Red Plum Jam

6 pints of Plum Jam

It hadn’t been my intention to make red plum jam this year; I still have 3000 pints of blackberry “jelly” (it didn’t jell very well!) and many half-pints of peach butter, spiced and plain (which I adore the most of all my jams and jellies), and pints of apple butter, and I even have several half-pints of strawberry/cranberry jelly. Oh, and I have fig preserves. In short, I have enough Jam and jelly to last the rest of my life, because I think making preserves is interesting and fun, but I don’t use them up at a great rate.

But Virginia asked me to pick up some red plums for her at the farmer’s market, and I did; THEN, I had misgivings and thought I had not bought enough (the plums were very small, and the farmer, Lightsey’s Orchards of Mexia, thought I had ought to have bought half a bushel, and not just 5 pounds. Because they were mostly all pit!)

So I was going to return the five pounds and get a half-bushel, but the five pounds were really overripe and had practically disintegrated in the bag! From banging against each other, I suppose. They were NOT RETURNABLE!

So I made plum jam out of them. And here is the preposterous, the amazing, the ridiculous thing: THEY JELLED RIGHT AWAY, THE VERY FIRST BOIL!!!

That never happens, at least not for me! I have been unlucky in most of my jam-making. Usually I can only count on it working out if it is a fruit butter situation: it cooks until it gets thick. Sometimes I can get a jell when I add extra pectin, you know, after I realize that it is NEVER GOING TO JELL!! But not always.

This time, I just removed the pits from the Plum Mush, and sliced up a few underripes. I dumped it into my copper jam pot, and then realized I had forgotten to measure it. So I estimated the amount of Plum Mush to be 6 cups. I added 6 cups of sugar, boiled it, and it JELLED!

Plus, it is the best jam I have ever made! It is way better than blackberry jelly, I even like it better than strawberry jam. It has a nice tart bite.

Here is the Victorian-era recipe:

PLUM JAM

Sterilize some canning jars in a hot water bath, (half-pints are best), and have some brand-new canning lids handy, and the requisite number of bands. I never know how many, it is best to do MORE than you think!

Cut or mash the flesh from some red plums. Remove the pits; leave the skin on though.

Measure pulp into a large cooking vessel that is not cast iron.

Add an equal amount of white sugar. Don’t try to make it healthier by using less! EQUAL AMOUNTS!

Bring to a boil, stirring occasionally and making sure you do not scorch it. After a while, it gets foamy, and them the foaminess subsides. After the foaminess subsides check it to see if it is jelling once in a while (or obsessively) whatever works for you! (I alternated between casual and obsessive.) When it is jelling, it kind of coats the stirring spoon in a more noticeable way, and when you pour the liquid off the side of the spoon, the drops run together a bit, or (if you are lucky) get “stringy”. (Then you know for sure it is jelling!)

Ladle into jars and hot-water process for ten minutes.  Put on lids and bands and allow to cool. When they are cooling, they seal and make a little “click” sound!

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf

The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf is YET ANOTHER coffee shop to come to South Austin; it is in the original Waterloo Records store, next to the new condominiums that ALREADY has “The Lift” coffee shop in it, and right across the street from the Schlotsky’s on South Lamar. When I first heard the name “The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf“, I have got to admit, I thought something along the lines of: “That is the dumbest name I have ever heard.” I still kind of think so! I mean, SERIOUSLY, people! How many people were on the committee to think that name up? It’s generic….AND twee! To my mind it seems to have “Ye Olde” in front of it, sort of IMPLIED! Ye Olde Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf!

But then they sent me a can of free green tea, and the tea was……TOTALLY AWESOME! THe tea is called “Lung Ching Dragonwell” and is tastes fantastic, comes in charming silken bags, and has so much caffiene in it it makes you feel like you are fixing to have an acid trip! Seriously, I L*O*V*E IT!

So that made me feel more charitable about their name and presence.

Tonight they had a little bash to invite folks like me (and I suppose their friends and colleagues) to see what they are going to do. It was packed! They were having tastes of all the stuff they are going to have, and they have wrangled some local companies to make stuff for them, such as Mary Louise Butters Brownies (that I think are Very Good) and some local cookies and Austin Nuts and some other people, all good vendors, and all local.

They provide LOTS of different powders to put in your coffee

But somehow, it didn’t feel local. It felt, to be honest, like “local-washing”, to coin a term. The store just looked like they had perfected their concept elsewhere. I asked around and it is true: they are from California or something. (Don’t you love how fact-checking and accurate I am on my Blog Posts?)

They had a really good jazz band playing, music I actually rather enjoyed, and I had an iced tea (for FREE!) and sampled their wares. The place is fine, what they are doing is fine; the coffee and tea are excellent, and they do other things, like make fancy coffee slushees that taste great, and yogurt and granola bowls to have with your coffee so that you actually eat breakfast. If I were travelling in a god-forsaken place like the Panhandle and I came across The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, I would be THRILLED.

Mary Louise Butter's Brownies

But here in Austin, the competition is so fierce, I am not certain that they have enough to differentiate them from other, somewhat corporate coffee shops. Well, maybe they don’t NEED to be different, maybe there are enough condo-dwelling well-to-do fancy coffee swilling bozos to keep everyone smiling and profitable. We shall see, I suppose. I hope so, because I wish them well, and they gave me some free tea.

And perhaps the excellence of their teas will set them apart. Because that DRAGONWELL, it is really something. They offer it iced, possibly all the time.

Many Sorts of Coffee

Raspberry Yogurt and Granola Bowl. It was Good.

Cold Brewed Coffee

Cold-Brewed Coffee and Garden Tomatoes

I have read about the superiority of cold-brewed coffee before, but when I noticed that my favorite coffee shop, Fair Bean Coffee, was advertising that they are serving cold-brewed iced coffee, I gave the stories I had read more credence. I mean, if a coffee guru like Andres is behind cold-brewed as a method, it MUST be a great way to make iced coffee.

In Texas right now (the beginning of June) it is getting up to a hunnerd degrees right about now, AND, tonight, overnight it will only get down to 82˚.  Even first thing in the morning, here in Austin, it is too hot to want hot coffee.

I tried cold brewed coffee, and, it totally rules! It is a great way to make iced coffee. Normally, when I make Thai or Vietnamese-style iced coffee, the heat of the coffee melts the ice and makes it watery. With Cold-brewed, that’s not a problem.

Also, if you  like your coffee to have a creamy, toffee-like flavor, and less acid, cold-brewed will deliver that. Cold-brewing extracts 90% of the flavor components of coffee, but only 15% of the acids.

How to make Cold-brewed Coffee:

Coffee Grounds and Water in Old Jar

1) Grind up some coffee.

2) Get a jar out. A pint jar is too small; a quart jar is good. I use this old tomato jar, it is not quite a quart but it is the biggest jar I could find.

3) Place ground coffee in the jar. How much? I like my coffee strong, like fake espresso, so I used four gigantic spoonfuls. About a third of a cup of grounds, I would estimate.

4) Fill the jar up with water. Use filtered or spring if it is handy.

5) Put the lid on the jar. Let it sit out somewhere in the kitchen for 24 hours.

6) Strain it through a fine mesh strainer.

7) Then, let it drip through a coffee filter back into the jar.

To make Vietnamese style, stir in a few spoonfuls of sweetened condensed milk.

9) This makes enough coffee for me for three or four days!

Strainer and filter set-up. I have strained the coffee into the pink glass, then I filter it back into the original jar.

Iconic Iced Coffee

Gardening Isn’t All Vegetables #2

Iceland Poppy with Larkspur

THE GREEN: vegan raw food at Flagship Whole Foods

The Green's Vegetable Maki

I have written a couple of times about the vegan raw food bar at Whole Foods; I tend to get the assignments that have to do with any sort of “health food” because, in stark contrast to most self-styled gourmands, I don’t HATE health food or vegetarian food or macrobiotic food on principle, because I had some yucky health food once, or because hippies are self-righteous (honestly, I do know some people who eschew health food for this very reason!)

  My mother was  ahead of her time in many ways, one of them being that she was an organic vegetable gardener long before most people knew the word “organic”. She was a GREAT cook, and her cooking stylings swung back and forth all during her adult life (including the years of my childhood) between “health food” and “regular food”. A typical regular food meal would be, say, spaghetti with clam sauce with garlic bread and a fresh organic salad. A Health Meal would be bread made with whole wheat meal and brewer’s yeast, almond butter and a smoothie. Mom used to call the Health food times “Health Kicks!”

Macademia Nut "Cheese" with Microgreens

Really, writing about it now, it just sounds like normal food, normal meals; but that is today, in 2009. In 1967, it was just extremely weird to even make your entire meal from scratch, let alone GROW a lot of it. And ingredients like honey and brewer’s yeast and liquid aminos! She was looked on as a total freak. (If my Mom had been a hippie, it would have been easier for her; but she was “too old” to be a hippie, already an old married woman in 1956.)

Macademia Nut "Cheese" rolled in fresh herbs

Slices of "Pizza", made with a dehydrated onion flax crust, topped with marinated fresh vegetables

But, the upshot here is that, when I get an assignment like “check out the raw food place”, it sounds like a great assignment and I usually like the food. I really, really like it when food is fresh and has it’s own flavor, and I really HATE food that relies on processing and added fat and salt to be palatable. Whenever I have to travel through Normal America, (like, say, rural Ohio or Oklahoma) I pretty much hate everything I have to eat, out there where most everything is frozen or canned and processed to be served with the minimum of waste and a maximum of profit. (I call it “Sysco Food” for obvious reasons.)

ANYWAY, I already liked the raw food counter at Whole Foods; they were doing some pretty inventive stuff, and my heart does go out to the folks who are following a raw, vegan regimen: to me that just sounds so limiting and so hard! The way to make a raw food regimen actually work (like the Hollywood actors do) is to have your own personal chef, or, live where there are a lot of raw food restaurants (like Hollywood!) because, if people have time to strain their brains to make raw vegetable matter of various kinds seem like actual dishes that you want to eat, then it is a lot easier to DO a raw food regimen.

A tuna-salad like substance made with nuts, that tasted like really yummy tuna salad. It did make me want to eat it on BREAD, though, for instance a delicious ciabatta roll.

Straining their Brains to make it not only palatable but desirable  is what THE GREEN is doing, and the results are really powerful. THE GREEN has undergone a name change and a menu reworking, and now the food is way more sophisticated (and it was already somewhat sophisticated.) It is more chef-driven and modern, and the offerings are visually and palatably much more akin to the offerings at places like Parkside and Fino.

In reading over my own writing, I have decided that pictures really DO speak a thousand words, and it is rather tiresome to read my description of every bite. All of the menu samples I tried at THE GREEN were surprisingly tasty and, as before, the raw food really DOES have a way of making one feel nourished. I especially liked the dehydrated crackers, they were crunchy yet chewy in a very satisfying way. I also liked the Nori and the not-tuna salad. When I asked about the raw food regimen, I was told that those following it often find the amount of food they consume decreasing, because they are actually getting a lot of the nutrients that are lacking in Modern American Diet; they get the “full” signal from the brain earlier than a guy chowing down on a What-A-Burger. I believe it; that makes sense. It was my experience also. I felt very satisfied, and I enjoyed every bite too.

WINE is a raw food!!  YAY!!  Both of these vegan wines were excellent, and I particularly liked “Clancy’s” Shiraz (I would buy it!). They qualify for being Vegan by using organic fertilizer; they qualify as “raw” because wine is never heated up above 110˚.

The Squash Experiment

Nice Big Leafy Unproductive Squash Plants

Well, what I discovered is that, while the greenhouse (with the doors OPEN) provides sufficient cover to HIDE the squash plants from their EVILLLLL enemy, the Squash VIne Borer (proving that the adult vine borer must fly through the air seeking squash plants), in my yard there is insufficient sunlight (now that the trees have leafed out) to adequately nourish the squash plants. 

The result: Nice big leafy squash plants covered with blossoms, but when a squash tries to grow, nothing doing. The little squash vegetable tries to grow, fails to thrive, turns yellow and falls off, like a dead little pinky toe. A yellow one.

So, I gave up, and decided that this is a failed experiment.

A Healthy looking Zucchini peeps out of the wilted vine!

But then!

One day I looked in the door of the greenhouse, and the squash plants were all wilted and dying (I hadn’t watered them, and rain can’t get in. You know, through the plastic roof.) Well, I am not a TORTURER, so I went to get the hose and at least WATER them! Even if they aren’t going to curry my favor by producing Squash!

Lo: a Squash was growing!    Lookit it!!!

Now there are several developing. I think maybe more sun is getting in now that the days are longer? (Is farming in the shade like farming in Canada? Or other places where the days are shorter? The day is, let’s see…15 hours long or something in Texas right now.)

I will now share the glorious recipe for SQUASH AND ONIONS (which is how I prepared this squash). This is a beloved family recipe taught to me by my Mother, as part of my very first cooking lesson (The menu was: broiled steak, squash and onions, and baked potatoes.)

The self-same Zucchini five days later

SQUASH AND ONIONS

You will need:

1 white onions (must be white!)

2 squashes (Yellow are best, but one Yellow Crookneck and one Zucchini is pretty too)

2-3 Tablespoons butter

That Squash Again!

Salt and Pepper

A frying pan with a lid.

1. Melt the butter in the frying pan over medium heat. Try not to let the butter brown. If it browns a little it is not the end of the world though.

2. Slice the onion up really thin. You may use a mandoline; I am usually too lazy to get it down and also wash it after, so I just use a knife.

3. Create a layer of onion in the bottom of the pan, using half the onion. Salt and pepper the onion liberally.

4. Slice the squash rather thin also; make a layer of squash on top of the onion. You can overlap some.

5. Put another layer of onion, salt and pepper

6. Another layer of squash

7. It should all be used up now. Keep layering until you use it all up.

8. Now, put the lid on the frying pan and turn the heat DOWN. Let it simmer and steam to some extent inside the pan. Like maybe 5 minutes or 8 minutes or so.

9. Get a spatula out and turn the mess over. It will be beginning to fall apart. Cover again.

10. After a little while, take the lid off and let the liquid that has been generated reduce.

11. Now it is done! It will be your FAVORITE squash recipe !! It is the MOST delicious SQUASH recipe in the world!!

Well, they say you should strive for brightly colored meals! Here we have cold beet salad from the garden, cold cucumber salad from Grandmother's Cookbook (a recipe I will be sharing soon) baked chicken and "squash and onions".