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.

What It's Like To Be Me

I was walking down the street this afternoon noticing edible plants the way I usually do, and I started thinking about my stream of thoughts and how funny they would seem to most people.

"Hey, which way do I turn to walk past that chestnut tree? Those people's tomatoes are still looking good. Ooh, lots of chestnuts today, must be because of the wind! Look at those bright red apples up in the top of that tree, I wonder what kind they are? Is that mint? How is so much mint managing to grow out of cracks in the sidewalk?! I guess I'd better take some home. Is it too cold to make salad rolls tonight? Well, there's always mint tea..."

And that was a typical one minute in the life of my hunter-gatherer brain.

That's also how I always end up coming home with some weird edible things poking out of my pockets and rattling around in my school bag. Here's a picture of just some of the things I've brought home in the past 24 hours:

I admit that the parsley is from my own garden and the crazy corn was picked up from my CSA farm, but the rest was authentically gathered off the sidewalk, and there were also a bunch of apples and tomatoes and shelling beans that didn't make it into the pictures.

Who knows what to do with chestnuts? I keep picking them up, and I now have at least three pounds of them, but I've never been all that successful at cooking them. I'd appreciate advice! Aren't they beautiful though? Here's a picture of the chestnuts at the farmer's market today:


I'm going to try soaking them overnight, then roasting some and boiling some others to see which one tastes better. If only I had some sort of open fire...

Fall Fell

This afternoon I tried to go to the Eastbank Farmer's Market and it wasn't there! I can't believe that the season is already over. There are so many things still being harvested! Tomatoes and eggplants, winter squash, walnuts, mushrooms, grapes, apples, pears...and I was hoping for one last week of peaches. Did I tell you about the black peach that I got last week at the People's farmer's market? From the woman who has the unusual apples and also crazy things like medlars. I had never heard of black peaches, but she said that they are grown in France in the vineyards, as a sort of canary in the coal mine--when the peach tree starts showing signs of a disease, the grape farmer sprays the grapes. Anyway, my peche de vigne was delicious and beautiful, like the peach equivalent of a blood orange, with intensely wine-colored and flavorful flesh. I'm going to plant the seed and see if it grows.

My CSA has tomatoes aplenty and I'm making lots of sauce and dried tomatoes. It's almost time for green tomato chutney too...I can't accept that it's time to pull out the tomato plants already, but it's time to plant garlic, so the tomatoes have to go.

Is everyone else obsessed with chanterelles right now too? I modified a recipe from Gourmet for shrimp and "pearls" by substituting chanterelles for the shrimp and it was amazing. (I also tripled the recipe, added some onion and garlic, and left out the sugar and tarragon.) I also made some outstanding roasted potatoes and roasted chanterelles with a little bit of parsley vinaigrette. And corn-chanterelle chowder a few weeks back. And tonight I had pasta with chanterelles, fresh chopped heirloom tomatoes, garlic chives, and basil. They're so cheap at New Seasons right now, only $7.99 a pound! You have to get some.

The other thing it's time for is winter crafts. Today I did a little sewing and a little knitting, getting warmed up for long winter nights spent under a blanket on the couch with just my hands sticking out, knitting away.