domestic dilettante, humorless feminist shrew

First, important garden news. Two nights ago, Nick and I ate the stuff in the picture above for supper. Thumb-sized baby carrots! A tomato that looks somewhat pallid in the picture but was, in fact, both perfectly ripe and delicious. Today I took another tomato off the same plant (a Better Bush, for those of you keeping up with this sort of thing) and gave it to my mother; another on the same plant will be picked tomorrow to be sliced thin and eaten with bread.

Now for more awesome: last weekend, I made jam! Nick and Emily were very entertained, commenting independently of each other that I was jamming (Nick) or having a jam session (Emily).

I made cherry-vanilla jam and peach-poblano jam. The peach was dead easy; the cherry a bit more work, though I spread it out over several days. Before I go any further, I have to warn you that this is probably–okay, almost certainly–not the USDA-approved method of jamming. That said, I’ve made a hell of a lot of jam, and this is pretty much how I always do it, and it’s never been a problem. I feel like so long as you have sufficient sugar and you process the jam adequately, you shouldn’t have a problem. If you find this worrisome, then either don’t use these recipes or freeze your jam when it’s cooled. Use common sense; don’t do something you’re not comfortable with.

I went out and bought a cheap little digital scale, because I hate measuring fruit. If you don’t have a scale, just figure out how many cups of (uncooked) fruit you have and use 3/4 as much sugar.

The recipe has the jam-making ingredients. This is a list of non-food things that are necessary: clean jars; new lids for jars; rings for jars; tongs or a silicone oven mitt, dishtowels. The last one isn’t mentioned in the recipe, I don’t think, but trust me when I say that you’re going to need them. This is a list of non-food items that are helpful, but not necessary: a wide-mouth funnel; tongs made specifically to lift jars; a ladle. Ball sells a canning utensil kit that includes a headspace clearer (which I’ve never used), tongs made to lift jars, a magnetic lid picker-upper, and a wide-mouth funnel. I do not recommend purchasing this, as my tongs fell apart halfway through making the jam. They were still functional, but the nice thick plastic on the part that picks up the jars deformed and fell off, which made the picking up much more difficult. I suppose that’s what I get for buying a six-dollar set of canning utensils. The wide-mouth funnel’s great, though.

Right. Peach first, then, eh?

Yeah, my classy jam-in-action shot is jam and cottage cheese on a cracker. So it goes.

This jam is, I have to say, totally delicious. It set up beautifully (helped, no doubt, by the fact that I had some underripe peaches in the bunch–more pectin) and tastes amazing.

3 pounds peaches
2.25 pounds sugar
3 small poblano peppers
basil
2 tsp salt

First things first: Your jars need to be sterilized. You can do this in one of two ways: boiling them for a while (ten minutes, probably, but I always get distracted and leave them in there for half an hour) or by putting them in a cold oven, turning the oven to 300, and then letting the jars hang out for fifteen minutes or so after the oven’s come to temperature. The lids and rings of the jars need to be sterilized, too. Drop them in a small pot of boiling water, let them boil ten minutes, and then leave them in the water until you need them.

After you’ve made the jam, it’ll need to be processed. This sounds scary but is actually really easy, plus other people find it very impressive. All you will need for this is an enormous pot with something to keep the jars off the floor of the pot. I use a pasta pot, the kind with the holey insert. Fill this pot most of the way with water and bring it to a boil as you make your jam.

Chop the peaches. I threw about half of them (the less ripe ones) into my food processor and whirred them about for a minute, which I think gave the jam a great texture, but just chopping is fine. Clean, seed, and devein your peppers. Wear gloves while you do this, otherwise your hands will tingly uncomfortably for an hour afterward, and if you swipe at your nose or eye, you will regret it.

Chop the poblanos finely–I cut them into narrow strips and then made a very small dice of them.

In a large (larger than you think you’ll need; jam foams up) pot, cook the peaches and the peppers over medium heat (with a tiny bit of water if you didn’t puree any of the fruit) for about twenty minutes, until the peaches start to look less like individual pieces of fruit and more like a uniform stew. If you didn’t puree anything, mash it up a bit.

Add the salt and then the sugar, slowly, stirring well. Leave the pot on medium and go check your email or something. You’ll want to stir every five or ten minutes, depending on the strength of your “medium”, but you’ll let this cook for a while, maybe a half an hour. It’s done when it looks like jam–it will be really obvious. If you can’t tell, drop a bit onto a cold plate and see what it looks like–again, if it looks like jam, you’re good to go.

If you’re not getting a jammy consistency, or if you like an especially firmly-set jam, you might want to add some pectin here. Commercial pectin comes in little silver bags, and I’d add maybe half a bag. If you have a few underripe peaches, this isn’t likely to be a problem; if your peaches have been sitting around for a few days, you might need it.

While the peaches and sugar are cooking, wash some basil and dry it really, really well. Chiffonade it and set it aside until the peaches are done.

When you have jam, take your pot off the heat. Stir in the basil.

Ladle your hot jam into the sterilized jars. A wide-mouth funnel helps here, though I’ve made plenty of jam without one. I fill the jars to the bottom of the screw-on tracks–you know how there’s the bump in the glass where the lid screws on? When I hit that, the jars are full. Pull a lid out of the sterilizing water, dry it with a clean towel, and put it on the jar. Then screw the ring over it. Don’t go too tight with the rings–I always freak out and think that I’m going to end with jam jars full of water if I don’t screw them on tightly, but you really shouldn’t, because I’m told that it increases the (slim but extant) chance that your jars will explode as they’re processed. Anyhow, screw the ring on to where you comfortably stop, and don’t try to tighten it.

Do that for all your jars.

Now for the processing. Remember the big pot of boiling water from earlier? You’re going to very carefully put the jars in. My pot can only handle four jars at a time, because you can’t stack them at all, and you need the water to be over their tops. (This may mean that you have to add more water if you’re canning a whole bunch of jars.) Once the water comes back to a boil, set the timer for ten minutes. (A little longer is fine–I often end up going more like fifteen, just because I’m doing other things.) When the timer dings, pull the jars out of the water bath using either tongs or a silicone oven mitt.

Let the jars cool on the counter. You’ll hear them sealing as the night goes on–ping! Ping! Sometimes they’re really loud, other times they’re barely noticeable. Don’t worry too much about it.

When morning rolls around, check your jars to make sure that they’ve sealed. The little button in the middle of the lid should have popped down–if it goes down when you press on it, the jar didn’t seal properly. This isn’t a huge deal, and the jam’s perfectly fine to eat, but it won’t be shelf-stable. Stick it in the fridge and eat within a few weeks, or in the freezer and eat within a few weeks of defrosting it.

So far, we’ve eaten the jam on cottage cheese and brie, and I dipped a bit of chicken in it the other night to good effect. The peach and sugar mean that it’s still a sweetish jam, but the peppers give it a bit of sweet-hot kick.

I didn’t realize how long this would get, so I think that the cherry-vanilla jam will be posted in a day or two. Tomorrow’s the Hamburger Festival, so I have to rest up.