tossed salad and boiled eggs

Green Gulch Farm salad greens in my favorite wooden salad bowl

It is Sunday morning. I've woken without an alarm. I've posted my poem. I have a few eggs boiling on the stove. We will soon be eating those eggs with a green salad and slices of toast topped with homemade jam. Green Gulch Farm adds lovely little flowers to their salad greens mix, and for me, it makes all the difference. It is a good day. I'm happy. That's all...

still knee-deep in plums!

Why is it called “canning” if we are putting food in jars?

according to Intercourse Canning Company:
In 1795 Napoleon offered money to anyone who could find a way to preserve foods for his troops. Nicholas Appert of France found a way to preserve food in jars sterilized and sealed with pitch and had a vacuum-packing plant by 1804. This process was a military "secret" but by 1810 Peter Durand of England had a patent for tin-plated iron to use in "canning." Canned rations were on the field at the Battle of Waterloo.

In 1812 a small plant in New York produced hermetically sealed oysters, meats, fruits, and vegetables in cans. Durand introduced his can to America in 1818. Henry Evans patented a machine that made the tin cans increasing production from 5-6 cans to 50-60 cans per hour.

In 1858 American John Mason invented the now famous glass jar for home canning. By the 1860s the process time had dropped from six hours to 30 minutes, making canned foods commonplace. In the heating process the sterilization destroys bacteria and enzymes that can cause spoiling, and the seal prevents new air or other organisms from entering.

what have we canned in the test kitchen?

• mixed garden plum w/garam masala preserves* (we've tried this one on bread and butter, toast, w/ cheese and toasted baguette slices, and on lamb chops)
• santa rosa plum w/rosemary preserves (excellent on french toast!)
• yellow garden plum w/ginger & clove preserves (tastes like peaches)
• garden plum chutney (waiting 3 weeks to allow it to mellow)
• garden plum w/vanilla bean preserves (tastes like raspberries)
• pickled garden plums (cooling off as i type...)

*noted in Can't take credit for them...

i need a nap.

Can't take credit for them....

 

 

We're lucky enough to have inherited three varieties of plums. Denise made a plum preserve last weekend with our new wonder spice, garam masala. Since we haven't stocked the Point Reyes pantry yet we are reaching for garam masala whenever we need something with cloves/cinnamon/cumin etc. It is very cool to cook with. Anyhow, it turned out like a cross between a jam and a chutney. We've using it on toast to date but Denise is using it to glaze lamb chops tonight.

I've got a plum tart in the oven as we speak. While Denise was inclusive in her preserve, using plums from all across the size and color specturm, my tart is a strickly fascist Santa Rosa affair. (See second pic.) I was about ten minutes into researching a crust from scratch when I decided it would take too much time. Denise suggested a graham cracker crust. So a little melted butter and some crumbled graham crackers and I was off. I decided that the plums were so sweet that I'd only add lemon juice and zest. I don't get all this sugar in the recipies.

The larger story is that I am trying to cook without recipies and internet more and more. One of my goals in moving up here was to get to know the hiking trails well enough that I didn't have to take a map along to find my way. I wanted to know which ones were good in shade and in sun, which were a hard workout, which had good spots by streams by heart, so I could just pick up and go.

I'm getting more and more like that with my cooking. I want to get good enough that I can improvise all the time...only turning to books and internet for new experiments, or complicated things like bread. (Although, I really want to get some basic breads down as well.)

So back to the title...I can't take credit for growing the plums, but you can bet your ass I'm going to claim credit for my tart. Assuming it turns out well...