Canning Tomato Sauce with a Vitamix

Do you have a Vitamix? I just was gifted one, and it came at the perfect time: just when I was about to can 150 pounds of tomatoes. Tomato season is about done in my parts, so I could have said this earlier, but for future reference, if you have one of these splendiferous blenders you can cut your tomato saucing time in half. This is starting to sound like a commercial, but...No peeling! No straining!

I chopped my tomatoes into big chunks, and, as you can see below, they were huge. I did chop out some cores that seemed a big woody. Put them all in the blender, seeds, skins and all, and turn it on, quickly go from 1 to 10, and then to high, until all the seeds are gone, about a minute or less. Each batch gets tossed into a big stockpot on a low flame to heat, while you continue the process. Proceed with your usual tomato saucing/canning techniques.

That's how I canned 150 pounds of tomatoes this year by myself!

Fine Liver Pâté

Out of the freezer for a photo op.

Well, this is the only picture I have at the moment, so it's not much of a seller, but I can assure you that this pâté will make you the belle of the ball. Maybe for ten minutes. To the one person who is eating it all. But that's okay. I'll take any recognition I can get. But seriously, can you puree something? Well then you can make some excellent pâté. The real question is: can you puree pork liver? Because, you know, some people think they can't. But you can!

I'll be honest, the blubbery mass that is the pig's liver is a bit slippery and a tad smelly, in a fresh liver kind of way. When I received my half of a pig, I had asked for all the organs and I received a huge liver. I think it was more than one liver. So, with two pounds of liver on my hands I made the easiest thing I could find, which was this recipe from The New York Times Cookbook, the original from 1961, edited by Craig Claiborne.

Because no one can eat that much pâté, I wondered and searched for a tip on freezing. And I found it from none other than Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall (the tip is the very last sentence of the article!). The trick to freezing pâté is to freeze it before you cook it! Et voila. I did this, and that's why I have one pan waiting for the holidays. The other was unveiled at a friend's birthday party, surrounded by slices of pickled pears, and I can attest, as well as one other party attendee, that it was superb.

Fine Liver Pâté
Adapted from The NYT Cook Book

2 pounds of pork liver, cubed
3 eggs
1/3 cup of pear brandy (or cognac)
1 cup of heavy cream
2/3 cup fresh pork fat
1 onion, chopped
1/2 cup flour
5 teaspoons of salt
1 teaspoon of ground ginger
2 teaspoons of fresh ground pepper (I like it coarsely ground, with some sprinkled on top for appearances)

Use some rendered fat to grease two bread pans well. I used ceramic loaf pans. Purée the liver, eggs, brandy and cream. Add the flour, onion and fat a little at a time. It will be quite a lot of pinkish liquid meat. Pour into a bowl and add the seasonings, mix well. Pour into your pan and cover with plastic wrap, so that the wrap clings to the purée. Then cover well with aluminum. Freeze on a level shelf.

When you want to cook it, pull it a good day before you want to cook it. Put it in the fridge and let it thaw slowly. Once fully defrosted pull off the aluminum so you can remove the plastic wrap. Put the aluminum foil back on. Bake in a pan of water in a 325 degree oven for about two hours. There's no toothpick method here, you just have to know what your looking for. I pulled mine when the edges were pulling from the sides and getting dark. Serve on a platter with pickled pears.

This post is for the ninth installment of Charcutepalooza!

Love my CorningWare!

A Port in Every Plum Jam

A lot has happened in the last two weeks! Or is it now three? An earthquake followed by a tropical storm, days of power out, major flooding, and now, more rain. It felt like we lost a week with the storm---preparing for it and then getting back to normal. We were left relatively unscathed. I didn't have to kayak to my house, or get my belongings sucked down a river, or see months of tough farming that was just about to pay off get doused in the fires of flooding, like some friends did. The pond was overflowing, many roads were closed, and the neighborhood had a house burn down. Pumpkins bobbed in the nearby Hudson river, a sign of the fields lost to the flooding. We lost our power for only three days, and thankfully our generator kept the chest freezer, which was packed to the gills, nice and cold.

Our street, our stream.

While the power was out, I had a bunch of garden tomatoes waiting to be salsa. Thank goodness I had just finished 150 pounds of tomato sauce the two weeks before. There were also four pounds of black plums macerating in the fridge. And boy, did they macerate. They sat for five days! I was waiting for the storm to pass, then for the power to go back on, then finally, once we got the fridge on the generator, I opened it up to pull the plums. That day I made the jam. That night the power came back on. Figures. I do have a gas stove, so there was no worries there---it was just the lack of water that was stopping me, both for cleaning and canning. Ends up, I never had to go borrow water.

How are you doing? I hope that if you weathered the storm, that you didn't sustain too much damage!

Thank you, Coleman lamp.

A Port in Every Plum Jam

4 pounds of black plums, halved and pits removed
1 1/2 pounds of sugar

Combine and let macerate in a turned off fridge for a few days! Without the storm, I would've let them macerate a day or two in the fridge. But maceration is the boon of the preserver. It always buys you time. These firm plums probably stood up to the sugar bath better than most fruit, though.

Pull the plum mixture and put in your jamming pot. Add:

1 pound of sugar
2 tablespoons of lemon juice

Bring the mixture to a boil, and let it cook at a boil until it reaches the gel stage, or 220 degrees on a candy thermometer. This will take about twenty minutes from the time it starts to boil. When the gel stage has been reached, turn off the heat and add:

two hearty glugs of port wine
a few coarse grinds of fresh black pepper

Stir to combine. Ladle into hot jars and process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes.

Cream cheese pastries.

These cream cheese wafers? cookies? pastries? are super easy to make. I used a 1/2 stick of butter and 6 ounces of cream cheese, pulsing them in the food processor with a quarter teaspoon of salt and a cup of flour, until they were thoroughly combined and looked like coarse gravel. Dumped into a bowl, you can then form the dough with a few kneads of your hands. Let the dough chill for an hour (or a few days, like I did). Roll and cut out circles. I egg washed and topped them with sesame seeds. Bake them for 8 to 10 minutes at 400 degrees. Make sure to let them cool well. If you eat them immediately they won't be quite as good---believe me! But do make sure to eat them up right within a day or two. They don't age well. This makes about twenty wafers.

Bacon, Smoked Ham, Ham Hocks, Liver Paté even, but no Terrine!

Box one of two.

Many people ask me, "How do you do it all?" Meaning, how do I find the time to do all the things I do, and write about them, and photograph them. Well, I often reply, I don't! Not all of it. There's so much I don't do. Like cleaning. And calling my friends more. And reading. I'd also like to point out that most of the things I do are very easy, once you get them into your routine. Bonus, if you really like making yogurt or bread or jam. Some people don't.

A few weeks ago, I started getting really exhausted. My back started bothering me a lot. Gardening and lifting my thirty-pound toddler had been taking a toll. I took out a few yoga videos from the library because I knew what I needed was some good stretching. As I read the back covers of the DVDs, I thought disdainfully: I don't have time for yoga!

And then I had this second thought: Seriously? I don't have time to not do yoga! It's funny, because I'm talking like some high-powered executive. Well, let's be real, shall we? I happen to be a homesteady-obsessed stay-at-home mommy of one toddler. Not exactly Soulemama, right? Rather rationally, I thought to myself: you need to cut something out. And immediately it came to me, clear as a bell: the blog.

I love the blog. I don't want to kill the blog, I screamed! Let me tell you what the blog does for me. It wraps up a few of my favorite things--writing, photography, food-- in one fell swoop. It also deeply satisfies a few other cravings I have. That of connecting with people who care about similar things, and the documentarian in me, so I can go back and see what I made and how I made it. But the quick and dirty fact about the blog, and it sounds so horrible, but this thing is not a paying gig, you know? And there are some things I need to be focusing on, that take precedence over something that is solely a self-centered pleasure.

Once I stopped obsessing about the blog, I suddenly felt a wave of relief. And then panic. And then a realization that I had been blogging for almost two years with no break! Maybe I'm just tired, I thought. Maybe I need to recharge. I'm not sure I can do this was a thought. Well, I'm not going to end my blog. I actually can't! Not because I think anybody will miss it. But, because I will miss it. Not because it's important to anyone. But because it's important to me. I'm trying to figure out how to make sure it doesn't take over my life, and that means keeping my nose out of Twitter and Facebook, much as I like to socialize. And maybe not posting every little victual I cook up.

And that brings me to this month's Charcutepalooza challenge. One of the things I also realized about having this blog, is that I've become a better cook for it. Joining Tigress' Can Jam and then Charcutepalooza really have pushed me to strive a little; something that's really not in my nature. I'm more of a perservere-er. (Very similar to the word preserver!) But this month's terrine challenge I really had no gumption for, even though I really wanted to make something, perhaps this tomato terrine from Bon Appétit. I was a little too overwhelmed, having ordered a half hog from Meiller's Slaughterhouse in Pine Plains.

After curing and smoking ten pounds of bacon, 3.5 pound of hocks, and a twenty-two pound ham, and making two huge loaves of liver paté, I was sort of exhausted (though it looks like I may be in luck for next month). Maybe that's what tipped me over the edge. That and the heat we were having at the time. Now it's been gorgeous out, the humidity and haze has lifted, and the air is clear and crisp making each leaf on a tree stand out. Every blade of grass looks distinct. The sky is blue with puffy clouds, the trees rustle in the breeze, and it gets cool at night which makes sleeping all that much more sweet. It's a small taste of autumn right around the corner. I'm looking forward to writing about it. Just a little.

Wild Raspberry and Blueberry Jam

Getting read to freeze. Checking for bugs is easier at this point.

What I love most about the summer, along with all the other things I’ve been waxing poetic about lately, is picking fruit. Mostly berries. The other day, I went with my husband and son to pick blueberries, and as we drove home I said that it was perfect—the only thing I wanted to do. Steve commented that although it was fun, he could only handle it once or twice a summer. That I could do it all the time was surprising to him. I find it surprising that people don’t want to pick berries all the time. That someone could pass berry bushes filled with ripe red raspberries is unthinkable to me.

Town hall? A cup of tea?

Everybody has a place that they belong in, and mine is the woods, I think. The other morning I got out early to pick in my secret wild raspberry (also called wineberries) patch. This was one of the hottest days of the year, to date, and I appropriately left at 7 a.m. I headed off with my bait bucket—perfect for berry picking. With my smart hiking shoes, I took off along the path and suddenly drifted into my world. Steve is never happier than when body surfing in the ocean. I easily can see it, as I sit on the sand while he's in the surf, by the light in his eye, that he is deeply happy.

A perfect ladder for a squirrel.

For me it’s winding paths in the mountains. It’s rocks and downed trees, seas of fern, and a muted quiet. Soon, I am lost in the berry picking, except for remembering to whistle or sing (this year it was songs from the new Winnie the pooh soundtrack, fittingly enough, and don't laugh-- it's a great album!) in case a bear is somewhere doing the same thing I am. I am happiest when I’m in that dark, green veiled world. A world where I can imagine frogs talking to mice in waistcoats, or a fox smoking a cheroot while he surveys his domain. There are secret little worlds in there, in the hollowed out tree trunks and lily-pad-strewn ponds, with its dark peaty browns and lacy soft greens and dots of ruby red amidst it.

A lovely place to rest for a weary spider.

When I came back, legs scratched and hands sticky with resin, I felt satisfied with my haul, which is good because it was probably my last of the season. I decided to stop this particular moment in time with some blueberries in a small batch jam. The sweetness of the blueberries stand up to the tart wild raspberries. And the pectin of the blues makes for a nice set, easily gained with the acid of both fruit. This recipe made a full pint that I stuck in the fridge and is almost already gone.  You could process two half-pints instead for ten minutes.

1 cup of wild raspberries
1 cup of blueberries (good for you if they're wild too!)
1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon of lemon juice

Put all ingredients in a pot that looks like it's larger than you need. It's not much fruit, but it will still boil up high, like all jams. I let my fruit macerate with the sugar overnight, just because I was too tired to do it then. Either way, when you are ready, bring the mixture to a boil. Let the little bubbles rise and wave frantically. My jam reached a gel stage after about ten minutes of boiling. I didn't use a freezer test or thermometer, just checked it dripping off my spoon and watched for sheeting. I'll admit, it's easier to recognize when you've made jam a ton of times. Remember, a thin jam is never a problem. A stack of pancakes will always come to the rescue.

Turn off the heat and let the bubbles subside. Ladle the jam into a warmed pint jar--I fill mine with very hot tap water and dump it out right before filling, so that it's not such a shock from boil to bottle. Or, as I mentioned you can process this, following normal canning procedure, for ten minutes in two half-pint jars.

I like this jam on toast, while thinking about chipmunks meeting for tea on a toadstool, or some kind of woodland fiction like that.

A spoonful of jam makes every story better.