Peeking into the rock

This last year the jam supplies have just about come out even. Once again I have tackled the lemons late, and once again I swear I will make lemon marmalade earlier next year. This year there is added force to the vow because I have come to understand that there is less pectin and more bitter in the lemons in May than there is in March.  The marmalade works fine though.

This year I am making very small batches more often. It sounds like it would be more work, but I think it is less nerve-wracking and does less bad things to the kitchen and my life. Also it means I can use the smaller amounts of fruit that drop into my lap for no reason. Like: the Grey Bears bag usually has one of those enormous boxes of strawberries which disappear in seconds if you have childen but are more challenging if you are a single old lady who doesn't eat cereal or ice cream. This is four cups of uncut berries or three of cut. Meanwhile, my rhubarb -- which I planted for the nice fellow as I don't care for it much (or mind it, really) is producing a small and steady amount of stalks which I dutifully pull, trim, and stick in the feezer bag I have dedicated to them. So today I made a small batch of jam: three cups of strawberries, one of rhubarb, and most of a lemon (for pectin, mainly). Most of my jam is running just over three quarters of a cup of sugar to a cup of fruit, but the rhubarb and the lemon are something to contend with, so I did it with four cups. And it came out very nice, with four half-pint jars and a bit less than a cup to put into a bowl for immediate snacking.

So the tally so far: 4 jars meyer lemon peel and blood orange marmalade, and four jars of strawberry-rhubarb-lemon jam. I'll make another two or three different batches of lemon marmalade, and probably more berry jam next week, depending on what the Grey Bears bag has in it. Since I liked the rhubarb with the berries, I may also do a batch of rhubarb by itself (or rather with candied orange peel I have from Christmas time). And I may also stick a box of berries in the freezer to wait for the next batch and make an all-berry jam.

I like feeling free to experiment with combinations with these small batches. If you're only going to lose four jars at most, it's a lot less intimidating than losing a flat's worth of fruit. Not buying flats anyway. My rule for a while has been: jam is made with fruit I grow, forage, or get as a gift. On that note, I'm tantalized by the pruple leaf plum around the corner. It's dropping its fruit, but the tree has gotten large and the plums smash on the pavement. I suppose I could go after it with the pole picker, but that entails geting over my shyness to ask the neighbors if I can go in their yard, and I don't know how many I'll get anyway, as it's not a heavy bearer and it is freakishly tall.

Also around the corner, at the house that used to be the high water house, there's a low fence with two kinds of passion vine on it: and one of them is l;oaded with fruit. When it comes close to being ripe, if it does that while I am not in Prague, I'll try to ask if I can pick some and give them jam in return.

Other forageables in the neighborhood are, of course, the yellow plums around the other corner, crabapples on Emma's old corner (I made very nice crabapple-jalapeno jelly out of them last year), manzanitas up the block from the yellow plums (but somebody else got them last year), a thing like a crabapple whose name I can never remember at the base of the Laurel Street hill, another wild plum tree on the steep path from the high school main campus to the gym, and another frustrating plum tree towards the top of Laurel Street Hill which has I believe prune plums and some of them reach the ground whole. Another neighbor has a quince tree, and the folks across the street have a fig tree. Nobody around here grows apricots because the climate is just barely okay and the ground water kills them. The same is true for peaches. But the plums from Woodstove and Sun produce a jam that is very like apricot. Also there are more manzanitas, which bear a little later, up on bay Street where the weird narrow park is that's dedicated to old-time Italian fishermen. Also, there are blackberries in various odd corners, naturally, and more plums at University Terrace Park, and I have the Satsuma plum tree and the apple tree.

So jam should not be difficult. Even being gone during the biggest jam month (JUly). My plums and apples come later than anybody else's.

It's Marvell season.

We've cleaned up the plums and apricots. The plum wine has gone from primary fermenter to secondary (that is, from a five-gallon plastic tub to a four-gallon glass carboy with an airlock). It's the color of raspberry sorbet, actually. In my kitchen right now are a large pot filled with windfall pippins: another large pot filled with fresh-froze blackberries from the good folks at Prevedelli Farm (about which more soon): and a really large bag filled with pears from some folks over on Chestnut Street who have been trying to give them away every day for a month (about which more soon). Tomorrow we are contracted to make low-sugar blackberry jam, canned pears in apple juice, pear leather, dried pear wafers, and apple-pear leftover juice jelly, one jar of which will have mint in it and one which will have rose geranium in it (like Grandma Emma used to make now and then).

So. Last year we ran out of jam. So the nice fellow wants to make sure we have every kind of jam we make this year. And for some reason we're making largeish batches of it. So the California Cooler (for those of us who haven't had to sit through this explanation before, it's a cupboard built into a lot of older California houses with ventilation to the outside. They're usually not big: ours isn't, it's about a foot wide, a foot deep, and starts at counter height and goes maybe four feet up. Make it four cubic feet, I guess. Anyway. They work on the principle that in a mild climate, air movement will keep staples cool enough for medium-term storage. I find it inconvenient to store stuff like flour in it, and I suspect it's not dry enough if you put anything really delicate, though I've had no trouble with it. We keep breakfast cereal on the bottom shelf and preserves all the way up. There's also three 24-oz. jars of dill pickles in there, and there will be, in a couple-few weeks, a very large number of jars of "chili sauce" which is an old, probably Midwestern, word for bumpy catsup, and also tomato chutney, both of which have become necessary staples in the house.

The Prevedelli farm: we got our strawberries at the Gizdich pick-yourself farm down at the southern end of Watsonville, sort of by Aromas. But when we called about blackberries we found out that they were done with all berries July 31st. I will tag this so we know next time. But we were undaunted and headed out to the Farmer's Market and asked the Prevedellis about bulk berries for jam and learned that we could get frozen "seconds" from them for $3.00 a pound. I guess what they do is when they're packing up berries for sale, they toss the squishy ones into a bucket and then put them up in bags in the freezer. What they do with these ordinarily is make jam. But they'd sell them to us. When we got down to their farm, which is way out in Corralitos at the north end of Watsonville, they were labelling the little cartons that sell in the grocery stores or the farmer's market. They seemed very nice. Years ago we bought apples and quinces from them a couple of times and it looked like grandma was doing the selling, and I now know that she was suffering from dementia -- in retrospect, that's what her struggling with the money was all about. I forgot to ask about quinces this time.

Then we drove around Corralitos, Freedom, and Pleasant Valley (not to be confused with Happy Valley) looking for a barn where the nice fellow used to buy fresh squeezed apple juice ("we have apples," I said, but not forcefully because our Pippins are a little tanniny when you juice them).

More about the pears:

So I walk down Chestnut street on my way home every day. There's a house which has been lifted up to make two stories where there were once one, and where the front yard is dominated by a plum tree and an angel's trumpet. For weeks now there has been a box or two of free fruit out front of their gate. Plums, and then pears. Yesterday I stopped to talk to an old friend who lives on Chestnut Street and is a relatively successful teacher (as opposed to me), and then I stopped at the free fruit house and thought: "dang, that thing with my friend's windfall peaches worked out so well, I think I'll do something with some of these free pears." Then I thought: "it's almost as much work to make a little as a lot, and these nice people keep offering their fruit to the neighborhood, why don't I make them an offer?" So I left them a note offering to dry and can some pears for them, and they called back and tonight I went over and showed them what I did with the peaches -- they have two small children, one of whom loved the peach leather -- and we agreed I would take their pears away and come back with a bunch of pear products. They thought there was something more they needed to do, but honestly, they already did their part.

They're nice young people: early thirties, I think, teachers, with the right books on their shelves (Rebel Girl, the biography of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, for example). And she's going to be working with another old friend who's a teacher, too.

Oh, those old friends who are teachers? I met the first-mentioned when we were doing the Early Childhood Education program at the community college, before we went to teacher school: and the second when we were both working at the freezer plant that is no longer there around the corner from where I now live, and were also both participating in the Neighborhood Coop (grocery buying club), and various political things. Also the first-mentioned friend's son went to school with Frank.

Who bought his ticket to Prague today. Priceline British Airways: it turned out that with Easy Jet, he couldn't get a guarantee on a return flight.

And he finished off the peach leather.