Spot on A Great New Cook Book and Cooks

This is my birthday present from my daughter and her family and I love, love, love it! I thoroughly enjoy Jamie Oliver's cooking show on the Food Network, but as it is now on very early in the morning I do not get a chance to see it. Our daughter's family DVR's it and we watch it together at a more ( to my way of thinking ) reasonable hour. Even better, I usually have a grandchild or two in my lap as we watch Jamie..oh joy! My husband is the "foodie" in the family and I thoroughly enjoy doing the table setting,being the go-for, and clean-up help when he prepares delicious meals , quite often, for friends and family. After all, my reward is that I get to eat fine food and drink fine wine and visit with people we love. Such a small price ...but I digress. My daughter asked what I wanted for my birthday and I suggested maybe a DVD of Jamie Oliver, not realizing he had a cookbook published. What a cookbook! It surpasses his show. It shows pictures of his gardens, him hunting, cooking outdoors, and much more...all done very practically too. As the wife of a hunter, it is refreshing to have a healthy view of such a much-maligned endeavor. Well prepared game of any sort is a rare thing now-a-days. I cannot say enough in favor of this cook book, and I will be reading it from cover to cover...and I have only read one other cookbook that way...might write about it later. All this to say that my husband suggested I cook through this book and blog about it like the movie "Julie, Julia". Nope, not going to do that, but I have decided I will blog every Friday starting next week about recipes from Jamie's book, and cook my way through it. Jamie's book is orderd seasonally and I will prepare his recipes accordingly. I will start with Autumn recipes and hopefully my husband will give me a LOT of help and we will have opportunities to share these meals with friends and family . I have been very, very busy preserving the harvest and bounty of the garden my husband so lovingly prepared, planted and tended. All he asks is that I do not let the fruit and vegetables go to waste. Until this year , my poor husband's labors have oft been wasted or ended up as chicken food because I am at the fairs from mid- August til the end of September and when home am too exhausted to do much canning, freezing, etc. Then I am ashamed for the waste and sad for my husband's hard work for naught. No more! I have canned pickles, jams, and tomorrow will can Tomato Jam, a recipe I found on this wonderful blog: One Perfect Bite* ( click here). I am excited about trying this jam out on broiled French Bread with a dollop of goat cheese on top. Another book my daughter and her family have ordered for me is by Nigella Lawson*( click here). I have seen a few of her shows ( Nigella Bites) on the Food Network, but she, too, is now on way too early for me. There is just something so pleasant about a woman who loves to cook AND eat too! I watched her prepare a few egg dishes awhile ago and thought I could get excited about cooking like that. Can't wait for my new cook book by her! Meanwhile, because I have been busy canning produce I have been making easy breezy dinners. That is O.K. with my husband because he has been coming home from work and straight-way working on finishing his new Honey house / pump house. It is looking good and we have been needing a new pump-house and water pump for a long time. It has room for all my husbands' bee-keeping equipment, and also has been prepared for extracting and storing honey. Yay! Dinner tonight was sliced ripe tomatoes, with baked chicken, toast and FETA PEPPER DIP , thanks to Noble Pig *( click here)! It is good, try it, you'll like it! "Here is what I have seen to be good and fitting: to eat, to drink and enjoy oneself in all one's labors in which he toils under the sun during the few years of his life which God has given him; for this is his reward." Ecclesiastes 5:18

Strawberries!

"One must ask children and birds how cherries and strawberries taste." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Isn't that the truth? We NEVER get any of our cherries, the birds descend on them at the first blush of red and clean us out, so I call them the bird feeder trees. We do get strawberries though. Yes, the birds, bunnies, and human nibblers get quite a few too. Above is a picture of the strawberry harvest I get every day. I have already made a lot of strawberry jam, and will make 2 more batches tomorrow. I still have strawberries in the freezer from last year too! So Alice, of Woebegone Cottage, come on over and pick all the strawberries you want!And granddaughters KN and MN, you come on over and help yourselves too!

A Spot of Plum Jam

~~~" Jam is a treat, that butterflies taste on their flutter-by feet." ~~~ Eileen Spinelli TEA PARTY TODAY

~Here is a basket of Shiro plums I picked in our orchard. These plums are so juicy and sweet, you cannot eat them without getting plum juice everywhere. They do not keep well so when they are ripe I need to use them right away. Sometimes I prepare the fruit and freeze it to turn it into jam later in the year, but I think the jam tastes so much better when I make the jam right away. ~~~It is raining again today so the weather is perfect for staying indoors and canning fruit.~~~

~To make jam you will need 5 3/4 cups of pitted crushed plums. Leave the peeling on while crushing. Add 1/4 cup lemon juice to the plums. While you are preparing the plums, sterilize your pint or half pint jars, bands, and new lids. Leave jars, lids, and bands simmering in the boiling water until you need the them. ( picture below)

~You will also need 10 cups sugar and a dab of butter or margarine and a box of pectin you can buy at your supermarket. I am using MCP pectin.

~Put the crushed plums in the pan with the dab of butter ( this keeps the cooking fruit from foaming too much) and the pectin. ~~~Bring the fruit, pectin and butter to a rolling boil. This is a boil that cannot be stirred down. Then add the 10 cups of sugar. When the plums and sugar again come to a boil, boil while stirring constantly for 4 minutes. ~~~Immediately after the 4 minutes boiling, remove the jam from the stove and begin ladling into hot sterilized jars. Wipe the rims and tops with a clean hot cloth to clean off any jam and put the lids on and then screw the bands on. Doesn't this look like liquid gold ? I have to label it 'jam' because it looks just like the jars of honey Hubby bottles from his bees. ~Here the jars of jam are placed into my canner. Now for years and years, all us little old jam makers just turned the freshly filled hot jars of jam over, let sit for a few minutes, then turn right side up and VOILA, the jam was done ! Now there are new standards that require we give the jars of jam a water bath. I never had any problem with my jams before, but since we give a lot of our jam away as gifts we play it safe . So.... a hot water bath it is !The jam in the boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

~~~Boiling away~~~

~This yellow plum jam is delicious on toast, but better on ham and pork roast. It is also a favorite jam of many in my family so we rarely have any to spare. After you take the jam out of the canner and place it in a draft free area, you will begin to hear little metallic pops as the seal sets in the jar. Leave the bands on the jars overnight. The next morning, remove the bands ( DO NOT STORE THE JAM WITH THE BANDS ON ) and check to see that there is an indentation in each lid. If not, the jar did not seal properly. No problem though, just pop the jam in the fridge and eat it right away ! ~~~Make some jam. You can get the recipes for your jam of choice in packages of pectin. Follow the directions carefully and you cannot fail. Jam is easy to make and your home made jam is so much more tasty than most of the jam you buy. Jam also makes great gifts. Everybody likes jam!

~~~JAM POEM~~~ from Mrs. Jone's Letter of the Week 'J' Who'll have jam ? There's jam for tea. Jam for Pam and jam for Sam And jam for little me. Who'll have jam, there's jam for tea. Damson jam and Bramble jam, And apple jam for me.