Cooking My Past

My grandmother had a plum tree, several apricot trees and about a zillion rose bushes. Every year, it seemed that the apricots all ripened at the same time, and my mother would drag us all over to grandma's house for a weekend of jam making. As kids, our job was picking and pitting. My older brother chopped and my mother and grandmother did the actual canning of the jam.

Apricot jam was the staple of our house. Being of a frugal nature, my grandmother did not let a single apricot from any of her trees languish on the branch or rot on the ground (she kept a tidy yard, did Grandma Peg). In fact, it was nearly the only jam I tasted in my childhood. Grape and strawberry, the glistening purple and red jewels of the grocery store, were rare treats at our house. Rarer still was plum jam. Unlike the unrelieved sweetness of apricot, strawberry or grape, plum jam makes use of the very tart, less ripe fruit. The skin is still very tart and tangy and lends a little frisson to every bite.

I also realized why it was so rare. Plum jam is also the only jam I've made that requires you to cook the fruit first before making it into jam. Pitting apricots is literally child's play (okay, child's drudgery, but you know what I mean) compared to sitting with a large, overfull basket of washed plums and a four-inch paring knife and systematically relieving about 40 pounds of plums of their pits and stems. If there's such a thing as plum-pitter's thumbs, I've got them. The attraction of just letting the kids eat them is awfully strong. But my sense of nostalgia is stronger.

The one smart thing I did was to use the food grinding attachment for my KitchenAid to chop the things. It meant that in about 20 minutes, I had finely chopped all the plums into two enormous bowls, ready for jam.

At the end of it all, I have 2 dozen pint jars and 13 half pint jars (that's 15 quarts + 1 cup) full of the flavor of my youth. It's already set up nicely, and is a beautiful rosy pink, just like I remember. I cut open a fresh loaf of sourdough and toasted the heel (my favorite part of the bread) and spread it thick with the fresh jam.

Ahhhhh. In my mouth, I'm young again.

Loss

On Tuesday, there was apparently a yowling outside the house. I didn't hear it because I sleep with earplugs in, but the Pirate heard it and thought that it was the skinny black stray we've seen around. He didn't investigate.

It wasn't until Wednesday evening when nobody'd seen him that the Pirate asked.

"Have you seen Oswald?" No, I haven't. I knew that I'd seen him Tuesday. The cat came out of the basement when I went in to work out.

When I got home from my writers' group Thursday night, and the Pirate told me that Oswald still hadn't turned up.

Friday afternoon, I went all over our property and our neighbors (the property is vacant). I didn't expect to find him but I was hoping to find something. Signs of a struggle, anything. Whenever any of our chickens gets eaten, we find blood, feathers, broken brush. But I found nothing. I was hoping to find blood or hair or something, but there was nothing.

Apart from the huge amounts of ripe fruit on the neighbor's trees. Later, the Badb and I went back and picked huge amounts of pears and plums. I think that it's time to make some plum jam.

We're thinking that Oswald was taken by either raccoons or coyotes. Ever since the neighbor with the aggressive dog moved out (taking his dog with him), the raccoons have gotten progressively bolder. Either way, our faithful, loving, stay-at-home cat is gone. The house is a bit subdued today.

A Season's Rest

Don't tell me - I know. It's been three months (okay, two and a half) since our last post. But you know how things go here. If we'd had a second to ourselves, we've have blogged about it.

June: school let out and the girls were off! First everyone went to Phoenix to see the grandparents before the girls went off on a whirlwind tour of D.C., Philadelphia and New York. When the Pirate and I came back from Phoenix, where we'd spent the week before the girls left, the woman who'd been watching after the chickens and the cats told us that raccoons had gotten in. We got in at 2am and found muddy footprints everywhere, including around the toilet seat and inside the toilet bowl in the guest bath.

July: The girls had hardly shaken the dust of the road off themselves when it was time to put on another coat - AT CAMP! This was the Baby Goddess' first time at week-long sleepaway camp, but she acted completely ready for it. When asked whether she'd ever been to camp before, she gave her counselor the hand up, palm out gesture that says "Oh, please! I'm a seasoned campaigner!" She already knew that it's crucial to get the top bunk, and could recite all the important cheers, so she had plenty of free time. Meanwhile Peaches is a counselor in training. What this means is that we're paying for her to do what the camp is paying college students to do. But she's having a fabulous time.

But let us catch you up with the avian members of the household. In mid-July we'd gotten a rooster from a woman who was raising chicks in Santa Cruz and came to realize that they were not all hens. We brought him home, but alas, our joy at having another man in the house was short-lived.

You know that no happiness is had from the sort of man who won't stay home evenings with his wife. Well, our little fellow had twenty wives and still ended up leaving the yard almost nightly. He would fly over the fence and roost in the grape arbor. I had proposed clipping his wings, but the Pirate felt that he would be even more defenseless if he managed to hop out of the yard and was unable to fly back. Remember the raccoons we had back in June? Well, they haven't left. They keep trying to get in, and we keep foiling them. But we can't protect the rooster who won't go into the coop at night.

I've also discovered a new charity: I love making soap, but soap is like baking. You can only consume so much of your own product. But there is a mission near here that's always looking for soap for the people it serves. Perfect! I can make more soap, and give it to people who really need it!

And now for the big news: at the end of July, the Pirate's parents bought a house about five miles from us, moving up from southern California. It's going to be a process getting them into the house as it was a foreclosure and so not in move-in shape, but they got a nice deal and it'll be great to have them close. In the meantime, the entire clan is going to be living in our little house for a few weeks. Cozy!

I have a surprise for you, but I'm not telling until tomorrow. And then, I'll say it with pictures!