One of the hardest things about facing a big health and diet change is giving up some of the things that I wanted to do, like making these citrusy, sugary winter preserves. I’ll share my list with you, in case you are still good to go with the sugar and want to make some of these preserves yourself.
Now that I’ve had to give up refined sugar, honey seems like nothing less than a miracle. I’ve been thinking of all those beautiful bees, working so hard to make it. They deserve our big respect. Here’s one of the first things I’ve decided about my new diet situation: No crappy honey. No squeezie-bear bottles…
In the three years since I started writing about jam and preserves, this is the longest I’ve gone without posting anything here — three months. I’m mostly taking a winter’s rest from preserving, though this past week I did make a batch of lingonberry mandarin marmalade using the last of our wild lingonberries from Alaska…
If you met a feijoa on the street, how would you say hello? You could greet it in Spanish (fay-ho-ah), Brazilian (Fay-zhwa), or as they do down under in Australia and New Zealand (fee-joe-ah). Or you could chuck all that and simply call it a pineapple guava. It will answer to any of these names…
A couple of weeks ago I got an urgent phone message from my mother. She said, “Call me back as soon as possible so we can talk about grapes.” (At this time of year it can be like a hotline for abandoned fruit around here, with people calling or emailing to say, “I have way…
There are some foodie words I can’t say with a straight face. “Foodie” is one of them. Terroir is another. Honestly, I can’t even pronounce it well. (Follow this link and mouse over the word to hear it.) Partly, I feel like a kid at the dinner table, trying out a grown-up word that I…
I’ve been thinking about wild blackberry jam. There’s nothing at all wrong with a basic approach: combining blackberries with sugar and lemon juice and cooking the mixture until it sets. You don’t need to add pectin, you can keep the volume of sugar relatively low, and you’ll get a fine result. (You can find some…
A recipe for simple homemade orange syrup for sodas or drinks, plus three variations: orange mint, orange cardamom, and orange elderflower.
My career as a legal writer and editor has involved reading and analyzing hundreds if not thousands of legal statutes. I wouldn’t call that part of my job fun, but I’ve always been nerdy enough to find it a little bit fascinating. Because people write laws and people are quirky, laws are often quirky, too….
Last year, two things came into my life that changed the way I preserve fruit. One was an upright storage freezer, which now lives in the basement. The other was a Food Saver, which allows me to freeze fruit in vacuum sealed packages at the height of just-picked excellence, without the danger of ruin from…
‘ve experimented with several variations on the quince-based marmalade theme and (other than orange) this version using Meyer lemons is by far my favorite.
On Sunday, I picked nineteen pounds of Rangpur limes. (I have the scratches to prove it. Rangpur trees are thorny!) I sent eleven pounds out to the folks who won them in last week’s giveaway. That left seven pounds to play with this week and about forty pounds still on the tree. That’s a lot…