Yes we are still eating...

but life has been on something of a "need to eat RIGHT NOW - no time for plate styling or photos" schedule of late.

I lack photos to persuade but nevertheless highly recommend to you the following for some tried and true fine eating:

Simply Recipes Blender Hollandaise sauce (for whatever your version of Eggs Benedict needs might be)

Garlic Roasted Chicken from the Food Network (I used bone in thighs and white wine rather than vinegar)

Tacos of Carnitas Roasted with Orange, Milk and Pepper from Cookstr

We had our tacos with a version of Austin Gastronome's Salsa Verde

Meanwhile, tomato plants are (finally!) in the ground and I am back into Chief Bug Smasher/Waterer territory for the season.

And speaking of the season: loquats are a-ripening.

In order to get our fair share before the bugs/birds/squirrels have taken all the lower fruit I can reach from my wobbly ladder perch,  this year I picked a bit early and will now depend upon the displayed low tech indoors ripening technique.

Overripe bananas plus not so ripe loquats plus a plastic bag equals WONDERFULLY RIPE FRUIT FOR JAM!  I hope, anyway.

That's Plan A and while the loquats huff ethylene and carbon I will be methodically gathering up jam jars and checking our supplies of lids and rims.

I'll have to see how much usable loquat fruit I end up with before deciding if I can make all loquat jam or will need to mix in strawberries or peaches.

I admit it is a lot of pitting and peeling for a fairly small usable amount per fruit.  Regardless, the novelty grabs me annually and I love having home made jam to pull out on demand (even though the making of it gives me night terrors).  Having homemade jam around makes me smile - every single time.  So worth it.

Is there something you will go to extra trouble to do or make just because it pleases you to be the person who will do that?  Some special sauce or quick bread or cake or dish that you make because you like what it says about you to do so?  Fess up in the comments - we all want to know!

Comedy of Terrors

Boil...boil...toil and trouble....

I have a love/hate relationship with making jam at home.

I love having it to eat and to share.

I hate (hate hate!) making it.

The instructions are so precise - measure "exactly" this and "exactly" that, cook it for "exactly" this much time. I wondered if there was an inside joke at the pectin company to see how many times "exact" or "exactly" could be worked into the instructions and still pass institutional muster.

My Mom was apparently scared enough she kept a wide berth from home canning and home canned goods. When neighbors gave us anything in a mason jar she'd as often as not taste a teensy bit, pronounce it suspect and dump it out.

She was a registered nurse and somewhere along the line somebody scared her half to death about the potential for killing off beloved family and friends alike with botulism. As fears go, this one was a doozy and she nearly passed it along to me.

I say nearly not because I am not afraid of killing somebody with my semi-casual home canning attempts, I totally am. However I am not so afraid that it stops me.

That nagging fear does make me edgy as all hell until I get the stuff safely done and jar lids have made their popping noise and refuse to bounce back after the appropriate amount of time. It is well after the jam seems to have set in its jarry home and I have refrigerated, opened up, and sampled some with no ill effects before I begin to relax and casually inform friends of my foray into Little House on the Prairie/Suburb territory. My relief will be so great I will obnoxiously be working that announcement into conversation at every turn.

"Sure, I'd read about that school closing for a week. You are right, parents must be freaking out. Say, speaking of home canning...."

Last year when I made loquat jam for the first (and second) time I think I quintuple checked that each batch had set, rotating the jars so often it was a small miracle I didn't drop and smash one on the tile floor in the kitchen (and not that I am superstitious but now I have written this what are the odds I won't do precisely that in the next week or so. Hmmm? Bets anybody?)

Last year's loquat jam.

This year I was slow getting to the tree with the larger loquats. They come in two sizes in our back yard. I have no clue why - both trees were planted at the same time. I ended up with mostly the teensy variety and knew I wouldn't have enough for an entire batch of jam. Feeling insecure about trying to figure out fractions of a pectin package I thought I'd combine whatever loquats I could get with some local organic strawberries.

The goop left on the stirring spoon tastes like fruity sugar sure enough. I am currently using my not for canning stock pot and not for canning tongs to gently maneuver the jars into their boiling baths, four at a time, and keeping my fingers crossed we will end up with a year's worth of jam and not a year's worth of fruity syrup.

They look pretty, sure enough.

This year's strawberry/loquat jam (I hope!)

But it won't be until tomorrow if I know if everything went well bath wise and later than that to see if it all sets up the way it is supposed to.

I hate waiting. I hate the slightly terrified totally frazzled way I feel when I do this. I love the jam (so far anyway) and the way I feel when I can give somebody a jar of organic home prepped goodness.

I am hearing the requisite reassuring "plink" of the jar lids sealing as they are cooling. Maybe three is the charm and next year I will feel all relaxed and wonderful when I try my hand at jammin'. Maybe.....

Seconds

Recently I'd written about my hesitance to post about certain meals in some misguided attempt to protect you from food that is/was not something-enough to blog about. Then I proposed that cooking things so I could blog about them rather than blogging about what I was cooking anyway, was the reverse of what I am interested in doing.

In that spirit I will admit to you a very typical yo-yo week around here dinner wise.

One night we had Niman Ranch pork chops, grilled, with sautéed apples, asparagus and beer muffins.For St. Patrick's Day, (warm temperatures be damned!) we had Irish Stew and Soda Bread. I posted separately about the bread, so here is a peek at the stew.I have a soft spot for stew.

My own mother had, as a result of a surgery meant to correct a progressive hearing loss decades earlier, a nearly complete inability to taste salt. That meant unless she was very careful, we all ended up with some pretty salty tasting meals. This iffyness put her off cooking somewhat, but she would reliably prepare beef stew for us about once a week the entire time I was growing up, and of all the things she cooked for us, I think her stew had to be a favorite.

Stew was one of the first meals I attempted on my own as a very young hostess, and I still feel most domesticated in certain ways when I have a pot of stew bubbling away, or safely tucked into the refrigerator, serving as potential for a nearly instant delicious meal whenever I need one.

As to the soda bread, in Ireland it is reportedly baked with great frequency as it does not keep particularly well. The third day after I'd baked it we still had a quarter loaf left so I decided to test out the premise that it makes great toast. Great toast it made, indeed. It takes a bit more time to get a nice browning going on with the slices, but the toast tastes very much like a hot biscuit. Any way you like your biscuits, you will probably enjoy soda bread toast. For us that morning, that meant butter and homemade loquat jam from the bounty of last Spring's harvest.One final note (I always have trouble finishing phone conversations and posts either one). We have loads more loquats out ripening even as you read this.I am excited at the prospects of jamming it up again in a few weeks when the fruit is ready. Jam! Yay!

Here's your question to mull over and prompt sharing in the comments section for today. If you could never eat your Mom's home cooking again, what would you miss most? For me it is my Mom's Beef Stew. What is your favorite dish that Mom makes?

Jammed Up

With all the brash confidence a second time jam maker could muster, I prepared another batch of Loquat Jam yesterday.

This time I left the peels on, reasoning the extra pectin and body from the skins would add a certain "toothiness" to the jam that I personally prefer. There is always "enough" sugar in these recipes (says me) to overcome any tartness the skins might yield. To my palate most commercial jam tends to rely too much on sweeteners, resulting in a loss of flavor that is what had me opening the jar in the first place. I think of it as "jammyness" and it is why I usually prefer home canned jam to most store stuff, even some of the expensive imports.

To me a good jam evokes warm afternoons. I want to be able to taste the sunshine in the fruit. Otherwise, why bother?

There are clear warnings against trying to reduce the sugar in the recipes provided in the pectin packages, with dire predictions of unset jam as the result. There are other products out there purportedly designed to produce a sugarless or reduced sugar jam, but I've not been able to find them on the shelves of my grocery store. It could be they appear and sell out early as do certain other seasonal products, but now I will keep an eye out and garner my own stash for next go round. Or not.

Jam is not something that should be treated like fresh fruit. It is a sweet treat and should be used judiciously, acknowledging the fact that it is mostly sugar, sugar flavored with cooked fruit, and not the other way around. I have been using organic fruit (seeing as we have never touched the loquat trees other than a rare trimmed branch) and organic sugar, but organic sugar is still, well, SUGAR.

Now I have the remainder of my ripe loquats sitting in a large bowl on the counter and scads more quickly ripening in the morning sun.

While I am told homemade jars of jam are welcome gifts, and I have always appreciated the jars I have been given, I believe my current stash of 12 jars will satisfy most of my gift giving AND jam eating needs for the foreseeable future. I usually make a jalapeño cranberry sauce I give away to various friends and they give me a jar of fig jam in return when it is "that" time of year. I am not sure they'll fully appreciate a switch up exchange to "loquat jam for fig jam" at this point.

What to do? For starters tonight I will prepare my usual Chicken Curry recipe, substituting chopped loquats for the chopped apple regularly called for. I am going to throw some Sriracha Sauce and ginger into some of that first opened jar of loquat jam to create a chutney to go along with the chicken curry.

Tomorrow I have plans to make the "hot pepper relish" recipe that comes inside the pectin boxes substituting loquats for some of the peppers in the ingredients list.

If I still have "too many loquats" left after all that I will give some away along with a copy of the pork tenderloin recipe I posted earlier. I want to try a simple purée of the fruit that is left. I am going to proceed with skins on - peeling loquats is tedious unless they are larger than an egg and most of the fruit I have left is smaller than that. I will strain the whole shebang, and freeze the reduction afterwards.

In this age of the built in ice maker, I don't have ice cube trays any longer. I can't decide on whether to buy trays or try to use muffin tins or just freezing in larger containers and then breaking the frozen fruit up into smaller sections. I want to have something ice cubish on hand this summer to use in iced tea or sangria. Or Margaritas... Loquat Daiquiris? Loquat Bellinis? Hmmmm- maybe I won't be giving many loquats away after all. Once we hit the hot dry days of summertime, a little frozen loquat might go a long way.

Loquats

I am embarrassed to admit my family has been watching loquats ripen, fall to the ground, and spoil, all without even attempting to harvest any for ourselves. I can't recall how long this has been the case. I originally bought two loquat trees in one gallon planters over 15 years ago and now both trees are as tall as our two story house.

Similarly, I don't recollect when the trees began to develop full fledged fruit, but I do know that my neglecting to pick the dropped fruit up out of the area underneath the two mature trees at one point resulted in a sea of baby loquat trees, completely covering their part of the yard.

I finally reached my breaking point and decided to clear the small trees out. I gave away as many as I could and composted the rest. At least a half dozen times while I was clearing out one set of saplings, I'd be hit on the head by a small loquat falling to the ground. About the size of ping pong balls or smaller, they were strange to me, usually still fairly green, and just didn't seem worth the bother.

Somehow, all that changed. I don't know if it was all the rain last year, the result of clearing out the hundreds of tiny competitors for nutrients, or a certain age being reached, but this Spring our two loquat trees were noticeably laden with fruit. Good sized fruit. Good sized golden fruit, some of it at least ripening easily within reach of a ladder.

None of that might have made much difference except that I am different this year. Having read Michael Pollan's "Omnivore's Dilemma" and Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle", I am determined to grow more of my own food. I was fortunate enough to score a spot on Tecolote Farm's CSA basket delivery list this Spring and have already stretched my usual choices of what to eat while meeting the challenge of preparing and cooking what is locally ripe.

On top of all that I have been working with my husband to take areas of our yard out of grass and into garden beds where we have planted native flowers, various culinary herbs, and several vegetables.

Bottom line, to have this abundance of fruit on two trees ripening within a few feet of my bedroom window was not an opportunity I would choose to miss again this year. Carefully opening a loquat, taking out the seeds, peeling it and slipping the slightly firm flesh into my mouth sealed the deal. They are a wonderful combination of peach, apricot and cherry flavors.

Out came the ladder and I hand picked a bag half full of loquats. I've never made jam before, but with several pounds of ripe fruit on the kitchen counter and countless pounds more steadily ripening on the trees, I knew I'd have to find some way to preserve as much of this bounty as we could possibly eat, and share the rest with my friends, neighbors, and the local wildlife. (Credit where credit is due - the birds, squirrels and bugs have been enjoying our loquats all along. It was only the humans who were missing the loquat boat.)

I adapted the recipe for peach jam that came with the instructions inside the box of pectin:
4 cups finely chopped loquats, seeded, peeled, with inner membrane removed
2 tablespoons fresh lemon juice
5 1/2 cups sugar

Use a food processor on "pulse" to chop the fruit. Process it in two batches, pulsing 4-5 short bursts until the fruit is finely chopped but not pureed.

Combine fruit, lemon juice and one box of pectin. Bring to a rolling boil stirring constantly, then add sugar. Bring to a rolling boil again, stirring, and cook for exactly one minute.

Remove from heat, skim off foam, and place in prepared jars for processing. Process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes. The jam has not cooled long enough for me to test for sealing or to try the results, but the jars sure enough LOOK like they've got regulation jam inside and the lids all popped, just like they were supposed to.

I did learn a couple of things. Loquats are much smaller than peaches so the work involved in pitting and peeling simply takes longer. It took me the better part of an hour to prepare the fruit for chopping. After that, everything went pretty quickly. I discovered that the loquat peel comes off easily - I could use the side of a spoon to both pull the interior membrane around the seeds off and to peel the skin. It often came off in only one or two large pieces.

I also decided that the jam recipes call for enough sugar that I will try a batch of not so ripe loquats next for a slightly tarter jam. Past that if I still have loquats available and the will left to preserve more jars, I will try to put together some version of a loquat/jalapeño salsa.

As a first time canner, I learned that size matters. Yes, sure, a no-brainer for real, but the jars I purchased were too tall to allow for 1-2 inches of boiling water to cover in the tallest pot I have. I figure on using those taller jars for other projects and I will keep an eye out for a taller pot at my local Goodwill store. And in the future I will buy shorter jars that will fit in the pots I have on hand.

I can barely wait for the jam to cool sufficiently to test if it sealed and set properly. After all these years of looking at loquats, and pulling out baby loquat trees, it will be truly rewarding to be enjoying the fruit itself. In the next few days, I will prepare a pork loin with a loquat reduction sauce. Loquats, welcome to the family table.

If you have something you prepare from food you have grown - check out this web site dedicated to that very prospect:.