The Urban Farmer's Almanac

We’re having a pre-Thanksgiving potluck with the neighbors tonight and I decided to make a pie with the sour cherries we got this summer at Paul’s parents’ place in Wenatchee. If I had room to grow a cherry tree it would be this kind; super tart and really only good for baking or jam.

When I thawed them out a ton of juice drained off, and I realized that I could do a batch of jelly alongside the pie. We had everything we needed in the basement (including the obscene amount of sugar that goes into jelly), and besides the processing time, it only took about a half hour to make 8 cute little pints.

Plus this was my first lattice-topped pie. Alicia accused me of showing off and I won’t deny it.

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Alicia has been making applesauce like crazy with the bags of apples that we brought home from Wenatchee back in October, and we have probably 20 or 25 quarts so far. I kept saying that I was going to make some apple pie filling since we just used up our last batch, but it’s been busy. Finally last night the Venn diagram of motivation and time overlapped, and I canned 10 quarts of pie filling. It looks like a good batch this time around; I followed this recipe (mostly, and despite the Comic Sans). Blanching the apples after they were peeled and sliced seems like it helped keep the whole production from oxidizing too much, though I had to run the sauce through the blender to de-lump it before pouring it in the cans.

A week or two ago, I also made some apple jelly with rosemary, which is an amazing combination of flavors. Rosemary usually overpowers things, but with the apple, the flavors are perfect together. We received a jar of this jelly from someone a few years ago and loved it, but I can’t figure out who it was. If you’re out there, reveal yourself! At any rate, it is tasty, tasty jelly, and it’s all Hannah wants on her toast for the time being. Just take any apple jelly recipe, and add a sprig of fresh rosemary after filling the jars, right before you put the lid on; the rosemary flavor infuses the whole jar.

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More canning… I really don’t know how this all fits in with everything being so busy these days. We brought back a box of beans from Yakima and pickled them. My grandma made these and I loved them as a kid, both the regular dill ones, and the spicy ones with red pepper flakes in the bottom. My mouth is watering just thinking about them now.

I’ve been doing a little bit of design work for Panacea, an awesome dinner delivery service here in Seattle. I am all for getting paid in food, especially when it’s this tasty. They did house-roasted beef sandwiches earlier this summer, and it came with a really good Tomato Jam, with big slices of ginger in there. I used the leftovers on egg sandwiches, a burger, and shamefully, straight from the spoon. So I took a shot at approximating it with the Tomato Preserves recipe in my trusty Ball Home Preserving bible. It’s close enough and will have to do… until I can get them to pass along the secret recipe.

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Every August we spend a weekend in Yakima picking up (and u-picking) produce to preserve for the coming year. The first year we went may have been pre-children, and I think a couple other times we managed to leave them with the grandparents, but by now it’s become a full-blown family vacation. There is the hotel with a pool, Mexican food for dinner, the quirky winery we go tasting at, and of course our favorite places to buy produce.

This year we made quick work of the tomato fields, picking 140 pounds in 20 minutes or so. Even when the tomatoes are 35 cents a pound, they end up costing quite a bit when you get 4 huge boxes full. When we got home and realized what we’d done to ourselves… the project was pretty daunting. The first half of the batch we peeled, pureed, and cooked down to a really tasty pizza / pasta sauce (the recipe in the photos is what we added to each stockpot of sauce after it had reduced by about half.

The second half of the batch we peeled, chopped, boiled, and canned as stewed tomatoes; it was a lot less work and we put those away as quarts rather than pints. All told, we ended up with about 25 pints of pizza sauce and 25 quarts of stewed tomatoes. The best part was getting that bucket of tomatoes out of our fridge.

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The little crabapples out in front of the run-down church next door are ready to go, so Robbie and I filled up a basketful yesterday. The sauce they make is really tart, but the batch we froze last year was perfect as a base for pie filling, adding either apples or rhubarb. The first batch today made 7 pints of applesauce, and I have the rest prepped to cook down tomorrow, hopefully for another 5 or 6 pints. That should get us through to next year in pretty good shape. Though pies have become my go-to potluck dish, so I think we’ll also do some apple pie filling this fall.

I got a little artsy with the photos this time, just to warn you. Here’s to steamy August nights in the kitchen.

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