Kick Out The Jam

You know how the moon looks bigger when it’s close to the horizon? Because you normally don’t have context to show you how big it actually is? That’s what it’s like when you’re staring at boxes of strawberries. We went for an afternoon of strawberry picking, and came back with 4 gallons of big juicy berries. 4 gallons of berries is objectively absurd, but when they’re just four nice boxes in amongst hundreds of other boxes, it’s hard to not thing “4 4 quart boxes? 16 quarts? That seems totally reasonable. I love strawberries, we’ll eat these all up.”

After a few days of berries on cereal, berry garnishes, berries for a snack, berries for dessert, berries for doorstops…you run out of fresh berry ideas. The next step in strawberry evolution is making jam. It can be an intimidating process, you’ve probably heard someone who knows someone that had a jar explode on them, or spilled hot jam all over the place. Like the moon on the horizon, those stories are blown way out of proportion. Making jam is a little time consuming, but otherwise really easy, and your kitchen smells totally amazing. Total disclosure-wise, we made a sort of jam before, so we’d been through the basics, but really – we’re amateurs, making jam is way easier than you’d think.

We’d recommend getting the book “Ball Complete Guide to Home Preserving,” it’s what we used, and it’s great. Their introduction to preserving recipe is for strawberry jam, so it worked out well. The basic process is straight forward, smash up a bunch of berries, add some lemon juice and pectin, bring to a boil, add a boat load of sugar (almost a half a bag), bring it back to a boil, then ladle the hot jam into pre-warmed jars. Put pre-warmed lids on the jars, put all the sealed jars in a big pot of boiling water for fifteen minutes, then let them cool for 24 hours. If you did everything right, the lids should be sealed. Obviously this is a little bit of a simplification, you’ll have to read the book for the details. Take our word for it though, if you find yourself swimming in summer strawberries, consider making jam, it’s easy, and will give you a big blast of summer when you open up a jar in the depths of a Chicago winter.

 

First Lincoln Square Tuesday Farmer’s Market of 2012

There were sunny blue skies for the first farmers market of 2012.

The opening of the farmer’s market finally arrived. I decided to switch up my running route so I would have an excuse to go past the corner of Lincoln and Leland before the market opened. At 6:00 a.m., the lot was filled with white tents, trucks, food, flowers and plants. Two hours later, Chris, Wil and I walked over to check out the market. It was good to see Don and Todd at Bade Farms. They had lilies, herbs and tomatoes for sale. Wil picked out a mini cinnamon cake from the Breadman and proceeded to leave crumbs of it along his path from booth to booth. We met Julia from Peasant’s Plot and picked up our garlic scapes. The early markets are usually lighter on fruit and vegetable offerings, but there were lots of options for herbs, flowers and plants to fill our patio pots. We’re already looking forward to next week’s market and our first official Peasant’s Plot CSA pick-up.

6/5/12: garlic scapes, beets, broccoli, rhubarb, sugar snap peas, collard greens, romaine lettuce, and asparagus. Not pictured: two patio tomato plants.

Farmer’s Market Fun for Little Shoppers

Four different kid's farmer's market lists/coloring sheets.

It’s almost time! The whole family is getting excited for Tuesday morning. Wil is most looking forward to seeing our “flower friend ” Don and picking out a baked good to eat as he walks around. I thought he would enjoy making his own list, so I made four kid’s farmer’s market lists and coloring sheets. You can download the PDF here. I also picked up strawberry themed writing supplies at Target. The small clipboard is perfect for the half sheet lists and smaller hands.

From Target's dollar section.

 

 

 

Library Love: The City Cook by Kate McDonough

“Library Love” is a new category for Tastebud Chicago.  It features books we like from the Chicago Public Library. Placing holds on books from all of the city libraries is huge.  Thank you for all your extra work Sulzer Regional librarians for receiving, processing and alphabetizing the many books we’ve placed on hold!

The City Cook by Kate McDonough

Kate McDonough clearly shares our love of city living and home cooking.  The City Cook has two parts. “Part 1: City Cooking: A Primer” contains chapters that include challenges a city kitchen presents to how to be a better food shopper. “Part 2: Recipes” contains chapters that have, well recipes.  She covers hors d’oeuvres to desserts.  The recipes look amazing and I have a few tagged to make.  However, I find the first part of this book the most rewarding.

“Part 1: City Cooking: A Primer” favorites:

  • “Strategies for Modern Urban Cooking” (page 6-7) – One of the strategies was a good reminder that I should stop making new recipes all the time and develop my own recipe repertoire.
  • “Plan Your Pantry-Don’t Just Fill It (page 9-13) – I moved our pine nuts and Panko bread crumbs to the freezer after reading this section.
  • “How to Cook From the Ingredients Up” (p.25-28) – I wish I would have found this book years ago just for this section alone.  Here she presents a plan for how you go about cooking/shopping and tips for buying the best ingredients.
  • “Be a Brilliant Food Shopper” (p. 31-39) – Pointers on how to shop farmer’s markets, greenmarkets, CSAs, urban farms and food co-ops.

Check it out and maybe you’ll learn something new!

 

One Week Countdown

Our neighborhood farmer’s market opens one week from today. We’ve headed to Lincoln and Leland for Tuesday’s Lincoln Square market every summer for the last 11 years. Besides filling our bags with fresh fruits and veggies from the vendors, we will be picking up our CSA shares from Peasant’s Plot and Earth First Farms. This is the first year we’re trying out a vegetable and apple CSA and we’re excited. We’re trying to eat a whole foods, plant-based diet, and the CSAs and farmer’s market play a big role in our grocery list. We’re looking forward to a summer of adventurous food.

To help you out this year, I made a PDF Tastebud Farmers Market List that you can print, cut and  bring with you. Happy farmer’s market shopping!

Non-edible Christmas Goodies

This is clearly a food based blog. We typically write about things you can eat. Technically, you could eat this week’s topic, but you’ll probably get a tummy ache.

Our friend (and first-commenter) Karin gave us the idea when she gave us a present of fresh all natural boiling potpourri. Potpourri, as a rule, smells like an old ladies bathroom, but when your potpourri is a bag with an orange, lemon, cranberries and cinnamon sticks, it’s pretty cool. Just slice up the citrus and boil everything in a big pot of water. It smells great, and adds skin-soothing moisture to the ridiculous dry winter air.

Orange, Lemon & 1/4 c Cranberries
1 whole nutmeg
1 teaspoon each whole cloves, whole all spice & juniper berries
Three each bay leaves and cinnamon sticks

Karin’s gift segued nicely into a problem we were having, how to decorate our Christmas tree in the post-Wilbur-is-walking world. Little-man loves to grab things and throw them over his shoulder. Glass ornaments would be terrible. So we went looking for alternatives, and found an easy recipe for baking your own ornaments.

Baked Ornaments: 2 cups flour 2 cups salt 2 cups water – stir, knead into a ball. roll to 1/4 ” thick. cut shapes with cookie cutters, poke holes in the top with a pencil (to hang them from). bake on greased cookie sheet at 350 for 20 minutes or until hard. let cool, add a string, and hang from your tree.

We had some friends over (hi Zoe and Moon!) and whipped up a batch of ornaments. We also did some fancy string tying with cinnamon sticks and pie tin cutting for fancy tree topping stars. We now have a safe Wilbur-proof tree. Occasionally he plays the game, undecorate-the-tree-and-leave-the-ornaments-in-the-middle-of-the-floor, but it’s safe.