‘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.

Some like it hot–and some not.

I like stuff hot, and as longtime readers of this blog should have figured by now, I will put chilies into anything, including chocolate truffles and brownies.

So, of course, since I am learning about and cooking Moroccan foods these days, it only stands to reason that I would feel the need to make my own jar of harissa to put up in the fridge. I mean, if I am going to be making my own preserved lemons because they taste fresher than the ones you buy in the store (and they very much do taste fresher), then it only stands to reason that I should give harissa a shot, too.

I am glad that I did.

I have eaten harissa from the store before, and while it is kind of hot and tasty, it is mostly hot and salty, though it tends to have a weird bitter edge. I suspect that this is from some of the preservatives and the vinegar they put in it in preference to the lemon juice that the cookbooks say to use in it. To be honest, most of the commercial harissa I have tasted has left me rather cold, and gave me a less than stellar impression of the beautiful, flavorful and fragrant foods of Morocco.

Homemade harissa, on the other hand, is a scarlet sauce that is filled with the heat of chilies, the sweetness of roasted bell peppers, the bite of garlic the smooth fruitiness of good olive oil, the tang of fresh lemon juice and the musky aroma of cumin. Oh, yeah, and there is salt in there, too–but it isn’t as overpowering a flavor as it is in the commercial kind.

I am a convert.

The other cool thing about making your own harissa is that you can make it as hot or mild as you like by either adding more roasted red bell pepper or by using milder or hotter red chilies. For mine, I used my last harvest of Kung Pao chilies from the garden on my deck–they are about the same in heat level as a cayenne, and I used a fairly small roasted red bell pepper.

It turned out wonderfully tangy-hot, with a lovely scarlet macaw color that looks quite vibrant in the jar or on a plate.

Once you have made harissa, what do you do with it?

Well, anything you would do with any other hot sauce. Put it in soups, stews or sauces to perk them up. Add it to any sort of egg dish, but especially scrambled eggs. Use it in a marinade for meats, use it in cooking or as a table sauce. (If you make that white bean and greens soup from Tangier I wrote about yesterday, you can put some harissa in it for a little extra kick. It’s really good that way.)

If you keep it tightly covered and keep the top covered with a layer of olive oil, your homemade harissa will stay fresh for six months in the fridge.

You can’t beat that, really.

Besides, with the holidays coming, homemade harissa would make a great gift for any hot-sauce heads among your family and friends.

Put into a clean jar just large enough to fit the sauce without leaving a lot of air space. Cover the top of the sauce with a thin layer of olive oil, close tightly and store in the refrigerator, where it will keep safely for six months.

I love pickles.

When I was a little kid, around five years old, my mother caught me drinking pickle juice right from the jar. This disturbed her greatly, not only because I had ruined a jar of pickles by putting my germy little lips on it, but, because she was sure that much acid was going to kill me.

I helped Grandma make many a batch of her dill pickles–my job was to scrub the heck out of the pickles before they went into the brine. When it was time to pack them into jars, my other job was to pick whole dill blossoms and peel whole cloves of garlic to put in the jars before Grandma squeezed the cukes in. The fragrant umbrels of dill looked like floral fireworks pressed against the glass of the jars, while the scent of garlic, vinegar and brine permeated my skin and hair, much to my delight.

As a pre-teen and a teen, one of my favorite snacks was a whole crisp, garlicky kosher dill pickle, fresh from the jar or barrel. I remember being impatient when it came to letting pickles age before nibbling on them, but when I did pick at them before their time, I found Grandma’s admonitions to leave them alone were right–young pickles are not always very good.

My love of pickles has diminished somewhat in adulthood, though I still love plenty of sour foods. I no longer drink pickle juice straight from the jar, but I will dig into my huge jar of spring kimchi and snag a choice morsel or two for a snack about every other day. Sometimes I will even eat that for breakfast;.

The last of cucumbers are in season, and are gloriously inexpensive, so I bought about three pounds of them at the farmers market with an eye to turn them into pickles. But what kind?

I nearly turned them into kimchi, but while I know that there are summer kimchi varieties made with cucumbers, they are meant to be eaten quickly, and are not meant for preservation and winter consumption. And I wanted to make pickles, but not plain old dill pickles.

So, I got the idea of making cucumber pickles with the flavorings that go into kimchi: ginger, garlic, fresh chilies, shredded, salted daikon, and dried Korean chile flakes.

(To find Korean chile flakes, try a Korean grocery or a general Asian market. The Asian market here in Athens keeps the Korean chile flakes in the refrigerated section. For reference, you can always print out the photo here of the chile and take it with you.)

I used a recipe that included a short brining time, because I was too impatient to let the pickles sit for a day, and because I didn’t really have a good place to leave them undisturbed where cats couldn’t get into them. This recipe was for sandwich pickles and included a heinous amount of sugar in it–sugar which, for the most part I left out. (I really, really dislike sweet pickles. They made me gag as a kid and to this day, tasting them still makes me shudder. I don’t know why, because it isn’t like I dislike sweet and sour flavor combinations. But something about sweet pickles—eech. It just gets to me.) I did leave a spare one tablespoon–and it didn’t so much as change flavor of the pickles as enhance them.

The first step I took was to peel and shred the daikon radish, which I then rubbed with about a teaspoon of salt, and let sit until much of the juice was drawn from the vegetable’s tissues.

That is the purpose of salting or brining when it comes to pickling, by the way–it helps remove excess water from the vegetable tissues. This does two things. First, the removal of some water gives the vegetable a crisper texture, and secondly, this slight dehydration process helps preserve the vegetable by means of making the vegetable a less hospitable place for bacteria. Salt, of course, also inhibits the growth of many harmful bacteria, so it also has a cleansing and preservative effect on its own, outside of its physical effects on the texture of the vegetable.

The cucumbers I sliced thinly on the diagonal–after obsessively scrubbing the somewhat muddy skins, of course–and tossed into a large stainless steel bowl with the thinly sliced serrano chiles and set them all to soak in brine (a solution of salt and water) for three hours.

While the cukes were brining and the daikon was leaching out excess water, I peeled and cut into very thin slivers four ounces each of garlic and ginger. I could have minced them up and that would have been easier, but I decided I liked the look of very thin slivers much better than a paste of ginger and garlic floating around in the pickle jars. Slicing tiny slivers is easy–you peel both the garlic and ginger, and then slice them into very thin slices. Then, you stake 3-5 slices on top of each other and then cut each stack into very thin strips. It is really easy once you get used to it, and when you must do a lot as I did, it becomes a moving meditation. I find such cutting relaxing.

After three hours, I drained the the cucumbers and chilies, and rinsed them well under cold running water, rubbing them with my hands to get the excess salt out of them. (I should have worn gloves for this, too, because all that salt is really not good for dry skin. Gee–maybe it is because of that dehydrating effect that salt on organic tissues? Hrm. Maybe.)

Then, it was time to make the pickling solution–I just poured the two vinegars, the water and the sugar into a pot, and brought it to a simmer over medium heat. When it started to boil, I poured in the Korean chile flakes, the ginger and the garlic and let it boil for about five minutes. This turned the solution a brilliant scarlet hue that kimchi-lovers know very well. and the fragrance once the ginger and garlic were added was delicious. I almost wanted to drink some right then and there.

But instead of that, I stirred the cucumber and chile slices into the pickling juice, and let them simmer for about five minutes.

Then, I packed them into hot jars, and as a final step, I added a bit of Ball’s Pickle Crisp to the top of the pickles, then screwed on the lids. Pickle Crisp, which is the proprietary name Ball gives to calcium chloride. Calcium chloride helps pickles retain their crisp texture by acting to firm up the natural pectins found in the cucumbers without also raising the pH level of the pickling liquid.

The most important thing you have to remember when packing pickles into jars, is to be obsessive about poking out excess air bubbles. Cucumbers are notorious for trapping pockets of air among themselves and between themselves and the glass of the jar. I have found, and was taught by Grandma to pack cucumbers fairly tightly, and after pouring in the hot brine, to use a thin spatula, a table knife or some other implement (a chopstick works pretty well) to poke around the pickles and down the sides of the jar to seek and destroy the air bubbles. After that, you just have to top up the vinegar solution while leaving the recommended empty space at the top of the jar.

Then, I just processed the jars for ten minutes. They all sealed perfectly, and I cannot wait to try the pickles!

But, wait I will. Pickles are not usually at their best when first made. They should really age a bit on a cool, dark shelf undisturbed. During this time, the flavors mellow and begin to cuddle with each other, becoming friendly. The vinegar loses its raw, sharp quality, the garlic snuggles up tot he ginger who kisses the cucumber, and the Korean chile pepper weaves all of these tastes and textures into a cohesive, spicy whole.

(Though, I have to admit that I tasted a couple of pickle slices before I started packing the jars. Even hot and fresh and new, the pickles tasted pretty darned good. They are also very spicy, so keep that in mind if you decide to make this recipe, and lower the amount of Korean chile flakes accordingly.)

Have no fear–when I open my first jar of these scarlet and pine colored wonders in a couple of weeks, I will write an update letting everyone know how they turned out.

Until then, here is the recipe, if you feel the need to experiment right along with me.

Kimchi-Style Cucumber Pickles

Makes four pints or two quarts.

I love applesauce, but generally only when it is homemade.

When I was a kid, my Mom and both grandmothers ruined my ability to eat store-bought applesauce by making it from scratch from really good apples.

Compared to the somewhat chunky, thick, tart-sweet and cinnamon-laced concoctions they made the applesauce from the store tasted like insipid, grainy sugar-paste. All three of them insisted on good apples, and would buy from farmstands or farmers markets, and they never used the mealy, tasteless apples that the grocery stores carried.

Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have their own orchard on the farm, but they knew folks who did, and they would either buy bushels of fresh apples from them or trade some of their home-grown potatoes, cabbages, and some of Grandma’s canned tomatoes, beans and jellies for apples. They never got Red Delicious, either, an apple that Grandpa decried as a “worthless, tasteless excuse for an apple.” They always bought Cortlands, Jonathans, Grimes Golden, and Rome apples–all of them fairly tart, very firm and crisp, and delicious. They kept half of them in the root cellar in their bushel baskets to eat fresh or make pies from all winter. They stayed perfectly crisp that way, along with the potatoes, sweet potatoes, turnips, pumpkins and winter squash–and it took no electricity or anything to keep them cool and fresh. (Sometimes I think that when we modernized, we lost out on a lot of more sustainable ways of doing things–refrigerators and freezers are electricity hogs, for example.)

Here in Athens, we are blessed with several wonderful orchards, where many varieties of apples, pears, peaches, cherries, quinces, apricots, plums and other fruits are grown. Right now, the apples are madly in season–at least from the trees whose blossoms were not hit with the late frost in April. Because most of the arable land here in Athens county is in hillsides and valleys, which saved many of the apple blossoms from being destroyed by frost and snow–hills and valleys create microclimates with pockets of warm air that can protect a fruit tree from frost.

The apples I had on hand to make this applesauce were Cortland, MacIntosh, and Ginger Gold. Cortland are tart-sweet, and MacIntosh cook down to a wonderful thick, flowery-scented sauce, while the Ginger Golds are tart and zingy. I mixed them with some organic frozen blueberries, with the notion of feeding the sauce mainly to Kat, mixed into her morning oatmeal along with yogurt. Blueberries are one of her favorite fruits–and they are so full of nutrients, I cannot help but give them to her at every opportunity.

I only used one cup of sugar–much less than is usually stipulated for applesauce, and I used raw sugar, because I like the more complex flavor profile it gives to anything it is cooked with. It has similar flavor notes to honey, in my opinion, which is more interesting than white sugar which is just purely sweet. And then, because I cannot leave well enough alone, I added some spices: ginger, cardamom and allspice.

Cooking applesauce is easy–I just put the thinly sliced apples into a large pot with the blueberries, and added just enough water to barely cover the bottom. Then, I put the pot on the stove over high heat, and started cooking, stirring constantly, until the apples on the bottom let out their juices. Then, I stirred heartily in order to get the still raw apples and blueberries off the top of the pot and to the bottom, and stirred in the sugar and spices, and kept cooking until all of the apples and blueberries were soft and the MacIntosh apples had started to fall apart. I turned off the heat, and let the pot sit on the still warm stove in order to keep the sauce hot.

Then it was a simple matter of taking out my immersion blender and ground up the entire potful of fragrant fruit into a lovely, slightly chunky violet-hued puree. After that, I mixed in three tablespoons of bottled lemon juice to acidify the sauce in order to can it safely in a hot water bath canner. (In canning recipes, bottled lemon juice is specified over fresh because the bottled type has an exact pH which is known and thus the correct amount needed to acidify a recipe exactly can be ascertained.)

Then I packed it into hot jars, put on the lids and processed them in a boiling water bath for twenty minutes.

While it was processing, I took a taste of the applesauce, and shivered. It was that good–flowery and fruity, with the best qualities of both apples and blueberries, with a perfect balance between tart and sweet. The spices were subtle, but definitely present, and they took the sauce over the top into splendid. It will taste great in Kat’s oatmeal, for certain, but it is also something that I see the rest of us eating too. I can see putting it over good vanilla ice cream, or serving it with braised pork or roasted venison. Or using it as a tart filling or a spread on bread. Or just plain old eating it.

It is so good that I am buying more apples and blueberries tomorrow in order to make more of it in the coming week, in addition to a batch of plain spiced applesauce and a cherry applesauce.(Yes, I will post the recipes as I make them.)

Spiced Blueberry Applesauce

Recipe makes eight pints or four quarts.

Tomatillos are a gorgeous fruit, and they are an integral ingredient to one of my favorite cooking sauces from North America–salsa verde. The fruit, which is encased in a papery husk like a leafy Chinese lantern made of mulberry paper, is often thought of as simply green in color, but the truth is, the hues it comes in are myriad. Subtle shades of kiwi, celedon, celery and leaf green are mixed with butter yellow, cream, and golden mushroom tones. Some fruits are even speckled and streaked with dusky violet which complement the greens and yellows in a way that many painters and interior designers would envy.

There are a couple of farmers who grow tomatillos here in Athens, and they seem to have had a bumper crop this year. Like the tomatoes which have been extremely flavorful (probably because of the very long summer drought we have had), this year’s tomatillos have been fairly bursting with flavor. Not simply tart, but also sweet, with a tangy pineapple fragrance and a rather herbal, woody tang, these tomatillos were perfect for making some salsa verde to can for the winter.

Nearly every ingredient in this salsa is local: I paired the local tomatillos with red or violet sweet bell peppers, and plenty of red onions, garlic and chilies. The hot version had green jalapeno, poblano and Anaheim chilies, while the mild had just poblano chilies.To raise the acidity to safe levels for canning, white vinegar was used, but significant amounts of lime juice were also added, while cilantro, cumin and smoked paprika boosted the flavor. Of course, there is also some salt to round out the flavors and keep the salsa from tasting flat.

I adapted the recipe from The Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving which is edited by Judi Kingry and Lauren Devine. The only things I changed about were the types of chile peppers and the seasonings–it is not a good idea to change the amounts or proportions of acidic to non-acidic ingredients in recipes that are going to be put up in a hot water bath (non-pressure) canner. This is because the acids used in these recipes are part of what helps prevent bacteria from growing in the canned food.

Cooking it is simplicity itself; you just chop the ingredients–I did the tomatillos in medium sized dice, and the peppers and onions in small dice, and minced the garlic and cilantro–and then put everything in a pot, bring it to a boil, turn it down and simmer it for ten minutes. I find that the colors look especially lovely in the uncooked salsa–not only does the red onion boost the sweetness of the salsa and complement the natural sugars in the fruit, but the violet color, even in the finished, canned product, looks lovely flecked through the variegated greens of the salsa.

The recipe I give here fills five pint jars or ten half pints. Whether you pack into the larger or smaller jars, the processing time is the same–you boil them in the covered canner for fifteen minutes. Then, remove from heat and let sit for five minutes before opening the canner and lifting the jars from the water.

So, what do I intend to do with my finished salsas verde?

Make enchiladas verde, of course! Or chile with pork and white beans….mmm.

There are lots of possibilities for soul warming foods to be made with this salsa in the coming winter months.

Tomatillo Salsa For Hot Water Bath Canning

Makes ten half pints or five pints of salsa.