Making marmalade is not quite like riding a bicycle. By that I mean that if you don’t do it for a few years, you’re probably going to have to refresh your skills, and you’ll wobble as you get started. At least that’s how it was for me. A few weeks ago, in the midst of a household cleaning…
Now that I’ve (mostly) given up sugar, I make fewer preserves with it. By my count, I’ve made a sugared preserve just three times in the past year: fifty tiny jars of quince apple butter for favors at our wedding party last September, a small batch of Satsuma plum jam when a gift of ripe fruit unexpectedly…
Stewart and I are turning over a new leaf. (Leaves are so light you would think it would be easy to flip one, but it’s not always, is it?) He travels a ton for work and I’ve returned to an almost-full-time job, so we’ve set an intention to make more time for relaxation and play. I can…
I made a sunny limequat syrup during a wild storm. A branches breaking, fences falling down, water blowing sideways kind of storm. I took the limequats off the tree when I heard the weather was coming. They’d been calling out for picking for a couple weeks, so the bad weather was a good excuse. It was also good…
I’ve been looking forward to the publication of Grow a Little Fruit Tree for a year and a half, ever since I took a pruning class with its author, Ann Ralph. When I signed up for that class, I had only one fruit tree — not counting my citrus in barrels — and dreams of more. The “problem” is that…
If my friends know me for any one preserve, this is it. For a long time, this recipe for Meyer Lemon Marmalade was available only in an eBook I published in 2011. I stopped selling that book a while back. I decided to make the recipe available here with what I think is a handy new tip…
Over the years, I’ve read many lists of tips for bloggers. One tip that stuck with me is “Don’t apologize if you haven’t posted for a while.” I agree. It would feel terribly self-important to apologize. I don’t know about you, but there are only a few bloggers I’d miss if I didn’t hear from…
It’s been a long time since I posted here. So long that I forgot one of the main reasons I started this blog, which was to keep track of jam recipes when something turns out well. I scratched out this recipe on a scrap of paper, then I was asking myself where I should put…
At this time of year, citrus is rolling all over the Internet. Lately, I’ve seen lemons, blood oranges, and lots of kumquats. I thought I’d better get my act together and write up this recipe before all the good grapefruits turn into strawberries, as they will before we know it. (You can see from the date in the…
Yesterday, I made three pounds of buttery, salty roasted almonds. It’s a family thing — if a slightly complicated one. My biological dad’s mom taught my mom how to make them. My mom and dad split up when I was small, but my mom carried on the holiday tradition of making the almonds because, in…
Last summer a friend gave me frozen plums. Enormous, icy bricks of purple, purple plums. They’d been tucked away in her freezer for quite a while, and she needed to clear them out in anticipation of moving. So this fall, when I haven’t had time to preserve a single thing, I’ve been opening the freezer…