‘Cause I been doin’ a lotta jammin,’ and I wanna jam it wid you.

Last year, I only made strawberry jam, and I THOUGHT I made enough for last at least part way through the winter, with something like 12 half pints, but I was so wrong. WRONG because Zak liked it so much that he invented reasons to eat it. Totally unnecessary peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on good bakery bread with good peanut butter were made and consumed just so he could eat more of that strawberry jam.

This year, I made twenty-one half pints of it and then froze a bunch of berries to make more when that ran out. I made strawberry jam back in May, and guess what? I already have to break out some frozen berries to make up another big old batch.

But that’s not the jam I made today.

Oh, no, chile.

Strawberry jam is good, but what I made today is like heaven in a jar.

Because Kat, Zak and I went out to our friend, Rick Vest’s farm and picked blackberries from bushes that were burdened with heavy fruit. And to me, there is nothing better than homemade blackberry jam. Nothing. It’s SO good. So tangy-sweet, sticky and the color–red-violet–is just eye-popping.

And, if you leave the seeds in, which I always do, blackberry jam is simplicity itself to make.

Why do I leave the seeds in?

Well, I figure when I eat blackberries, I’m eating the seeds so why should I object to the seeds being in the jam? I mean, really. Plus, I’ve found that if you try and remove the seeds, you lose a lot of the fruit pulp, too, and I refuse to waste something that I spent hours in the hot sun picking in the company of bees, wasps, mosquitoes and a child complaining of heat and thirst.

So, when you eat my blackberry jam, you’re eating it with the seeds. And if I use it in any of my baking, you get the seeds. If you don’t like the seeds consult with a less lazy blogger to find out how to remove the wee buggers without ending up needing to pick a thousand pounds of berries for a few pints of jam. I’m just not your girl for that process.

And while you’re looking stuff up, find out how to clean and treat your jars, lids and rings for safe canning by looking at the USDA National Center for Home Food Preservation’s website. They have all the information you need to know to can safely. They will of course, also try and scare you to death about canning, but the fact is, lots of us have canned for years and never killed anyone yet, so just follow their directions to prepare your half-pint canning jars, new lids and rings for this recipe and you will not go wrong.

For this recipe, I cleaned and sterilized 18 half pint jars, lids and rings, but ended up only using 17 of them. You might end up with 18. It could happen–you never know.

AND now, let’s talk about pectin.

Pectin is a surprisingly sore subject with lots of folks who make jams, jellies, preserves and marmalade out there in the food blogging world, because apparently there is a contingent of “preservistas” who think you just suck the big wang if you use any kind of pectin to get your jams to gel and will get all huffy and be like, holier than thou about it.

I say “horse-hockey.” If you want to use pectin, use pectin. If you don’t, don’t. But I will tell you what–my Grandma made literally gallons of the clearest, most delicious wild blackberry jelly in the world–we’d literally pick the tiny seedy things in five gallon buckets so she could extract enough juice–and she used pectin.

If it was good enough for Grandma, then it’s good enough for me.

Look, pectin isn’t evil. It isn’t artificial, and the use of it doesn’t denote that you’re a bad jammer. It’s nothing more than a substance that exists in fruits in their natural state, that when placed in the presence of sugar and heat, causes your liquidy fruit juice to turn into a nice, thick gel. That’s all. It’s not extracted from a cow’s stomach or made out of plastic. It’s fine and dandy, and I use it, and you can, too.

That all said, I tried out a new to me pectin today and am a convert to what I see is the pectin of choice for all the food blogging world. That would be Pomona’s Universal Pectin, and instead of relying upon sugar to make it do it’s job and make a gel, it utilizes calcium.

Now, before you start frothing at the mouth about the calcium, remember, you need it for strong bones and teeth, so hush and listen. Pomona’s is made from citrus peels–again–nothing bad there–and it has two packets in each box. One contains the powdered pectin and the other has the calcium powder. You can tell them apart because the calcium is in the tiny packet.

Before you start jammin,’ though, you need to make calcium water, and Pomona’s has directions on how to do it right in the box. You just mix 1/2 teaspoon of the calcium powder with 1/2 cup of water in a small clean jar with a lid. You use the directed amount for your recipe and the rest you can keep sealed up in your fridge for the next time you haul off and preserve some fruit for winter.

After you do that, you can start jammin’ with impunity. All you do to make cooked low-sugar jam (AH HA! Now you know why I like Pomona’s Universal Pectin. I can make low-sugar jams that taste great and gel exactly the way I want them to!) is mix the mashed up fruit with the directed amount of calcium water and lemon juice if you need it to balance the flavors, and bring that mixture to a boil. Meanwhile, you measure out your sugar, stir the pectin in completely, and when the fruit boils, you stir in the sugar, and keep stirring for about two minutes while the lovely scented fruit mixture bubbles happily away. This makes certain you dissolve the pectin thoroughly into the fruit and juice. You bring it back to a boil, then remove it completely from the heat and pack your jars. Then you use your hot water bath canner and process it in boiling water for ten minutes, then take the jars out and sit them on a towel to cool off and seal properly. And voila! Jam.

It really is easy.

And it gels up much better than the regular grocery store brands of pectin that I’ve used for years. It’s more reliable, from what I can tell.

So, finally, we get to the recipe for the jam pictured above. It’s very simple, it uses Pomona’s Universal Pectin, which you can get at local natural food stores, Whole Foods or online.

Once again, if you want to remove the seeds, keep in mind you will have to have picked more berries. For my recipe, I got 2 mashed cups of fruit from each quart of whole berries–if you remove the seeds, it will be a much smaller ratio of fruit. Think about that while you are picking or buying berries.

Summer Blackberry Jam
Ingredients:

10 cups fresh blackberries, washed, picked over and mashed
5 teaspoons calcium water
5 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons butter
5 cups sugar
6 teaspoons Pomona Universal Pectin
1 1/2 tablespoons Cortas rosewater

Method:

Put the fruit, calcium water, and lemon juice into a heavy-bottomed pot on a medium low fire and bring to a boil.

While the fruit is heating, stir together the sugar and pectin quite thoroughly. After the fruit mixture boils, add the butter and sugar/pectin mixture all at once and stir the still bubbling fruit for at least two minutes to ensure that the pectin and sugar dissolve thoroughly.

Bring back to the boil and after it boils, stir in the rosewater thoroughly, then remove from the heat and ladle the hot jam into jars, leaving 1/2 inch of headpace. Fit a flat lid and then add the screw lid, making the ring tight.

Process in a hot water bath for ten minutes under fiercely boiling water. Remove from canner, set on a folded towel on the countertop, and leave undisturbed for twelve hours.

As mentioned before, have 18 half pint jars ready. I only needed 17, but I had quite a few scrapings and tastings before I packed the jars, so I might have had enough before Kat, Zak and I started taste testing it.

It’s a good introduction to making your own cultured dairy products, too, as it is beyond simple, since you barely have to heat the cream above room temperature and add either some commercial cultured buttermilk or a creme fraiche starter culture. You then cover it loosely and let it sit on a warm, not hot countertop out of drafts and away from the sun for about twelve hours and like magic, you come back to some rich, thickened, lightly tangy cream that is stable when it’s heated.

Yeah, let’s say it again, and more firmly this time. Creme fraiche is stable when it’s heated.

Commercially available sour cream is most emphatically NOT stable when it’s heated. In fact, it’s rather unstable after being heated and will often “break” when whisked into a simmering sauce, There is nothing more annoying than adding sour cream to a delectable sauce at the end of cooking and have it go all lumpy and curdly instead of making a nice, smooth, tangy creamy sauce. And yes, this can happen even when you are good and “temper” the sauce by whisking a small amount of the hot sauce into the sour cream before incorporating it into the rest of the sauce. (This is part of why I’ve used full fat Greek yogurt in my Beef Stroganoff for years–because it can be boiled and it will not break once it’s put into a sauce.)

But creme fraiche–well, it doesn’t break. You can boil it. It’s fine. You can temper it into a sauce, but you don’t have to. For all it’s velvety, lightly tangy delicate flavor, it’s tough, like a streetwise flower child who wears love beads and a set of brass knuckles.

And it tastes really, really good, too.

Very rich and satisfying.

Oh, and did I mention how easy it is to make?

Well, I’ll say it again. It’s easy to make. Easier to make than yogurt, because you don’t have to hold it at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for eight to twelve hours.

If you use commercially cultured buttermilk, just heat up a pint of heavy cream to 80 degrees F. (I used our local Snowville Creamery Heavy Cream, which is from grass-fed antibiotic free, growth hormone free cows just one county over from where I am typing) to room temperature and stir in two tablespoons of buttermilk. Pour into a clean glass jar (I use the locking ones with the gaskets like the one pictured above) and cover with the lid, but don’t lock it. Leave it in a warm, draft-free area out of the sun for 12 hours. Yes, I said twelve hours. Twelve. Please don’t get all worried about spoiling your cream or food poisoning. In this process, you are making friends with good bacteria, and they are keeping the bad bacteria at bay and are making your fresh cream into something sublime. Trust me.

After twelve hours, the cream should have thickened without solidifying, and should have the texture of commercially available yogurt. It isn’t as thick as the sour cream you’re used to buying from the store, but if you want to thicken it, you can put together several layers of cheesecloth and spoon the creme fraiche into it and tie the ends together and hang it up to let some of the whey drain out for an hour or so.

I used a starter from the company Cultures for Health. They sell yogurt starters, kefir starter, various dairy cultures and starters for vegetable ferments and soy ferments, and so far, all of their products I’ve tried have worked well. (Yes, you’ll have more posts on culturing milk coming up in the future.)

Their instructions are a bit more complicated, but not by much. They instruct you to heat one quart of heavy cream to exactly 86 degrees Fahrenheit, then stir in the contents of one packet of starter (they are sold in a box of four packets which can only be used once for $4.99–which is more expensive than the buttermilk, but in order to not use milk from a confinement dairy, I decided to go with the culture instead) into the cream, cover it and let it sit in a nice warm, non-sunlit place for 12 hours. I used my jar as noted above–I covered the jar with the lid, but didn’t seal it up.

How did it turn out?

Well, let me just say that everyone who tasted it buckled at the knees and rolled their eyes up in their heads. I ended up giving lots of my first batch away, so I never got to use much of it. That’s okay. I love my friends.

What can do you with Creme Fraiche.

Use it in any way you’d use sour cream, except be prepared to have your socks knocked off by the result. You can use it to top a cheesecake. You can use it in your Beef Stroganoff sauce. You can use it on a taco, on a baked potato, in mashed potatoes or swirled on top of a bowl of cream of tomato soup. It can go on top of fresh berries.

You can also just dig a spoon in and have at it plain and straight up.

Just use your imagination.

It’s good stuff.

Trust me.

The last time I had a large, in ground vegetable and flower garden would be back when I lived in Pataskala, Ohio, about seven years ago. When we amended the soil, since we didn’t know many farmers in the area–we had just moved there–we bought commercially composted manure, compost and top soil. And we put it on our soil, tilled it in and miracle of miracles, our plants were huge, happy and gorgeous. Our flower borders looked like an over-crowded English cottage garden, which suited the look of our home, which had a sort of fairytale “Good Witch of the Forest” feel to it. The vegetables we grew–tomatoes, tomatillos, chilies, sweet peppers and basil–were all crazy-huge and prolific. It was beautiful.

Here in Chez Zak and Barbara in Athens, most of our yard is too shady for vegetables, so until this year we’ve only grown vegetables and herbs in containers on our deck–which is the only place that gets enough light for growing such things. I’ve chronicled our success with this approach here on this blog, but this year, I wanted to do something bigger. I yearned to grow more of a variety of vegetables, and I wanted to grow strawberries like I had in Pataskala.

So, I joined the Westside Community Gardens here in Athens, and as noted here, started building raised bed boxes because raised beds are supposed to make your plants healthier, stronger and you can grow more food in smaller spaces than with conventional in ground row gardening.

Without a second thought, Zak, Morganna and I filled those raised bed boxes with commercially made compost, manure and topsoil, and started planting seeds.

My dear friend, Judi Winner warned me that she had read an article in Grit Magazine about persistent herbicide residues in commercially available compost and manure, but since we’d already filled the boxes and seeded them, there wasn’t anything to do but wait and see what happened.

What happened was strange, and it does point to some level of herbicide contamination, possibly from Clopyralid or the newest DuPont darling of the “I must have a green lawn with no clover, violets or dandelions in it set”, Imprelis. The contamination most likely came from the compost mixed with cow manure that came from a compost company based in West Virginia which I bought at either White’s Mill or Lowes here in town.

Before I talk about what happened and is happening in my garden, let’s look a bit at the two possible culprits for my abnormally growing vegetables.

Both of these herbicides are meant to control “broad-leafed lawn pests” such as clover, plantain, dandelion and wild violets. (I will try not to get sidetracked on a rant about the idiocy of considering a legume which fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil where other plants can use it such as clover a pest plant, not to mention how can you hate violets?) Neither of these chemicals pose a threat to human or animal life, which is in large part why they are (or in the case of clopyralid, were) used to create perfectly green, grass only turf in lawns, golf courses and pastures and why they are considered to be “safe.”

However, legumes, such as clover, peas, and beans, plants in the Solonaceae family, such as tomatoes, potatoes, eggplants and peppers, and plants in the Compositae family such as sunflowers, are all particularly sensitive to the effects of these herbicides. And since these herbicides can not only persist in grass clippings, hay or straw where they have been used and NOT break down under normal composting conditions, they can also be eaten by an animal and be excreted, unchanged, into their manure and urine, the contamination can come from multiple sources and thus, multiple concentrations in each bag of compost.

In my garden, I noted that very few of my brassicas sprouted and if they did, they did not grow, or they grew slowly. The only ones I’ve been successful with at all are lacinato kale and mizuna. Bok choy will not grow, nor will gai lan, turnips, or kohlrabi. The radishes grow slowly and strangely, often not forming proper root bulbs.

Right now, my bush haricot vert, which should by now be 18-25 inches tall and well, bushy, are single shoots, four to five inches tall and are now SETTING BLOOM. Also, these beans, which normally fix nitrogen from the atmosphere into their root systems with the help of a symbiotic bacterium, have all shown signs of nitrogen deficiency, which I had to correct with the application of blood meal.

My peas are strangely almost normal–they are stunted in growth in that they are about five inches shorter than they should be, and the petit pois are not as bushy with side shoots as they should be, but they are setting pods now and are also still loaded with blooms. They are not, however, as prolific as I think they should be.

My lettuces, which did sprout happily and did grow beautifully, still grew very slowly. To test and see if this is a normal, just slower rate of growth than I am used to, I seeded two containers filled with non-compost containing potting soil last week with lettuces in one, and spinach, bok choy, which absolutely would not grow in the garden, kale, which grew slowly, spinach which grew barely at all and chard which would not sprout, to see if it was the seeds.

It wasn’t. All of them have sprouted and are growing like gangbusters.

Strangely, my tomatoes are doing perfectly well as are my potatoes–both are blooming and healthy, with no signs of leaf deformation or other mutations in growth. None are stunted, BUT, my pepper plants are all stunted and are setting both blossom and fruit in smaller quantities on plants barely four inches tall.

My bare root strawberry plants are growing very slowly and have not put out runners yet, as they should have by now.

It has got to be contaminants in the commercial compost and soil. In the garden right next door where Morganna tilled the earth as it was and seeded directly in the native soil, beans, squash, pumpkins, corn, potatoes, sunflowers and cucumbers, everything is growing at a prodigiously normal rate, which is to say–fast. The plants she put in as starts: tomatoes, peppers, onions, and eggplant, are all healthy and unstunted.

What am I going to do?

This fall, I’ve decided to dig out the dirt and compost we bought and lug it home in lawn and leaf bags. There, I will put it in an unused corner of our land to sit and think about itself. I may add dead leaves to it to see if I can get it to compost itself out and improve itself over a series of years before using it anywhere where I want anything to grow. Or, I could use it where grass is to grow since grass is specifically unaffected by these chemicals.

Then, I will take apart our raised bed boxes, and store them in the garage to be used another time.

I already have pre-composted manure promised to me by a young friend who has a barn to clean out once the quarter is over. That will go on top of the extant soil in my garden plot. That, the wood mulch, and the compost I am making here at the house, along with fallen leaves, and grass clippings from non treated grass which includes our entire hillside “yard,” will all be tilled into the rich soil that exists under my current raised bed boxes. A cover crop will be planted–likely buckwheat and clover–to grow over the winter.

I’ll have to transplant the strawberries before covering them with straw for the winter, and I do still plan to build a coldframe over part of the garden plot, but otherwise, I want to let the soil rest over the winter.

Then, in the spring, more manure from another friend who has rabbits, and another with goats, and the cover crop gets tilled under first thing in the spring, before planting season begins. And then, I will plant without the raised beds.

Let’s hope that much soil amendment works to undermine any last traces of herbicide that might have leached from my beds into the perfectly good floodplain loess that is native to that plot!

And next year, we will have a much more prolific, happy garden.

Of course, I’m disappointed that this year’s garden, even with my best intentions, is not growing as it should, and it seems that if I’d just left well enough alone and used a tiller and planted straight up in the dirt, I’d have done better. BUT, on the other hand, I’d have probably wanted to add soil amendments and having had no trouble with commercial compost and manure in the past, would have used them anyway. At least with this stuff contained a bit in the boxes, with cardboard laid between the native soil and the added, I have a chance to remove most of the contaminated dirt, and what is left can be easily diluted.

I’m disappointed, but it is all a learning experience. No doubt I will be an even better gardener after this experience, and by making this innocent mistake and blogging about it, I can get the word out to many more people to be very careful when it comes to compost and manure from commercial sources.

Here’s to next year’s garden!

There’s a new bit of locavore lingo on the scene: “food sovereignty.”

What it refers to is the ability of individuals to safely sell and buy locally produced foods such as raw milk, or farm-slaughtered meats without having to fear prosecution for violating federal or state laws regulating such foods.

Two communities in New England have passed by voter referendum statues declaring the rights of consumers and producers to buy and sell local food products without having to adhere to any state or federal regulation regarding these items.

The first community, the town of Sedgewick, Maine, passed the “Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance” which effectively allows local consumers and farmers or other local food producers to enter into private agreements and transactions which effectively override federal and state health codes, bans, food safety laws and regulations governing food production. The ordinance also notes that the individual is required to do his or her own research into the safety of consuming raw products such as dairy, meat, vegetables and eggs.

In other words, caveat emptor–the buyer must shoulder the burden of understanding the possible health consequences of eating the food they are buying from their hopefully trustworthy farmer/neighbors.

The towns of Penobscott and Blue Hill, Maine later followed suit by passing similar legislation.

Barre Town, Vermont passed a similar measure by voter referendum (673 votes for and 200 against) which “reject federal decrees, statutes, regulations, or corporate practices that threaten our basic human right to save seed, grow, process, consume, and exchange food and farm products within the State of Vermont.”

The Vermont measure was in part a response to the threat from Monsanto to local seed-saving farmers whose crops had mingled with the corporation’s GMO seed, as well as a push back against a short-lived ban on the teaching of raw-milk cheesemaking. (Vermont’s Governor Shumlen signed The Dairy Class act into law, which allowed the raw cheesemaking classes to continue.)

The wording of both the Vermont and Maine laws are wide-reaching and on a shallow reading of them unable to withstand a legal challenge on a state or federal level.

However, if one looks more deeply at the Maine Constitution, there is a strong provision for “Home Rule” which allows local municipalities self-governance on community issues, which many say should include food sovereignty.

On the other hand, two bills which would support the local ordinances passed in Maine, one involving the sale of dairy products from small farmers directly to consumers, both were defeated in the House of Representatives recently.

This is a contentious issue, and one that I, myself, find difficult.

On the one hand, I understand that historically, our federal and state laws involving food safety regulation were originally put into place in good faith to protect the consumer from unscrupulous food producers who adulterated their products, (such as watering down milk or adding chalk to it) or engaged in unsafe slaughtering practices (such as were outlined in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. These laws were at one time, good and just, and truly had the well-being of the consumer in mind. And currently, those laws still nominally protect consumers from unsafe food production, though truthfully, looking at all the corporate food recalls and foodborne illness outbreaks across our country, one must note that they are doing a pretty poor job of protecting consumers.

However, those same laws have since morphed into protections for corporate and industrial food producers, by insisting that smaller family farms and food producers adhere to the same sanitation rules that govern the huge agribusinesses that dominate the landscape. In doing so, these laws are effectively pushing smaller producers out of business, because the regulations no longer recognize that smaller operations can be cleaner and more safe for workers and consumers by using different methods more applicable to small productions. Forcing small producers to use the same equipment as large producers creates an onerous financial burden for the small farmers, which essentially forces them out of business, allowing the larger corporations to sell their products with no local competition.

Which sounds rather like government-supported racketeering to me.

So, what do I think of all of this?

I think that the essential idea of local food sovereignty is a good one, but I also believe that communities must tread carefully in their pursuit of it. I think that it is perhaps too sweeping to throw out all food safety regulations, on the other hand, I believe that the fight against corporate control of our food supply is not only just, but necessary.

My very first reaction to the ordinances as they were presented on blogs was a knee-jerk, “Well, that’s a dumb idea,” but since carefully reading other sources of information, I have revised my position. It should be a fundamental human right to personally determine where and how we obtain our food, and there is no need for governments essentially force humans to stop farming on a small scale in preference to farming on a corporate scale.

For our federal government to do so goes against the very spirit of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, and I, personally will fight against such actions every step of the way, until I have expelled the last breath from my body. I was born of a line of small farmers and butchers who made their livings producing food for their families and others, and I am proud of that heritage, and I stand with those whose livings are made the way my forefathers and foremothers were.

Finally!

I succeeded at getting a good shot of flames rising from the wok while cooking.

And, I thought that since this photograph looked cool enough to share, I should probably write a bit about how and why to safely set fire to food in your wok.

First, let’s talk about why you’d want to set your food on fire in the first place.

Well, because it makes it taste good, of course. It flash caramelizes sugars and sears any ingredient that is in the wok. It also burns off the alcohol in the liquor or wine and leaves behind just the flavoring essence.

It also looks really cool.

But, it can be dangerous.

So, let’s look at a few simple rules to follow when using distilled liquor to flame a dish in a wok.

1. Never pour liquor directly from the bottle into the wok or pan while it is on the fire. Distilled liquors have too much alcohol in them for this to be safe–the alcohol vapors can ignite while you are pouring from the bottle. The flames can then follow the stream of liquor up into the bottle and ignite the rest of the alcohol. Which can cause an explosion. No, really, it can. It happened at the culinary school I attended. So, just don’t do it. Always pour the amount you are going to use into a pitcher or small container with a wide mouth.

2. When you pour the alcohol, do it quickly, and don’t lean close to the wok while you do it. You would think this would be a self-evident bit of common sense, but no–plenty of folks when they ignite something in their wok the first time lean in to see what will happen next. Well, if you lean in, what happens next is your eyebrows get singed. Oh, and if you have long hair like I do, tie it back before playing arsonist in the kitchen. The reasons for this should be obvious.

3. If your flame isn’t high enough to ignite the alcohol directly, you can gently tip one edge of the wok away from yourself and toward the burner slightly so that the flame catches and tongues of fire leap up. At this point, set the wok back level on the burner and gently stir the contents of the wok with your wok shovel in order to spread abut the flavor enhancing effects of the liquor.

4. Always have your exhaust fan on before you set things on fire in your wok. If you don’t have an exhaust fan or vent hood, consider NOT setting stuff on fire in the wok. Also, have your wok lid handy to smother the flames if necessary, and keep a box of baking soda nearby to use to smother flames. Also, please know exactly where your fire extinguisher is, you know, just in case. Do NOT use water to douse any flames.

5. Finally, keep all wayward children, animals, boisterous family members and naturally nervous people far from the stove when you go to set fire to anything in your wok. In fact, I highly suggest you send all such folk out of the kitchen before you do it, otherwise, you will have to listen to the nervous ones kvetch about your “reckless cooking” for hours, and it will just might ruin whatever dish you cooked so beautifully.