Category: food

Canning: It Also Rquires Measuring

Karen

When I posted that Thing #28 was “easy,” I didn’t mention that I did it with my mom, at her house, with lots of supervision. Well, pride goeth before a fall, and lack of spatial awareness goeth with my second canning attempt.

I had half a box of peaches and big plans to make jam with some and then just can the rest in syrup. I imagined jars full of lovely peach halves like little suns. I planned the steps carefully. I peeled the peaches beautifully. And then the halves didn’t fit in the jars and I had way too many.

As it turns out, I had half pint jars that I thought were the larger one pint size. Never in all the planning and peeling did it occur to me that the peaches were almost as big as the jars. No, I was convinced I had pint jars; peach halves fit in pints; it would all work out.

This wasn’t a total canning fail, because after I cut everything into smaller pieces and kept going, it all worked out. (I ended up slicing and freezing the leftovers.) It’s just that I now have seven successful single servings of peaches, laboriously canned.

Seven servings! I’m stocking up for the long winter!

You know what goes well with peaches? Bourbon.

Food-Related Things I Learned Last Night

Karen

I was searching the Gourmet.com archives for a plum cake recipe that used ingredients I had, got distracted by their Cocktails of the Decade, 1940-2000 gallery (awesome), and noticed a cocktail called the Phoebe Snow. I knew the Phoebe Snow was a train, and that Utah Phillips wrote a song about it (her?), but I didn’t know the backstory: Both the cocktail and the train were named for
a character created for a railroad advertising campaign that ran from the 1880s into the middle of the 20th century. The original Phoebe Snow was a young woman whose white dress remained pristine while riding the train because it ran on anthracite rather than normal, sooty coal.

Both Wikipedia and Utah Phillips back that up. Cool.

(Here’s Phoebe, courtesy of Wikipedia.)

Then I moved on the The Joy of Cooking, still looking for a plum cake recipe, and I finally decided to look up “cockaigne.” Many recipes in there are called “Chocolate Cake Cockainge” or “Christmas Fruitcake Cockaigne” and while I’ve been reading the cookbook since I was about ten, I’ve never bothered to find out what it means. (In my head, I had decided it meant “with nuts;” I don’t know why.)

As it turns out, in medieval times “cockaigne” was a mythical land of plenty to peasants, kind of like the Big Rock Candy Mountain was to hobos. The Joy of Cooking authors had a country house named that, so all the “Recipe Cockaignes” were really just their house specialites–no nuts involved. Apparently this was in the forward to the cookbook the entire time. Thanks, Wikipedia!

(I did finally make “Plum Cake Cockaigne,” but I always forget how much sugar plums need. It’s a little tart.)

Now It’s Personal, Chickens

Karen1 Comment

So Mr. Isbell’s parents became chicken owners this spring, and the chickens are now big enough to wander their back garden freely. This is all kinds of cute:

They’re really soft–even their feet–and have so much personality. They take sun baths and stick their leg out like Toby!
Obviously, I do not eat chicken. I do eat eggs, but I make sure they’re at least cage free, if not Certified Humane. (I’m really looking forward to eggs from these girls!) But after seeing these chickens up close, I’m now hyper-aware of the eggs from unhappy factory farmed chickens used in things like mayonnaise and ice cream. So Mr. Isbell and I are exploring the strange new world of Vegannaise and Soy Dream.

It’s a good thing his parents don’t have a pet cow: I’d never buy shoes again.

Food I Cook For Myself

Karen

Oyster stew is a traditional Christmas Eve or New Year’s Eve supper in my mother’s family, but only she and I like it. Mr. Isbell doesn’t care for it either, but since he was at band practice last night, I made some for a week-before-Christmas-eve dinner for myself. (And Toby. Toby, I discovered, is a big fan of oyster stew.)

I’ve started reading some M.F.K. Fisher again, to compare her with Laurie Colwin, and in Consider The Oyster I found this about oyster stew: “mildly potent, quietly sustaining, warm as love and welcomer in the winter.”

And also very popular with spoiled housecats.

Experiments In Feeding Myself

Karen4 Comments

I think my experiments can be summed up in a phrase: It’s a good thing I live two blocks from Smith’s.

While I didn’t expect my garden to fill all my produce needs for the summer, I did expect it to add some nice salads by now. Out of two rows of lettuce I planted, I have grown two lettuce plants, one of which bolted yesterday while I was at work. (Well, quickly.) I don’t know if my seeds were bad, if the last month of cold had something to do with it, or if the snails ate both rows as soon as they came up out of the ground.

I’m thinking it was the snails, because after they ate my lettuces, they discovered my beans. The beans had come up easily, almost with a cartoon-y “SPROING!!”, and they were doing really well…for a day.

Obviously, poisoning the snails wasn’t an option, so I looked into natural deterrents. I tried some copper tape around the rows–the snails laughed*. I tried some coffee grounds around the beans–the snails laughed and ate some more.

Last weekend my mother offered me iron phosphate snail bait (named, fabulously, Escar-Go!). Iron phosphate is non-toxic and naturally occurring; snails eat it and then their hunger mechanism shuts down and they starve to death. Don’t laugh, but the thought of snails starving over three to six days seemed too sad for me, so I tried a beer trap as a last resort:

The snails got drunk, had a party, ate some beans, and laughed.

All my snail compassion disappeared. Monday night I re-planted the lettuce rows with beans and filled in the holes in the existing bean rows, and I Escar-Go!’d my garden within an inch of its life.

So I think I’ve won the snail battle but my beans will be three weeks behind schedule. At least radishes grow safely underground, far away from snails:

*I think the issue with copper tape on the beans was I couldn’t make good border around the whole row. I have copper rings around the base of the tomatoes, zucchini, and eggplants and they’re happy and un-eaten.

Agricultural Monday

Karen

Continuing the “Where Does Your Food Come From/Are We Doomed?” theme of the past few weeks, here’s an an article by Michael Pollan for the New York Times online titled, “Why Bother?“–which was part of the angst of that trip to the Midwest:

The realization that all my efforts aren’t doing anything–that no matter how much I try to eat eggs from happy chickens, or buy organic parsley, that there will be thousands more people buying the cheapest eggs and parsley, with no thought as to where they come from–was really discouraging.

So imagine how happy I was to find an article telling me why I should still bother. Read it and see why you should bother, and we’ll resurrect the 1970’s back-to-the-land movement!