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,…
When I launched this blog in 2007 — with no intention of writing about jam — I googled “Hitchhiking to Heaven” to find out whether anyone else was already using the name. My search didn’t yield much, certainly not anything that concerned me. What I’m saying is that I didn’t find this entry in the…
Who cares if you don’t have a say in this year’s Oscar race for Best Picture? You can exercise your voting muscle in the 2009 Bookseller/Diagram Prize awards for the most bizarre book title of the year. This annual contest kicked off in 1978, when the winner was Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on…
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…
Yesterday I asked my grandfather what he remembers about the Great Depression. His clearest memory is meeting a hungry man on the sidewalk and bringing him to the back door of the family home. My great-grandmother fed the man and gave my grandpa a lecture so stern that it’s still with him today. But our…
Today I went to Bed Bath & Beyond to look for a bath mat. I should have known better. BBB has the power to induce in me a confusion and delirium unique in the world of retail. It surpasses even the weirdness of IKEA. I discovered the trouble with BBB years ago, when my friend…
Sometimes all it takes to wake you up is a quick shift in perspective. That happened to me today, when my friend Janet reappeared after almost four weeks hiking solo in the Eastern Sierra. Having trekked more than 270 miles, she got off the train skinny, strong, and brown from a rough mix of dirt…
A while back, Stewart came home from a trip and I told him I’d taken up with a guy down the street. My other boyfriend is a fat guy — big belly, skinny neck — though he weighs only 30 pounds. And he honks. Which makes sense, given that he’s a big domestic goose. When…
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…