4 posts tagged “cooking”

One of my favorite things about summer is making strawberry jam for the year.  There is no store bought brand that can compare with homemade strawberry jam.  Nothing.  At All.  This year Maia was finally big enough to really help and was very excited about it.  She did everything up until it came time to make things hot.

First she opened up all of the new jars and separated them into their pots for sterilization.

Then, while I removed the stems from the berries, she donned an apron.  She had to wear one of mine because she's outgrown hers.  (I'm going to attempt to make her a new one soon.)

Maia pours about 1/3 of the berries into the pot to start with.

Crushing the berries was a bit tougher than Maia thought it would be.

She persevered and crushed all 2 quarts of the first batch!  All by herself!

I must add that she was quite relieved when they were all crushed.  She wiped her brow and said "Whew!  That was hard work, Mummy.  Good thing I did it for you!"

I took over from this point and she stood on a chair near the stove to supervise.  Here, the crushed berries-pectin-little bit of butter mixture is just starting to boil.

Here is our favorite part!  The sugar!  A whole heaping lot of it!  (This pot does contain 8 8 oz jars of jam in for you anti-sugar nuts out there---so it's not so much when it's all spread out like)

I use many spoons for the spoon test to see if the jelling point has been reached. (Why in just a second) In this picture, it has.  What you don't see is the pile of freshly licked clean spoons that were off to the side from my 'supervisor' and her brother who showed up on the scene just in time to get some of the first tastes in.  They didn't mind that it wasn't quite jelling yet when they tasted it so long as I tested with an even number of spoons so they got even tastes!

Ladling hot jam into smallish jars is always the messiest part for me.  If I haven't managed to get burned by boiling hot sticky jam at least twice by this point I usually make up for it by spilling it on me at least two more times.  Luckily (for the jars) all that it takes is a quick wipe of a damp cloth to clean them off--which is necessary anyway prior to putting on the lids to dampen the rim.

Almost done!  In this picture, I've just removed the first few jars from the first batch going into their boiling water bath.  I'm always glad this size of a jar only takes 5 minutes to process because I'm always worried I'll have to re-process the few jars whose seals didn't go down and I'm usually hot and sticky and tired by this point.  (All jars have sealed as of 10:00 p.m!)

Tada!  All finished!  Seventeen jars of homemade strawberry jam to last our family until this time next year!  =)

But I'll settle for partial success!   Today I made Spare Ribs with a Fresh Ginger Marinade (glaze?) and everyone (but me--how ironic!) liked them.  EVEN MAIA.

For the Marinade/Glaze:

Soak a 3 inch long peeled piece of fresh ginger in cold water for 10 minutes.  While that is soaking, finely dice an onion to make 1/2 cup.  Finely dice 2 cloves of garlic.  Then, cut the ginger into matchstick size pieces--about 1/8 of an inch thick.

In a medium sized frying pan, slowly saute onion, ginger and garlic in 1 tablespoon of oil.  You want a nice deep caramel color so it will take about 8-10 minutes.  To the pan, add 2 tablespoons of lemon juice,  3 tablespoons of sugar, 1/4 cup of soy sauce, 1/4 cup of water and a nice sized pinch of cornstarch.  Cook on medium to high heat for 3-4 minutes or until thick and bubbly.  Allow to cool some.  Brush on spare ribs every 20 minutes or so of their cooking time (325 degrees for 2 hours for roasting the ribs)

It made the whole kitchen smell fantastic!  I only wish I liked pork.

I'm still babying my pulled muscle so I stuck to using the treadmill on 10% incline again for 30 minutes.  The rollerblading yesterday didn't seem to hurt it--much--but I didn't want to repeat it again tonight.  I'm thinking maybe biking tomorrow on the jail trail.  Speaking of bikes...I fixed Rick's bike today!!!  He crashed it on Sunday at Frick Park--complete with flying head over heels over the handlebar.  When he landed, the bike came down on him and caught his right lower thigh in between the front wheel and the frame leaving a terrific bruise.  Thankfully that's all that happened!!   His bike was considerably worse off than he was; we feared we'd have to take it into the bike shop.   But I fixed it--all on my own!  And I'm not telling anyone how I did it either because it sounds like it was a much more complicated job to NOT tell. =D

In an effort to make vegetables more pleasing to Tristyn and Maia I've been letting them help me pick them out and prepare them.  At Whole Foods Market yesterday the kids chose peas, becasue they've never seen them in their shell.  We didn't get very many just in case the fun of shelling them wasn't enough to overcome the 'it's green and it must be yucky so therefore I won't even put it in my mouth' factor.  If all goes according to my sneaky scheme to get them to eat more green vegetables then it will be well worth the difference in cost between fresh peas and canned peas.