipping the boiling, bubbling waiting) isn’t the result gorgeous?

Tower of tastiness

Now to treat myself like a titled lady: Gosford Park on the telly, a cup of Earl Grey, lovely homemade marmalade, and buttermilk biscuits instead of scones…because I am, after all, a Southern lady.

Cheery bye, y’all!

So which of my peeps want some? Be warned that I may ask for something in return…

Quid pro quo, little Starlings.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

Lessons Learned

As Madame JoJo commented to me yesterday, the creativity is steadily seeping from my bones. So I spent another rainy morning perusing a favorite foodie blog, CakeWalk, to hunt for inspiration on how best to showcase the rest of the figgies picked yesterday. The BROWN ones.

Unfortunately, any responsibly constructive tendencies I muster up are tempered (as always) with a slight touch of attention deficit that cannot be remedied, even by scoring one of RouBarb’s Ritalins. Instead of settling on how best to use the rest of the lovely figs, I stumbled upon a recipe for Violet Jelly. The flavor of flowers – especially violets and roses – bring back fond memories of sharing scented pastilles with my old (hee) friend Patio, and I longed to have the luxury of a field of violets just ready for the pickin. But this is Houston. In July. Scorched lawns? Yes. Fields of violets? No.

Dried lavender, however, can be found here readily. (What? They’re flowers.) Pictures danced in my mind of a cup of Lady Grey tea served with gorgeous scones blanketed in homemade lavender jelly. CakeWalk had no lavender recipes, and Food in Jars only had one with pears. Delicious sounding, but I was determined to make a flowery, subtly scented jelly. Not pears.

Off to Google!

This is where the plan fell apart. I forgot the cardinal rule of Googling: specificity. I typed “lavender jelly” and expectantly clicked the search icon…to see this:

Way to go, Google.

In the MIDDLE of the page. Sandwiched between actual recipes. Ew, Google. Just…ew.

Lesson #1 learned, though my thoughts of lovely floral jelly with scones and afternoon tea were tainted by Google’s dirty-minded little trick.

Still needing an outlet for my seeping creativity, I decided to fall back on an old standby: Three-Pepper-Lime Jelly.

Once upon a time I was tired of the too-sweet, too-food-colory-green pepper jellies out there, and I asked around for a better recipe. So Oklahoma Me gave me her great recipe for jalapeño jelly (which she found on the internet somewhere – no link, though). My pantry lacked some basic ingredients needed, so I made a few substitutions with great results. Instead of using only jalapeños – Oklahoma Me grows her own in abundance – I decided that a red bell pepper would give lots of color and just a bit of sweetness and a habañero would lend a lovely, short-lasting burn of strong heat.

Don’t be askeered of the mighty habañero.

Do not fear me!

I chopped up all the fragrant peppers and inhaled too deeply while chopping Mr. Habañero. An immediate dry burn hit my sinuses and I sneezed and sneezed and sneezed and sneezed until Little Dog wandered in and asked me WTF?

Fer totes, WTF with all the sneezing?

Lesson #2: Don’t breathe while dealing with monstrously hot peppers (AND Lesson #3: don’t rub your nose vigorously when they’re covered with capsaicin).

Since I was chopping and grating and boiling anyway, I decided to finish off the rest of the brown figgies – some preserved whole (NO idea what to do with whole preserved figs, but they look so pretty) and some into a fig-lemon-ginger jam.

Lesson #4: a canner in motion stays in motion.

The *ahem* fruits of my labors…

So endeth the lessons.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

BLORP!

Since it’s been a stormy summer day with Little Dog cowering and trembling and chattering her wee teeth when the thunder booms, I found the time to peruse the net to find lovely things to make with my newfound figgy wealth.

ka-BOOM!

I curled up in the comfy chair and went to my jam-guru blog, but alas, found no fig recipes. Check her out anyway. Especially her strawberry vanilla jam recipe, which the Power Rangers call CRACK JAM. I dole it out to them when feeling all queenly and magnanimous.

So I Googled “fig jam recipe” and a slew popped up, of course. But one stood out: Drunken Fig Jam.

Allow me to break it down:

DRUNKEN.

FIG.

JAM.

And I was smitten because what’s better than succulent figs? Fig jam! And what’s better than that? DRUNKEN fig jam. To quote Madame JoJo: oh, HELLS yeah.

As I cross-referenced my household supplies against the recipe, I knew it was Meant To Be:

Recipe says four cups of sugar. That’s what I had. Exactly.

The wee black knotted vanilla bean I let live in the now-empty sugar jar.

Recipe says ¾ cup brandy. That’s what I had. Exactly. Well, its understudy, Grand Marnier. But it worked sublimely.

No mo’ Marnier!

Thus begins the jamming:

Chopped up figgy bliss with microplaned lemony goodness.

Vanilla-sugary grit and mess.

After a one-hour nap. Juices flowing, ready for the heat!

The recipe called for mashing, but because of my food texture issues (I hate the unexpected stealth chunk in an otherwise pristinely smooth jam), I’m a huge fan of the wand mixer. VROOOM!

Blorping merrily and smelling like boozy heaven.

BLORP! This time with gnarly, weirdly goldenrod-colored, foamy grossness. Skimmed that nasty, foamy little ickiness and none came back, so WOOT!

I got 4 pints total from this recipe instead of the 3 pints they said would be the outcome, but to be fair, I probably started out with at least a half pound more figs than I needed.

It’s just lovely. The vanilla sugar adds a nice, caramelly smoke to the rich, figgy flavor, and I may just hunker down and eat my not-enough-for-a-full-jar jam with a spoon.

No judgement. It’s jam time.

Sincerely,

Bonnycate

Give me some figgy goodness…

June 30, 2012

Figgy picking day today. I first visited the Matt Family Orchard a few weeks ago and picked a bazillion blackberries…

which became some jams…

and wee bitty individual cobblers. No pics of the cobblers. I assure you that they met a good end, piled high with whipped cream and inhaled at a Game Night with the Power Rangers.

So despite it being one of my summer days off, I set that alarm for all too early and ChrisTina and I hauled our grumpy butts up to the farm. The Matt family representatives crack me up. A young joker stood behind the counter while a more *ahem* mature joker met us as we walked up and greeted me (in my workin’ girl headscarf) with “you’re a PIRATE!” and ChrisTina with “thanks for bringin’ MY coffee!”

“WELL!” Chris barked back, one hand on hip, the other waving her cup widely and dangerously, “we didn’t KNOW what you WANTED!”

“You coulda called.”

Yeah. It’s a good place. Our kinda place. You should go there. Often. But not before I go and get my stash, please-and-thank-you.

After more banter, during which we were instructed to pick purple, brown, or yellow fruit that “feels like a boiled egg,” we set off with buckets for the trees with fruit that dripped nectar.

And here our paths diverged. ChrisTina is a wanderer. She strolled from tree to tree, commenting, picking a fruit, tasting it, commenting, talking figs to a guy who crossed her path (irritating the girl with him, too…she started whipping figs into her bucket the longer he talked to Chris).

I was a machine. Search. Touch-test for boiled egginess. Abandon or pick. Repeat. No fruit visible? Crawl up in the midst of limbs, girl! Inhale that yummy fermented figgy whiff coming from the windfalls…but harvest!!

Thirty minutes later, my two buckets brimmed with fruity yumminess. ChrisTina had scored about a dozen. And blamed me for picking the trees bare before she could get to them. Whatevs.

We sweated home and I checked out my bounty. Nine pounds of figgy riches.

Some browns, some purples. No. I don’t know the names. Don’t care to. I picked BROWNS and I picked PURPLES.

Not only did I score a massive fig haul, but I brought home fresh Eggs From Our Farm.

Ain’t they purty? Lookit the freckles on this one.

Ever since I’ve really started on my canning /preserving kick, Big Dog and Little Dog now see me piling bags of fruit into the kitchen as the sign that they will have to go Out Of The Kitchen Or Else, and obligingly took care of their afternoon ablutions then set up shop hovering in the kitchen doorway. Waiting…

(Yes, that’s laundry sitting in the white basket behind the table. Don’t judge me.)

The preserves gang, all stem-free and spotless and shiny and ready for their closeup:

And some too delectable to cook up that were spared just for eatin’:

Now to find recipes…

Sincerely,
Bonnycate