I wanted to do something to soothe myself after last week’s garlic disaster. That garlic jelly was a total loss. When Stewart came home from his travels, it took me a whole day just to get him to smell it. When I held out the greenish yellow goo he looked at me like I was…
When I said onions made me nervous, I didn’t know what I was talking about. Onions are innocent. Garlic, on the other hand, assaulted me and drove me out of my own home. Maybe it was the conspiracy with chiles that turned the little cloves against me. Two full heads of garlic blended to a…
This month for the Tigress’s Can Jam, we were asked to get down and dirty with the allium family: onions, garlic, leeks, shallots, scalllions, and their ilk. Except for the few onions I throw in with my pickles, I’ve never preserved alliums before. But I’ve been seeing a lot of mighty fine looking chutneys lately,…
In recent months, I’ve logged an astonishing number of hours making marmalade. Many kinds of marmalade. I’ve learned that lots of recipes tell you to cut the peel into thin slices, but leave you alone to figure out the particulars. Other recipes require arguably unnecessary work to separate peel from pulp. We need some help…
There’s pressure canning, and then there’s canning under pressure. Today, I learned about the latter. I’m one of those weird folk who likes deadlines, but I’ve really been busting my butt the past few days to catch up with the Tigress’s Can Jam. Tomorrow’s the cut off for a post about carrots, so I ran out…
I’m a Meyer lemon fanatic. Everything about them makes me happy — the yellow weight of them in my pockets and palms, the flower-sweet but citrus-sharp fragrance they lend to my hands, my car, my kitchen. I smile whenever I see them. As soon as I learned that Meyer lemons are the only citrus that…
I packed away this blog almost a year and a half ago, and I didn’t expect to come back to it. Why start up again, when the world is aclutter with everybody’s words about everything? The fruit made me do it. More specifically, the dozens of of like-minded, fruit-obsessed participants in Tigress’s Can Jam inspired…
You probably know about the Darwin Awards — honors bestowed upon those who advance the human species by doing something so dumb that they accidentally remove themselves from it. Like the guy who wanted a Snickers so badly that he rocked the vending machine until it fell on him and crushed him to death. Or…