Beets: How I Love Thee

Indeed, I love beets. I've been wanting to pickle them for a few years but first had to find a good recipe for them (not easy) which I located in The Joy Of Cooking book "All About Canning". Is it really a good recipe? I won't know until the beets have sat around for at least a few weeks. Pickles are not good until all the flavors have had a chance to really get personal with each other in the jars. The concept of old food is interesting. People are so freaked out by germs and bacterias and yet it takes certain yeasts and bacterias to age or ferment some of our favorite foods.

Isn't it weird that most cheddar cheese is at least two years old? I find myself thinking about the age of my cheese and how it relates to my life. You could have a baby and make some cheese at the same time, and then when you're baby is a toddler and you're crying about how fast the years have passed, only then will your cheese be ready to eat. That's some OLD dairy. Yet the idea of drinking sour milk freaks the living sh*$ out of us all. What the heck do we think "sour" cream is anyway, angel farts?

It must be admitted though that when foods are purposely fermented or aged we're applying some muscle to the right kinds of micro-organisms. We aren't courting just any old yeasties. We are pretty specific about the ones we like, with good reason. There are some pretty dangerous ones out there.

You know how we always hear about how Native Americans respect animals more and show that respect by not wasting even a tiny bit of the animals they kill? They use every scrap. But you don't hear people saying the same thing about vegetables. I was thinking about this yesterday and enjoying the fact that in pickling my beets I was making use of all of their parts. Now that I have developed an appreciation for the beet greens I washed them all and saved all the good greens. I blanched them and put them in the fridge for a meal later this week.

There are two possibilities for the stems and trimmed bits: 1) the compost pile. Obviously you have a compost pile. Right? (Well, I can't be all superior here because I didn't have one until just this year. But seriously, you should start one if you don't already have one.) or 2) chicken scraps. My girls LOVE kitchen scraps. They do have preferences though and I know they don't care for carrots. They love greens and beets as far as I can tell. So these scraps go into the production of fresh eggs. That is so cool, I'm totally geeking out over it!

So am I as spiritual and cool as a Native American for not wasting any part of the vegetables I harvest? I know I'm not as good looking as a Native American. But clearly I have deep respect for nature.

I was supposed to ripple cut my beets. I don't have a ripple cutter though. So I sliced them in the Cuisinart. They are a little thin and the rounds were too big so I had to cut them in half while carefully giving myself second degree burns. They aren't going to look quite as pretty as I would like. If I get a chance to do another batch I think I'll borrow Lisa E.'s crinkle cutter or I'll julienne them. Either way would make a prettier presentation. Does it matter?

HELL YEAH!

I like my food to be pretty. You know how some people are perfectionists with remodels and painting? You know how I'm not quite so particular with my remodels? But I am a perfectionist when it comes to the results I get in my kitchen. Food should be nutritious, tasty, AND look appetizing. It should be better than anything I could buy in a restaurant or store.

In the interests of giving others the courage to start canning some of their own jam or other foods, I am going to list here the most important tips I can think of for canning:

• Always put your canning pot on to boil before you start anything else. It can take over an hour to get it to a rolling boil. Sometimes longer depending on the size of the pot and the strength of your stove.

• The most important thing to know before canning is this: preserving food can never make bad food better. Never use old, bruised, or rotting foods to preserve. Preserving doesn't stop deterioration, it merely slows it. So you should always start with the best produce possible- you want it ripe for best nutrition and flavor, but not over ripe or the flavor and nutrition will be inferior as will be the texture.

• Everything that you use for canning should be clean first. However, if anyone ever tells you to use bleach or disinfectant to sterilize your kitchen they are freaked out and giving very unsafe advice. It is unnecessary to sterilize your kitchen with chemicals. Hot water and soap will do.

• Before eating any home canned goods check to see if the seal is still strong. If you can't pry the lid off with your fingernail it's good. It should be slightly concave, if it makes a popping sound and gives a little to pressure the seal is no good. There shouldn't be a primordial ooze leaking out. Smell it: if it smells foul, it probably is. Unless it's kimchi and you hate kimchi. Because if it's something you hate it's going to seem foul to you whether it is or not. If there's mold or bad smells, dump it out. The only other indication that the food has gone bad is if the texture is slimy. But you would notice these things in commercially canned goods too, right? It's really no different. Except that with home canned goods you can be sure there are no bug parts or rat parts in it. You can't be so sure about commercially canned foods. Once you start thinking about that you may never want to eat commercially canned foods again.
  

• Follow the directions. If you follow the directions you will be successful. If you aren't sure of the directions you can call your local extension office and they will probably have someone who can answer your questions. Or you can call a friend who's experienced which is even better. Best of all is to find a friend to teach you. You can always e-mail me with questions and if it's something I don't know the answer to I can most likely find the answer somewhere else.
  

• Start with jam. You can't go wrong with jam. It's the easiest and safest thing to can. It's high in acid so the risk of botulism is nonexistent if you follow the instructions and properly process it. Most people like jam. Jam is good. Jam is delicious. Right now it's berry season so get your buns out there and pick some berries!!

Smith's Blueberry Flats

Blueberry season is here in earnest and I missed it last year so this year I am not letting it slip past me. I took a ride on highway 240 yesterday morning where all cars are going 70 miles per hour (note to traffic cops: you may want to show up every once in a while.) on a two lane highway whose highest legal speed is 55 miles per hour. It's a beautiful road and even though I was fully able to keep up with the speeding traffic, the cars kept insisting on passing me.

It made me angry. What the hell is everyone is such a goddamn hurry for? And why do they feel they need to be ahead of me just because I'm on a scooter? It actually brought out the testosterone in me and made me want to show them what a bad-ass my little scooter is. But this is the kind of behavior on roads that makes road-kill out of people. So the next time I'm on that pretty road I'm going to go the speed limit and let everyone pass me dangerously. (There's no shoulder to pull over on to let people pass).

People are annoying.

There were some people picking blueberries when I arrived. One couple was just finishing up picking forty pounds of them to freeze. There was one other person picking who engaged in some awed conversation with the couple and their forty pounds.

Man "Wow, that's a lot of blueberries."
couple "Yep. Forty pounds."
Man "What are you going to do with them?"
Couple "Mostly we freeze them."
Man "Cool. So how do you do that?"
Couple "Freeze 'em on cookie sheets in the freezer and then bag 'em."
Man "But you wash them first, right?"
Couple "Nope. The water will make them all stick together."

Thoughtful pause.

Man "So you wash them when you're ready to use them?"
Couple "Nope."
Man "So you never wash them?"

After the people left I was alone out there with the crickets and the hot sun for about an hour and a half. I can't say my thoughts were restful or pleasant, but still, there's something delicious about time spent industriously by one's self in the middle of nowhere.

Hell, it wasn't the middle of nowhere, it was the middle of the Blueberry Flats! I picked twenty pounds.

That's a lot of blueberries. My kitchen kind of smells smurfy now.

I always eat a lot less jam than I think I will. When Max was under two and still eating peanut butter and jam sandwiches we went through at least a jar of jam a week. I was eating a lot more jam toast back then too. I always thought that it would be great to make all the jam I could possibly use in a year which I calculated at around 52 jars. I wanted to never buy jam again. Unfortunately I haven't bothered to reassess that goal since neither Max nor I are eating much jam these days. So I still have lots of blackberry jam left from last year.

I certainly want some blueberry jam because I've never made any, but I finally realized that I need to make less jam. I'm more likely to use a sauce that I can put over yogurt. In spite of this new goal, I managed to make nine half pints of blueberry lime jam (very good!), and six and a half pints of plain blueberry jam which was supposed to be sauce because I didn't cook it to the jelling point, yet somehow, it is thick enough to be called jam.

I also prepared a batch of blueberry lime jam to make Chelsea's way: you cook your jam only for ten minutes then let it sit over night, or over many nights in the fridge, until you have enough energy to heat it up again and process it. Not boiling it to death before processing really helps to preserve a fresher flavor. Letting it sit for a day helps to develop the pectin or something, because this process tends to help the jam be a little thicker.

So I'm going to end up with over twenty jars of blueberry jam. Shit.

That was just using about twelve pounds of blueberries. So with the rest of them I'm really going to make sauce. Which means being careful not to boil for more than a couple of minutes. Sauce is great for pancakes, ice cream, yogurt, or to pour over something exotic like cheese cake.

I'd love to freeze a bunch of them but I still don't have an extra fridge or freezer. So no freezer space. Which is too bad because blueberries freeze very well and are great for using in smoothies or for tossing frozen into muffins or coffee cake batter.

Anyone else taking advantage of blueberry season? Tell me how!!