Tomato Jungle

August 31, 2017August 22, 20181 Comment

I don’t even really like tomatoes, so I don’t know what possessed me to plant twelve of them in a 4X4 white planter box I had bought at the New England charity auction last fall for $25 – a real bargain, but you had to be there early to push and grab, worst than a garage sale but worth it for 75% off. Somehow I had the idea in my head that I would have a garden like my parents did years ago on the farm. The farm garden was always planted in the cornfield closest to the house for easy access, spread out among the rows of corn. Sometimes we would help my dad plant it, he dug the holes, and we put the seeds in and covered them up with dirt, but other than that I don’t remember it being any work, it just grew. It had the usual garden staples, tomatoes, cucumbers, yellow beans, sweet corn, squash and pumpkins. The beans and tomatoes were canned, and my mom made dill pickles with the cucumbers. Many a hot August day (there was no air conditioning back then), I would wake up and go downstairs to find rows of inverted mason jars covered with tea towels on the kitchen countertop, as my mom would have been up early to can in the cool of the morning. They would later be moved to the pantry shelves in the basement. I don’t remember ever eating the canned goods, but once in a while my parents would have a jar of stewed tomatoes with a fried steak and onions. I can eat a tomato on a BLT but I was never one of those people who rhapsodized ecstatically about a tomato sandwich on white bread with thick slices of beefsteak tomatoes sprinkled generously with salt and pepper. I ate catsup, and when I was older branched out into pizza sauce and PC spaghetti sauce, the one without the garlic. I had bought 3 different types, cherry, Roma and beefsteak, and planted them in half of the planter box as the other half was taken up with two strawberry plants (which did well and provided berries for salads all summer), and lettuce, romaine and leaf , (which also did well). How lovely to be able to go outside and just pick just what you needed for a salad, instead of buying at the grocery store and throwing half of it out a week later. I also stuck a
a squash plant in there for Thanksgiving. I guess I had figured on some of the tomato plants dying, like things usually do in my yard, but we had a lot of rain and in a few weeks I had a tomato jungle. Luckily my neighbour took pity on me one day and thinned the tops (which is supposed to concentrate the plant energy in the fruit), and staked them for me, to let the sun in. A few weeks after that, I had a bumper crop. But then what to do with all those tomatoes? There are two types of people – those that love tomatoes and usually grow their own – and the rest. Luckily I managed to find a few neighbours to share some of the bounty with. Still there is something memorable about the smell of a fresh picked tomato, so maybe next year, I’ll try making spaghetti sauce – send tried and true recipes if able, light on the spices please.

Song of the Day: Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off – Ella Fitzgerald click here for music link

Song on Home Page: Scenes from an Italian Restaurant – Billy Joel click here for music link

Poor Brenda and Edie – they should have read the Book of the Day – Secrets of A Happy Marriage – see Goodreads review home page…

Quotes of the Day: “A bottle of red, a bottle of white, it all depends upon your appetite. I’ll meet you any time you want, at our Italian restaurant.”

“You like potato and I like potahto, you like tomato and I like tomahto. Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto, let’s call the whole thing off….”

: Tomatoes – 2017

Jamfest

August 23, 2017September 12, 20183 Comments

Freezer Peach Jam

There was a jamfest in my kitchen last weekend in honor of August. I had bought a big box of canning peaches from the Saturday morning farmers market for $9 – they were seconds, overripe but perfect for canning – there must have been over fifty peaches in the box – the guy who owned the stand had to carry it to the car for me, but they needed something done with them stat. It was my first time making peach jam and after some google research I still couldn’t decide what recipe to use so I decided to make three small batches – two freezer jam and one the old-fashioned preserves way. For the first batch of freezer jam I used the Certo Light Pectin – 3+ cups of peaches, but I cut the pectin and sugar in half, ½ package pectin and approx.. 1 ½ cups of sugar – it was just right – made 4 little jars and one plastic container. The dollar store jars were cute but the lids were not the best – the grocery store was out of the standard jars. Freezer jam can be stored for 3 weeks in the fridge and for 8 months in the freezer. It was fairly runny so I’m not sure it set properly but then I had cut the amount of sugar in half and the directions warned against doing that….but it was still plenty sweet enough! I’m not sure why this recipe had you sprinkle the pectin and ¼ cup of sugar over the crushed fruit for 30 minutes stirring occasionally, whereas the Bernardin No Sugar recipe called for boiling the pectin with apple juice, but there is a chemical reason behind it according to one of the websites, for those who like a little chemistry with their canning. It has something to do with the ph and acid molecules but since I am retired from all that it didn’t stick in my brain.

The second freezer batch was Bernardin No Sugar Needed Pectin – and I followed the recipe on the box exactly this time, boiling the pectin in 1 ¾ cups unsweetened apple juice, then adding to 3 cups crushed peaches, 1 tbsp lemon juice, and 2/3 cup of sugar as recommended. It set thicker, and there was lots of nice peachy taste, but it could have used more sugar. Maybe the tart apple juice cancelled out some of the sweetness? Made 8 smallish plastic containers.

The third and largest batch which we made on Sunday (I put my mother to work helping to peel the peaches…she said she enjoyed it, it brought back old memories), was made the old-fashioned way with sterilized jars and boiling the fruit with sugar but no pectin…..8 cups of peaches and 2 cups of sugar. Last year I had made pear marmalade with 8 cups of pears and 3 cups of sugar and found it way too sweet, so I cut back on the sugar. But this batch, while it had plenty of peach flavour, could also have used more sugar. Made six 250ml jars. Many of those old fashioned recipes call for a 2:1 ratio of fruit to sugar, (the sugar acts as a preservative), including the Purity Cookbook, which I tend to use as my food bible as it is the reissued edition of the original Canadian classic my mother used when we were growing up. My mother’s copy is dog eared and stained, whereas mine is still in fairly pristine condition, which might give you an idea about how often I cook. Unlike the Pioneer Woman I will not be appearing on the Food Network anytime soon. That cookbook being old, originally published in 1917, uses the paraffin method of putting a bit of melted wax over the top to seal the jar, which I did, but it is no longer recommended according to my online search. Apparently it does not make a good seal and people do not like having to fish hydrocarbons out of their jam so I am not recommending it – do not try this at home. It is a wonder we all survived when our grandmothers knew nothing about organic molecules.

Unlike Goldilocks, none of the recipes were just right, but the best was the first – Certo Light…..now if I could only remember exactly how much sugar I added as I didn’t make any notes and just sweetened to taste…..a bad habit I picked up from my mother. It’s hard to get a recipe out of her because like many experienced cooks she doesn’t measure, and if she does give you a recipe it never quite turns out like hers. My mother used to store her canned goods on pantry shelves in the cellar, but I put mine in the freezer and fridge. I figure if there is a nuclear war and we are forced to use the basement as a bomb shelter, at least no one will die of scurvy.

Peach Preserves

Music for a Jam Session – Duke Ellington – C Jam Blues – click music link here

Peaches in a Blue Bowl – 2017

Postscript: Feb 2018 – the first batch Certo Light tasted good at the time but did not keep well and had to be discarded, it might have been the dollar store lids, and I reduced the sugar which they said not to do. The Bernardin No Sugar batch tasted wonderfully peachy even in Feburary.

Out in The Country

August 21, 2017September 10, 20186 Comments

The Homeplace – 2005

A few years ago when I was still working I took my 90 year old mom for a drive in the country to visit her farm (not the homeplace which no longer exists.) She rents the old white farmhouse (old farmhouses only come in two types – white clapboard and yellow brick), to a lovely couple and the wife showed us around her very large vegetable garden, and gave us a couple of jars of pear jam she had just made and some big fat beefsteak tomatoes. We sat out on the veranda and listened to the birds twitter. It was quiet and peaceful. I remembered thinking what a lovely lifestyle. Although my roots are rural it had been a long time since I was out in the country. I grew up in on a hundred acre farm in the 60’s and 70’s and while I hope I am not romanticizing the past, I do seem to remember it as being a simpler more peaceful time. My dad had a dairy farm with Holsteins, (which needed milking twice a day so no family vacations for us), then later beef cattle, and he also cash cropped. It was a good thing to be self-sufficient and not always reliant on a grocery store, but it was also a lot of hard work, as was canning during the long hot summer, as my mother can attest, although she also often says looking back that we had the best of times.

It was a century farm, settled by my dad’s Irish ancestors in 1849, who had escaped the worst of the potato famine just in time. They arrived in Canada penniless in October of 1846 in a party of twenty or so, three having died on the coffin ship on the way over, and they lost one young 15 year old son in the bush after having jumped ship during the cholera quarantine in the St. Lawrence River. I have a record from the National Archives of Canada for the three brothers who had to borrow one pound for water transport from Port Toronto to where they settled. My great grandfather, who was fourteen, stayed behind in Ireland because he had a chance to go to school with the landlord’s son, and came a year later through New York. An uncle was sent to pick him up, which seems amazing as the land was all trees and wilderness. My great great grandmother walked thirty miles along Indian trails to the nearest post office to get the letter telling them when and where he was coming. It was October when they arrived here, and the Indians helped them build a hut, otherwise they would never have survived the first winter.

: First Homestead – 2017

Several years later they bought the homeplace – for poor Irish tenant farmers to own land was a dream come true. The homeplace was sold and the house and barn torn down twenty years ago after my dad died and now all that survives is the silo. My mother painted it in 2005 from an aerial photograph, which is the picture above and on the home page.

While I am nostalgic for the country lifestyle, farmland today is way too expensive to live in the country, and farming is for the most part big business. One day I was driving down our old line and there were four big combines out in the field (trying to beat the rain), and I thought, well there’s a million dollars there. The small family farm is a vanishing business, to survive you have to go big. So much of life is about survival but it is a good thing to remember where you came from, and it is also a good thing to know how to make your own jam!

Song of the Day: Out in the Country – Three Dog Night

Beach Blanket Books

August 8, 2017August 22, 20181 Comment

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It’s not been a great summer weather wise, too many cool cloudy days with too much rain, but it’s been a great summer for beach books. Retirement stress is having way too many books come in at the library at the same time, (and all just new releases/ bestsellers so nonrenewable), so that the large stack on your bedside table starts to feel like some kind of pressure instead of a pleasurable pursuit. How will I ever get through all these books! I have just recently joined Goodreads (how did I ever survive without it all these years – it’s like a candy store for book lovers), and so will be posting reviews on my site as time permits…..(see link below) So far this summer I have read:

1. Into the Water – Paula Hawkins – (author of The Girl on the Train)

2. Camino Island – John Grisham (a legal tale for book lovers)

3. The Identicals – Elin Hilderbrand (the Queen of Beach Fluff)

4. Secrets of a Happy Marriage – Cathy Kelly – (who is Maeve Binchy reincarnated)

5. All By Myself Alone – Mary Higgins Clark – (the Queen of Suspense) – just starting and good for a couple of late nights…

They were all good reads. You don’t want anything too heavy in the summer, (you can’t lug Anna Karenina to the beach, or Moby Dick unless of course you want to fall asleep), just a nice piece of beach fluff you can sink into while you sink your toes in the sand. There is nothing quite like a good beach read – you emerge four hours later when the sun is low in the sky and hopefully you will have remembered to apply sunscreen. It’s like the perfect summer fling, fun while while it lasts but not too memorable.

Song of the Day: Love Letters in the Sand – Pat Boone

Beach Book Review – The Identicals

August 7, 2017April 12, 2018Leave a comment

Song of the Day: Old Cape Cod – Bette Midler

The Identicals by Elin Hilderbrand

My rating: 4 of 5 stars
The perfect peace of beach fluff – be prepared to sink your toes in the sand and emerge four hours later wishing you lived on Nantucket – and don’t forget the sunscreen. It is an annual summer tradition for me to read her latest book and this one did not disappoint. Although I wasn’t sure after the first few chapters that I was going to stick around for the rest of the summer….er book. The same old (bed-hopping, drinking, (even worse) drinking while driving, piss-poor parent (her words) whose uncontrollable 16year old teenager is doing the same) character grows stale after a few books…..but then the story got more interesting when they switched islands and lives……I’m not sure if this kind of book would be as appealing if the setting wasn’t Nantucket/Martha’sVineyard, as I am currently obsessed with that part of the world, having recently read Susan Branch’s wonderful book…..Martha’s Vineyard, Isle of Dreams. And of course there are plenty of family dynamics and hot romances all destined to work out in the end, because hey – it’s beach fluff and when you pack up at the end of a long day at the beach you want to leave things nice and tidy. (see link to Goodreads reviews below)

Sailing

August 8, 2016April 12, 20181 Comment

Song of the Day: Sailing – by Rod Stewart

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n9fFTH917M

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Summer’s over half over and first time at the beach….the waves were awesome! (This was written one year ago – it is one thing to start a blog, but another thing to keep it going. I wonder how many abandoned blog ships there are floating out there in the wordpress sea!)