This week, I emerged from the woods in Alaska with a pocket full of recipes for apples and cranberries, made on our two-burner propane stove. Those recipes — a butter, a sauce, and a conserve — will be coming soon, but today I’m looking back to mid-summer, when my pineapple sage was in full bloom…
Editor’s Note, added September 15, 2010: While this technique came straight from a published preserving book, and you can find similar methods in many obvious places (even the New York Times used to say this was the way to do it), there’s a chance that it is unsafe. (See the comments at the end of…
Shae took off for the Alaskan Interior and left me, Spike, the porcupine, in charge of her blog. When she asked me to do it, I thought she was joking, but then she handed over the laptop and flew off in a helicopter. Crazy. She worked so hard trying to get this recipe right before…
I was thrilled to get this month’s Can Jam assignment — tomatoes all the way, chosen by my buddy Julia — because I knew it would give me a chance to redeem my favorite condiment. Ketchup, ketchup, ketchup. I love ketchup. When I was a kid, I’d sometimes insist on eating a hot dog bun…
This is my favorite kind of canning project — making something wonderful (and a little bit quirky) from a plant, bush, or tree that we live with every day.
The first jam I ever made was plum jam. There were two plum trees in the backyard of the house I was renting and I almost killed myself picking two hundred pounds of plums that year. The thing is, it wasn’t very good jam. As I remember, it was so rubbery you might have bounced…
A classic bread and butter pickle recipe — sweet, sour, and spicy, with roots in Depression-era sandwich-making
[spacer height=”10px”] Look at these funny little apricots. They’re Royal Blenheims, and I won’t make apricot jam without them. I really have no license to be such a snob. I made my first batch of apricot jam only last year. But you know what? That very batch won first place at this year’s Marin County…
I came home from the 2010 Marin County Fair with a fistful of ribbons for my preserves. Nine in all, for my seven jars. Did this surprise me? You bet it did. I’d never entered a fair before, so I didn’t know what to expect. But I’m a perfectionist and obsessive about details, so I’m…
Last week I drove from Fairfax down to Watsonville (six hours round trip) in search of the elusive tayberry. I found one scraggly patch of tays at an organic U-Pick farm — not enough for even one batch of jam. Rather than send me away empty handed, however, the farmer directed me to one of…
It’s the Fourth of July and the Marin County Fair is going full Tilt-a-Whirl. This is the first year I’ve entered my jams and jellies in the fair, and my babies did well. Later this week, I’ll do some strutting and clucking of my own — posting a bit about my experience and offering some…
Stewart said this jam is the best he’s ever had. He got so excited about it that he ran out the door to buy vanilla ice cream while the mixture was still cooking, so we wouldn’t waste even the foam I skimmed off the top. Myself, I’m a little bit partial to last year’s Blenheim…