Rhubarb Ginger Jam

For all the time I've known Donald, he has sentimentalized (is that a word? I like it!) about his mother's rhubarb ginger jam. I don't remember seeing much rhubarb in Arizona, but once we had our own prolific plant in the garden, I started looking for ways to use it. I've perfected rhubarb pie (modestly polishing fingernails on my collarbone), so it was time to move on to jam. ;-)

His mother's recipe calls for massive amounts of ingredients, so I researched a number of recipes and adapted them to what I had on hand:

4 cups rhubarb cut in 1/2" pieces
3 cups sugar
1-2 tablespoons lemon juice
2 ounces candied ginger, chopped fine

Combine rhubarb, sugar, and lemon juice, and let sit to draw out rhubarb juice. Bring to boil and cook for 15 minutes. Add candied ginger and boil 5 minutes more. Put into canning jars. (Made 1-3/4 pints)

The result was a big hit. It's a gorgeous deep burgundy color (I swiped the photo--it's not my actual jam), and it set up absolutely perfectly without any pectin. Donald says it tastes like his childhood memory, but he wants to double the ginger next time. I wonder if the ginger taste will permeate the jam more fully as time goes on.

We put in a second rhubarb plant this summer, but we won't be able to use it until next year. My next project is rhubarb rosemary jam. How good does that sound??

Book report: I'm gradually working my way through Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, but really, with three summer classes all going full-tilt, who has time to read?

PS) Trying these for Father's Day breakfast!

Rhubarb Ginger Muffins
an original Shazamer recipe with help from Mary Margaret McBride

2 cups flour

1 tsp baking powder

1/2 tsp baking soda

1/2 tsp salt

3 Tbsp sugar

1 egg, well beaten

1 cup buttermilk

3 Tbsp melted butter

1 stalk rhubarb, minced

1/4 cup minced crystallized ginger

Whisk together flour, baking powder, baking soda, salt, and sugar. Combine the buttermilk, melted butter, and egg in a separate bowl and then add to the dry ingredients stirring just until combined. Fold in the rhubarb and ginger.

Line a muffin tin with papers and spray briefly with cooking spray. Divide the dough between 12 muffin cups. Bake in a hot oven at 425 degrees F. for 20 minutes, or until golden brown.

Wild Turkey!

And I am not talking about whiskey. I was outside a few minutes ago when something caught my eye as it silently slipped into Willie's forest. If I haven't already explained this, one whole side of our property is lined with fir trees that the previous owner (Willie, of course) planted years ago. He set out 2,000 fir trees, thinking he would sell them as Christmas trees. (That is something of a failing business proposition out here in the bush where people tend to help themselves to the queen's trees at Christmastime. ;-) But as the trees grew, he found--like Robert Frost in his poem "Christmas Trees"--that he didn't have the heart to see them cut down and sent off to town as decorations. So he thinned them to 1,000, and they make the best privacy screen you've ever seen. Because they form a long, narrow border on our property, they also provide a secure thoroughfare for any wildlife coming down from the forest across the road from us.

I have only seen wild turkeys once before when we had to stop for a flock that was crossing the road a few miles from our house. Someone up the valley apparently feeds them. They are amazingly beautiful and agile birds--not like the domesticated, over-busty ones raised for meat.

Fortunately, I saw the bird, but our dog didn't. She dares any bird to land on her property, and she would have run it off if she'd got the chance. I wonder what else is out there that we haven't seen yet.

Book report: I am about halfway through a book I picked up at the library because I loved its title: If No One Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor. The premise is fascinating. It begins with an ordinary street scene in a town in northern England. We get to see all the sights and hear all the sounds of street life. Then a tragedy happens. We don't know what it is. And the rest of the novel (so far) details the personal tragedies and worries of the residents of an apartment building on the street. It's not clear if there really was a big tragedy outside, or if each is so caught up in his or her own drama that it is as if everyone has experienced something awful. Very captivating novel!

Nine pounds of peas?!?!?

So a little while ago I was making potato salad for dinner (a sure sign of summer when there's potato salad and watermelon for dinner!) and I went looking for peas in our big freezer out in the garage. When I say big, I mean big! Donald likes to say you could store an entire corpse in that thing. Actually, if you stack them, you could store three. We inherited this freezer when we bought the house, and it seemed like such a cool thing to have. (That is, until we paid our first electric bill in Canada.)

Well, I hit the jackpot of peas. There is a bottomless supply of peas in that freezer--I stopped searching after the first 4 kilos. I don't mean to complain about abundance, but the fact of the matter is that I don't really care for peas. I like those little canned messes of bloated, oversalted, olive-colored things that pass for peas. They don't taste like peas at all. And I certainly never would have bought nine pounds of them. I'm going to have to figure out something to do with them, especially since we have future peas sprouting in the garden as I write.

Lately I've been thinking about those moments in life when we make a discovery that upsets our little apple cart. It may seem like a potential disaster, an irredeemable theft, or an insoluble problem. How often do we look back on those events later as gifts that we nearly rejected because we didn't care for the gift wrap?

I'm dealing with that now. Someone has indeed upset my apple cart and caused (to borrow a phrase from Grace Paley, RIP) "enormous changes at the last minute." My first impulse was to stand my ground and fight back for the principle of the thing. My second--and better--impulse was to accept the changed circumstances and look for the pony amidst the piles of @#$^.

Now I'm thinking of sending an anonymous gift to thank the person who has wronged me. I wonder if I can send peas through international mail??

;-)

Book report: Not a lot of time for reading as summer school begins and my three classes are launched. I am halfway through a quirky novel called Family Planning by new novelist Karan Mahajan. The title is somewhat ironic since the protagonist of the novel, which is set in Delhi, is an Indian bureaucrat who has 13 children because he finds his wife attractive only when she is pregnant. The oldest son, who bears the brunt of caring for his siblings, has asked the father why he and his wife keep having children. That question sets the novel into motion. Another light summer read.

KAFM

Or Keyboard Away from Me.

Two days without internet (a lightning strike fried our modem), and we begin to feel very isolated. It was nice to see Selby for more than a few minutes at a time, though.

;-)

Donald is away in Vernon because his mother's being discharged from the hospital today. She's made an amazing recovery so far, and she's going back to her apartment where she lives very independently. Selby and I are keeping the home fires burning. (It actually is cold enough for a fire in the evenings!)

While he's that close to Princeton, he's going to stop and visit with his Aunt Grace as well, and he will be back on Sunday.

The most excitement we've had in his absence was a coyote performance (howling and barking) in the neighborhood sometime after midnight last night. Selby and I took the industrial strength flashlight (or is it a floodlight?) and checked on the rabbits and chickens. As I panned across the forest with the flashlight, I saw a pair of glowing orange eyes looking back at me, but I think they belonged to a deer. Either that, or that was one tall coyote. They drive our dog Maggie insane, and she's not about to let them on her property.

I listened to the so-called "dueling speeches" on national security yesterday and was struck by the paradox we find ourselves in: what was "new" thinking in the last administration is now "old" thinking, but what is new thinking now is old in its commitment to our Constitution and our founding values. I'm with Green Day on this: "Silence is the enemy. Give me revolution!"

Speaking of which, I am waiting impatiently for my pre-ordered copy of 21st Century Breakdown to arrive. Lindsay has already listened to it, and she seconds the Rolling Stone's comment that this album makes American Idiot sound like a warm up. I can't even imagine that.

Book report: Finished The Birth House. If you can suspend your suspicion of too-convenient conclusions, it is an excellent read. Now I am on to--should I confess that I read this series??--Miss Julia Stands Her Ground by Ann Ross. These are light novels about the very provincial concerns of inhabitants of a small Southern town: the literary equivalent of eating M&Ms. What's summer vacation for??

Farm and Garden Report 2009

A rainy day gives me a chance to start this year's blog from Canada. As usual, we hit the ground weeding, preparing to plant our garden. How can all that stuff grow underneath snow?? On the other hand, we've already had a crop of rhubarb, which we enjoyed in a pie for Victoria Day yesterday. (Or, as it is known to local anti-colonialists, Long Weekend in May. ;-)

It's wonderful to be home again. This year I made the 1500+ mile drive alone for the first time. Well, I wasn't really alone--I had a collection of books on CD with me (David Sedaris, I love you!). On the way up, I saw an amazing assortment of roadkill, including the debris of an accident scene caused by a perfectly beautiful black steer that looked as if it had merely been tipped over instead of killed. Then after I crossed the border, within the first few miles, I had to stop three times to wait for small herds of deer to clear off the road. I also saw a gorgeous elk and a fat coyote between the border and home. The coyote are having a boom season, so our chickens are confined to the henhouse and yard.

A day or two after I got here, I was sitting in the family room talking to my daughter Selby when I saw a flash of a white tail sprinting across the backyard. Two fawns were chasing each other in and out of our little cedar forest. I've seen plenty of deer in the yard, but this is the first time I've ever seen them playing.

Speaking of Selby, we saw her last high school drama performance--Romeo and Juliet at the elegant, old Capitol Theatre in Nelson this weekend. I hope she'll continue to dabble in theatre, at least, when she goes to college.

Mostly we've been busy trying to get the garden in. I arrived home with a long list of orders to fill--thimbleberry jam, zucchini relish, spicy dills, applesauce, etc.--for family and friends in Arizona. It's been a cold, wet, even snowy spring, so everyone's a little late with planting this year. We're trying some new things this season. We got a couple of those upside-down tomato planters (if the plants survive being wrestled into those planters, they must be very hearty), and Donald has built some garden boxes for plants that need vertical support, such as cucumbers, peas, and beans. Our raspberries are taking over the garden, and we're trying to propagate more blackberries as well. Our two strawberry plants have miraculously turned into seven plants and are already blooming. I've planted winter and summer squash, radishes, carrots, peppers, spinach, and lettuce, and now we're building up a potato and beet hill. For herbs, we have basil, oregano, dill, parsley, rosemary, and thyme.

I thought of a way to take some of our chicken eggs back to Arizona in August: pickling them. The first two experiments are in the fridge as I write this. They are black (balsamic) and yellow (turmeric). I'm told these are very good on salads.

We're reading Michael Pollan's new book In Defense of Food, which is very sobering in its discussion of the "nutritional industrial complex." It motivates us to get out there and weed the next row. Here is his sage advice for healthy, sustainable eating: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Book Report: Just started The Birth House by Ami McKay, which takes place in World War I era Nova Scotia. The protagonist, Dora Rare, is the first female child born in her family in five generations, and she is taught midwifery by a Cajun woman regarded locally as a witch. So far, I am really enjoying this book.