The Harvest Continues...

Last weekend I got to harvest figs and grapes with the Portland Fruit Tree Project. I love picking fruit, obviously, and I love having fruit to cook with, but the other best part of the PFTP is having friends come to harvest parties with me so we can hang out and talk all morning while up a 15-foot orchard ladder picking figs or craning our necks and having grapes rain down all over us.

I made the best thing I've ever made with figs: Honey-Lemon-Fig Marmalade. It's a beautiful rosy color because I used black figs with red insides, and the lemon gives it a much needed tart and bitter counterpoint to the intense sweetness of the figs and honey. I can't wait to serve it at holiday parties with cream cheese and crackers.

I started with a recipe from cooks.com, but made some changes based on how many figs I had and my own taste.

Ingredients:
3 cups fresh figs (stems and a slice off the bottom removed), mashed into the measuring cups
1 1/2 cups mild honey
1 whole Meyer lemon plus juice of 1/2 Meyer lemon
1 bay leaf

Chop figs or break them up with your hands until there are no pieces left that are bigger than a chunk you'd like to find in your jam (for me, this is about 1/2 inch pieces). Put the figs in a wide, non-reactive pot, and add the honey. Finely chop one whole Meyer lemon, including rind, and pick out the seeds. Add the lemon (but not the seeds) to the pot with the figs, along with the juice of an additional 1/2 lemon and the bay leaf.

Bring jam to a boil, then cook over low heat until thick and jamlike and reduced in volume by about half, stirring occasionally. This took me about 1 1/2 hours. Meanwhile, fill up your canning pot with water and bring it to a boil and sterilize six 4-oz canning jars (this jam is intense, so I think the small jars are a good idea). I'm assuming that you know how to can or can look up the procedure on one of the many extension service sites, so I'll just say, once your jam is done, take out the bay leaf, ladle the jam into the jars with 1/4 inch headroom and process for 10 minutes in a boiling water bath. For me, this recipe made six 4-ounce jars with a little left over to spread on toasted baguette slices with cream cheese.

Hood River Ho!

Last weekend I met a friend of a friend who I've been hearing about forever. He lives with his wife and two nearly grown daughters on 20 stunning acres of forest near Hood River, with a creek, using only solar and hydroelectric power. He's got a swimming hole, ahuge vegetable garden, and a couple of small orchards, using only an acre or two of the land for his house and food plants. He gave me lots of inspiration and this piece of advice: "If you're a gardener, you should be planting. If you're not planting something every few weeks, you can't call yourself a gardener." This year I've been doing pretty well with planting every few weeks, planning for parts of my garden to become open for new plants. Mainly what this means is that I've been well supplied with salad greens continuously since early summer! Right now I have insane amounts of chervil and a plentiful supply of mild and spicy mustards. Coming soon, Gai Lan, Tatsoi, and wild arugula. Plus my CSA share has lettuces and greens most weeks, so I'm required to eat as much salad as possible. The one pictured here was my breakfast a few days ago. Although really, if I had my way, I would eat an egg and a carbohydrate for breakfast every day.

Egg on toast, egg and cheese on a fresh-baked biscuit, fried rice, and egg-and-onion donburi over rice are some of my favorites. Here is Agatha, Theresa's chicken and a frequent provider of my breakfast egg. I'm making an effort to eat more vegetables at breakfast, and a recipe I've had my eye on for a while now is salad with hot cubes of roasted potatoes mixed in like croutons, and a poached egg on top. Doesn't that sound good?



It's peach season at Sauvie Island Farms and I've been a couple of times in the past two weeks...plus my boss went and brought me back some more peaches! I believe that this week is the last week for peaches, so if you haven't picked yours yet, get out there, now! Only $1.00 per pound, and each peach weighs about a pound, so the picking couldn't be easier. At this very moment Christine's food dehydrator is humming away making some sweet dried peach slices for me to enjoy in my winter oatmeal. And also some fruit leather...so far I've made blackberry, plum, and grape using the glut of apples and pears that I keep picking up off the street, not to mention the ones I brought home from volunteering with the Portland Fruit Tree Project. I also made a couple of kinds of summer fruit jam--the really good one is Five Stone Fruits, with peach, nectarine, apricot, pluot, and plum. Theresa made watercolor painted labels for them that I love. It's going to be hard to give them away (or even to eat them) when they're so pretty!