That fine balance...

Once upon a time, I was a canning nut. I scavenged the Boyne City farmers' market for pickling cukes, even though I hate pickles; I bought pecks of tomatoes and peaches, and made more kinds of jams than I care to remember. Everyone I knew started giving me their old jars, and I made things like dilly beans, even though I didn't like those, either. What was I thinking?!
Eventually, the charm wore off. I came to realize that I was never going to have chickens in the backyard, or incorporate the plans from Mother Earth News for building a greenhouse from old windows, or hooking up my exercise bike to power the house. Not that any of those things are bad ideas. I just didn't have the time or the know-how, and it seemed that the pay-off was not worth finding the time or learning how. But, my adventures in canning did teach me a few tricks that have come in handy in the kitchen over the years, and as it turned out, there are definitely some things that are worth making yourself. By the way, pickles are not one of them, especially if you don't like pickles in the first place!

Jam is totally worth it. One of my favorites is apple pie jam. (Thank you, Linda Lou from the GardenWeb site canning and preserving forum.) I'll tell you more about that this fall, when it's time to make it. Strawberry freezer jam; also totally worth it. I like the freezer variety because it tastes more like fresh strawberries, and you don't have to worry about all the berries floating to the top of the jar, in an unappetizing grayish-red mess, leaving a puddle of jelly in the bottom. My completely insane friend, Tressa, made blueberry-lavender jam for wedding favors when she got married this summer. That one is definitely worth repeating, although perhaps not to the tune of 150 half pints cooked in a Chicago-size apartment kitchen.

Taking advantage of the blanching water to get some peaches ready for a crisp.

Blanched tomatoes waiting to be peeled. Look at how those skins are splitting!

Some things I have found to work best as kind of a blend. After reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, some of my book club girlfriends and I got together to make the tomato sauce recipe from the book. We started early in the morning, and finished late at night, completely bespeckled with tomato bits. All that work rendered not nearly enough sauce, and we found ourselves judging which of our dinner guests were "sauce-worthy," kind of like Elaine from "Seinfeld"'s judgement about the "sponge-worthiness" of her various man friends.

With the tomato sauce, I have arrived at a compromise. Each fall, I still go to the farmers' market and buy at least a peck of Roma tomotoes. I faithfully blanch them (although I did a few peaches first, for a peach crisp to go with dinner), peel off those skins and squeeze out the seeds. Then, into the blender they go, sometimes with a bit of jalepeno, for winter chili. I fill up those rectangular freezer containers, label away, and everything goes into the freezer. Mason jars have been known to be called up, too. I've had great luck freezing these, as long as they're not overfilled.
 No standing over a hot pot for hours, waiting for the sauce to boil down, and more hours over a hot pot to can it. In fact, the only hot pot is the one for the blanching, and I only had that going for 30 minutes or less. I worked out quite the little assembly line this year, of coring and "x-ing," into boiling water, into ice bath, into colander, where I amassed my tomatoes until they were all blanched. And from there, I finished preparing them from the freezer, while watching The Travel Channel. If only Anthony Bourdain had been in Tuscany, my life would have been complete!
I love being able to take these containers out of the freezer all winter long, instead of buying cans of tomatoes. They make great sauce, chili, vegetable soup base, and the list goes on and on. Yum!

Labeling the ones with jalepenos!

Adventures in grocery shopping by bicycle

It'll be so European...
This is what I thought when I hopped on my bike last week and headed to the grocery story a mile or so away from my new home. When I moved to Holland, MI from the northern part of the state, one of the things that I was looking forward to was riding my bike more. Holland has bike paths everywhere, while the road that my old house faced didn't even have a shoulder.
So I packed up my shopping bag and put a few dollars in my pocket, and headed to the grocery store to get some produce to go with that evening's dinner. Things began to fall apart after I came out of the store and loaded my purchases into the bike basket. My combination cable wouldn't come unlocked. I'd had that moment of "maybe I should test this first" when I had locked the bike up; I couldn't remember the last time I had actually used the cable. But I hadn't tested it. I had just hoped for the best. Now I couldn't get my bike free, even after trying the lock a dozen times, and enduring the stares of people who thought I might be doing something untoward, like stealing it.
After a hot and dusty walk home, and waiting for my husband to come home from work, we returned to the store to "steal" my bike back. His tin snips did the job on the cable, and my bike was free. I felt rather silly, getting locked off of my bike.

Today, I redeemed myself. With a new lock coiled around the frame of my bike, I took off for the Holland Farmers' Market this morning. It was a mostly flat, uneventful ride, only made challenging by the wierd barriers the Padnos metal recycling plant has placed near all of their driveways, which form a little obstacle course/maze for people walking or on bikes. I guess they're to keep people from driving on the sidewalks, but really, who does that?
At the market, I tempted fate and bought a dozen brown speckly eggs, in addition to a pint of blueberries and a little box of raspberries. A quart of green beans filled the rest of the space left in my bike basket. As I unlocked my bike and wheeled it back from the bike rack, I had visions of spilled berries and cracked eggs on the road if I took a tumble. But luckily, it seemed that I had used up all my bad luck on my previous outing.  As I rode home, I thought that what I really needed was one of the gorgeous boquets of sunflowers I had seen, sticking out of the top of my basket. That would have been just lovely. Instead, I settled for the satisfaction of making it back home, with my bike, all in the same trip, and not cracking an egg or spilling even one berry.

This is not my kitchen.

Two months ago, I married a man who has two children from a previous marriage, and moved into his house. The house has a beautiful kitchen, with cabinets full of undiscovered cooking gadgets. I brought a few of my own gadgets when I moved in, but since the cupboards were already pretty full, I tried to limit what I brought along. Each time I follow a recipe that requires some specialized item, I have to wonder whether or not I'll have what's recommended, or if I will have to figure out a different approach.

Today, I was trying to figure out to do with the chicken that was going on day four in the refrigerator. It needed to be made into something for dinner tonight. The question was, what?

Chicken satay with peanut sauce sounded good for some reason, and after sifting through cookbooks for a recipe, I found myself in need of a food processor to make an onion/garlic paste to use as a marinade for the chicken skewers. I delved into the floor to ceiling length cabinet that houses large kitchen gadgets, to see what my options were. A salad spinner sat precariously on top of my mandolin. A panini/waffle iron that looked shiny and expensive sat on the shelf below. The third shelf housed various bases, with a mish mash of clear plastic bowls wedged between them. One of the food processors looked large and complicated, the other was small, and appeared to be a good thirty years old. Its base was a discolored shade of cream, with mysterious drips dried onto its sides. A bowl that looked to be a match was nearby, and after a little hunting, I found the lid and blade. After wiping everything down, I loaded it up with my ingredients, which I thought might have been a mistake before doing a test run. However, when I locked the base, bowl and lid together and pushed the power switch, a perfect whirr met my ears, and I watched my paste come together. After adding enough soy sauce to achieve the right consistency, I blended the paste one more time, before pouring it over my chicken skewers.

When I cook in this kitchen, I sometimes feel a little like a kid who has snuck into her grandmother's closet to try on her fancy dresses from long ago. At the back of my mind, I fear that in the middle of some enterprise, my step-children, or their mother, might pop into the kitchen and ask, "What are you doing with that?!" But, it's also fun playing dress up in someone else's kitchen.

Cutting the mango, perfectly! Pineapple, too.

One of my most favorite kitchen gadgets is my mango pitter. I don't have a ton of kitchen storage, so I have to be somewhat choosy with my kitchen toys, but this one is definitely worth the space.

Before I bought this tool, cutting up a ripe mango usually resulted in a slobbery mess. The mango ended up fit for a smoothie, but nothing else, and I usually ended up with more mango juice down my arm, on the counter and on the floor than in any sort of designated receptacle. The flesh would be mushed to a pulp. It drove me crazy when I would see some kitchen show host talking about cutting a grid, and ending up with perfectly diced fruit. I could not make it happen. Then, I saw this mango pitter at a kitchen store one day, and thought I'd give it a try. It was less than ten dollars, and surely I'd spent more than that creating mango slurry over the years.

The mango pitter operates on the same premise as those apple corer/slicer gadgets. It has an oval-shaped middle to cut around the pit, and you are left with two halves, sans pit. To get the whole operation to work smoothly, it is best to refrigerate the mango for an hour or two before slicing it, to make it more firm. Also, score the top of the mango where the pitter blades will cut it. Otherwise, you may end up with the aforementioned handful of mush. Once you've sliced through the mango, cut each half into thirds, and then using a very sharp paring knife (that's the only kind you have, right?) pare the flesh from the skin. I find that this works best if you cup the mango section in your hand, skin-side down, and carefully run the paring knife between the mango skin and flesh, as if you were cutting cantaloupe from its rind. From there, you can put your skinned mango sections onto a cutting board, and dice away.

This may sound like a whole bunch of steps, but the whole thing can be done in a minute or two, and the result is definitely worth the effort!

I'm still on the fence about my pineapple corer/peeler/slicer. Too often, I miss the core with the center, and have to trim each piece, anyway. The pinapple in the bowl in the picture above, I just cut by hand. Quick and easy steps:

     -Use a big cutting board. Cut the top and the bottom of the pineapple off, so you have flat surfaces on each end. Cut an inch deep, so you don't have any exterior debris left.

     -Working your way around the pineapple, cut down the side in strips to remove the skin. Don't try to cut it too thin, or you'll have eyes poking thourgh. 1/2 inch works best, I think. Throw the skin into your compost so it isn't cluttering up your work space and getting little picky things everywhere.

     -Cut the pineapple into quarters, from top to bottom, into four columns. Then, to cut out the core, stand each column up straight, and trim the triangle from the center of the column. You can usually tell how deep the core goes by the change in color and texture of the fruit. After you have cored each column, lay them down, cut them in half or thirds, lengthwise, and then dice them.

Again, this may seem like a lot of work, but fresh pineapple is to die for, it's so good. My local Aldi has had them on sale for less than two dollars all summer long, so they have become a staple in the house. Yum!