Weeknight Pickling

Long time no post! January is hardly the best time for canning and preserving...and February isn't exactly a cornucopia either. Or is it? This week I'm making sunchoke pickles from the seemingly endless supply in the backyard. (It may only seem endless because a year's supply of sunchokes to me is...about three pounds.)

In homestead news, I've opened the last jar of pears in light syrup. I definitely should have made more, because I can happily eat cottage cheese with canned pears three or four times a week for breakfast or a snack. I LOVE it. And my canned pears are the best I've ever had, if I do say so myself.

The carrot pickles I made last fall were also delectable--with what I think of as my "Portland blend" of pickling spices: coriander seed, fennel seed, and celery (really, lovage) seed, plus a few peppercorns, garlic, and a dried chili pepper. Everything but the peppercorns came from within five blocks of my house. And this year's green tomato chutney is getting high ratings. Good, because we still have, like, 14 jars. Apple butter is also tasty and getting used.

But the winner of last summer's preserving, by far, is Dan's Blackberry Freezer Jam. Next summer I want to fill our entire freezer with it. Because it doesn't have a lot of sugar, it tastes good in yogurt, on ice cream, from a spoon, and piled in excessive mounds on toast. And each time I eat it, I think about Dan showing up on his bike with scratches up and down his arms and a gallon jug full of blackberries, pretty much every afternoon in August.

Another Miracle of Hanukkah

"Hmm, it looks like we only have nine Hanukkah candles. So if we light one the first night, we won't have enough left for the rest of the 8 days. What should we do?"

Although I saved all the candles on display instead of lighting them, today (day after the last day of Hanukkah) I discovered three more boxes of Hanukkah candles in my candle drawer! It's the miracle of the candles that burned for eight days when there were only enough for one...next year, I will actually light them.

And why was I looking in my candle drawer? Because I was making my yearly batch of recycled candles! They always end up being red and green, because my favorite store-bought candles are a red one that has a vanilla-cinnamon-flowers sort of holiday scent and Pacifica Fig, which is green. My friend Colette wanted to make candles, so I busted out the votive molds, wicks, and a ton of burnt-out candle ends and empty candle jars, and, like magic, one 28-ounce-can of warm wax scraped off the kitchen floor later, a bunch of new candles to use and give away.

I was going to write out directions, but there are plenty out there, so I'll just add my personal tips:

*Use a big steel can, like from 28 ounces of tomatoes, inside of a small saucepan, as a double boiler. Make sure the wax in the can is at a higher level than the water in the pot, so the can is heavy enough to not tip over.

*Unsplit disposable wooden chopsticks are excellent for holding the wicks up while you pour the candles. You can see one in the photo--just slip the wick in between the two sides of the chopsticks without splitting them all the way apart.


But hey, how is our homestead project going? Well, some good news: Dan's blackberry freezer jam is so amazing that it transports us back to summer every time we eat it, to those bright, neverending afternoons when Dan would show up on his bike with scratches up and down his arms and a gallon jug of fresh blackberries, still warm from the sun. Also, pears picked in October and persimmons and kiwis picked in November are still ripening. We stuck some in the fridge and have been taking them out gradually so we have an ongoing supply. It's working perfectly. You can see them here alongside one of Dan's famous Dutch Babies, which happened to be served with five kinds of homemade jam.

OK news: most of the Long Keeper tomatoes ripened, and we ate them. They were mediocre. Some of them turned all the way red and got somewhat sweet and flavorful, but several spoiled before ripening and some were still sour and a little bitter after they turned red.

Not-so-good news: the greenhouse isn't doing a great job of keeping things alive all winter. That hard freeze at Thanksgiving was really unfortunate, because it's been warm enough since then, but only a few lettuces, a pot of arugula, and my friend Rob's lemon tree are still hanging in there, and those mainly because I brought them in the house when it froze. However, it's still warmer than outside and nicely wind- and rain-proof, so I think it will be great for starting plants in the early, early spring...which is almost here!

Fall Preparation

School started again, so I, Gillian, have a good excuse as to why I haven't posted in a while. Everyone else is just slacking. Anyway, this morning we had such a good breakfast that it was gone before it could be photographed: giant popover with poached pear and quince. Mind your p's and q's! I used a recipe from Deborah Madison's Local Flavors, which seems to be my cookbook of the moment. I also failed to photograph last night's pot pie. It makes me very happy that pot pie season has arrived! But I did take a picture of this back-to-school feast that I made a week ago. The pear and quince frangipane tart was the star of the show, but we also deliciously used up a ton of kale in potato-kale soup and Jenn's famous massaged kale salad.


Theresa and I were motivated by rain-free but distinctly cool weather to move a couple of tomato plants into the greenhouse to see how long we can keep the tomatoes ripening. I dug out some potatoes that had been very ill-treated all season, from when I accidentally let them sprout in the cupboard, to throwing them out in a dark corner of the garden to fend for themselves, to deciding that even that location was destined for more glorious plants and planting tomatoes much too close to the potatoes. I got a whole big bowlful of potatoes from only two much-abused plants, which I think is pretty good! We also did our first planting of garlic--about 20 heads. I'd like to plant at least that much more, but we are out of garden space until we pull out the rest of our tomatoes, and they're still producing.

Pears with a View

I love going to Hood River for a lot of reasons, but a big one is how enormous Mount Hood looks from there. I think of it as the way the moon looks from orbit around Earth, that's how spectacular Mount Hood looks from Hood River. So I enjoyed myself very much picking 5,000 pounds of pears (with a group of about 40 volunteers) at a small pear orchard on Monday. It was a Portland Fruit Tree Project harvest party, so the pickers each got a portion of the fruit, and the rest is going to the Oregon Food Bank to be distributed all around the state.


So now, after giving some away and eating a few with this delicious blue cheese, I have around 30 pounds of pears left that I'm planning to can today. It may sound boring, but I truly love canned pear halves in light syrup, especially with cottage cheese. I might make some dried pears too...also boooo-ring! But I am open to other pear recipes. If you have a good one, please share it with me.