Here I am in Southern California

Jam

This is my total haul of jam from June & July's canning frenzy. Nearly nine dozen jars in all!

That was an intense couple of weeks, while the apricot crop came in. I got a lot of plums and peaches from a friend's tree at about the same time. I had about a week straight where all I was doing, besides working and sleeping, was washing, and sorting fruit, cooking down puree (so it would hold a little longer) and then making batch after batch of jam.

The main goal was to lay in a large store of apricot butter: Dan's favorite, and our house specialty. I put up a LOT of this, mostly in full pint jars. We know we'll go through it quickly enough, so the big jars are OK.

This - the apricot/blackberry - seems to be the favorite among the people who have sampled the jams. I love that, since it seems so particular to our neighborhood: the apricots from our yard, the blackberries from our neighbor across the sheet.

After a few batches of the butter and the apricot/blackberry, I was feeling confident enough to improvise some new flavors: Ginger Peach, Plum/Cardamom, and Plum/Cardamom/Ginger Some new flavors I tried out this year. They were all pretty successful, but the ginger peach is my favorite.

I also made a large batch of the Brandied Apricot Preserves I made last year. It would be good on almost anything, but it's a pretty much perfect crepe filling right out of the jar. Dan's been having fun making crepes as dessert for our family and friends lately. We have a good division of labor in our kitchen. :)

Black Tartarian Cherries

We first had these cherries from the market last year, and were despondent when we went back for more the next week and they were gone. We vowed to buy all we could get our hands on this year, and can them so we could savor them over time.

Dan saw the farmer last week, and implored him to bring his cherries to market even though his harvest was very small this year. He offered to buy his whole crop, and even to go to Visalia and pick them off his trees.

Well, the farmer came through this past Saturday, and Dan came home with 15 pounds of these beauties.

After a warm afternoon of canning, I have 10 pints of these little lovelies, plus one and a half that we didn't seal. Shucks, we'll have to eat those in the next week or so.

The canned ones account for about 10 pounds. We've got another 3 pounds soaking in brandy a la Alice Waters, and the rest we ate with ice cream!

Moro Blood Orange Marmalade

I think I mentioned that I've been making some new friends down here. Well, one of the women in my spinning group lives on a citrus farm and is a veteran jam and marmalade maker. And, she offers workshops. I decided to take one with her, and had my brother join me. We spent last Friday afternoon at Mary's house, getting a lesson in making marmalade and basic canning. Since it was a rainy day, it was the perfect opportunity for Don to take a break from the yard projects.

She taught us the method for making marmalade without added pectin, using only fruit and sugar. The process is fairly simple, but it takes some experience to get the feel for it, epecially knowing when it's ready to jar, and also how to have all the equipment prepared and laid out so you can work quickly.

I won't divulge the recipe, because you should take a workshop yourself. But I will share the photos we took of our Sunday morning breakfast where it made it's debut. We made Moro Blood Orange marmalade, because that's the variety that's best right now.

The jars pose with the french press:

Look at that color!

Don spreads it on toast (which happens to be homemade fig & fennel bread I baked earlier in the week):

And the aerial shot:

Mary sent us home with enough fruit to make another batch, reasoning that's the best way to make sure that what we learned sank in. We cooked up our solo batch last night, and it went swimmingly. Taking a tip from her site, I added a little red wine to the recipe. Delicious. Rumor has it that this is very good on vanilla ice cream. But we wouldn't know anything about that.

We have declared marmalade a new food group in this household, and are endeavoring to eat the recommended daily allowance.

Bagels

I've been really interested in bread baking for a while now, and I go in and out of baking a lot. Now that I'm working at home, it's a whole lot easier to babysit bread dough during the day. One day, I'd like to get a wild-yeast sourdough starter going, but for now I'm sticking to commercial yeast. I've been working my way through the recipes in The Bread Baker's Apprentice, which have been completely foolproof so far, and have turned out absolutley delicious bread.

For my latest effort, I wanted to tackle bagels. I grew up in the Northeast, with pretty authentic bagels from Jewish bakeries. I've eaten my share of Noah's bagels, but they just aren't the same. I was really hoping that the recipe in this book would live up to my expectations. And they did. Yes, yes they did.

The recipe warned that this is the stiffest of all the bread doughs, and sure enough it brought our KitchenAid mixer to a standstill. I finished the kneading by hand. You shape the dough into 12 rolls, and then after a short rest into the bagel shape. After another rest, you test them to see if they float. If they do, they are ready to go into the refrigerator over night - the "retarding" step. This lets them rise slowly and allows the flavor to develop.

So after all that, here they are the next day, all risen and ready to be boiled:

And boiling, about a minute on each side.

You add the baking soda to the water, which helps to gelatinize the surface of the bagels, contributing to the nice chewiness of the crust. The topping in the ramekin is a mixture of sesame seeds and kosher salt.

After boiling, the toppings stick right onto the damp surface. Here's sesame seeds:

And poppy seeds:

They bake for a surprisingly short time, only about 10 minutes.

And here is the finished product.

They tasted as good as they looked!