Adventures in Canning - Midwest girl at heart

Last week I participated in my very first Google hangout.  It looked like this:

I must say, that in this instance, a Google product was finally cooler in real life than in a Google commercial (Have you seen those Google HangOut commercials?  Those friends seem lame!  Mine are not lame.). 

It was much needed interaction with my support network.  We're now spread out all over the world and while we used to get together at least once a month to drink wine and complain about lab (under the guise of a "book club"), I now rarely see anyone at all.  In steps technology and suddenly, we're all drinking wine again :)

About 3 glasses in, I realized I could not remember the non-Michigan word for "sliding glass door."  My friends were surprised to hear there was a "Michigan word" for sliding glass door.  So I looked it up: Doorwall  And there it is. I can go out and earn a PhD, modify my behavior to say "soda" instead of "pop" but three glasses of wine in, I'm going to be emphasizing the first A in "salad" and using words like "doorwall" expecting people to know what I'm talking about.  I'm lucky j thinks it sounds "cute."  Her current favorite Michigan term is "Ja'eet?"  A contraction of the sentence "Did you eat?"

Since that day, I realized today, I have been in full Michigan mode.  And here's why -

 j has been in San Francisco for a week now and still has another week to go.  It's been pretty quiet around here without her and frankly, I just feel sad when she's not around.  Enter, my coping mechanism, Cooking.

I started cooking as a coping mechanism during the early stages of grad school.  After weeks and months of not having a damn thing work in lab (even when I followed ALL the steps and was VERY careful), I found that coming home and cooking dinner from scratch was deeply meditative and satisfying.  Cooking is actually a lot like working in a lab.  There are "protocols," steps to follow, many stages where you wait for a certain period of time before adding the next thing and frankly cooking involves a lot of science... but unlike working in a biomedical sciences lab, cooking often produces something that "works."  It was pretty rare that I made anything that is actually inedible.  It might not be the best thing on the planet, but edible, yes.  Cooking has become a way for me to revalidate my abilities.  Things out in the real world might not be going my way, but at the very least I know I can come home and cook a delicious meal.

(Side note:  j knows this about me and a few weeks ago came home to me at the dining room table making tiny pies in 1/2 size mason jars.  The first words out of her mouth were "What happened!?"  Thankfully, it was just that the peaches I wanted to use for Sunday's dessert with j's parents were bruised and if I hadn't used them right away they would have gone bad.  This time, no crisis.  Just crazy :)  )

Anyway, this week, it's been hard to cook a lot because even though I am still receiving our CSA veggie box, there's only me here to eat it.  Thus, canning has become this week's activity.  It's mid-Western, it's one step beyond cooking... and it reminds me of home and my own mother and that's calming.

On Sunday, I went to a local orchard recommended by j's brother, Milburn Orchards.  It was hot, I was by myself, but searching for blackberries in the bushes is a surprisingly addictive thing to do.  You become protective of your particular area.  You eye newcomers and hope they don't come over and find better berries.  All in all, I got pretty into it.  So into it, in fact, that I ended up picking nearly 10lbs of berries!  Oops.  Well, blackberry jam it was!  I also put about a pound of blackberries into some brandy and am "brewing" my own blackberry brandy.  We'll know how that turns out in 2 months...

While at the orchards, I also stopped by the market an bought a 25lb basket of Red Haven peaches.  This was really my intention of going to the farm, but I quickly learned that they don't do U-Pick peaches.  So I bought a basket and brought them home for canning, visions of childhood dancing through my head.

Today was the big peach canning day.  So I set up my sink station:

The little bowl on the left is for pits and peach skins.  The colander is in the sink in an attempt to make it drain slower (so I can fill it with cold water) and the glass bowl on the right is for catching peach juice and any reject peaches that turn to mush when I try to separate them from their pits (more on that later).

Then I set up my kitchen.  I do not have an ideal kitchen by any stretch of the imagination.  Ideally, a canning kitchen would have a double sink, a stretch of counter, the stove and another stretch of counter.  This would streamline the blanching the peaches to remove the skins, cutting the peaches, packing the peaches into jars and finally processing the cans in the canner.  Since I was going to have to transfer peaches from across the kitchen with a slotted spoon, I laid down towels on the floor to catch all the dripping water.  It kind of worked.

I had hoped to get more pictures of the actual process of canning, but let me tell you, canning peaches by yourself when you are 31 is a lot different from canning peaches with your mom when you are 6. 

I remember that her peaches had the skins fall right off of them after they were blanched.  I remember that she had a twisting motion that would separate the two halves from the pit.  I remember that the peaches in the jars looked absolutely perfect in every way....

My peaches did not want to separate from their skins.  Some would slip right out and be perfect in every way, until I tried to pry the halves apart.  My peaches did not respond to twisting and had to be pried.  My peaches pretty much look like an animal lacking opposable thumbs pried them apart and stuffed them into jars.

I also ended up with 3 pints of peach butter that I had to made from the peaches I accidentally crushed instead of neatly separated into halves.

I sure hope j comes home soon... we're running out of storage space...

    Canned products that I made this weekend: 8 qts peaches, 3pts peach butter, 4 pts spicy dilly beans, 7 half pts blackberry jam, 3 half pts blackberry preserves and 1 liter blackberry brandy

Offensive Corn

So, I'm kind of a hippie.  Or as modern day hippies like to call themselves.. "a foodie".  Don't blame me.  I moved to San Francisco to learn about biology.  Suddenly, everyone was talking about food.  What it was, where is came from, who to buy it from and what to do with it.

I bought into it, lock, stock and barrel.  Organic, Free-range, Local.  Turns out, I LOVE FOOD.  Food is great.  It tastes good, it's good for you, and it turns out, food makes a house a home.  I think I always knew all of these things... but it took going to San Francisco (and growing up) to really understand.  We always ate dinner as a family growing up.  We sometimes had a garden.  My mother canned food for winter.

When it was finally my turn to feed myself, I realized I wanted to do more than just fill my belly to make the hunger feeling go away.  And honestly, it also turned out that cooking is a lot like doing science experiments in the lab.  Only, after you've had a crap day in the lab, experiment-wise, you can pretty much always come home and cook something that is edible. It may not be Michelin Star worthy, but it's pretty rare that I make something that has to go straight into the trash.  This was not the case with science experiments in the lab. I'll admit that in the dark days of grad school, it's cooking that reminded me that I was capable of following a "protocol" and tweaking it to make it work for me.  Eventually, this was true of my science as well.  But in cooking... it's way more reliable...

Me, with a baby chick at the farm in California...

So I bought into a local farm.  It's called CSA (community supported agriculture).  You pre-pay a particular farmer for a given amount of produce.  Once a week, there is a delivery of fresh veggies to a central location.  In exchange, the farmer has piece of mind knowing some of their product has already sold (instead of taking out bank loans against likely product) and you know that your money is staying local and helping support a local family.  Plus, all your food is fresh.  Whatever gets picked the day before is probably what will end up in your box.  What an easy way to see a quick turn around from field to plate.. minimal loss of nutrients and produce is often picked ripe, rather than the "green" stuff you find in supermarkets (the ideal fruit for shipping is the baseball-like peach, picked green and shipped across the country, "bruise-free," in crates).

Four years later, I nearly cried when I had to tell my California farmer I couldn't buy his produce anymore.  After my move to the East Coast, in December 2011, when he was diagnosed with spinal cancer, I bought a ticket to a benefit dinner even though I couldn't attend.  I miss that farm.  But as soon as I landed on the East Coast, I found my new local local farm.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I love my new farm too.  I love having fresh vegetables.  I no longer understand how to plan meals without first having a grab-bag of produce delivered to my door.  I inherently plan meals based on what I need to use up in the fridge.  I can't stand planning meals and realizing I have to go out and buy nearly all the ingredients. 

But this new farm is proving challenging.  Whereas my wonderful California Farm gave me lots of items and could nearly promise weekly strawberries from April to November and weekly tomatoes from July-September, this new farm is limited by East Coast growing seasons.  Gone are weekly strawberries.  Apparently strawberry season is over... in mid-June. And here is the reality of produce that is prime for picking one week and nearly gone the next.

Strawberry season has been replaced.... by CORN SEASON.  Now, California Farm sent me some corn from time to time, but this was not a staple crop.  It was used as a "special treat"... I am used to boxes of tomatoes, green garlic, some new potatoes and more types of greens than you ever thought possible.  And sometimes a few ears of corn.

Now, flash forward to the East Coast.  We had a few weeks of small boxes of strawberries... many weeks of lettuce, chard and beets... and suddenly... CORN.  The first week of corn gave us a reasonable 4 ears.  J and I ate it two nights in a row and were happy.  The second week (last week) provided us with a nice variety of veggies (onions, collards, lettuce, green beans)... and 10 ears of corn.  What is even more difficult with this arrangement is that these 10 ears of corn also arrived with 2 lbs of new potatoes.  Um... that's a lot of starch for two people.

"Nevermind," I said, "Surely this is peak season time.  I shall freeze some of this corn for the winter when I will surely want it for stews and soups and cornbread galore."  And I did.  6 ears. At least 4 cups of corn kernels.

And lo and behold, when j came home with the weekly box of veggies this week, she mentioned "Seems heavy."  And I opened it to reveal... an additional DOZEN ears of corn... and all I could think was:  "Corn... You are offensive to me."

12 ears of fresh corn... alongside the bag of frozen corn from the week before...

Shifting gears

Today, I drove my girlfriend's VW stick shift car for the very first time all by myself... I therefore think this is an appropriate day to start this blog.

I've chosen the title "Shifting Gears" because it is where I am in my life... I just graduated with my PhD, I have moved from the West Coast to the East Coast, I am starting down a new, "non-traditional" career path and, yes, my girlfriend (j) is teaching me to drive stick shift.

Remarkably, with all the recent change, the thing that has been most difficult is that last one. Let me say this, j is a great teacher, but I hate driving. I have always hated driving. And as such, I've never been sad that I didn't own a vehicle. I lived in cities with busses.. Why drive when you can pay $2 and someone else will do it FOR you?

When planning my move to the East Coast, I was already aware that I was going to need to learn to drive stick. J's car (named Das Beav) is a manual transmission and my little 12 week position in DC is not going to pay me enough, nor provide the stability needed, to buy a car. J also lives in a very spread out location. If we need to buy anything, we pretty much need to hop in the car to go get it (although I admit to falling in love all over again with online shopping since I've arrived here).

I found myself thinking about, and dreading, learning to drive this car for weeks before and after the move... I had had one lesson in the middle school parking lot on a previous trip out East and knew that THIS was not going to convert me into a driving-loving person, in spite of copious amounts of encouragement from everyone around me, including j's parents. Everyone was telling me:

"Oh, once you get the hang of it, you'll just LOVE it!"
"That little VW is such a 'zippy' little thing! So fun to drive!"
"You'll have so much control of the car!"
"Driving stick gives you something to think about and keeps your mind active!"

Right, I said. YOU don't know about my recurring stress dream where I'm driving a car whose brakes don't work! Also... In all the years I have been driving, I have never once thought, "Gee, I wish I had something more to think about while controlling this death trap of metal hurtling down the highway..."

"Don't hit anything and don't let anyone hit you." seems important enough.

BUT, I told myself, "You are a good girlfriend. And you cannot expect that j will drive everywhere all the time from now until she grows old." I tried to find a reason to get out of it anyway. "Maybe I can strike a deal... In exchange for taking out the trash, j can still drive everywhere and that will be fair." within seconds my conscious was saying, "You would never take that deal if you were j. And what if j gets hurt and needs you to drive her to the hospital?" It was apparent there was no getting around it.

Two days ago, j took me for my second driving lesson in the high school parking lot. I drove in circles shifting from first to second gear and back down again for a half an hour. To be honest, the physical driving part was technically fine. I didn't stall out much, the gears didn't grind, the car moved in a forward direction... I didn't hit anything ;)... But still in my head, I was thinking, I HATE this. It was a long half hour followed by dinner with j's parents who still want me to love stick shift.

And then j did something that reminded me why I love her so... At the end of dinner, she borrowed her mother's Prius so that I wouldn't have to drive home from dropping her off at the Philly airport the next morning, alone... In Das Beav. Because of that, after making my way home from Philly, it was a glorious Friday full of errands! Today, however, I had to drop off the Prius at j's parents and pick up... Das Beav. I turned over the Prius dongle and took up the VW key.. This foldable widget of a key. I climbed into the driver seat and narrated to myself the starting up process "Clutch and brake in. Parking brake off. It's in first gear. Give some gas."

The drive was only 2 miles long... And yet I could feel myself hating Das Beav every inch of the way. Every time the engine revved and the little light on the dashboard let me know I needed to shift, all I could think was,"Fuck you, Beav, you needy bastard. If you know when I need to shift why can't you just do it yourself!?" and then I would grudgingly press the clutch and shift the gear... I am happy that Das Beav is sitting in the apartment's parking lot. I am not looking forward to the next errand I can't avoid. Case in point... I made tuna salad with plain yogurt tonight instead of driving to buy mayonnaise...

I suppose some people were right then... Driving stick shift does give you more to think about... But I'm pretty sure this isn't what they meant.