Ars Culinaria

A very small batch

I haven’t had many Saturdays lately that were just Saturdays – days without real plans, made for puttering and experimenting and maybe daydreaming. Today, this Saturday, is pretty much all mine. I drove Keifel to work very early for a weekend, dropping him about 7:45am. It was too early to go to the market but silly to drive all the home so I popped into Provence on 21st. I’ve been disappointed the last few times I’ve been there, the service has been off or the floors have been really dirty. Things seem a little improved today and I got an almond croissant, my favorite, and a latte and scrolled through some social media while the other early birds flocked in.

By the time I got to the market, the day was in full swing. I got milk and fruit. There were some gorgeous eggplant but no one at my house will eat them but me and as much as I love it, I don’t want to eat leftover eggplant for three days. The Peach Truck is still going strong so I picked up a bag of peaches and traded dollars with a couple other farmers for some huge blackberries and some tiny red plums I had never seen before (I wish I had thought to take a picture…).

The house was still quiet when I got home, so I dragged out the laundry baskets and made some coffee and set about making a batch of plum jam. I bought Food in Jars last spring with grand dreams of making Christmas presents of jeweled summer fruit in jars after a Saturday spent making some iffy strawberry jam with Andrea. Since purchasing the book I have perused its pages many times and made exactly zero things from it. I have actually made (so much better) strawberry jam a couple times and some devilishly good pickled onions but nothing from the book. I even bought a Kuhn Rikon pan with a rack insert big enough for exactly one pint jar… still nothing from the book. With my bounty from the market laid before me on the counter, I was determined to make something. I settled on the recipe for Small Batch Mixed Stone Fruit Jam thinking the plums wouldn’t equal the three cups of chopped fruit required and I would need to throw in at least one of the peaches.

The plums were exactly three cups. I grated in the zest of one lemon, pouring its juice in after and sifted the desiccated vanilla bean pods out of my jar of vanilla sugar (Ms McClellan had suggested adding a vanilla bean) and topping it up to two cups from the sugar canister. The sugared, lemoned plums hung out in the fridge while I started laundry, put the dishes away and had lunch with Julian (his breakfast). Then, on to serious jam making.

The recipe says the batch should be enough to fill three half-pint jars. Apparently I don’t have any half-pint jars. Apparently I have a whole box of wide-mouth pint jars (no idea), a couple small-mouth pints and two 1/4 pints. I set everything up best I could as I have not invested in a canning pot proper but use my pasta pot with a steamer in the bottom. This is not ideal as the pint jars are actually a little tall on the rack. The directions in the book are pretty spot on though it took a lot longer than I thought it would to reach the temperature suggested for a good set since there’s no added pectin. My batch made one full pint and one 1/4 pint of deeply purple jam. Of course I tasted the slick of jam left in the pan. I am always amazed at the natural spiciness of cooked plums. If it sets it’ll be wonderful.

As I typed the last line I heard the favorite sound of all home canners: the ping of a sealing jar.

The Magic Bowl

It has finally hit, the overwhelming knowledge that my son, the boychick, is graduating from high school. He’ll soon be moving into an on-campus apartment which includes a mandatory meal plan. He’ll still need a few kitchen things for his first kitchen. His. First. Kitchen.

When I started this blog ten years ago, Jules, the aforementioned boychick, was 7. One of the first entries I wrote was about things in my kitchen that are precious to me. One was a knife my father gave me for my first kitchen in my on-campus apartment at the very same university. The amazing purple bowl, which the accompanying photo is a good example of, was purchased at a junk shop along with a rolling pin made in Yugoslavia to add to my kitchen items for my first married kitchen.

I no longer have that rolling pin, or that husband. I do have the purple bowl. Mine is now a little scratched but is still the go-to bowl for everything from making pancake batter, soaking apples in lemon infused water, to marinating chicken for the grill (whenever that happens). It’s a workhorse in our kitchen and everyone uses it. It’s bounced on the floor a couple of times and survived. It’s been knocked against the sink and stone counter tops and moved to exactly 7 other kitchens with us (yes, we’ve moved a lot in 14 years).

It’s almost time to let it go. It will get packed up with a new knife and some other basics to set up Julian’s kitchen. He won’t need it for everyday. He’ll have whatever college cafeterias serve these days to keep his belly full and his body healthy (I hope). But if he does decide to cook something, he’ll have The Magic Bowl that’s been part of preparing countless meals, loaves of bread and stacks of brownies. Like my dad’s knife, it will be a little part of home, a connection to our cooking together, and a start for all his kitchens to come – until it breaks or a replacement is needed. It is just a bowl after all. The important thing is the memory and the love of the person using it.

Heat be damned, I have cooked more in the last week than in the last two months. I’ve tried to carve out time for both shopping and cooking and I have to tell ya, it feels much better. I don’t mean to sound all Suzy Homemaker superior (the universe knows Saint Martha would be appalled by my baseboards) but it’s really that I get sick of restaurant food quickly. And with the heat, all I’ve really wanted to eat was fruit and more fruit. Sadly, the local batshit crazy weather has made even seasonal fruit crazy expensive but we stocked up anyway. I am convinced that it might be possible for me to become a fruititarian. Not to worry about my sanity though really; my family would desert me for the siren call of cow and pig flesh inside a week. In light of that we’ve had brats in beer, a yummy blackberry cobbler, salmon cakes, stir-fried bok choi, teeny marble-sized new potatoes, and ribs and a coffee and ancho rubbed shoulder roast. I won’t my dryer because of the heat but I did crank up my oven. Insanity thy name is hunger.

And for the usual non sequitur, the aforementioned weather and my own laziness prevented any real gardening aside from a leggy thyme plant on the kitchen sill. However, I have been watching Britains of the 1980s re-enacting gardening of the posh Victorian and starving WWII eras. The Victorian Kitchen Garden, The Victorian Kitchen, and the War Garden & Kitchen are fascinating and strangely addictive in that way that can never be fully explained by the anglophilic addict. If you find yourself somewhere loathsomely hot (with electricity and the intrawebs) and some time to kill, you could do worse than watching someone toil in the gray British summer and stifling smoky kitchens of yore. Bonus points added for an adorable ’80s professorial presenter with a spindly mustache in Peter Thoday (I can’t believe he doesn’t even rate a Wikipedia article; he really is fun to watch).

Best of luck to you on the weather crap shoot this summer and safe and happy 4th.