canning joy

so a few weeks ago i bought a bunch of weck canning jars. let's get down to business and state this right here: i bought them before they appeared in the new york times, which appears to have copied me (check the style section from last sunday). i, in turn, copied a food blogger in germany who was using her jelly jars for tiramisu. and it looked so good! (where "it" refers to the jelly jar, not the tiramisu.)

i saw the jars back in february, but kept holding off on buying them because it seemed like a frivolous expense. enter carly's wedding registry. i bought her a spice rack for her wedding, but i felt like it was impersonal (and is it me, or was there no place to enter a note that would get sent to her?!) and wanted to get her something else, too. i thought about a photo album but they were kind of out of my price range, so instead i went for preserves. so i'm going to mail her a card and a cute little jar of jam. it seemed appropriate since part of her family is from germany, but in reality i have no idea if she'll recognize the jars (which, in the US, are only available by mail order or telephone from a company in illinois, called glashaus. glashaus has two specialties: weck jars and glass bricks).

i also planned to give my mother four of the jars (i have eight), but then mother's day loomed large, and i panicked. then i remembered the jar scenario, and thought, well, it would be nicer if i gave her jars with something in them. so jam it was.

as i've never actually made jam by myself, i went with easy. i did a strawberry jam, a rhubarb-ginger jam, and an orange marmalade. as it turns out, i totally misread the recipe for the marmalade and accidentally got much less orange poundage than i needed, but i had sufficient fruit to make a surprisingly good marmalade that almost exactly fit the two jars i had set aside to contain it. by "good marmalade," i don't mean that it gelled correctly - gotta wait 'til it cools for that assessment. but the sugar balance was good, and the time spent shaving off all of the pith from the zest i cut off was well worth it, as it wasn't at all overpoweringly bitter.

i did use pectin in the strawberry jam. you can make your own pectin by boiling pith, but it's a long process and the pith is damn bitter. so i went the store route, and really, pectin looks like flaxseed goop. the color on the jam held well, but i don't know how the flavor will mature. i think i may have overdone the lemon balance - i added the recommended lemon juice, plus an entire quarter of preserved lemon, minced. oops. i thought i had enough fruit to balance the lemon, but i guess i'll taste it tomorrow and see. why is strawberry jam so testy? mine seems to be overly tart. the rhubarb-ginger combo is fantastic, though! mine might be just a touch sweet, but overall i think it's great. it's also probably the closest to jam consistency, though nothing has cooled completely yet.

usually when my mother makes jam, she uses old food jars that she's sterilized. this is high treason to the weck people. ah well. the weck canning process has glass jars (both jar and lid), a rubber ring that goes between the jar and lid, and little metal clamps that hold the lid down. the clamps go on after you fill the jar, and then you boil the jars, and then you can take the clamps off. it's an excellent setup. i guess you have to be careful with the lid after you open the jar, though, huh? i guess at that point, you can put the clamps back on.

tomorrow is my sister's bachelorette party, and we're having dinner at her friend's. each of us has been asked to bring a side. if i had planned it, i probably would have provided more direction for the sides, so they'd go with the main course, but whatever, it'll be fun anyway. i thought i'd make something vaguely healthy, so i'm making a green bean salad. sounds awful, doesn't it? it's a loose interpretation of a green bean salad that carrie made once that has a dill dressing and feta cheese. i don't really like feta cheese, so my salad will have green beans, red/yellow/orange peppers, a little cucumber for crunch, fresh mozzarella, basil, and a balsamic dressing of some kind. or maybe the orange muscat vinegar? i dunno. at any rate, i will eat it if no one else will.

ode to pork products

mmm...i could tell as soon as the wind started blowing that it was going to rain hard. as a result, i didn't go outside the entire day. instead, i worked on my thesis all day in my room, watching the rain come pelting down outside. however, carrien had to go to class, and she came back soaked and wanting soup for dinner.

the contents of our fridge, which really wants a washing: one emaciated, very....tanned carrot, one bag of carrots, celery, potatoes, a couple onions, broccoflower and broccoli. huh. you know what would make all of this work? chicken stock! or....bacon...

we'd done a potato-leek soup with bacon and rendered bacon fat a couple times back in the fall, but we decided to do a broccoflower bacon cream soup once keith consented to buy us bacon on his way home. anyway, this soup was pretty standard: render the fat from the bacon, pour some of it off, cook the onion/celery/carrot mixture, add diced potatoes and broccoflower, add some water, and boil. i do very much like to cook with rendered bacon fat, even though it's horrible for your heart. it makes everything taste so wonderful, and it's nice to know that you can use the fat for something. to add more bacon flavor, we steeped the cream in the bacon pieces (de-fatted), then stirred that into the soup after we'd pureed it.

for all of you out there wondering what to do with your weirdly bright green broccoflower, this soup is it. it doesn't require much in the way of ingredients except a bunch of vegetables, cream, and salt, and it's really fantastic. it got the roommate sticker of approval as the "best soup [he'd] ever eaten." also went well with the remaining four cheddar-black pepper scones i'd made last week.

and the red sox won 14-3.

*
by the way, we transplanted the petunia to a bigger pot, and it seems to be doing just fine in its new, roomier environs. doesn't seem to want to contain itself within the pot anymore than it did previously, though.

and a random rant: someone in an archinect.com thread said that he taught himself how to make a website before anyone else was teaching it, with the possible exception of cranbrook and mit. wait, seriously? who teaches web design here? (ok, i taught my students how to use dreamweaver, but it's not the same thing) we're a tech school, not an art school - thus we do things more along the line of inventing the programming language that makes it possible to make webpages. please. get your facts straight.