Marisa McClellan's Blog, page 131

Upcoming Classes and Events: Brooklyn! Marple Township! Perkasie!

August is here and the tomatoes are coming! Here are some of the places you’ll find me in the next few weeks! I’ll be talking jam, vinegar pickles and lots of tomatoes, so don’t miss it!

 August 7 – Jam class at The Brooklyn Kitchen in Brooklyn, NY. Last I heard, there were still four spots available in this hands-on class. We’ll make two kinds of nectarine jam, one with Pomona’s Pectin, and one batch without any additional pectin at all. 
August 8 – Free canning demo and book signing at the Marple Township Library in Broomall, PA. Festivities start at 7 pm. Click here for more info.
August 10 – Pickles at Indy Hall! This class will focus on vinegar-based pickles. A deeply hands-on class, students will make quick cucumber and preserved green bean pickles and will take both varieties home to compare and contrast. There are just two spots left in this class. First come, first serve!
August 12 – Free jam and water bath canning demo at the Santore Library in South Philadelphia. The demo starts at 6 pm. More information is here. 


August 15 – Tomato canning workshop at Reading Terminal Market. This event is sold out!
August 17 – A massive tomato canning workshop at Blooming Glen Farm in Perkasie, PA. I’m going to set up a bunch of burners and we’ll can enough tomatoes for everyone to take home 2-3 quarts (final yield will depend on how much we’re able to get through that day). It costs $75 and will be a sweaty, fun, productive day. Click here to sign up.
August 18 – Canning demo and book signing at Wyebrook Farm, with a few tastes of preserves from my pantry. I’ll make a batch of spiced plum jam and will have books to sign. The event starts at 2 pm. Click here to sign up.
August 20 – Spicy Tomato Chutney class from 6:30 – 8:30 pm at the Plymouth Meeting Whole Foods Market. Click here to sign up!

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The First Philly Food Swap

Links: Pickling Cucumbers, Seven Day Pickles, and Winners

I got back to Philly last Monday morning, met Felicia Day on Tuesday (she was the keynote speaker at a conference my husband organized), dashed around on Wednesday trying to do work and then left town again on Thursday (it was a whirlwind week). The weekend of classes in Boston was terrific (thanks to everyone who came!) and now I’m home again and am scrambling to get ready for the photo shoot for the new book. Despite all the busy-ness, I managed to collect some links to share.

A fabulous post by the incomparable Linda Ziedrich comparing and contrasting various types of pickling cucumbers. 
Jess from Sweet Amandine makes and preserves apricot jam using Rachel Saunder’s method as outlined in the Blue Chair Jam cookbook.
Cathy Barrow’s fabulous seven day pickles. I have had these straight Cathy’s pantry and they are amazing.
Raspberry rose petal jam. Lovely!
An explainer about liquid loss during processing, otherwise known as siphoning.
Pickled figs!!!
Rhubarb season is pretty much done around these parts, but I want to remember this rhubarb jam with fresh ginger and lime for next year.
Shiitake bacon!
Never has there been more beautiful challah than this batch that Camille from Wayward Spark did recently for Food 52.
Elderflower cordial. I pine for an elderflower source.
My friend Roz (she who did the recent redesign of this site) just launched a blog about chai and her deep love for the stuff. She’s out on the west coast right now and just posted about her visit to The Tao of Tea, which was a tea house I frequented a lot in my late teens and early twenties.

 

The winners of the Girls Can Tell canning diagram towels are…

#79 llp
#195 Nicole
#218 Joann
#378 Michelle in Montana
#445 Becca
#559 Heather

Related Posts:

Links: Basil Jelly, Jam Ice Cream, and a Pie Box Winner
Links: Pickled Okra, Lemon Balm Jelly, and a Kilner Pan Winner
Links: Rose Petal Preserves, Garlic Scape Vinegar, and Winners

Canning Questions, Communities, and Social Media

We’ve hit that point of the summer when the number of canning questions arriving in my inbox each day is outstripping my ability to answer them in a timely manner. I hate that it can sometimes take me up to a week to answer your questions and so I’ve been searching around, trying to find a good solution.

It used to be that the Food in Jars Facebook page was a good way to the readers of the this site to engage with one another and get answers from a community of canners. However, Facebook has evolved in a way that has made it harder to use it in that manner.

Recently, Google Plus introduced Google Communities and it appears to be just the sort of thing I’ve been looking for. So I’ve created a little FiJ community and I’m throwing open the doors, in the hopes that it might just be a good place for ask questions, get answers, and share some favorite recipes. I’m hoping some of you will join me over there and help turn it into a vibrant place for conversation.

While we’re talking social media, don’t forget that you can also find me on Flickr, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Tumblr if you’re so inclined.

Finally, I’m headed to Boston tomorrow for three classes and a canning demo. There are still spots available in my dilly bean class tomorrow night (6-8 pm) at MassHORT as well as my Saturday morning jam and pickle class at Create a Cook. For those of you on a budget, I’m doing a free demo on Friday afternoon at  at the Hudson Public Library in Hudson, MA. The demo starts at 2 pm.

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Some Canning Questions/Answers
How to Check That Your Seal is Good
Taking Canning Questions at The Kitchn

Sweet and Sour Cherry Jam

Sour cherries have long been one of my favorite fruits for preserving. I mostly missed the season last year and so spent much of late June and early July this year trying to make up for my lackluster show in 2012. I picked at least 15 pounds on my own and when that didn’t prove to be quite enough, I bought a flat from Three Springs Fruit Farms.

Towards the end of my sour cherry extravaganza, I found myself with both sweet and sour cherries. I could have made a duo of small batches of jam, but instead decided to combine them for a sweet and tart preserve. I used a lower than usual (for me) amount of sugar and turned to Pomona’s Pectin to help me out in the set department. The finished jam has much of the sour cherries tangy bite, but with the deep richness of the sweets. I am very happy with the result.

I realize that cherry season is rapidly drawing to a close throughout the country, but I wanted to get this one published to the blog in the hopes that maybe it will still be of use to some of you. Plus, I want to remember it for next year, as it’s a recipe truly worth repeating.

Speaking of cherries, the folks at Fillmore Container are hosting a giveaway this week, featuring this fun cherry pitter and one of the new blue heritage Ball jars. It screws on to a regular mouth mason jar and catches the cherry pits there (perfect if you want to use them for an infusion project). To throw your hat in the ring for a chance at it, head over to their blog.

Print

Sweet and Sour Cherry Jam

Ingredients

5 cups pitted sour cherries
4 cups pitted sweet cherries
2 lemons, zested and juiced
3 teaspoons calcium water
3 cups sugar
3 teaspoons Pomona's Pectin

Instructions

Prepare a boiling water bath canner and 7-8 half pint jars.
Combine the cherries, lemon juice, calcium water, and 1/2 cup of water in a large pan. Cover and bring to a low boil. Cook, stirring regularly, for 10-12 minutes, until the fruit softens and releases its juice.
Whisk the pectin and lemon zest into the sugar.
When the fruit has softened sufficiently, add the sugar, pectin, and lemon zest mixture. Stir to combine.
Bring the fruit to a boil and cook vigorously for an additional 4-6 minutes, until the jam begins to thicken.
When you've deemed that the jam has thickened sufficiently, remove the pot from the heat.
Funnel jam into prepared jars. Wipe rims, apply lids and rings, and process in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes.
When time is up, remove jars from canner and place them on a folded kitchen towel to cool.
When jars are cool enough to handle, remove rings and check seals.
Sealed jars can be stored on the pantry shelf for up to one year. Any unsealed jars should be refrigerated and used promptly. Schema/Recipe SEO Data Markup by ZipList Recipe Plugin2.2http://foodinjars.com/2013/07/sweet-and-sour-cherry-jam/


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Notes on a Batch of Sour Cherry Pie Filling
Pear Cranberry Jam
Sour Cherry Jam Recipe

Giveaway: Canning Diagram Tea Towels from Girls Can Tell

More than four years ago, when this blog was just a wee sprout, I helped my friend Sara Selepouchin Villari (she’s the owner and illustrator of Girls Can Tell) brainstorm the best way to capture the bits and pieces of a canning kit in diagram form. We met for coffee, I described how everything was used, and she went off to sketch and label. A few weeks later, a diagram was born.

Since that conversation back in early 2009, a lot has changed for both Sara and me. I wrote a book, became a full-time blogger and freelancer and wrote a second book. She added many dozens of diagrams to her line, greatly expanded the number of stockists who carry her stuff, and then earlier this year, opened her own gift shop on E. Passyunk Avenue.

Called Occasionette, this new shop carries both a goodly number of pieces from Girls Can Tell, as well as cards, gifts, dishes, and other lovely things that you never knew existed but will desperately want the moment you see them.

Right now, Occasionette is carrying a number of jar-based items, including the Mason Shaker and an array of Cuppows. I hear tell that she’s also planning on stocking the newly released BNTO, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Occasionette a lovely addition to a commercial corridor that’s rapidly been coming back to life and vitality over the last few years. If you’re in the Philadelphia area, I urge you to hop down to 1825 E. Passyunk Avenue and check it out!

Of course, every new beginning comes with a handful of endings. Because Sara has so much on her plate and only so many hours in the day, she’s begun to retire some of the older diagrams in the Girls Can Tell line in order to make room for new, fresh ideas and projects. One of the diagrams that’s being tucked into the vault is the one that features the canning tools.

In order to give this lovely diagram the send-off that it deserves, Sara suggested I give a few of these towels away. And so that’s what I’m going to do! We’re giving away three of the unbleached towels and three of the white towels for a total of six winners. Here’s how to enter:

Leave a comment on this post and share your favorite preserve of the summer. Whether it’s something you made, picked up at a farmers market or got from a friend, I want to hear about it.
Comments will close at 11:59 pm east coast time on Friday, August 2, 2013. Winners will be chosen at random (using random.org) and will be posted to the blog on Sunday, August 4, 2013.
Giveaway is open to US residents and Canadian residents.
One comment per person, please. Entries must be left on the blog, I cannot accept submissions via email.

If you can’t bear to take your chances with the giveaway, you can also order one of the last towels directly from Sara’s shop by clicking here. She also has a few of these cute notecards bearing the diagram left as well.

Disclosure: Sara is providing the towels for this giveaway at no cost to me. No money changed hands and my opinions are entirely my own. 
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Giveaway: Mighty Nest’s Pie Box and Serving Kit
Giveaway: Kilner Canning Tools from the Williams-Sonoma Agrarian Line
Giveaway: An OXO Berry Pack

Links: Basil Jelly, Jam Ice Cream, and a Pie Box Winner

I was in Portland with my parents, sister and nephew all last week and it was just about the best thing ever. The weather was beautiful, Emmett is cutest kid around (those curls!), and it was just so good to soak up time with these people I adore and don’t see nearly enough.

There was also plenty of good food, meals with friends, backyard blackberries, and couple of very fruitful thrift store outings. Truly, the only hitch in the whole trip is that instead of being at home now as planned, I’m stranded in a motel room in Chicago with no flight out until morning. Still, it seems a small price to pay for such a magical visit. Now, on to the links!

Next time my CSA offers unlimited u-pick basil, I’m getting enough to make this jelly. 
Have you guys seen this? Homemade ice cream flavored and sweetened with jam.
A reminder that watermelon pickles are awesome and you should make some soon.
Skip the jelly and make grape jam instead!
Comparing frozen green beans to pressure canned ones.
How to tell whether the lids you’re buying are the new BPA-free ones or not.
Fermented ketchup. Dip your fries probiotic-style.
Maple bourbon peach butter. As my dad would say, sign me up!
Cherry preserves with plums, adapted from Saving the Season.
Towards the end of this post, Julia explains her approach to making drunken apricots and apricot liqueur. Oh yes.
Even though I’m not really a paleo eater, I sure do like the sound of these chocolate nut date bars.

Thanks to everyone who entered the Pie Box Kit giveaway. The winner is Sharon, who said that her favorite thing about pie is, “Eating the flaky layers of crust, with the wonders of the great tasting fillings!”

If you didn’t win the giveaway, MightyNest is offering all Food in Jars readers 10% off on the Pie Box and the serving kit. Just enter FOOD10 at check out (and if you spend $50 or more, you get free shipping too).

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Cookbooks: Preserving with Pomona’s Pectin

This has been a very good season for cookbooks dedicated to preserving. First came Sherri Brooks Vinton’s new book Put ‘Em Up! Fruit. Then came Little Jars, Big Flavors, quickly followed by Saving the Season. And now, I have one more to add to the roster. Preserving with Pomona’s Pectin by Allison Carroll Duffy.

It’s a fabulous little book that covers a wide range of preserves, all set with Pomona’s Universal Pectin. What makes this pectin so handy is that it doesn’t rely on sugar or evaporation in order to set. It’s a variety of pectin (extracted from citrus peels) that is activated instead with calcium, which means you can make jams sweetened with just a little sugar, honey, or fruit juice concentrate.

The book is divided into seven sections. The first gives a little bit of background about the Pomona’s Pectin company and defines the different kinds of preserves covered in the book. The comes a chapter that goes deep on how to use the pectin and preserve your product (my paternal grandmother was an illustrator and I can’t help but look at these drawings above and think how much she would have appreciated them). Then comes jams, jellies, preserves, conserves and marmalades.

Each chapter contains tried-and-true basics (Allison calls them Simple Classics) as well as more inventive and sophisticated fruit and flavor pairings. I’m very excited by this Rosemary-Wine Jelly pictured above. I’ve been in Oregon the last week visiting my parents and they have a giant rosemary plant in their yard. Before I go home, I’m cutting a generous armload to bring home, in large part so I can make this jelly.

I’m something of a fool for vanilla and while I’ve paired it with nearly every fruit I know, I’ve never done a jam with red plums and vanilla. This particular preserve (Allison defines preserves as something akin to a jam, but with much larger fruit chunks), sounds like a lovely way to bring them together and would be a great addition to a morning bowl of yogurt.

 

For those of you who want more options in the world of low sugar preserving, this book is ideal. The recipes are concise, easy to follow, and appealing. The book is colorful and sturdy. It’s a welcome addition to my collection of canning books and might be to yours as well!

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How to Can in Hex Jars With Lug Lids

Today’s tutorial is a sponsored post from Fillmore Container. They are a jar and closure distributor based in Lancaster, PA and have long been a friend of Food in Jars. In addition to selling traditional mason jars and two-piece lids, they also offer an array of jars designed for commercial preserving, including four sizes of six-sided jars called hex jars. These are the jars we’re going to focus on today. While these jars aren’t approved by the USDA for home canning, they can be safely used in home kitchens for preserves if you know just a few things.

These are jars that should only be used with high acid preserves that need short spells in the boiling water bath canner (I try to keep the processing time to 10 minutes when using these jars). That means that I don’t use them for fruit butters or denser jams that need longer stints. They fill and process much like mason jars.

Fillmore Container sells four sizes of hex jars. There’s 1.5 ounce (perfect for samples and variety gift baskets), 4 ounces (which is the same size at the smallest quilted jelly jars that Ball makes), 6 ounces (a nice in-between size that you can’t get with a mason jar), and 9 ounces (think of it as a very generous half pint jar). Their faceted sides are smooth, which makes them perfect contenders for all sorts of label and stickers, which is a nice thing if you’re trying to create a more professional or uniform look.

Hex jars use lug lids that are lined with plastisol. The reason they’re best for shorter times in the canner is that the plastisol liner can’t take long periods of heat exposure or extreme heat. So while they’re perfectly safe for short periods of boiling water bath canning, but are a no-go for pressure canning. If you want to preserve low acid foods in jars like these, you use retort lids instead.

I prep these lug lids the same way I do regular canning jar lids, by warming them with a little simmering water for a few minutes before applying them to the jars. The most important thing to remember with these lids is that you don’t want to tighten them too tightly. A gentle quarter turn is plenty to keep them firmly in place and leaves enough space for the oxygen to escape during processing and cooling.

The mouth of these hex jars is a bit smaller than conventional mason jars which means that regular wide mouth funnels don’t work with them. The Kilner wide mouth funnel I featured last week has a slightly smaller opening and so does work with the larger of the hex jars. For the smaller ones, I ladle my product into a spouted measuring cup and use that to fill the jars. It’s not a perfect method, but it’s better than trying to spoon jam into tiny jars. Once your jars are filled, take care to bubble your jars, because those edges at the top like to trap air bubbles. A few gentle taps and a chop stick will do the job.

Once your product is in the jars and the lids are on, everything else about canning in these jars will be familiar to anyone who’s got a batch or two under their belt. The filled jars are lowered into the canning pot and processed for the amount of time called for by the recipe. When the time is up, you pull them out and let them cool on a folded kitchen towel. The lids have a button that goes concave as the jars seal, just like two-piece lids have. You know that your jars are sealed when the lids feel solid and don’t wiggle when pressed.

In conjunction with this tutorial, Fillmore Container is hosting a giveaway on their blog. The winner can choose from a 12 count case of  hex jars or 12 sided jars and get to pick out lids to fit (they come in a bunch of colors and hues). Click here to enter their giveaway.

How would you use hex jars in your home canning?

 

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Notes on a Batch of Sour Cherry Pie Filling

When I made the cherry pie for Sarah and Dave last week, I used the very last of my fresh cherries (it was the very end of the season, after all). Happily, I managed to snag enough sour cherries this year that in addition to making a bunch of jam and preserved cherries in a bourbon-spiked syrup, I also made a two quarts of sour cherry pie filling (plus one half pint jar of overflow).

One is promised to the winner of the Pie Box giveaway (have you entered yet?), but I have grand plans for the other one. Sometime next winter, when the days are painfully short and sour cherries are just a flickering memory, I will open that last jar and brighten my day with pie.

It had been at least two years since I worked with ClearJel and I remembered a couple things about it in this go-round (though a little too late to be truly helpful). The first is that I like a thinner pie filling than the National Center for Home Food Preservation’s recipe makes. This time, I’ve made a note in my cookbook to remind myself to go a little lighter on the thickener. Second, headspace is really important when canning pie filling.

You see, I didn’t quite tell the entire truth up above. When I made this batch of pie filling, my initial yield was three quarts. However, I was so focused on squeezing every last drop of pie filling into the jars that I overfilled that final jar. During processing, ClearJel expands a little and in the case of that jar, it expanded so much that it popped the lid right off. It was a frustrating reminder about the importance of following headspace instruction. Live and learn.

The recipe I followed can be found here. I made enough to fill three quarts and next time I make it, I will use a scant 1/4 cup ClearJel per quart (the recipe calls for 1/4 cup plus 1 tablespoon). I skipped the food coloring and cinnamon, but did add the almond extra.

Related Posts:

Sour Cherry Jam Recipe

Giveaway: Mighty Nest’s Pie Box and Serving Kit

Most people think that pie is a winter dessert. After all, it’s traditional to serve it at Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations. Thing is, the summer months are made for pie. All that seasonal fruit just begs to be tossed with a little sugar and flour and tucked between two layers of pastry. To truly feel like I’ve gotten the most out of these warm months, I have to make at least three or four pies.

The thing is, pie is a dessert that craves community. It is at its best a few hours out of the oven and doesn’t keep particularly well (I figure no more than 48 hours before the crust has gone unpleasantly soft). So a pie maker is faced with an age-old issue. Eat the bulk of a pie on her own or find people to share the pie with. Because I have a healthy respect for the integrity of my arteries, I always opt to share.

However, transporting a pie without damaging its delicate, flaky structure can be a tough trick. Sure, you can tuck it into a cake carrier (if you have one). But because they’re scaled for larger desserts, it might slide around. You can balance it in a cardboard box or risk carrying it uncovered. Or, you can tuck it into a Pie Box.

Designed to hold a 9 inch pie, the Pie Box is made of untreated raw pine by hand in Chicago. It is sturdy, solid, and when paired with a glass pie pan and a wooden server like Mighty Nest has done, makes for a perfect way to share and give a pie.

I have some very nice neighbors named Sarah and Dave. They are both grad students and are in the throes of dissertation writing. It goes without saying that they’ve been a little stressed. And to my mind, nothing alleviates stress like a homemade pie.

Sour cherries have been in season, so I used them in a simple pie for Sarah and Dave. It was five cups of pitted sour cherries, tossed with 3/4 cup of sugar, 2 tablespoons of cornstarch, and a pinch of salt. I used a basic white flour pie crust and cut the top out using a round biscuit cutter.

Once it was cool, I tucked it into the Pie Box and Scott and I walked it over to Sarah and Dave’s apartment. They invited us in to share the pie and we stood around for an hour, talking about life, summertime and pie. It was a terrific stress reliever for all involved.

Sarah and Dave plan to “pie it forward” and share the Pie Box, plate and server with a friend sometime in the future. I wrote the name and date of the pie I gave them on the lid of the box, and when they pass the pie kit along, they’ll do the same. Hopefully, this particular pie box will carry many a pie and travel around the city (and even country!).

Thanks to the nice folks at Mighty Nest, I have one of these Pie Box and serving kits to give away (maybe you’ll “pie it forward” too!). I’m also including a jar of homemade sour cherry pie filling, so that you can make your own pie.

As you can see, there’s a Rafflecopter widget just below instead of my regular entry guidelines. Because I’m working with Mighty Nest for this giveaway, we’re using it to track entries and give people more opportunities to win. Think of it as an experiment.

Kate at the Hip Girl’s Guide to Homemaking is also giving away a pie box, serving kit and jar of her gluten-free pie crust mix. Make sure to visit her post to enter as well!

This giveaway will run until Sunday, July 28 at 12 noon EST. Open to US residents only.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Disclosure: This is a sponsored post. Mighty Nest provided the pie kit I gave to Sarah and Dave, are supplying the one for this giveaway, and they’ve also given me one to keep. They also provided the Weck jars in which I canned the sour cherry pie filling. All thoughts and opinions remain my own. 
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Giveaway: Kilner Canning Tools from the Williams-Sonoma Agrarian Line
Giveaway: An OXO Berry Pack
Links: Rose Petal Preserves, Garlic Scape Vinegar, and Winners