Category Archives: Food

Pear preserves

Last weekend, we visited my husband’s grandparents and acquired a large quantity of rock hard pears from a neighbor’s tree.  What do you do with rock hard pears, you ask?  You make pear preserves, of course, which is what I did this Saturday.  As a warning, this task is not for the faint of arm.  No matter how good your knife, cutting over twelve pounds of rock hard pears is intense.  By the end, I felt like I would be unable to pick up a knife again, ever.

After all the pears were cut and cooked into preserves, the canning commenced.  I sterilized and filled the jars (6 pints and 2 half pints) and started placing them in the huge pot of boiling water.  I placed all of the pint jars in the pot, along with one of the half pint jars.  As I went to get the last half pint, I heard a kind of popping sound from the pot.  Probably not good.  My fears were confirmed as I looked into the pot and saw the water becoming cloudy.  The half pint jar had broken.

Unsure what to do, I used the canning tongs to lift the jar out.  When I did this, instead of merely seeping out, the contents of the jar, gushed out into the water.  It pretty much looked like someone had vomited pear chunks into my pot.  The canning had to go on, so I gingerly set the only remaining half pint jar into the pot with the intact pints jars and waited an excruciating eight minutes or so for the water to return to a boil and boil for five minutes, terrified that I would hear another pop at any minute, signaling the destruction of more of my hard work.  Fortunately, that did not come to pass, and after boiling for five minutes, I retrieved seven intact jars of pear preserves from the pear vomit pot.

Weekend update

Once again, we made it from Sunday through Friday without the car, but it made an appearance again on Saturday.  I think that habit will be hard to break as long as we are commuter gardeners, but it does make me think crazy thoughts like, “Do we need to own a car at all?  For as seldom as we use it, couldn’t we just rent a car once a week?”  Perhaps . . . .

Saturday was full of gardening and food preservation.  I canned pear preserves (to be discussed in a future post) and prepped more fresh basil for freezing.  We will be enjoying lots of pesto in the coming months — no complaints here!

Sunday dawned rainy, great for all the little seeds we planted yesterday, not so great for biking to church.  I resolved to bike in spite of the rain and ended up staying relatively dry, due to convenient breaks in the rain that corresponded with my travels (and due to my fenders).  In the afternoon, we needed to run an errand that involved exchanging a long handle of a tool with interchangeable heads.  When I say “run” an errand, I do mean literally.  The store is 1.25 miles from our apartment, but we weren’t sure how to safely and securely attach a seven foot pole to a bike.  I was highly opposed to driving, so I suggested walking, which became running (well, jogging actually) to save time.  No doubt we looked highly ridiculous, running through residential neighborhoods carrying a seven foot long red pole.

Mission complete, we returned to begin a cooking/baking extravaganza, including roasted beets*, vegetable pot pie, and apple pie**.  This was our first time making the vegetable pot pie with all local vegetables: potatoes*, butternut squash*, carrots*, green beans*, sunchokes**, and onions**.  We love this pot pie recipe, but before you are fooled into thinking that this is a super healthy dish, in the interest of full disclosure, this recipe has 3 sticks of butter in the crust and filling.  Three sticks in a recipe that’s meant to serve four people!  We stretched it into six servings — this means I consumed a half stick of butter in one meal.  Oops!  Maybe we’ll go with even smaller serving sizes in the future.

Preach it!

Michael Pollen, Big Food vs. Big Insurance, in the NYTimes:

To put it more bluntly, the government is putting itself in the uncomfortable position of subsidizing both the costs of treating Type 2 diabetes and the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup.

There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Yes, yes, and yes.

The third snippet is a bit of a sore point for me right now.  I have been looking for a job as a health educator for two-and-a-half years.  Apparently I should have stuck with the medical school plan and gone into amputation surgery (is that actually a surgical specialty, or did I just make it up?).

I’ve always had mixed feelings about John Mayer’s song, “Waiting on the World to Change.”  I like the melody, but the lyrics raise some questions:  Why are you waiting?  What are you waiting for?  Why don’t you go out and change it now?

I know what I want to do, but the jobs just are not out there, in part due to the reasons Michael Pollen mentions.  Our health care system does not fund prevention.  So maybe I am waiting on the world to change.

We now return to our regularly scheduled posting

Now that I’ve gotten all of the blogging about vacation out of my system, we can return to daily life.

Daily life returned in full force this past weekend with an exhausting barrage of gardening, attempted car sales, food preservation, and cooking.  The yield of our labors:

9 quart bags of green beans in the freezer
9 bags of basil (each with 4 packed cups) in the freezer
3 quart bags of shredded zucchini in the freezer
4 quarts of tomato sauce, each with ~1/2 cup of garlic, canned (started with 18 pounds of tomatoes)
1 big pot of vegetarian gumbo
2 loaves of zucchini bread
4 people who saw the car in the freezer
20 pounds of peaches purchased — waiting to be sliced, sugared, and frozen

This was our first attempt at canning, necessitated by our over-stuffed freezer.  All four jars sealed in the water bath, so I guess we did something correctly.  Extra canning jars in hand, we are now ready for future canning experiments.

The vegetarian gumbo, featuring almost all home-grown and local ingredients, came out pretty well.

And no, I do not really have the bodies of the people who came to see the car in the freezer.  That is not why the freezer is over-stuffed.  I promise.