Autumn Foliage Envy and Pear and Sugar Jam

Did you guys notice how spectacular the sugar maples were this year?  I don't know why they were particularly colorful this fall.  Maybe because unlike the last few years we had enough rain that all the leaves didn't just shrivel up and drop off.  What ever the reason, there are many trees that I drive past every day and never noticed before, but the last few weeks they almost take my breath away with their awesome color!

Is it weird to stand in a strangers yard and take photos of their leaves?  Would it be weird to come back to a strangers yard in the spring and steal seeds from their tree?   

The big tree in my front yard is a silver maple, not a sugar maple.  Even though it makes me feel disloyal, each fall I secretly wish my silver maple, which normally celebrates the end of the summer by turning a dirty brown color, was a golden sugar maple instead (shhh... don't tell). This year though, all my shrubs and trees, including the big silver maple, put on their best show ever, so I had very little fall foliage envy.  My little dogwoods turned bright red, for the first time ever.  I've never had my very own red tree before.

Puck and I frequently admire the fallen yellow and orange silver maple leaves and the way they match his fur.  He looks pretty good in yellow.  

Jamie and I are still working to process all the pears I brought home from the tree at the farm.  While Jamie sliced the pears using one of those apple corer slicer dealy-o's, which cuts an apple or a pear in eight chunks and removed the core, I created my first pear crumble.  I filled the dish with big pear chunks, peel and all, spread old fashioned oats on the top, drizzled on sorghum molasses, and then sprinkled flour and butter that I mixed in the food processor.  I added more drizzles of sorghum, and more butter and baked it all in the oven.  We told our selves that this was health food, since it had home grown organic pears (plus the fibrous peel), fiber in the whole oats, local molasses, einkorn flour, and butter from grass fed cows.  All this healthy junk meant we could eat as much as we wanted, right?  I'm not sure how to justify the ice cream from the gas station that we piled on top though.  

With some of the other pear pieces, I simmered them on the stove until they were soft, and then squished them through my hand crank food mill, which removed the peels.  

In the end, I had over sixteen cups of pear sauce!  It was pretty good just plain, or with kiffer, but our ultimate goal was to make pear jam.  

I used the pectin that reacts with calcium water again, so I didn't have to use quite as much sugar as I used to.  Traditional jam recipes are normally half sugar, but this jam is one third sugar.  When I look at a jar of jam now, I imagine the line on the jar where the sugar would be if I removed the fruit.  No wonder jam is so tasty!  The few jams I made without much sugar at all were not big hits with Brandon, who is the primary jam eater and connoisseur, so I tried not to be so conservative with the sugar this time and remind myself that it's a spread, not a side dish. If we ever get better at getting honey from our bees, I would like to switch to honey in our jam instead of sugar.  

In the end, I have twenty-two jars of pear jam.  That's a lot of jam, and we still have more pears!  

Pear Jam Leads to Chicken Liver Pot Pie

The giant pear tree at our little farm is overloaded with pears.  There are hundreds, if not thousands, of pears on the tree, and most are so high that I'm not sure how a person would get their hands on them.   It only took me moments to fill a large pail from the lower branches.  Unfortunately, I picked the pears weeks ago and they are still in the pail on my front porch.  

One of the reasons I haven't taken the time to use up the pears from the farm, is because Jamie and I filled a five gallon bucket with pears from my two little trees in my yard.  So many pears!  

I used about a third of the pears to make jam.  Turns out that my handy dandy hand cranked apple peeler, corer, slicer machine works great for pears too, and I filled a pot with neat pear slices.  

The chickens have been loving the compost ever since.  They use their feet to move the pear cores and long strands of pear peelings into interesting compost still lives.  Chickens are artists.  

In years past, I've used regular pectin and the recipes call for more sugar than fruit.  When I started buying sugar in ten pound bags, I began to question the wisdom of feeding this to people, even as a holiday gift.  But, this year I've been experimenting with a different type of pectin that used calcium water to set up instead of sugar.  My first batch of pear jam has about a quarter of the sugar of my old recipe.  It's a good thing I have so many pears because without all the sugar the jam doesn't go as far, which means I need more fruit, and have to work harder to process it.  Less sugar and burns more calories!   

How does pear jam lead to chicken liver pot pies?  Well, because I have limited storage space I was struggling to fit all the jars of jam on my "jam shelf".  I was knocking things around and being generally irritated with the disorganized condition of the shelves when I realized that a big box was taking up too much room.  The box was an unopened Christmas gift from my brother in law containing a mini pie maker machine.  I pulled it out and brought it to the kitchen and was in mid thought about where to put it, or if I should keep it, when I joked to Jamie that we should make mini pies for dinner.  Then, still joking, I said we could make chicken liver pie since I have a giant bag of chicken liver that needs to be used up.  We laughed, and then I seriously considered the idea.  Why not make chicken liver pot pies?   

Now I know why I don't make pot pies -too much work!  I steamed the potatoes and carrots, thawed out the peas, cooked the liver on the stove top, picked rosemary from the garden, diced everything up, made the gravy with home made chicken stock, then mixed and rolled out pie dough and cut it into little circles for the mini pies.   The kitchen was a disaster by the time I was finished.  But, even though we had to use some whole wheat pastry flour because that's all I had, the pies were quite good.  I think I like chicken liver, which is a surprise to me since I didn't like it when I was a kid.  Jamie and Brandon liked it too, so it's not just me, chicken liver pot pie is tasty!  Even tastier were the pie's filled with pear jam that I made for dessert.  The pie maker may get to stay on the shelf after all.  

Chicken Kisses and Calorie Free Pie

The tomato harvest is slowing, but I have been able to keep up with our demand for fresh tomatoes in salads, on sandwiches, and just plain.  I even had enough extra to make a few quarts of sauce and some spicy tomato jam.  The tomatoes in the top of the bowl pictured above come from a volunteer plant that sprouted in my herb bed.  This is the third summer I have had volunteers of this type of tomato.  They are small like cherry tomatoes, but pear shaped and green around the stem.  Nice, really.  I've never planted anything that looks like this, so I'm not sure where it comes from, but it's been easy to just allow one of the many volunteers that come up on their own to grow to maturity and take advantage of the free bounty.  The small dark round tomatoes in the lower half of the bowl are called chocolate cherries, and they have become one of my favorites.  Not as sweet as red cherries, but tangy and delicious.  

Helen and Mrs Hall get their fill of tomatoes that go to the compost, and they are not above helping themselves to any nearly ripe ones that overhang the chicken wire I haphazardly wrapped around the tomato bed.  

The tomato featured in the photo above is one I refer to as "chicken kissed."  I can clearly see the beak marks from the taste test performed by one of the chickens, but it hasn't caused the tomato to go rotten yet.  At first this grossed me out and these got chucked in the compost with the mushy ones, but these days I've gotten less picky and have convinced myself that one chicken kiss isn't that big of a deal and I can just cut it off.  If I die of some rare chicken disease you will know how this has happened - I eat chicken kissed tomatoes!  

I used the surplus of cherry tomatoes to make tomato jam.  If you have never had spicy tomato jam spread on hot buttered cornbread, then you just haven't lived!  One of the best parts of making tomato jam is getting to use my favorite hand cranked kitchen tool, my food mill.  I just cook the tomatoes until they start to burst, squish them through the food mill, and then follow the recipe in the pectin box.  The jam has sugar, cinnamon, cloves, and allspice, so it smells like Christmas in the kitchen while I'm making it.  

The jam goes into a hot water bath for a while, and then I use a sharpie to label the lids and I have jam to gift to friends and family - if I can keep us from eating it all!  

Remember the apples that I picked from the tree at the farm?  Well, I finally got around to processing them for the freezer.  This job allowed me to use my second favorite hand crank kitchen tool, my apple peeler/corer/slicer.  

From about two and a half gallons of apples, I got over eighteen cups of sliced apples.  I'm all set for thanksgiving pies!  I was worried that the peeler wouldn't work well on these apples because they were so lumpy and had so many spots.  But, the peeler handled the lumps like it was designed for them, go figure, and the spots were easier to remove once the peel and core were out and I could see if the blemish was only skin deep.  

Because the peeler is adjustable for apple size, I started with the biggest and worked my way down in size.  By the time I got to the bottom of the bucket the apples were tiny and I was starting to get a back ache from working.  Mentally, I was complaining to myself that I wasn't even going to get enough calories from a pie made with these little apples to make it work peeling them.  Eureka!  A pie that actually burns calories!  If I expend enough calories picking apples, washing, peeling, coring, slicing, cutting out spots, freezing, and then baking into a pie that I actually burn more calories that I am consuming, I could eat apple pie guilt free!  I love it.  

Plops, Jam, and Shots

The best thing about growing basil, beside the fact that bugs and chickens don't seem to care for it so I actually get to eat it myself, is getting to make basil pesto.  Basil grows big and fast, like a weed, and to make pesto I don't even have to turn the stove on.  This is my kind of food preservation!  

The past few years I've been storing it in small jars in the freezer, but a friend of mine says she likes to make it in ice cube trays so she can just pull a cube out of the freezer when she needs it without worrying about using up a whole jar.  That's a problem?  Instead of using ice cube trays, mom tried freezing the pesto by plopping scoops on a plate and putting it in the freezer.  The little frozen plops can be picked off the plate and stored in a freezer bag.  Introducing us the the ease of the now loved - pesto plop!  The plops in the photo above were made with mom's melon ball scoop.  

I tried my hand and some plops this weekend, and they did not turn out as pretty.  Actually, when Brandon saw them he said "something looks weird about these cookies." Maybe it was the green color?  If I hadn't been sure he would notice that they were frozen, I would have encouraged him to take a bite, just to watch his reaction.  

I don't usually spring for pine nuts, even though they make a milder tasting pesto.  This year I tried a batch of pesto with walnuts and garlic, and a batch with pecans.  Olive oil, walnuts, green leafy plants, and garlic - healthy, right?  Well, there's also cheese, but I embrace dairy too.  

Speaking of healthy, I've been turning healthy fresh fruit into sugary jam!  Actually, I made the elderberry jam with honey, and used the kind of pectin that doesn't require as much sugar to set up, so this elderberry jam should be one of the least sugary jams I've ever made.  I hope it's not the least loved.  

I didn't have enough elderberries left after jam making to make wine, so I covered the extra berries with some vodka, to make an infusion.  Elderberries have more vitamin C than oranges, so elderberry shots may be just what the doctor ordered, eh?  

Jars of Sunlight

Citrus season has inspired more triple citrus marmalade, which I found to be very photogenic food.  I think the recent months of winter gray in the garden made the bright colors of the citrus really appealing.  I like the bitter orange peel taste, so this is one I've made for several years.  Of course, I just enjoy taking natural and healthful foods, like fruit, that are on sale and turning them into processed sugar coated treats, like jam.  

This marmalade has oranges, tangerines, and lemons -  peels and all.  Brandon still thinks I tried to feed him poison when I gave him some last, but he likes his jam sweet and is "sensitive" to the bitter taste (he's a flavor wimp, really).  That's okay - more for me!

It takes quite a while to cut up all the fruit, but mom and I took our time and experimented with mixing different types of home made wine while we worked.  We found out that if you mix a the Storm Grape wine (2011, from mom's yard) and the Brandon's Uncle Junior's Persimmon wine (2010, from Brandon's uncles Junior's yard, of course), with a little Merlot from a box (2012, probably from Liquor Barn), it was an improvement over any of them on their own. At least that's what we thought after a few glasses. 

The fruit, peels, and bag of seeds were cooked, then allowed to sit over night before I added the star anise and sugar, and cooked some more, and more, until I eventually got tired of simmering it and waiting for it to thicken.  I poured it in jars and used a hot water bath to seal them.  Hopefully it won't be too liquid, but if it will pour its easier to use in fruit cakes and keffir, so I don't mind. 

We debated about putting the star anise in the jars with the marmalade since mom thinks they kind of look like giant brown spiders in the jar and can be quite shocking when you see them at a glance.  I never really noticed that they look like giant spiders until I was at mom's house, deep in a forest teaming with invertebrates, working on the marmalade.  Giant spiders are a very real possibility in that setting so your mind sees them even when they aren't there!  Outside of the wilderness I think it looks kind of fancy.    

We had a little extra marmalade and decided to try a vodka infusion, since everything is better soaked in alcohol, right?  After sampling, we think it might be great in margaritas.  We should probably try it when we haven't been mixing wines, though.  It could be terrible under different  circumstances. 

I really liked the way it looked in the bottle when held against the light.  Like we bottled a little bit of bright orange sunlight.