Jam Session

Saturday was a special treat for me. Kate brought her sister Kim to the house for a Jam Session.  It’s probably not what you’re thinking. We made jam. Kate and Kim spent the morning at a flea market in Rockford, which gave me the opportunity to bake a loaf of sourdough bread, make noodles, and put together a raspberry pie. Quite a lot of gluten in the meal. Good thing my guests weren’t fussy. For the first time ever, the crust did not slouch into the bottom of the pan when I blind-baked it. Hooray! It may have been because it was the first time that I followed the direction about chilling it for 30 minutes. Since I was busy with other things, it may have been longer. Whatever the reason, the crust was beautiful.

My first successful blind-baked crust

When Kate and Kim arrived at 1:00, I put them to work washing berries, making sure they were careful to check the inside of Japanese beetles or picnic bugs lurking within. We only found two picnic bugs! Either the population is low, or there’s a bunch of them in the jam. There was one Japanese beetle on the floor. I assumed it had escaped from the raspberries.

Step 2 was putting the berries through a food mill to remove some of the seeds. Kim had a little epiphany when she realized what the cone-shaped strainer and pestle were for. She sees them all the time at flea markets (together and separately) and never had any idea.

Kim puts raspberries through the food mill

When we had the required 5 cups of raspberry puree (which made us sing that old Prince song), we added the Sure-Jell mixed with a little bit of sugar and brought it to a full rolling boil while stirring constantly.

Kate stirs constantly until the raspberry puree comes to a boil

And then we added pretty much an equal volume of sugar (4 cups). Yes, indeed, the amount of sugar in jam will take your breath away.

So, so much sugar

After returning it to a full rolling boil and cooking for 10 minutes, there was still too much foam. We had added butter, which was supposed to prevent that. Hmm. Nothing to do but skim the foam off and put it in a bowl. Kim ladled the jam into clean jars.

Kim fills jars with jam

We positioned the lids and put them in the canner.

Into the canner

While waiting for the steam canner to build up enough pressure to start the timer, Kim dared Kate to eat the foam. Such babes, thinking that the foam was bad! Kate soon learned that the foam was delicious. When I was a kid, we used to spread it on saltines, but Kate and Kim had it eaten before I could suggest it.

This foam is delicious!

Here I am with the final product. Please note that my t-shirt says “We Be Jammin’”.

We Be Jammin!

Our next order of business was the tour. I peeled carrots for the chicken and noodles so Kim could give the peels to the girls. Kate went all artsy and took this photo and an angle.

Kate's artsy fartsy shot of Kim feeding carrot peels to the girls

We also let Kim collect the eggs using Hilda’s special egg apron.

Kim gathers the eggs with Hilda's apron that has 12 individual egg pockets

While were touring the gardens, I noticed that the deer had not only eaten the tops off of the beets again and pulled about half of them out, they had also eaten all the leaves off the sweet potatoes. Damned deer.

We had peaked too soon, being all done with the jam and the tour by 3:00. I couldn’t let them leave because I’d spent all morning making supper. We sat around and talked, which was fun. Kim teaching middle school, and we all swapped teaching stories.

We ate chicken and noodles with the bread and had raspberry pie for dessert. Kate took a picture of her pie.

Raspberry pie

On Sunday, we working in the garden all afternoon. By midweek, we knew that the tomatoes were dead. Hilda and I pulled them out. It was heartbreaking to see all the green tomatoes on the wilted vines. “Too bad we don’t like them fried,” Hilda remarked.

I worried all Saturday night about the cabbage. They are looking sad. I planned to harvest them if I found that they had rotted off at the bottom. But all were still securely in the ground. I left them and hoped for the best. What would we do for a year with no sauerkraut??

Sad, sad little cabbage

I was curious about the sweet potatoes. It was our experiment for the year. We are a bit north for them, although Hilda bought a variety that was supposed to be appropriate for our zone. I thought we would get a few puny ones at best. Imagine my surprise with the first one we dug up yielded this:

Sweet potatoes from a single plant!

We dug four altogether. The last one made one giant potato instead of a lot of little ones.

A giant sweet potato

The total for all four is here.

Yield from four of 25 sweet potato plants. Good heavens!

Trouble is, I don’t really like sweet potatoes, and these four plant represent 1/6^th of what we planted! I like sweet potato fries and sweet potato chips, but I do not fry at home. Stinks up the whole house for days. Terry likes mashed sweet potatoes. Ug. Ah well. I learned to like squash. Tonight we were short of white potatoes in the house (Hilda dug just a few the other day), so I sliced up a sweet potato to put with the last of the white potatoes in a foil pack for the grill. Terry got them nice and crispy, and they were delicious.

To catch up on some odds and ends, Terry thought I should include a photo of our magnolia, which is the “Jane” variety and blooms throughout the growing season. Oddly, its flowers never seem to fully open, but it is beautiful even this time of year.

Our "Jane" magnolia

Fiinally, I renewed my subscription to Science News in August and was surprised to have my check returned to me last week with this form letter:

The letter that came with a returned check from the Science News subscription service

Apparently it happens all the time or they wouldn’t have a form letter. It cracks me up that it is not enough to tell you that you put the wrong year on the check, they tell you what the correct year is, in case you just woke up from a coma and started writing checks willy-nilly. Still it was a relief that they didn’t tell me they were cancelling my subscription because I was clearly too clueless to understand Science News.