I’ve met Andrew Wilder, the proprietor at Eating Rules and the host of the October Unprocessed challenge, only once. At last year’s BlogHer Food conference, I tried to stab him with a giant fork. We happened to be standing next to each other in the long line for a photo booth, and the three-foot long…
Of all the seedlings I started last January, my ground cherries fared best. (Ground cherries are also called “husk cherries,” or sometimes “cape gooseberries.”) They proved hardy from the start, weathering all sorts of storms — including one that tipped the greenhouse on its side and dumped them all onto the floor. They chugged straight…
One of my kitchen goals for this year was to learn to make yogurt. From what I understood, it was going to be one of the easiest tasks to scratch off my to-do list. When I investigated yogurt-making methods, however, I became so confused by the number of ways to proceed that it stopped me in…
This one’s a darkly elegant jam, with a touch of black raspberry liqueur and some of the seeds removed to make it smoother than it would otherwise be.
I’m sitting on the floor in the San Francisco airport, waiting for a flight that’s been delayed three hours. One of the only good things about hanging around the airport all afternoon is that I get to share this recipe for plummy peach jam, which I didn’t think I’d have time to post. I made…
There are a bazillion and a half ways to make fruit leather. You can use one fruit or a mix of many. You can add sugar or not. You can add spices or not. You can cook down the fruit before or after you puree it — or not at all. You can dry your…
A week or so ago, I was bemoaning my lack of plums. I used to rent a house with the most gloriously productive Santa Rosa plum tree you could imagine. During my first two summers of canning, I picked and jammed so many plums that I thought I would never want to see a plum…
I felt subdued about entering my preserves in this year’s county fair. I’ll confess, my confidence was low. It may be because I did well last year — my first year — and I made a big deal about it. What if I went and bombed after I’d gone on about being a prizewinner? I…
Remember how we weren’t sure whether our King pigeon Yuzu was male or female, but were certain that Quince was a boy? (Even our expert pigeon veterinarian said so.) Well, look what our boy Quince went and did . . . And this is how she looked at me when I asked to see her…
Is there really such a thing as “sugar-free” jam? With all the sugar in the fruit itself, it’s technically impossible. But you can make jam without refined sugar. All you need is fruit, fruit juice concentrate, and pectin that’s specially made for no- or low-sugar preserves, like Pomona’s. (You can also make jam with honey…
For the past few days, I’ve been experimenting with recipes for jams that don’t contain refined sugar — just crushed fruit, sweetened with concentrated fruit juice and jelled with Pomona’s Pectin. On Saturday, I made a successful “sugar-free” cherry-blueberry jam, and I’ll share that here soon. Today, I want to quickly show you what happened…
This is a somewhat labor intensive salad. Still, I should have been able to pull it together in less than an hour, not the four days it ended up taking. I got distracted — by fruit, by summer, by the opening of our county fair — which is why my June veggie challenge post is…