Come on, Spring!

Spring is coming slowly to Northwestern PA this year. Usually, there are a few days between February and April that warm up into the 60’s and 70’s, but that has not really happened this year. It has been wet and cold.

Surprisingly, the damage from the winter has not been too great, considering we had almost two feet of snow the week before Halloween. I had some carrots which ended up over wintering in the garden. Most of them were not really storage carrots so they were no good, but some Bolero carrots went just fine with a pot roast just a couple weeks ago. I’m planting those for sure again. Also, I never got my strawberries mulched, and it seems they are not going to make it this year. that is also fine, because I never like the location they were in. they were a permanent feature of my lower vegetable garden that had started on the edge but had somehow gotten into the middle after a couple garden expansions. My neighbors are nice kids, but they use herbicide between the little row of arborvitae they have planted as a property line marker, and my strawberries suffered mightily from deformations cause by herbicide blow off. Not sorry to see them go, though I still have not decided where a new strawberry patch should be placed.

Seed starting season is here. I have a good selection of really fun sounding plants this year. I ordered from a lot of different sources. One of the seed companies I order from sent the order really late along with a note of apology. It seems they needed to hire a bunch more people because so many people were ordering garden seeds this year. I feel like my orders were really conservative, actually, about equivalent to last year, though I also ordered a fancy potted plant which was a splurge. I’m working full time. I should have a fancy dwarf pomegranate, right?

Right now, all I have started is my onion plants and some slow to germinate herbs and flowers. I’ve never started onion plants indoors before, but that is how they sell them at the farm coop, in big clumps of pre started plants. You can get sets, too of just really normal types of plants, but for specialty things like sweet onions, they sell plants. My onion plants are for red onions which are also supposedly good storage onions. I am a little tired of never having red onions for summer salads, so this is plan C 2.0.

We are getting into some landscaping plans this year. I have a raised bed I’ve never been happy about, and this is the year it gets new sides, a fresh load of topsoil and compost and hopefully a new lease on life. Right now, it’s full of stove ash, and the cats have been using it as a littler box. Except for the one kitten my old dog Zora chomped, we still have all of last year’s kittens. The girls Bili and Boots have been moved into the house and spayed. Our regular vet has turned out to be a great advocate of kitties and is willing to accept the wild cats from the garage for spaying a neutering as long as we can get them in. One of the cats has already been spayed. We kept it in the house right after the surgery to keep it clean, but it appears to be a combination of very scared and very stupid, and hasn’t gone back outside yet. I’ll be going downstairs in the middle of the night to take care of the fire and I’ll see it crawl up into the ceiling of the semi finished basement room or it will fall out of a closet when I go to hang up clothes. We keep leaving the basement door open for it, but no luck.

Speaking of pets, I took the plunge after saving up money all winter for another Weimarnaner puppy. I had a couple of kennel visits lined up and more cash than I needed to get my truck last year. By chance, I was at the bank and one of the neighbor girls who just moved to a house down the road from me mentioned she was getting a puppy, and I said I wanted a puppy, and the other bank lady said her son just got puppies, and I said I wanted a Weimaraner, and she said, these were Weims, at least their mom was, and there were a lot of them, and they were cute.

So a couple days later, I went down to see some half Weimaraner and half chocolate lab puppies. Interestingly enough, some of them were female and dark brown but most of them were black with a little really dark brown on the ears and male. One of the little brown females was still there and, she was really pretty. According the the lady we got them from, the last of the little brown females was actually going to some relatives in Texas.

One of the males, a kind of chunky labby-looking boy crawled right into my mom’s arms the second she knelt down by the puppies, so I had to get that one for sure. Then, I picked the prettiest one I could find who looked most like a Weimaraner despite being almost black! That was also a male, so I’ve spent the last month and a half having my house torn up and laughing my rear end off at these crazy boys!



Spencer is the little goofball on the left, and Bruce is the handsome “angel” on the right!
I wish one as the good one and one was the bad one, but mostly, they just take turns! It’s good having young dogs again! I actually use my back yard now to make the dogs run around. I barely walked back there for months!

Other than puppies, not a lot going on right now. We went to the outdoor show up in Erie a few weeks ago, and that was nice. you can always visit with land management people, but I missed the retriever demonstrations. My mom chatted up a guy who sells deer plot who recommended clover and chicory as a good seed for our wet back field. I found yet another taxidermy person, but this time we were actually able to get my uncle’s tiny bear skin to him. I personally love fur and would probably trap or shoot something for fur except it grosses out my mom, so I only get to indulge myself at things like outdoor shows or fur trapper re-enactors. There’s this newer arts festival they’ve had out in Russell the last few years which I consider like a “man” craft show with lots of furs and blacksmithing and things like that. Possibly an idea for a future entry!

Also, I can’t keep my mouth shut about a couple of issues in the news I’ve seen recently. One was under the headline: “Alternative energy quest threatens birds” and was about how domestic energy production like growing crops for fuel and windfarms threaten birds’ lives and habitats. Lumping in with this, bafflingly, was mountaintop removal coal mining. Now, logically, you can look at a toll of birds randomly hitting obstructions at wind farms, or habitat displacement due to more corn farming for ethanol as a change that will have a toll on birds, but none of these could possibly compare to the complete destruction of mountaintops in WV and KY and the filling in of miles of streams in the valleys in terms of habitat loss. And when did coal mining become alternative energy anyway? I’m not against even strip mining in a lot of cases. You can fix that once you get the coal off the top layer, but the tops of mountains can’t be put be back on and no one but no one is going to do the work to restore the streams once they’ve been filled in. And I know the Obama administration’s EPA has recently put on hold a lot of these permits to do his mountaintop mining, but it was also the Obama administration’s EPA that grouped mountaintop removal mining with wind farming as a threat to habitat.

From the EPA to the FDA: There is no stopping a proposal that has been floating around the FDA and the Agriculture department to have all farm animals marked with microchips and RFD tags. People who keep livestock, eventually at any scale, ae going to be required to report on the location and condition of the livestock using electronic monitoring and questionnaires on the internet. All of this is going to be done at the owners’ expense, which will be considerable for small “homestead” type farmers and basically only benefits big producers. The idea is the keep the food supply safer by tracking livestock from the farm to the slaughterhouse. It’s of course vastly counter-intuitive since most of the contamination takes place in the slaughter house after the individually monitored animals have been mixed with hundreds if not thousands of others. This is basically expensive window dressing to relieve factory farms of liability for who knows what, but it is also looking to add significant costs in money and time to small farmers who possibly only produce meat for their own consumption.

No time today for links to either of these issues, but google both of them, and you can see that it is real, AP news type outlets which are reporting on these and not just conspiracy theory people, sitting in little houses, in the middle of nowhere, trying to decide how many tomato plants to start this year because we’re getting lulled into sheep-like complacency by government agencies which dictate the sugar content of processed food to guarantee a certain amount of sleepiness, obesity, and disease in an increasingly failing effort to distract and occupy the rich, vital energy of our people!

Try Cedar Grove Cheese

Hi!

I usually don't go in for picking a brand name something or other and insist that it's wonderful. Branding of anything has really gone to far with all the fetishing of labels, Nike etc.

I like sports despite the constant brand reenforcement, and I really think that one of the main reasons that NASCAR is pushed as a sport when it is not really a sport is because of the sheer amount of advertising that goes on. Really. And I think that soccer is not pushed as a sport in America (and to some extent this applies to hockey, too) is because the format of the game is not conducive to excessive advertising. The most they can manage for soccer is like a little Snickers bar logo around the time clock. With hockey, they kind of conceded to the complaints of advertisers and if you listen to the games on the radio, you'll hear the commentators say several times that they are on a television time out.

Speaking of which I was watching the Wimbledon men's final on a DVD the other day (vamos Rafa) and it was just presented in the British broadcast version with almost static camera, very little commentary and no stupid computer graphics and sound effects. I liked it. When you watch old football games, they don't have the whole screen crowded up. I remember watching some of the Wimbledon and French open coverage at my sisters' and there were so many graphics and crawls that when the commentators were oohing and ahhing over Federer's footwork, you couldn't even see his feet. This trend has kind of maxed out and probably should be dialed back a little. The whole "crawl" thing constantly came in right about 9/11, and I think, psychologically, it may be an attempt to push people into a permanent state of crisis mentality, but that's just me.

Anyway, I do recommend that anyone who cares for cheese give Cedar Grove Cheese a try. They have grass fed cows with no bovine growth hormone. Actually, so many farmers and food companies have phased out the use of rBGH that Monsanto even sold off it's brand to a smaller company. That's what they get for abusing the endocrine systems of the American people! Cedar Grove also has a really nice little web site at Cedargrovecheese.com, of course, where they tell all about how wonderful their environmental practices are. I think that if Cedar Grove's six year aged grass fed cheddar (it's called "Prairie Pride", or something like that) required some serious environmental damage to produce, it would still be worth it.

The extra aged cheddar is a special cheese experience. I can never find cheese that is sharp enough. All the of the commercial American cheeses that are "Extra Sharp" are getting to the point where I can taste them. Some Canadian cheese are okay. But the Cedar Grove cheese six year aged cheddar is the most wonderful cheese I've ever had. It's fill of these little brine spots and has a taste that is tart, bitter, sweet, and musky before the true cheddar taste even hits. Their other cheeses are very nice, too. I like a milder, softer mozzarella, but it's still fine, and the other hard cheeses are just amazing.

I buy this at the farm store at the dairy where I get my milk. I guess you can do a direct order, too, but if you get the chance to try especially the aged cheddar, it's a must.

PS. I can hardly imaginve being in a situation where you'd have access to aged cheddar and no toothbrush, but there are substances in aged cheese which kill tooth decay germs. So, if you are done with a meal and can't brush, snack on a piece of real aged cheese, and you'll give your teeth a little protection.

PPS I keep seeing where there is more and more information coming out about the digital TV conversion. I keep hoping that some of the channels that I pick up now will adopt stronger signals, but in infact, as we get closer to the time, I am getting poorer reception on fewer channels that I did when I originally set up that converter. PArt of that is due to the fact that that broadcast equipment of the local PBS station is kind of broken right now, and won't be fixed for a few weeks until they get an out of state team to come in, but I hate PBS anyway. I will kind of miss seeing House in Febrary since we can't get digital Fox.

I'm getting more than a little fed up with stuff like that. Every time the powers that be "improve" something, it's like not being able to see Federer's feet. All this digital, HD stuff, and all of the new features on everyone's web sites? Can't use 'em, can't see 'em, they take too long to load, and I just move on to a different site that doesn't take too long to load. One of he news sites that I used to visit quite often because it was just text headlines go the genius idea of adding video to their page, and now I just don't visit that site anymore. That's fine, because I didn't really agree with their politics, and they were just starting to annoy me, but I dhave a little bit of news gap.

I hate to be a whiner about this stuff, but there you go. I used to think it was so important to check tha tnews so many times a day. Now that I can't get it to load on my computer, it just all goes on without me. Kind of like the stupid PBS station. They really just don't care until it turns out they want money from you, and I say, nope, I just spent my spare cash this week on some cheese that has spent the better part of decade in a cave in Wisconsin!

August Was Busy. September Will Be Worse!

Hello!

Gosh, it's been a while! I had to get a full time job, so I've been realloting my time to other things. I actually worked in a factory for about three weeks before I found a cushier job where they actually cared whether or not I had actually graduated from college let alone high school. One good thing about the factory was I was able to earn some money while looking for a better job, and I’ve given up cussing. I’ve seen where these things can lead, and I’m done.

A quick note about “American manufacturing”. The town where I live is a really typical rust belt town with a lot of little machine shops and steel mills which are only still there through a combination of miracles and ruthless management. (And, judging by the number of government vehicles that park regularly outside one of the forges, the defense industry, of course.) None of these factories maintain more than a token human resources department and instead, bring in waves of people through a bunch of different temp agencies.

The job that I was doing involved assembling presewn pieces that were brought in from China. Literally, it was the job that wasn’t worth having the Chinese do and absolutely depended on having a high turnover among the workers. There was no way to do that job without getting severe repetitive motion stress on your arms and hands, and if anyone was able to actually work as long as you had to work to get on the real factory payroll, there would be so many workers’ comp claims that the business would go under. The majority of the permanent people were men, the majority of the temps women. Men who came in as temps at the same time as the women who came in the same week I did were already getting bumped up into shipping while the women were being threatened with lay off because they weren’t meeting the number of pieces completed an hour that management wanted. Meanwhile, we were all getting paid what people in Erie get paid for working fast food because the temp agency gets contracted to provide a certain number of workers and then pays a smaller salary than what people would have earned had they been employed directly by the factory. Additionally, the temp agency is able to further skim the workers’ pay by offering “health care” for $18.00 a week which, of course, if you were too sick to work and actually needed, you’d no longer be purchasing. I’d like to see some of the political candidates this year address stuff like this!

But that’s not why I’m here! I’m here to tell you that food prices are going ot spike in September. Things seemed to have stabilized over the summer, but that’s not going to be the case anymore, and now is the time to think about stocking up, even if you’ve never done it before. I took my first full pay from the factory and went to the dry goods store. I didn’t buy the finest little hat in the store, but I did get a lot of dry cereal and sugar which I spent the day vacuum sealing into quart jars. Oh, people mock now, but when the fit hits the shan, they’ll be asking me for my jars of oatmeal. (And I’ll say, sure, glad to keep you from starving.)

I really couldn’t read Cormac McCarthy’s latest book “The Road”, even though I usually just pounce on all of the stuff he comes out with. I thought it was too horrible that the man was just wandering around with his starving kid and everything was dead and ruined, and I would rather just sit in my basement and chew on old cornmeal if things are going to go that way. I’m not sure that I’ll even go and see the movie of that book, despite the fact that it has Viggo Mortensen and was filmed on Beach 10 up at Presqueisle. They also filmed in Conneaut Lake Amusement Park which is partially burned down, and I happened to be at the movies down that way one night over the spring and I saw the filming truck coming in which was cool. I love movies, and the only bad thing about living in the country is the seventy mile round trip to go and see a movie.

But I’m not here to tell you this! I’m here to tell you that you need no special equipment whatsoever to freeze beans!
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And if you’ve seen the prices for frozen beans lately, it may be time to give bean freezing a try. Everything is late this year, and there’s a good chance that you can still get beans either out of your garden or out of the garden of someone who is tired of them and just wants them gone before you even need to think about buying them.

Here’s how you do it:

You need plenty of cold water, a stove or heat source, a colander or sieve, a pot, and zipper bags. You can also use bags with twist ties. When I was little, we always used a vegetable freezing kit that you could get with bags and little white boxes so your frozen veggies looked kind of like the boxed ones that came commercially and stacked up in the freezer better. I’m not sure they even make those anymore. Then, of course, you need beans. Green, yellow, filet, bush, pole, flat, doesn’t matter. Also, the amount doesn’t matter, either. That’s what’s great about beans! Some beans freeze better than others, but they’re all okay as long as they’re pretty fresh.

Prepare the beans: Wash them, of course. Then, snap the stems. I usually snap the tails, too, and them break them into about one inch pieces. French beans don’t freeze too well, but they’re still nice in the middle of winter, so just snap the stem and leave the beans whole on those. You can also go to the kitchen store or even an upscale grocery store and get a bean “frencher” which is a neat little gadget you can run beans through end to end and get long strips like French cut beans. That’s a good option and easier on the hands than snapping pounds and pounds of beans, but we are talking no special equipment here, so you don’t need one.

Get a nice big pot of boiling water going. Then, you want to blanch the beans. This just means boil them for a couple minutes until they turn bright, bright green but are still hard and uncooked on the inside. Make sure the water is really hot before you dip in the beans. Blanching breaks up the enzymes in the beans that makes them ripen, so you are kind of freezing your beans in time before you freeze them. You can’t skip this step!

Take your bright greeny beans (or they could be yellowy) and dip them out of the water with the colander. If you’re not doing multiple pots of beans, I suppose you could just dump the water, but I usually have to use the same boiling water three or four times before I am done with my beans. You don’t have to boil new water every time. Run cold water over them until they get cold. This keeps them from actually cooking and holds them at the blanched stage.

Shake off excess water. Stuff whatever sized portion you think you would like to cook when it is time to cook into the plastic bag. Squeeze out excess air. Seal. Throw in the freezer.

Congratulations, you’re done. You just gave the Man a thumb in the eye. Especially if your beans were free.

Canning beans is much, much different. Unless you are going to make a pickled or a dilled bean, you can’t use regular canning methods to put beans in jars because they are not acidic enough, and you need to can them under pressure. A pressure canner is not cheap, and I don’t have one yet, but my aunt cans everything from beans to venison stew. But she is also the one that I have to borrow a bean Frencher from, as well

Jammin'

Hello!

We’ve been sitting through a bout of pretty bad weather the last few weeks. After it was so hot in late May and early June, it’s been cold and really wet since then. My poor melons which were outgrowing their greenhouse pots have been sitting in the ground actually getting smaller since it’s been so cold and wet. We’ve had nights in the forties and yesterday, it barely made it out of the sixties. Though all my lettuces and cabbages and left over cold weather crops are doing quite well.

Another thing doing well is berries. It is getting close to currant time, and I have also already made two batches of strawberry jam from berries in my own patch. I’m tempted to get some more from one of the berry farms around here, but I was not impressed the last time I did pick your own at the big local farm. The berries were not good quality and there were so many rules! Don’t pick any with white tips. Don’t pick across the row. Don’t do this. Don’t do that. And worst of all, they actually did not allow people to bring kids younger than twelve with them to pick. Of course, who wants their kids to be rooting around in the kind of chemicals they spray on things these days, but one of the reasons why I enjoy picking and jamming and and jellying is because that’s one of the things I used to do as a little kid with my grandparents. Even my very short stint as a strawberry picker on a big commercial farm didn’t ruin it for me. Unlike my job I had as a baseball card sorter! I hate cards. I don’t think I’ve even thought playing war or solitaire or Sorry! was any fun since then. Memory card games are sheer heck, I tell you, and if my niece starts putting non matching cards into different piles, I get really uptight.

Anyway, I did end up plowing under my patch of honeyoe strawberries. They were just disappointing. They took up too much space for the three berries that were actually picked from than patch in two years. The sparkles are really great, but I have a lot of deformed berries. Strawberries can get into really funny shapes and get stunted from even a whiff of herbicide, and I didn’t realize my next door neighbors were going to spray roundup on everything that grew when I situated my strawberry patch right next to their property line. That is definitely something I will have to revise when I do the next patch. I guess next spring or at the latest the spring of 2010, when I put in more strawberries and get rid of this bunch, I’ll need to situate a patch somewhere a little less likely to get herbicide blow off from either the corn field or the neighbor’s.

Speaking of my “conventional” gardening neighbors who use pesticides and fertilizers all over their garden. Their stuff might be bigger right now, but my dirt looks better. Theirs is all pale and tan and dried up looking, and I know they have been irrigating even with all the rain, and mine is all rich and red and moist. Ha!

Anyway, about jam. I really think it’s actually pretty easy. Jam is easy. Jelly is hard. Because you need cheese cloth and a strainer, and you need to juice the berries before you make jelly. Jam, you just get the leaves and stems off and mash em up. I luckily found sugar on a good sale a few weeks ago, less than a couple dollars a bag, which is what it cost a few years ago. Though, I was prepared for jelly and jam season when they had all the sugar and baking things on sale over the holidays last winter. I bought up a whole bunch of sugar and vacuum sealed it. I used the bags you cut to size and left an extra few inches on the tops of the bags so I can reuse them to seal more sugar later. The vacuum sealer has been very wonderful. I made two giant pans of lasagna for a party way back in March and froze and sealed the leftovers into individual packages, and they are still as good as they were back then.

Back to jam!

Jam and jelly are really one of the few things that I can’t put off. When the fruit is ripe, you need to put it away. Everything else gets put on hold. Luckily, the first thing that comes in is strawberries, and they are not hard to deal with. No thorns, no seeds, no tiny little stems. Elderberries are so time consuming, and blackberries are just painful.

You need good sugar to make good jam. A brand name like Domino. It really makes a difference. The last couple of years I used Wegman’s store brand sugar for jam, and it made the jam just fine, but it didn’t store well. I got the really big bag, and and the bottom of the bag, there was just a rock hard piece of sugar that was too solid to even knock apart with a hammer. If sugar gets chunky or hard, usually I can still shove it into a measuring cup and use it that way, but the big, solid pieces that clumped up in store brand sugar were just too big! I usually store even sugar that is not vacuum sealed wrapped in a few layers of plastic bag because my basement gets so damp in summer, but even this couldn’t keep the store brand sugar from turning into a rock, so I’ve stuck with Domino ever since.

A tip for saving chunky sugar:

Pour sugar with a lot of lumps in to a metal bowl. Use a dry, sturdy utensil to grind up as much as you can. A pestle or a really thick stoneware teacup will work. Pour ground sugar through a sieve and either back into the empty bag (as long as it’s dry) or into a storage container. Save any stubborn sugar lumps for the sugar bowl where you can put them in tea or coffee. Or use them in recipes. I make a loaf of bread that calls for sugar cubes dipped in cinnamon to be baked right in. Use smaller lumps to put “snow” on decorated Christmas tree shaped cookies. In airtight containers, sugar has an almost unlimited shelf life!

Like a lot of things, you really don’t need that much to do jam. Jars, of course, but you can reuse other jars as long as they have the metal lid with the “button” on top and you can get the smell of whatever they used to have in them out. You need two big pots and also a saucepan. One pot is for cooking the jam, and the other is for jar sterilization. The jar boiling pot can be any old stock pot. The jelly cooker should have a thicker bottom. You can get a hot water canner with a little rack inside for lifting jars in and out almost anywhere. My mom got mine for me at a yard sale for fifty cents. You can buy new, but check yard sales and estate sales or your older relatives’ basements first!

Also, that fruit pectin, is the same whether you get the brand name or the discount stuff. It is also sealed really well, and keeps a long, long time. I bought about forty boxes a few years ago, and I just pull one out and use it whenever I like. I do orange marmalade in the winter when the citrus fruit is on sale, and if I didn’t buy ahead and stock up, I’d have a hard time finding pectin powder in the middle of winter. I get generic “Jel-ease” at Save a Lot instead of getting the name brand, and it is like a quarter the cost and does the same thing. also, the recipes for a million different kinds of jams and jellies come on a little paper right inside the box, and it’s really good resource for getting ideas on how to preserve things.

Other helpful things for jelly and jam that you don’t need but which make things easier:

1. Long handled wooden spoon
2. Tongs and/or jar lifer to lift jars out of hot water
3. Canning funnel

And that’s it!

Basic jam steps:

1. Get fruit. The pectin you choose will tell you how much. Strawberries take two quarts. Jams don’t take a lot of fruit. Jelly takes more.

2. Get other ingredients. Generally this is just sugar, but strawberries and other less sour fruits also call for lemon juice. The acidity is what allows the fruit to be preserved. I buy the big bottles of lemon juice from concentrate. Lemons are too expensive, and those little lemon shaped squeezy bottles are not accurate.

3. Get jars ready. Count up your jars and make sure they are clean and have matching lids. I also like to have one ore two extra jars prepared just in case the recipe turns out more than I expect. There are a lot of variables involved here including size of fruit, water content and things like that. I usually get more than what the recipe says. Jars can be prepared in one of two ways. You can either put the jars in the canner and just boil the heck right out of them for ten minutes and then leave them in the hot water, or you can fill them with water and set them upright in the canner which you then fill just to cover the jars and bring to a simmer. This second way, you need to reboil the jars for ten minutes after you fill them. This is supposedly safer. I have started doing this because I think it is faster, and easier even with having to process the filled jars. I grew up just boiling the jars and filling them with hot jam and calling it good. The idea being that if you have boiling hot sauce in boiling hot jars, you can’t get any germs in there, but I guess thinking on that has changed. Though, I use the “new” method just because I don’t like to have to wait the whole time it takes for the jars to boil up empty for the whole ten minutes.

4. Measure the sugar. You need to measure the fruit later, but measure the sugar first because the ratio of sugar to fruit is actually really important. The same measuring cup that you will use to measure the fruit should be used at the beginning when it is clean and dry to dole out the sugar. Jam is serious scientific business, and if you skimp on the sugar or blow off the lemon juice, it won’t work.

5. Prepare the fruit. The recipe will tell you what to do with specific fruit and how to prepare it. Basically get rid of leaves and smash. A potato masher is good for this, but also that pestle or stoneware cup from the lumpy sugar incident can be employed in smashing up berries. Especially if you have a cheesy “modern” potato masher that is just like a curvy piece of steel instead of a nice round one, then just use the teacup. Measure the fruit out according to the recipe. If you’re short, you can pad that with a little water.

6. Do the cooking. The jars should have simmered or boiled or whatever for their allotted times and should just be hot now. Still sitting in the other big pot, waiting for the jelly. Mix up the pectin and lemon juice and boil. Then add the sugar. Make sure the pot is big. Jelly making involves bringing many cups of sugar to a full rolling boil for a couple minutes, and there is nothing funny about letting seven or eight cups of molten sugar boil all over your stovetop. A cousin of mine also ruined her ceramic cook top by trying to scrape off burnt sugar. I have a ceramic cook top, too, which I have dumped sugar on, and the solution is just keep cleaning it regularly and let the sugar wear off. It will eventually. But a nice big pot will also cover up the burner, and protect it from stray sugar. A “full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down” is the phrase on the jelly instruction, and it’s like anything else, you’ll know it when you see it. If you’re going to reprocess the jam, let it boil a minute. If you already sterilized the jars for ten minutes, let it boil two minutes. You need to stir all the time during this part. Nothing can scorch or stuck or burn or everything will be ruined.

7. Get the lids ready. The lids need to be clean and hot and pliable, as well. In the saucepan, get them hot fast with just a little water.

8. Jar up. Pull sterilized jars out of canner. (Why you might want tongs.) Use your funnel to direct the sauce into the jars. I’ve used a ladle, but just dumping the jam into the funnel right from the pot is quicker and easier. Long sleeves are a good idea, though, in case of hot splashes. If the jars were boiled ten minutes empty, slap on the lids, and turn them upside down on a dishtowel for five minutes, and you’re done. The “modern” method where the jars are just simmering in the canner: take out the jars and fill them and put on the lids. Drop the jars back into the hot water. Do it one at a time, so the jars don’t get a chance to cool down and explode! when you throw hot sauce in them. Then, make sure there is an inch of water over top of the jars and put the lid back on the big canner pot. Bring to a boil and boil ten minutes. This sounds like extra work, but it really isn’t. And also supposed to be safer!

9. Let hot jars sit in water for five more minutes. Lift out. (This is where the jar lifter comes in handy.) Let set for a day.

This sounds like a lot of work, but it really isn’t! Maybe two hours tops, counting doing the washing up and the picking. And it is a lot cheaper and better than storebought which with all the preservatives and high fructose corn syrup is kind of like jellified pop!

Energy and water and time saving tip:

Use the hot water left over in the canner to clean up. I usually dump it into the sink or the jam cooking pot. Nothing but hot water and jars ever goes into the canner so there’s n chance of getting soap on things that are finished.

I know there are ways to make jellies and jams without commercial fruit pectin. I keep reading about boiling tart apples. I haven’t tried it yet. I may, but right now I’m well stocked with powdered pectin! I have also not yet tried any jelly recipes with organic sugar or raw sugar, which I would like to do at some point in the future when I can afford to experiment and make mistakes, but right now I'm too poor and food is too expensive! Tried and true is the way to go, as long as tried and true actually works! Which in this case, it does!

Three Sisters update:

It looks like at least some of my corn is going to be “knee high by the Fourth of July” and my pumpkins and squash are starting to come up. So far so good!

Springtime Update and More Food Issues

Spring is here, even though it doesn’t look like it! We still have piles of snow, and the weather is still chilly. But there are a few hopeful signs. Tulips and daffodils are starting to peek up through the mud. The robins have been back for a couple weeks. The killdeer came back last week, and I expect to hear peep frogs down in the frog pond any moment. I have started my earliest seeds, and some of them are actually growing, and we had our first party of the year: a combined birthday party for my brother and my niece. So, my picture is of my nieces and my sister feeding stale crackers we liberated post-holidays from my grandmother’s cupboard to the goats Matt and Don who very badly need sheared at our first party of the year!

The weather for the party was sunny but very chilly, and the yard is wet, wet wet! We refer to the “back 40” which is more like the back eight by a few different names. We have the Little Pine Forest and the Big Pine Forest which are both overgrown stands of Christmas trees, and then there is a little field at the bottom of the hill and an old fenced field that I would like to be able the call “the Pasture” someday, but right now, we can’t be romantic, and it is “the Swamp”. Don’t get me wrong. It’s nice back there with tall grass and elderberries and man places to explore, but it is just swampy. Right now, the whole yard could be included in the Swamp, however.

Speaking of elderberries and outdoor things in general, I have a few new pieces of information that I was just pleased as punch to know about! Elderberries first: I read recently how you could read the vegetation of an area to discover the state of the water table. I need to find the book again and take better notes, but what I can remember off the top of my head is that elderberries indicate that there is water within ten feet of the surface. I bet that’s true, since we have a spring fed pond and a really clean, productive well and also a lot of elderberries.

As spring was rolling around, I also was looking for when I should “unmulch” my strawberries and my lavender and other plants that I had covered up last fall. I really go by a nice book I’ve had for a few years called The Complete Book of Garden Magic by Roy E. Biles. It originally came out in the 1930’s which is enough to win me over right there, because I am a fiend for all things Depression Era from clothes to cookbooks to history to art and architecture and music. Judging by the state of the economy and all, I may not have a bad “hobby” of learning how they did things in the Depression.

Anyway, Mr. Biles give much good advice about every sort of thing from houseplants to flowers to greenhouses and vegetable gardens. Except for the pesticides, I think this is my very favorite book for gardening. There is a great month by month guide in the back. According to this guide, in March, mulch should be loosened to allow it to begin to dry out and to start to allow air to circulate among new leaves and shoots but should be left in place as there can still be rapid temperature changes that might damage the plants.

Ideally, I should have done my grape vines in February, but there was a lot of snow in February, and there was a lot of snow in March. Luckily, there were a few warm days, and still had to do a lot of tromping around in the snow, but at least I didn’t have to be all the way bundled up! I needed to repair a fallen wire on my grape vine trellis, and to lift the wire back up, I needed to be a lot more aggressive with my grape vines than I have been in the past. I wish I had taken a before and after picture of what the vines looked like, because I took a pile of vines about four feet high by five of six feet across off the vines this year.

Trimming grape vines: This should be done in late winter. It also is something that you just figure out after you do it a few times. You are supposed to take off about eighty per cent of the new fruiting wood, and I have seen all kinds of diagrams with pictures of nodes and vines and what is what. Basically, the new fruiting wood is the wavy stuff and the very end of the vines. If your vines have been neglected, you need to be meaner than that, however. This year, because I had to also lift the wire, I needed to unwind the vines, and I chopped a lot of the things that were too unwieldy. Also, last summer, lot of the fruit was located on the insides of the vines. Those bunches didn’t ripen well, and I made a decision to cut out a lot of the insides of the vines. We live very near a huge grape growing area along Lake Erie, and I have had the opportunity to see how the commercial vines are shaped. I still haven’t pared mine down that far, but they are getting there.

The thing to remember is that there is very little you can do to kill grape vines just by trimming them back. It’s possible you might get a thin year, but the following year after a really aggressive trimming, the whole harvest will be better. If trimming and pinching and everything seems like a waste, like throwing away potential grapes, it’s really not. Grapes that are not cared for will overproduce, and the plant will get stressed. Last year, I pruned and trimmed and pinched like a madwoman, and I still had more grapes than I knew what to do with! And nothing is more wasteful than seeing the grapes just shower down off the bunches still unripe because they plant can’t support them.

Speaking of not knowing what to do with excess produce, boy do I wish I had put away more tomatoes last year! I ran out of my sauce about a month ago, and while the storebought wasn’t expensive, it took me only one year of using home grown canned sauce to get spoiled. Luckily, I saved seed from my paste tomatoes and plan to try many more varieties this year. My grandmother whose father was a baker during the Depression and basically always had money (so that is the sum total of her Depression-era advice -- get work as a baker) wanted brandywine tomatoes, and I was able to find some seeds for her. If they come up good, she’ll send some plants my way, I’m sure. I shared seeds with her a few weeks ago, and that was fun.

I was reading in an article just today about how much food inflation there has been over the past few years. Things have basically gone up by a third, and people are cooking at home instead of eating out. It’s a shame that it took making food more expensive to do that, but I also could have been able to tell anyone who asked that was what was going to happen. I don’t like to brag, especially not about misfortune, but I really think that my food trends are a little ahead of the average, and I have been cutting back on everything for a couple of years now. I have basically gotten rid of ice cream, most frozen foods including those fancy baby veggie mixes and those pre-cheesed broccolies and cauliflowers that I used to just live off of. I buy bulk ingredients and also troll the expired food section at the local market for usable produce and also for bread for French toast and things like that.

Luckily, I make all my own bread, and only get it from the store if it's something REALLY cheap. My grandmother has another funny story about when she was a little girl, and a big family sized loaf of bread cost ten cents and it came with a lollipop. She always says: "Now, you can't even get the lollipop for ten cents!" According to the Associated Press, a loaf of bread costs on average $1.37. I usually make this giant batch of multi grain bread, but if I was going to generalize, I could say that out of a regular bag of good flour, costing around $2.50-3.00 a bag -- which is expensive, but bread takes good flour -- at twenty cups of flour to a bag, my favorite white bread recipe uses a hair over five cups of flour to make two loaves. If yeast is bought in bulk, the cost is neglegable same for salt, sugar, and fat. I put buttermlik in which is the most expensive thing, so count about sixty cents per batch, or thirty cents a loaf for non flour stuff, and you can make a good loaf of bread yourself for about seventy cents a loaf with less than ten dollars spent for bowls, pans, etc. that you then used again and again. And this is proper bread, too. When I eat store bread, I feel like I need four or five pieces to get full when two of mine do the trick and last longer in the tummy, as well.

I also buy as many things as I can directly from the producer. I get eggs for a dollar fifty a dozen, up from a dollar and a quarter in the past few months at an egg farm down the road. They sell the same eggs from the same farm in the grocery store for over two dollars a dozen. I get milk from a local dairy. I’m pretty sure that it is more expensive than store milk, but the store milk is gaining fast, and this is good milk from a small herd and no junk and chemicals. If I’m on the ball and put a call in to the farm store, I can also get raw milk which is legal in PA as long as the cows are tested for the right things and licensed. It used to be that you could get raw milk as long as it was in your own jug. Some states are really strict about this. There is a website called www.realmilk.com that goes into the whole raw milk debate and also how to get milk from small dairies. But be warned, it gets a little zany out there! I just get raw milk because I grew up shaking the bottle and can’t stop and don’t want to let my efforts go for naught. Actually, I figure, if they’re going to offer it, I might as well go for it. That and the bottle shaking thing.

The small dairy thing might be a good idea considering that one of the constantly cited reasons that milk goes up is the cost of feed and the cost of transport. The small dairies around here all grow their own corn and make their own hay. I know that you need to get actual grain feed with vitamins and trace minerals and everything from a feed mill, but almost everything else is “in house.” And I’m not sure what the average person knows about the way modern dairy farms work, but the milk truck comes to the farm twice a day to get the milk, it goes to a processing plant and gets mixed with milk from a lot of other farms and they do what they do to it, pasteurizing and homogenizing and adding vitamins and all that, they package it and send it off to warehouses and the warehouses send it off to stores, and by the time the milk gets to you, it’s actually up to three weeks old. The milk I get goes from the barn to the farm store, about twentyfive feet. They put it in glass bottles you pay a deposit on. Then people come and get it. They take some out to local stores, too, but not grocery stores which have their own suppliers which I why I sometimes end up in hardware stores buying milk.

Speaking of milk, and then I’ll be done! It just became legal in PA to label milk as not containing recombinant bovine growth hormone. This is some nasty stuff, despite what you may have heard. Cows given rGBH give more milk, but they also suffer from chronic udder infections (painful for cows, yucky for consumers) and it is possible that the growth hormone in milk is freaking out kids’ endocrine systems and that is why so many really, really young girls are physically mature so early. That is just a theory, but because of labeling laws pushed through by Monsanto (a company spat from the bowels of hell if there ever was) farmers were not allowed to put on their milk if they were using hormones or not. But just last week, I saw non rBGH labeled milk at my sister’s house, which is cool, because her kids drink milk by the gallon, and she won’t pay for expensive organic milk from the store (which I won’t either, because storebought organic milk is a scam) and yet, she still doesn’t deserve to have her children’s glands poisoned by Monsanto so they can make money!

A recipe so you can use up everything and still have a good time!

We’ve been “dipping” loaves of bread in olive oil and spices at family meals lately, and I’ve been breaking out my favorite French toast to use up day old bread. This is also great if you find outdated loaves at the grocery store for cheap. Our local egg farm also offers cracked eggs at half price a dozen. If you are feeding an army and you’re going to use up the eggs very soon, there is no reason not to use cracked eggs.

The French Toast:

For about 3/4 loaf of bread.
Take three eggs and crack them in a bowl. Add about a half cup of milk, two teaspoons of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of vanilla. These are the secret ingredients: Put in a pinch of cardamom and about a quarter cup of orange juice, bascially that last swig in the carton that no one ever drinks anyway.

Beat up. Make a hot butter pan. Give the old bread a quick dip on each side. Don’t soak! Fry each side very quickly. The butter should almost burn. The pan should be that hot. Add more butter and keep frying.

If you don’t have pancake syrup, make some!

The fake Maple Syrup:

2 cups Brown Sugar
1 Cup Water
1 tsp. maple extract

Boil together Sugar and water until the sugar dissolves. Simmer and stir another five minutes or so. Let cool. Add the maple flavor. Put it on when it’s warm. Store in the fridge.