Jam, jam, jam, jam… Jam, jam, jam, jam…

Tags:apples, canning, cordial, Farmer's Market, fruit, homemade, jam, organic, peaches, plums, preserves.

Preserves, technically, but “preserves” doesn’t rhyme with “spam.”

I was lucky enough to receive a whole lot of organically grown peaches and plums from some friends’ fruit trees and I had to come up with an idea for what to do with it before it spoiled.

I took several plums and started a plum cordial: plums, cinnamon sticks, candied ginger, lavender blossoms (from my own patio garden), all in a big gallon bottle with a whole mess of vodka I’d gotten for tincturing before I decided I like brandy better for tincturing.

When I’ve decided it’s more or less done, I’ll strain it, sweeten it to taste with a simple syrup, and then let it sit some more so the flavors can blend.
Now then, on to the preserves part.

I already had a couple of apples and some lemon juice and zest left over from making Apple Brown Betty for a 4th of July party. I blanched the peaches (so I could easily remove the skins) and peeled them, peeled the apples, and cut everything up. It took a while. When I was done I had 20 cups of fruit. Yes, 20 cups. I know jam recipes say you shouldn’t make more than 6-10 cups at a time because it won’t set right, but I decided to go for it anyway. (For anyone who has read my blog before, you may begin to see a pattern developing here.) Stuck all the fruit, some lemon juice and 10 cups of sugar in my biggest stock pot (hey, it’s less sugar than the recipe called for even!).
It looked like this:

It needed to sit in the pot for at least a couple of hours before cooking (the sugar helps draw out the juice) and I kind of got started later than I meant to… That meant that the preserve-making process went on late into the night. Doh!
Moral of this part of the story? When canning, start before 3:30 in the afternoon because once you get started cooking, you really have to go until it’s done. It was completely done (including the boiling-water process part) at 4:30am.

I enjoyed the whole process, even if I was fading a bit at 3am. Hearing the jam jars PING! as they cooled from the boiling water bath was worth it. I don’t have any fancy equipment, I heated the empty jars in a chicken fryer full of hot water (they’re short jars), lifted them in and out of the stock pot with barbecue tongs, and used a towel in the bottom of the big process pot. I actually had to wash my stock pot after filling the jars so I could use it again right away to process them. A canning funnel is now on my list of must-have kitchen equipment, but it all worked fine makeshift style.

Last night I decided to make labels for the jars, because…well, because I’m like that. I put a little something together in Illustrator and cut them into circles on speckly card stock. My friends who are designers would, I’m sure, scoff at my simple design, and they certainly could have done better and fancier. All the same, the labels are far better than Sharpie on the lid.

I enjoyed it so much that I’m making plans for more preserves! Maybe I’ll add lavender or thyme to the next batch! Maybe Drambuie, maybe whisky! Maybe I could get a booth at the Farmer’s Market and sell them for $7.50 a pop! I guess it depends on how much people like it. We’ll see…
In the meantime, it’s still fun.

The Beauty of Limits

Tags:art, beginning, collage, limits, poetry, writing.

I’d love to say that I’m one of those creative types who just has ideas flowing forth all the time, that I could barely keep up with all my ideas for thing to make, to do, to write. I wish that were true. The truth is, despite the fact that I have (finally) a fine arts degree, I usually struggle to come up with a starting point or an idea. For me, when the field is wide open, I just can’t even imagine where to begin. Sometimes my kids will request of me, “Draw me something.” They don’t understand how hard that is, to just draw something, anything. “Well, what do you want a picture of?” “I don’t know.”

I don’t know either.

Sometimes it seems easier to me to begin within a set of parameters. Sometimes limits stimulate creative thinking. This is one of the reasons I’ve been a perpetual student for the last 20 years: because in school I’m forced to push myself and jump-start my thinking by having to generate something that conforms to a specific set of rules.

Now that I’m done with school (for now), I have to find ways to create my own parameters and my own rules. It’s really quite challenging in its own right. I’m not particularly good at rules.

Magnetic poetry provides one such set of parameters. I know, it can be used to make really stupid and pointlessly crude phrases (that is certainly one of its most popular uses), but it can also be used to force a certain kind of flexibility in imagery and word choice. I realized I like it because it’s a sort of verbal collage. In the same way that I cut out images and move them around until they look right, I enjoy taking words and moving them around until they feel right. There is some element of selection, of course, but the options aren’t originally my own. I have to use what I’ve got.

Hmm, that relates to the cooking thing, too. Using leftovers, and all that.

So, what does it mean to be an artist anyway?
Does it really mean “creative problem solver”? That doesn’t sound as glamorous somehow…
Well, I don’t know. Maybe. Too many choices, I can’t even begin to decide.

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Some Poetry That May or May Not Be Good,
But Was Made with Magnetic Poetry

A thousand whispers
Planet balmy like evening wind
What gold-red moon sips my breath?
Strange universe falling

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Tinge my pithy Kafkaesque zeal
With crass delights and sanguine veils
(that was a great philosophy-themed set)

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still roses cry their elaborate symphony
as my bitter honey sleeps,
a languid beauty

shadowed tongues dream easy beneath
the forested light
and sing the mists away

Into the Void

Tags:art, cooking, custard, enlightenment, food, nap, pudding, rice, school.

Now what…(?)
I mean, ok, I’m done with school. This is a very good thing; I know it and feel it deeply, profoundly. My desire to go on to grad school has abated for the moment, but I do still want the MFA.

Why?

Because.

I really can’t give a better reason, I just want it because I’ve always wanted it. Because.

So, that’s all fine and everything.
I’m feeling remarkably tired these days even though I have far less to do. I think it’s a factor of my slowing down: now I’m actually noticing how tired I am because I’m stopping to smell the roses (or coffee), and stuff. No more onward and upward for me. Time for a nap. Or many.

I’m trying to get back to cooking. It’s something I’ve always enjoyed and I still do (once I manage to overcome my inclination to do absolutely nothing for several months). I also enjoy eating food cooked from scratch; I used to be quite a purist about that sort of thing before frozen organic vegetables packaged in plastic bags became a staple in my household. (sigh)

To that end, tonight I decided to be resourceful and make some rice pudding from leftover cooked brown rice. Yes, brown rice (!). Already a red warning light is going off in your head, I can tell. No one makes rice pudding with brown rice! It won’t be, well, mushy enough! It was slightly overcooked actually and I decided to go for it. I also just hate to waste and since the microwave died it’s not very convenient to reheat anything (that’s a whole other ongoing misadventure in my kitchen life).

Anyway, rice pudding it was going to be. Only one recipe in Joy of Cooking but it seemed alright; the Joy of Cooking is always a good place to start. The recipe seemed to be more of a baked custard recipe than a pudding recipe but that’s ok with me, I like custard too. I substituted freshly squeezed grapefruit juice and grapefruit zest for the lemon juice and zest and skipped lining the pan with cake crumbs, both because I didn’t have any and because I’d never heard of such a thing when it comes to rice pudding. Oh, and I cooked it in a water bath because that’s what you do with baked custards. Other than the aforementioned minor alterations, I followed the recipe exactly. All the proportions were just as specified.

It is yummy, though a bit more ricey than puddingy. The kids were suspicious.

Actually, eating it reminds me of the raisins and rice my mom used to make for breakfast sometimes: leftover rice heated in a pan with milk, butter, raisins, and maybe honey. Good solid comfort food, and not too bad for you as long as you kept the butter to a relative minimum (hard for me, I love butter).

Tomorrow: banana bread and, here’s hoping, plum jam. Got to get that started before all those luscious plums go bad.

What does cooking have to do with art, you might reasonably ask, now that I’ve racked up so much debt getting my fancy art degree? A fine question.

One could argue that everything is art, but I won’t get into that.

Chop wood carry water, you know…