Pecan Corner

"Rogation Days" were a church tradition in Europe that involved the whole community walking the boundaries of their village lands, led by their Priest and asking the blessing of God on it all.

Maybe if we had kept walking the boundaries and teaching children the landmarks, we would not be in such danger from the new iconoclasts today, who seem determined to tear down every landmark of civilization. From the article "Rogation and Ascension"  on Full Homely Divinity:

"The reminder of boundaries had another important impact on communal life. In a poem by the 20th century American Robert Frost, the poet's neighbor asserts that "good fences make good neighbors." Boundaries are often very important in relationships. As members of parishes beat the bounds, they would often encounter obstructions and violations of boundaries. The annual beating of the bounds provided an opportunity to resolve boundary issues. It also led to the tradition of seeking reconciliation in personal relationships during Rogationtide. The sharing of a specially brewed ale, called Ganging Beer, and a mysterious pastry, called Rammalation Biscuits, at the end of the walk was a good way of sealing the reconciliation.

"George Herbert gave the following good reasons to beat the bounds: 1) a blessing of God for the fruits of the field; 2) Justice in the preservation of the bounds; 3) Charity, in living, walking and neighbourly accompanying one another, with reconciling of differences at that time, if they be any; 4) Mercy, in relieving the poor by a liberal distribution of largess which at that time is or ought be made."  [in The Country Parson, Chapter 35]

I've decided to track my spending on groceries this year, as I am growing and preserving more and more of our own food.  I will note when we eat out in these as well, but that is very seldom. We are starting also with a freezer full of various meats, a good stock of flour & sugar, and a pantry from my canning over the past 6 months.  This is the second video I've made on this. I can already see a strong drop in how much I spend each week for food, as well as a reduction in the amount of garbage we have!



I'd love to hear your tips or your reflections on the difference food storage or preservation has made for your family.  If you enjoy the video, please give it a "thumbs up" on You Tube & please subscribe to my channel there. :-)

This is the season when Texas citrus are ripe. It is surprisingly easy to can fresh grapefruit  (or oranges) - and it tastes so fresh when we open it in the summer, when the refreshing sweet flavor is welcome for breakfast on a bright summer morning! These videos show how I do it!

My latest video gets you ready for one of the easiest, quickest, after-work home cooked meals there is: Pesto with  pecans! :-)  Enjoy!

I've been having fun this year in the print shop, turning out seed packets for saving seeds in.  The Pecan Corner Press is a hobby, and this kind of ephemera is what I usually produce. I use handset type and some fun old cuts.  I've been taking these to the local Farmer's Market since the grasshoppers and deer have eaten all my gardening efforts this year.  The empty ones are great for saving seed and tucking into a get well card or garden club seed exchanges. Some people even said they were going to use them in their little miniature display cabinets.



My Swiss Chard went to seed this year (it is a biennial, and can be harvested as long as it lives - it is never tough or bitter), so I made the linoleum cut and filled these to see how the seed would sell. This is the old variety, Fordhook, and they can be planted in Texas all the way though the fall.

I didn't take a press but I have taken a locked-up chase and it has drawn a lot of interest.  I have a ways to go before I sell enough to pay for my market fees, but this is a good way to support our little market and help it grow.
 
 When September rolls around, I'll be able to offer more items - we all will. Texas passed a Cottage Food Law a couple of years ago that made it possible to open one's home to sell baked goods and jams. It is a common-sense approach that recognizes that if we know the person doing the cooking, we can decide for ourselves whether we want to eat what they have cooked.  The newest version, which takes effect Sept 1st 2013, is pretty exciting, because it expands common sense to foods that are pretty much going to be safe to eat and allows us to take our products to Farmers' Markets and locally sponsored Fairs, as well as sell from home.

 Here's another place where we - Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Tea Party, Occupy... pretty much everybody but the Socialists and Communists - can come together, I think. We all want personal sovereignty over our food!!!!



 So, in anticipation of HB 970 (still awaiting the final rules to define exactly what items we can sell), I have been carving linoleum blocks to use on labels for my homemade jams, jellies, relishes, sauerkraut, syrups and baked goods. The linocuts, combined with Art Deco era typefaces, give the labels a fun old fashioned look. These are the first proofs of a few of them, printed on dry-gummed paper. I will tweek the colors and ink coverage a bit for the final labels.

Sauerkraut, drained, rinsed and ready to eat!

For this batch, I used a gallon glass jar. Next time, I am going to use one of Big Grandmother's crocks - I am sterilizing it in the dishwasher right now. You could easily use one of the old style "crock pots" without plugging it in. You would still need to use the plate or bag method to weight down the cabbage to keep it under the brine. Be sure to read up on how to use various containers and weights BEFORE you get started. The National Center For Home Food Preservation is a reliable reference for safe canning and preserving methods.

[July 5, 2013 UPDATE: Second batch completed, as easy to make as the first, and we enjoyed some of it yesterday. But I learned I cannot use antique crocks. They have crazing that absorbs the liquid and that would also prevent them from being sterilized. Stick to glass or modern options such as the crock pots mentioned above, or brand new crocks. Thanks to everyone who has stopped in to read this! I hope it has been useful to you :-) ]

I got my recipe from here,  and they also detail the method: it is originally an Extension Service recipe from the University of Georgia. It is the same recipe that is given in many cookbooks and other websites, but I chose this one because it is very simple and the instructions are complete and matter-of-fact. I've added my notes within it, and given the lower portions for making a small batch.

I loved that there is also a recipe for making sauerkraut out of Collard Greens! It is too warm here in Texas for cabbage to do well, but we can grow some collards. Collards are one of those biennial vegetables that you can keep alive all through the year, making it possible to have fresh home-grown veg even in the dark of winter.  The Collard Sauerkraut Recipe is just below the one for cabbage. I haven't tried it yet.


1 head of cabbage or about 5 pounds
3 tablespoons of canning or pickling salt (you could use kosher salt but not sea salt or iodized salt, the iodine will interfere)

Discard outer leaves. Rinse the whole head under cold running water and drain. Do not use disinfectants or vinegar rinses on it, just a simple wash with plain tap water.

Cut the cabbage in quarters and remove cores. Shred or slice to a thickness of a quarter (about 1/8"). You can use a knife if you don't have a mandolin but don't chop it into little bits. Long shreds are what we want. I used one head of cabbage, and shredded it fine with a mandolin (be REALLY careful with those and always use the safety guards, make sure someone else is in charge of the kids while you are using it, etc. Most important: THINK and pay attention - don't get distracted by anything.).

Add 3 tablespoons of salt. If the weather is very warm, you may need to use a little more salt. Toss well and mix thoroughly with your hands, then pack it all into your fermenting jar or crock. Leave space at the top, maybe 4 or 5 inches, for the brine to cover the cabbage completely.

I added a round piece of plastic that was the diameter of the jar and sealed weights inside a freezer bag and put them down in the brine to hold the cabbage down under the brine.  This time I used brine in a gallon freezer bag (actually two of them in case one leaked) and put it inside the jar to seal
the whole thing. You use brine in the bag in case it leaks because plain water would dilute the sauerkraut causing it to spoil. If you use a crock, you can put a plate inside it instead.

"Add plate and weights; cover container with a clean bath towel. Store at 70 to 75 °F while fermenting. At temperatures between 70 and 75 °F, kraut will be fully fermented in about 3 to 4 weeks; at 60 to 65 °F, fermentation may take 5 to 6 weeks. At temperatures lower than 60 °F, kraut may not ferment. Above 75 °F, kraut may become soft. If you weigh the cabbage down with a brine-filled bag, do not disturb the crock until normal fermentation is completed (when bubbling ceases). If you use jars as weight, check the kraut two to three times each week and remove scum if it forms."

I set my jar back in the floor in the guest room. That part of the house, on the south side, is always shaded so it stays pretty cool back there, especially down at the floor level because that room, one of the originals from about 1895, is on pier and beam foundation so cool air can circulate below.

Collard Kraut Recipe

A big bunch of fresh collard greens, about a gallon when cleaned.
2 or 3 Tablespoons of canning or pickling salt for each one gallon of collards.

Procedure: Wash the greens well, and shred. Use the same process as given for Cabbage Sauerkraut above. Store at 70 ºF for fermenting. At this temperature it will take approximately 3 to 4 weeks to ferment. If any scum forms above the plate or weight, remove it about 2 to 3 times a week. Taste in about two weeks. Allow collards to ferment until desired flavor is reached. 

Store in refrigerator or process in boiling water bath, as directed at original link or at the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

 We are not unduly careful about what we eat: we prefer fresh, real foods but do not insist on organic; we trust our bodies to balance our diets, rather than following elaborate prescriptive eating plans; we don't buy food processed in China, but are ok with Mexican tomatoes during the winter months (from a locavore perspective, Mexico is closer to us than California LOL!)...

Still, my husband Paul has had a growing concern about the pervasiveness of High Fructose Corn Syrup in processed foods. We've started avoiding those things that have this ingredient.  Ketchup is a bit of a problem, since most brands contain HFCS and we like our ketchup!

I'd never made it myself since most recipes are for huge batches, calling for bushels of fresh tomatoes. Not only the investment, but what if we didn't like that particular recipe? DIY is foolish if it is wasteful!  So I was pretty excited to find this simple, small batch version on Instructables.com.

The original recipe is from Instructables member Scoochmaroo. Her basic recipe is very good as it stands. I made a few adjustments - mostly, to allow it to be cooked in a crockpot, so that I wouldn't need to stand over the stove and watch it.  My recipe is below.

 


Easy Small Batch Crockpot Tomato Ketchup

2 (6 ounce) cans tomato paste (total of 12 ounces tomato paste)
1/2 cup white vinegar
3 teaspoons molasses
4 Tablespoons brown sugar
1 Tablespoon onion powder
1 teaspoon garlic powder
1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
1 teaspoon salt

Mix all ingredients together in a small crockpot* and cook on low for 4 hours. To cook on top of the stove, add one cup of water to the recipe, bring to a boil, then simmer, covered, on very low heat for an hour or two, stirring every 15 minutes, until thickened. Cool, pour into a clean, sterile container, and refrigerate.

*I have a small "Crockette" that I used for this. If using a larger crockpot, I would probably double the recipe, just to give it enough bulk to cook properly.





 This recipe makes about 3 cups of ketchup (depending on how much water you add). It can be used immediately. The vinegar will preserve it, refrigerated, for a couple of weeks. I will just keep the ingredients on hand, and once a month or so will pop a batch into the slow cooker while we go about our business for the day.




We had this with our burgers tonight, and Paul said "That is some good ketchup!"  YAY! I won't even have to fiddle with the spice mix. 

It doesn't taste like "homemade ketchup", it tastes like plain old ordinary ketchup - which is, after all, what we really want on our salty french fries!

Enjoy!

A couple of weeks ago, we went to Cross Plains, Texas, and toured the Robert E Howard home as part of their "Barbarian Days Festival".  Howard's father was Dr. Isaac M. Howard. This simple frame house served as the family home, and, also, sometimes, doubled as Dr Howard's office where patients were seen. The home was continually in use as a place to live for various families from the time Dr Howard sold it until Cross Plains' Operation Pride recovered it for preservation in 1989.


 Since that time, they have worked to furnish it with period furnishings and house those artifacts they can obtain (such as the camel inkwell that stood on Howard's desk - a gift from Cecil Lotief, local Cross Plains  dry goods merchant - and first Texas legislator who had been born in Lebanon. He was first elected in 1932). Other furnishings are close copies of items either known to have been there, or true to the period.  Below is a photo of Bob Howard in front of this house, circa 1925.



My main interest was that I enjoy touring simple historical homes: the kind of house in which ordinary citizens lived a hundred years ago. In this case, the home of an ordinary small-town family physician. During that epoch in American history, there were similarities among all Americans of frugality, economy of space and furnishings, and natural closeness of proximity to household members and neighbors, that is readily apparent when we walk through such a home and consider how life would be lived in it.

 By today's standards, the author's cell-like bedroom/study (below) is tiny, cramped, and simple. But by the standards of the day (continuing even up into the 1970s in most of the country), it was probably much like the rooms of Howard's own unmarried peers. The room offered simple comfort, privacy, a bright and airy place in which to write and attend to the voluminous correspondence an author would keep up in that era when postcards and letters would be mailed daily for the same purposes email and messaging would serve today. 

The bare bulb was a common feature of most homes until new homes built in the prosperous 1950s and 60s popularized inexpensive, built-in light fixtures. My grandmother's house had several while I was growing up.  Our current house still had bare bulbs in the mid-1940s during WWII, when Rita's family first moved here, and it was the first time they had electricity. This house at that time had 4 rooms - and her family rented one of them out to a soldier and his wife, who kept all their household goods in that one small bedroom, brought pots out to cook and went back into their room to eat their meals! This gives an idea of how economically indoor space was used during these earlier eras.



 Porches were converted into bedrooms more often than not - and existing windows and doors were just left intact. During pre-electric times, such windows and doors still had use for ventilation and light, just like the transoms found above interior doors in so many old homes. If not needed to carry daylight and breezes, these unused windows and doors were often covered permanently with a heavy curtain or drape to block light and drafts, and furniture would be placed in front of it as though it were a solid wall.

My mother's house, of similar or slightly earlier vintage as this one, has two such converted porches: one very similar to this one resulted in her kitchen having a window-to-nowhere (well, technically, a window-into-the-next-room). Her kitchen also has another window that faces into the remaining screened "sleeping porch" that could have been, if needed, similarly converted. The other converted porch left a door-to-nowhere behind the sofa in her living room (but alas, there is no "door into summer"!).

Not only were bedrooms added to accommodate growing families, but also young adults tended to live at home until they married, and were given their own space by adding a room or converting a porch. Our house has a converted porch that we now use as the laundry room. but which once turned a crowded 4-room house into a three-bedroom home  and housed a family's sons, who had previously slept in the living room.

From the back, it is each to see the flat roof of the addition - also very common for what is known as "lean-to" add-ons. Our house has a similar flat roof over the portion added in the 1970s.
 


 I was particularly interested to see the plate block for Dr. Howard's original bookplate (or Ex Libris as some call them). It is a linoleum cut and bears the doctor's own signature. A corresponding print from it is framed with it, but I couldn't tell whether the plate was designed to make prints onto gummed paper for application, or to print directly onto a book's fore-leaf.


 The docents at the museum, all members of Cross Plains' Project Pride, were wonderful, and I appreciated their friendly guidance through the tour. Here is one of these nice ladies with the Cross Plains Centennial Quilt, displayed in Mr and Mrs Howard's bedroom of the home, to which she had contributed a square. Each block was made by local women to celebrate the town's history, and its recovery from the devastating wild fires that burned 130 homes and killed two people in 2005.


 We wrapped up the day with the Barbarian Festival in a lovely, oak-shaded park, complete with live music, free watermelon (courtesy of AMA-Techtel), Conan the Barbarian artwork, and fabulous food. There was even a car show. This is an annual event and it was a lot of fun. I hope we will be able to go again from time to time!



Much more about Howard, his writing, his family, and life can be found at various places, including REH: Two-Gun Raconteur, REHupa (the Robert E Howard United Press Association), and the Robert E Howard Foundation.

7/4/12 Update: Thanks to OpiningOnline.com for the link! :-)

I miss mince meat pies at Christmas time. My dad's father, "Pawpaw", used to make them. He had been a cook for the Santa Fe Railroad track crews, and his pies were top notch.  The trouble is, every mincemeat pie I've tasted in my adulthood was like fruitcake: one piece is all I can enjoy. The flavor is overpowering.

But now I've found a solution. This Mincemeat Mayonnaise Cake is perfect. It uses one cup of mincemeat, so the flavor blends gently throughout the cake. With a thin cream cheese, frosting, it delights the tastebuds - and our taste for nostalgia!

It's an easy cake to make, but it takes a long time: it must bake for two hours! So start it when you have the evening at home. It is moist and dense, so it also keeps very well. You can make it days in advance and refrigerate it, icing on the day you plan to serve it.

Mincemeat Mayonnaise Cake


Wishing a Merry and Blessed Christmas to you and yours.  Thank you for reading my blog, and for spending your precious time here at Pecan Corner. May 2012 be a very good year for us all! :-)

It's Peach Season! Time to eat all we can and can all we can't. ;-) I love canning - it's one of those tasks where we get to enjoy the fruits of a day's work for a long time.

The jar to the far right is Peach Chutney I made last year. It turned out great! It is wonderful with roast poultry and makes a really nice alternative to cranberry sauce. We can't grow cranberries in Texas so this is a good thing for those trying to eat locally or do the "100 mile diet" bit. Aside from some of the spices, all the ingredients either were local or "could have been" homegrown.


Personally, I don't think we should count the spices when trying to eat locally, because spices were one of the early commodities traded as far back as stone age people thousands of years ago - right up to what is now called "The Spice Trade" explosion in the 15th century Age of Exploration. It's why Columbus discovered America: looking for a shorter trade route to the continents and islands of the Orient (the Orient - from the Latin root "orientem" meaning the direction of the sun rise - was the Eastern world, the Occident, from L. "occidentem", direction of the sunset, was the word for the West), where all sorts of wonderful spices originated.

I found the original version of this recipe for "Spicy Peach Chutney" on Allrecipes.com, submitted by "Shana":

Original Recipe Yield 6 - 1/2 pints

Ingredients
* 4 pounds sliced peeled peaches
* 1 cup raisins
* 2 cloves garlic, minced
* 1/2 cup chopped onion
* 5 ounces chopped preserved ginger
* 1 1/2 tablespoons chili powder
* 1 tablespoon mustard seed
* 1 teaspoon curry powder
* 4 cups packed brown sugar
* 4 cups apple cider vinegar
* 1/4 cup pickling spice

Directions
1. In a large heavy pot, stir together the peaches, raisins, garlic, onion, preserved ginger, chili powder, mustard seed, curry powder, brown sugar and cider vinegar. Wrap the pickling spice in a cheesecloth bag, and place in the pot.
2. Bring to a boil, and cook over medium heat uncovered until the mixture reaches your desired consistency. It will take about 1 1/2 hours to get a good thick sauce. Stir frequently to prevent scorching on the bottom.
3. Remove the spice bag, and ladle into hot sterilized jars. Wipe the rims with a clean moist cloth. Seal with lids and rings, and process in a barely simmering water bath for 10 minutes, or the time recommended by your local extension for your area. The water should cover the jars completely.

I used fresh peaches I had just picked off the tree, but it can as easily be made with canned, frozen or dehydrated fruit. You could even use your peach jam (I'd leave out the sugar in this recipe if I were making it with jam).

To make Peach Chutney using dried peaches, pour plain hot water over the fruit in a ratio of 1 1/2 cups water per cup of fruit and let soak for an hour. Don't add the sugar yet or it will keep the peaches from absorbing the water. Measure out 6 cups of reconsituted peaches and use in place of the fresh peaches called for in the recipe.

This recipe, like many pickles, is best after it has had time to age for at least 2 months. Made at this time of year, it was perfect by Thanksgiving, and we enjoyed it all the way through the winter.

Remember those green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper we put in flats under the bed before the first frost (Nov 2nd)? This is what they look like now!



They also have excellent flavor. Not quite the same as vine ripened, of course, but still much richer than store bought. These taste like real tomatoes. A few of them didn't keep, but most of the ones I have pulled out so far were perfect. We enjoyed them sliced with salt, and I made a salad of them.


I had great fun playing "Guess what's under the bed?" with visitors over the holiday. Heh. There are still many more wrapped up under the bed, so I will post again in another month or so to see how they are doing as we get farther into the winter.

Our neighbor - the one who grows amazing amounts of tomatoes in his yard and sells them wholesale - came in to where I work today . He asked about my garden and I told my tale of woe, that I didn't make tomatoes either at home or in my borrowed garden plot.

The vines looked good but most didn't fruit and those that did had poor quality. I told him I am going to try once more next year, and do things differently. He shared some tips with me, including the variety he likes best (Carnival), and to be sure and water every single day. He cages his, which I have not been doing but will do next year. And he told me not to put plastic under them as it will get too hot.

I bought a couple of flats of green tomatoes from him. Some of these green tomatoes I am going to store for ripening. My friend wraps each one in newspaper, and puts them in a single layer in a soda flat and stores them under a bed. She said she just took them out as needed, and each one ripened, and they all kept until they used the last of them in February.

Our neighbor said he has the best luck storing the ones that have gotten closer to beginning to ripen, that have turned a bit yellow-green, while the dark green ones don't keep as well.

One flat of the small, hard green tomatoes, I am going to use to make Chow-Chow. I do have my own onions and bell peppers for it, and I would have had to buy the cabbage anyway. I think the tomatoes will qualify as "local" since they were grown within 50 yards of the house! Heh! With luck I will be able to do that on Wednesday evening. Yum, I can't wait!

Dec 28th: Edited to add a link to the follow up post. Click here to check out how the green tomatoes are doing after two months of storage.

Today the Harvest Moon is full. Be sure to step outside your door and enjoy the beautiful sight of it rising over the next couple of days. It will rise tonight at 6:47 pm Central Time here, and, at 7:18 tomorrow night - so figure about half an hour later each night. You can find the moonrise times for your location from the link at the Farmer's Almanac, or from the links at Calculator Cat's Moon Phase site, pictured in my sidebar.

I had saved my corn stalks in hope of using them for harvest decorating in the yard. Alas, they did not hold up well enough to look good, so I made do with my little cane poles from the climbing beans.

Last year, I bought what I thought were bales of straw to decorate with, thinking to use them later as mulch. Turned out they were baled oats... so I had to pull "wild oats" out of the saint augustine grass all summer AND had to find someone to give the bales to. Our friend who goes to church with us and drives the garbage truck took them to his goats!

The crow scarecrow is so fun, and Mama gave me the "real" looking crow. A coworker gave me pumpkins he had raised, and some of those fruits are my own acorn squash. I grew acorn and spaghetti squash this year and dutifully cured them then stored in mesh bags in a dark closet. The acorn squash turned orange and dried out! Guess next year we'll eat them as they ripen.

The spaghetti squash still feel heavy, I plan to cook one this week and we will see if they kept well. But the dried acorn squash make for nice decorations in Thelma's wooden bowl.


This postcard came from Mama today. Isn't it great? She is the World's Best Letter Writer, and has taken to sending me vintage postcards. I save all of her letters in a file box and if she never writes her memoirs, the great great grands-yet-to-come in the far off future will have all these marvelous letters through which to get to know Amos, if they are not fortunate enough to know her in person.

It is such a fun idea, too, to send vintage postcards. They don't require much time to jot a few lines and cost only 28 cents to mail. Use a vintage (but previously unused) stamp, or the cute polar bear one that is out now, and it's a perfect little component of vintage living that we can add to our routine. And oh so much dearer than email: a keepsake from now on.

Be sure the see the first post (How to find and gather) and the second post (how to prepare the fruit and juice).

If you have not made jelly before, please do the safe thing and read up on specific canning methods, with up-to-date instructions before making this. The National Center for Home Food Preservation (linked from my sidebar) is a good place to go to start learning. If you have a dear one who knows how to can, call them and enlist their advice. Call your mom anyway, just for general principles.

Jelly is one of the easiest and safest home-canned foods you can make. I follow the instructions that come in the package of Sure-Jell, which is the brand of powdered pectin I usually use. For this batch I used Can-Jel, which is Kroger's brand, and it came out just fine. "Pectin" is a naturally occuring substance that causes fruit juice to gel when it is cooked with sugar. Apples, especially the peelings, have a great lot of it.

I always add extra pectin to my jellies and jams. I don't use liquid pectin, only the powdered type. However, my recipes all call for powdered pectin - be sure to use the type that your recipe calls for. It does make a difference!

Gather your jars, wash them and sterilize them with boiling water: either put the jars (jars only NOT the lids) in a pot of boiling water for 10 minutes (use canning tongs to remove them), or run them through your dishwasher's "sterilize" cycle. I always sterilize one extra jar just in case I need it.

Set them on an old towel in a handy location so that you will be able to easily ladle the hot liquid jelly into them when the time comes. Right next to the stove works best for me, and is safest. You do not want to be carrying a pot full or even a jar-full of boiling liquid jelly. The towel under the jars is to catch spills.

The Prickly Pear Jelly recipe I use is very similar to recipes for elderberry jelly. It makes about 11 half-pints. Since this recipe calls for 2 boxes of pectin, you could half it but do not double it.
If you need more, make 2 batches. Use only sugar for this recipe - do not reduce the amount of sugar and do not use sugar substitutes.

Only make jelly when you can give it your full attention from start to finish. It won't take long for the actual cooking and putting up but you cannot leave it once you start. So get everything else done in advance, but make sure you have an hour of uninterrupted time and turn the phone off before you turn the stove on.

You will need:
6 cups of prepared Prickly Pear Juice
1/4 cup lemon juice (either fresh or bottled)
9 cups of sugar
2 boxes of powdered pectin
1/2 tsp of butter or margarine (to reduce foaming)

Put your jar lids (the seal part) into a sauce pan of water and heat to boiling. Turn the fire down and keep warm.

Measure the sugar into a large bowl and set aside.

Measure 6 cups of prepared juice into a large spaghetti pot and add 1/4 cup lemon juice. Add both packages of pectin and whisk or stir well. Add 1/2 tsp butter - this will help keep the foam down once the jelly starts boiling hard.

Cook on high heat, stirring constantly, until it comes to a full rolling boil that cannot be stirred down.

While stirring, pour all of the sugar in all at once, and keep stirring over high heat until it comes back to a full rolling boil.

Don't take your eyes off it at this point.

Once it is at a full rolling boil, boil it hard for one full minute - this is important, use your timer if you can.

Turn the stove off and remove from hear and keep stirring until the boil dies down. If there is foam on the top, use a metal spoon to skim it off and discard it (I put it into a bowl and use it as my first taste after all the jars are sealed, but you shouldn't have much foam if you put the butter in).

Ladle the jelly into jars to within 1/8" from the top. When they are all filled, wipe off the rims with a wet cloth.

One at a time, get the lids out of the hot water with tongs and put lid and ring onto the jar. Tighten as tight as you can and set back down on a level surface away from drafts.


Repeat with all the jars, setting them close together so they will cool slowly. In about half an hour to an hour you should start hearing the sweet sound of lids popping as they seal.

Don't disturb them til the next day, then you can set them into a sink of clean water and finish getting the jelly off the outside, dry off and label. If they have sealed, they will keep for years.

If the seal didn't tighten they will still keep a long time, but you could either refrigerate those or process them in a boiling water bath if you want (per the recommendations of the NCHFP). Until recently -- oh sometime last week I'm sure -- we sealed jelly with paraffin wax and kept it until we used it up!

The first post told how to find and gather the ripe prickly pears. You might want to refer back to it if you just arrived. This post is part 2: making the juice. Part 3 will explain how to make the jelly.

Preparing the prickly pears: I always singe (pronounced "sinj") the pears before I do anything with them. This helps assure that all those spines are gone. If you have a gas stove, you can do this over a burner. Otherwise, rev up the grill and do it there. You need flames to burn off the spines.

Hold each pear by tongs or a long fork and hold especially the blossom end into the fire, until it stops sparking, then turn and flame the other side, until all sides and top and bottom have been singed. Don't worry about overdoing it - for some reason the skins just never char, so you can keep them in the fire quite a long time if necessary. Set aside into a bowl and flame the next one until all are done.

Next, get a cutting board, sharp knife, your gloves, and tongs or a fork.

They can be eaten raw and you might like the flavor. To eat them that way, singe them and cut off the ends. Using a paring knife, hold the pear with a fork and cut away the peeling and discard. Then, cut the peeled pear in half and, with a spoon, scoop out the seeds - they are
hard and inedible. What is left is tasty raw fruit! You could prepare them this way, then candy them if you like, but I always make jelly.

To make juice so you can make jelly, there is no need to peel them nor to remove the seeds. Just cut the pear into 2 or 3 pieces and drop into a large cooking pot.

When they are all in the pot, add water until the pears are completely covered and an inch or two under water, depending on how many pears you have and how strong you want your juice.

Bring to a simmer and cook, covered, for about half an hour. This will give you the juice for your jelly. Strain it into a pot or pitcher, and discard the pulp of the pears (which will have lost their color into the water).

If you need more juice, and there is still a lot of color in the pears, you can add a little more fresh water to them and simmer again to get the last of the flavor from them. (The photo above shows the pears before they have been cooked. The juice is a much richer magenta color after cooking).

You can either make jelly right away or freeze the juice to use later.

Monday's post will have the jelly recipe.

One of my favorite things to make for Christmas gifts for many years was Prickly Pear Jelly. Devin asked me last year to make some, and Alvina mentioned it last week, so it is in my mind to make some this year. This article will be done in several parts, to cover the process from start to finish: from collecting the ripe prickly pears to beautiful jars of jelly.

The first part is finding the pears (or "tuna" as they are called in Spanish). I usually keep my eyes open throughout the year for sizeable prickly pear patches along county roads or waste places that might be ok to gather in. You can also ask friends with acreage if they have prickly pear cactus on their land, and if they would let you gather some.

We can't pick anything in State Parks or along state highways, but there's no need, really, because in the southwest, even up into Oklahoma, cactus is pretty common.

Once you have located a likely patch, keep your eyes open. Starting in late August or early September, the pears will begin ripening. You know they are ripe when they turn reddish purple. They ripen over time, with different plants turning red at different times Even in the same patch, some fruits will be ripe while others are still green. They will last a long time on the plant if they are not eaten by animals, so you have a little leeway, usually, to gather them.

CAUTION: THEY HAVE THORNS AND HORRIBLE LITTLE HAIR-LIKE SPINES on them, even on the pears!!!! I use a set of tongs to pull them so that I do not have to touch them at all - those little hair spines can get into gloves and are bad news!

I just grasp each ripe pear firmly with the tongs and twist and pull. They come right off. The riper the pear, the easier it will come loose. If your tongs are not strong, you can use them to hold the pear and a long knife to cut them at the base. Either way works fine. Just stay on strong footing and don't even think about trying to get pears from the middle of the patch. Leave those, and only collect the ones you can reach without reaching!!!

Drop them into a heavy paper sack (paper so the spines won't come thru and so you can throw it away when done. Do not reuse the bag as it will have invisible spines in it.

They will keep like this for several days until you are ready to use them. No need to refrigerate at this point.

Tomorrow's post will tell how to prepare them for eating and how to make juice for the jelly.  The third post tells how to make the jelly itself.

Our county has a shared Christian social ministry center that all of the local churches, local businesses, and local people help support. It is called Good Samaritan Ministries (www.goodsambwd.org) and includes a food pantry along with other services. People can come once each 30 days and get a grocery cart full of food, enough to feed a family for at least a week
- or more depending on famly size - and usually this even includes fresh frozen meat - even venison!

Volunteers from our church are responsible for the food pantry two days a month, and I try to go and help when I am off. My task is usually to help fill sacks with groceries. It is a lot of fun. Friends from church who are usually busy get a chance to visit with each other, and it is all good.

The people who come for food do not want to be wasteful so there is a bin where they can put back things they will not use. I noticed that one thing a lot of people put back are canned carrots. Plain old canned carrots are not my favorite either. I make a candied carrots dish that is easy to make and most ingredients are in the average pantry.

With permission from Good Samaritan's managers, I bought enough fresh oranges and made enough copies of the recipe to be able to give one to each family on "our" day along with their can(s) of carrots.

This was during a time when oranges were plentiful and on sale at the store, so it did not cost me much to buy the 5 bags necessary to have one for each of the 50 or so families we serve on the days our church works. It was a one-time thing, too, so it did not create expectations or cause a hardship to do this.

Here is my recipe for Candied Orange Carrots:

1 can of carrots
Juice of 1 orange or 1/2 cup of orange juice
1 Tbls of orange "zest"*** if available
1/4 cup sugar or honey (can also substitute brown sugar or syrup of any kind)
Mix together carrots, orange juice, orange zest and sugar or honey.
Simmer uncovered for 10 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally. Serve with any meal.

If you have Orange Marmalade, or peach or apricot jam, you can mix 1/2 cup of the jam with the carrots instead of using orange juice, peel and sugar.

*** "Zest" is citrus peel - just the orange (or yellow or green) part of the peel. Lemon zest and orange zest are most often called for, but you could make tangerine zest and lime zest. Remove in strips from the orange with a potato peeler or run the whole orange across a grater to
get the zest. There's even a special little tool you can get that takes the peel of in skinny strips.

You can dry or freeze the extra for future use. To dry it, just let it sit out on the counter until it is dry! It will keep for ages in a jar in the pantry. It is useful for cooking and baking with, and is great steeped with hot tea.

I wasn't able to be there that day, but they told me a lot of people thought it sounded good and said they were going to try it. They made extra copies of the recipe and put one into each family's sacks for the whole month.

There's been a 29% increase in the number of families served with food this year at Good Samaritan. It has jumped from around 600 families each month to nearly 800 per month. And there is always a rise at Christmas time, so we can expect that there may be a thousand families
for December in our little county.

Often charities need gifts of our time even more than money. With that many more people to serve, more helpers are needed to fill bags and do paperwork, otherwise people who come for groceries have to sit and wait a long time.

I am sure it is the same in your town. So if you have a little time to spare - even if only once in a while - it will be appreciated.

PS They don't call those graters "knuckle busters" for nothing! Careful not to grate your hand. If you do, the sticker on the fruit makes a handy make-do bandaid. ;-)

When I looked around the net for tips on organizing a freezer, three great ideas were to use stackable tubs, to separate beef, pork, and chicken, and to color code. To this I added my own preference to stand things upright in the bins, like a filing cabinet. That way I can see everything in each bin at a glance. Think vertically.

I measured everything, length, depth, width, including the width of the step in the bottom of the freezer, to be sure I would get bins that fit. I found these at the Dollar store in with the school supplies for $2 each. It would also be very easy to just use heavy cardboard boxes - cut hand-holds in the sides and don't worry about color coding.


Here are the first three baskets. We have a lot more beef than anything else right now and I separated the ground beef to its own tub. I put it in the bottom one just because. :-)


Here is the second tier. The chicken is on the left - there's only room for one basket on that side, because it sits on top of the step, and the basket that came with the freezer will fit over it. I put vegetables in the middle one. I filled the space in the back (outside the bins that are just a couple inches too short) with the large bags of blackberries and okra, standing upright. Those are large enough they will not fall over and get lost and since it is only those two things I will not forget they are there.


We don't have much chicken right now so packaged cheese (a good sale) filled the rest of that bin. It is important to fill all the space - the freezer will use less electricity and hold the cold better if things are packed tightly together. If you don't have enough food in it to fill the freezer, store bags of ice or gallons of frozen water, then you can remove them as needed to make room for food. Just be sure you can still close the lid effortlessly so that it will seal properly.

The top bins are for small packets, odd sizes, and things we will want to get to right away. Later on, when I have more packages of bell peppers, I'll probably give them their own bag that can sit down in one of the lower bins so they won't be exposed to warm air when we open it.

Speaking of warmth, this freezer will need to be defrosted once each year or two. It will hold the food far better than self-defrosting ones that work by actually warming up the sides of the freezer enough to melt the frost. It is no trouble to defrost it myself, plus that is good incentive to use up the food that is in there so we do not waste.

Right now, this arrangement looks good. We will see over time how well it actually works in practice.

I am so thankful to have a freezer again! We had one for many years, and it made it so much easier to feed our family of 3 boys! It was by far the single best tool for saving money and living well on a budget that we could have had.

We decided on a chest-type, which we have not had before (our other was an upright). I put it in the laundry room, and as Paul pointed out, it is handy as a folding table.



Now it is full of sirloin-on-sale and blackberries and okra and bell peppers! And I haven't a clue how to find anything in there.

We are having chicken for dinner tonight because I couldn't find the pork steaks.

So our next mission is to figure out how to organize it. Baskets? Boxes? Maps? Surprise Stew every night? Oh dear....

Update 09/08/09:  Here's how I ended up solving this: "How to Organize a Chest type Freezer, Part 2"

One thing I am always looking for is ways to use the pickles, relishes and preserves, jams and jellies that we put up when canning.

It's rather late in the season, but if you still have figs (or access to them), here's a good recipe I found. You could use fig preserves instead of fresh or dried figs, because by the time they are cooked, they pretty much are exactly like preserves. I started with fresh ones, and cooked them down, but in the winter I will use my fig preserves.

It is sort of like a Fig Newton, but the dough becomes a bit more like pastry than cake.
I'll just post the link and you can go there to see the recipe:
http://www.cajuncookingrecipes.com/closeclone/fig_newtons.htm

One note about the recipe: the "soak in water" part mentioned in the recipe is only for dried figs. Do not do this with fresh ones. The photo below is figs cooking in sugar - no water added.



Be sure to let the dough chill the full length of time or longer. It is a very tender dough, and it helps to roll it out on a pastry cloth - especially the top crust. I still had to pat it into place gently.


Spread the cooked figs (or fig preserves) onto half the dough, then cover with the over half. Don't worry about getting it tidy. By the time you cut into squares it will be fine.




Never wash your rolling pin if you can help it. Water is very bad for the wood, and also removes the "seasoning" that helps it develop a very smooth finish that dough won't stick to. Just take a clean towel and rub it clean.




Cut into rather small pieces, as they are very rich. These were a big hit with everyone who tried them. They also store nicely and are good the next day.