Urban Comfort

A Simple Snack with Homemade Strawberry Jam

Strawberry season comes earlier in Louisiana than the rest of the country. Just when it nears the end and I'm finally in step with spring, I end up scrambling to pick the last of the harvest. Which is exactly what a friend and I did a few weeks ago, batching those berries into countless jars of jam (and if you're going to make 6 batches of jam after a day of picking, I highly suggest the company of a good friend). 

I love this particular recipe from the cookbook, Dam Good Sweet.  It's the second year I've used it, and I find it more complex than your basic strawberry jam. There's just enough citrus to brighten up the flavor and not so much sugar that it's cloyingly sweet.

I have more than one friend who simply eats it with a spoon, like candy.  But my favorite way to enjoy it is with goat cheese and Triscuits (after a side-by-side comparison, I like the Reduced Fat version best with this). It's a heavenly snack, even better when shared with friends. 

PONCHATOULA STRAWBERRY JAM

Adapted from (and courtesy of) DamGoodSweet: Desserts to Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth, New Orleans Style [Taunton Press, 2009]  [cookbook by David Guas and Raquel Pelzel]

Ingredients

2 1/2 pounds strawberries, hulled and quartered
3 1/4 cups sugar
Zest of 1 lemon
1 1/2 teaspoons pectin

Directions 

Place a small ceramic or glass plate in the freezer. Place the strawberries in a large pot and, if desired, mash the berries a bit with a potato masher. Add 3 cups of the sugar and the lemon zest to the strawberries and place over medium heat. Cook, stirring occasionally, folding the strawberries and sugar together until the sugar is dissolved and the mixture comes to a simmer, about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile, mix the pectin with the remaining 1/4 cup of sugar. Add the pectin mixture to the strawberries and continue to cook until the mixture reaches 220ºF, another 30 to 35 minutes (note that the jam will stay at around 217ºF for what seems like an eternity - be patient, the temperature will rise, so stick with it), skimming the foam from the top and stirring every so often. Take the plate out of the freezer and spoon a small dollop of jam onto it. The jam should set up semi-stiff, and when you run your finger through it, the trail should not run back together immediately. If it does, keep cooking. If it doesn't, turn off the heat and let the jam sit for 10 minutes. (This helps ensure that your berries don't float to the top of the jam jar.)

Fill a large stockpot or canning pot with water and bring to a boil. Add the jars, lids, and bands, and simmer for 10 minutes. Use tongs to remove the jars, bands, and lids to a clean kitchen towel. Once cool enough to handle (but still warm) fill the jars nearly full with strawberry jam, leaving a 1/2-inch space at the top. Screw the lids on.

Add more water to the pot if necessary and bring to a boil. Place a canning rack in the pot and set the filled jars into the rack. Boil the jars for 10 minutes (the filled jars should be completely covered by the boiling water). Using tongs, remove the jars and place on the kitchen towel. If refrigerating, be sure to cool the filled jars for a few hours first. Unopened, the jam will keep in a cool, dark place for a few months. After opening, try to eat the jam within a week or two.

Makes five 8-ounce jars

 

Tips:  

Even when using small strawberries, I prefer that they be mashed into smaller pieces. But if you like to keep the fruit whole in your jam, simply quarter the large berries and leave small and medium berries whole. The whole berries will stay suspended in the jam and disintegrate into a schmear when you spread it.

The cooking temperature in the original recipe specifies 220ºF to 222ºF. However, I start checking it at 218ºF. I found some of my batches were ready at 219ºF, but most often, 220ºF was perfect. Anything beyond that was overcooked. (For tips on canning 101, I find this post to be helpful.)

You may not want to put the effort into homemade jam. But you can still experiment with store bought - try mixing in finely grated lemon zest to taste. My favorite tool for grating citrus is my Microplane Zester.

 

Thank you to chef David Guas for sharing this recipe. 

 

Making Paper Flowers

In the midst of the hustle and bustle these last few weeks, I’ve been making flowers. Every day, a flower in the morning with a cup of coffee, a flower before bed, a flower in the stolen moments between those bookends of time.  It’s the most focused I’ve been in a long time. Something has clicked into place. It’s a meditation, even while an act of utter frivolity.

I haven’t finished them or made leaves or attempted to coax them into perfection. I just make them, plunk them into glasses strewn around my house. I will get to the details later.

My brain is busy, already thinking beyond the confines of instruction and books. I’m learning, technique and process, but my spirit is already in the garden, thinking about what I can recreate.  It’s beyond rhyme or reason. For now, just simple medicine.

 

**I'm making flowers based on instructions from The Exquisite Book of Paper Flowers by Livia Cetti

Blackberry Dye

Three times in the last month I've been to the woods where the wild blackberries grow. I've learned one thing about myself during these outings - if I see a berry that's ripe, it's impossible for me not to pick it. Impossible. So we eat some and my husband makes batches of blackberry shrub to enjoy in winter cocktails, but then I still find myself with leftovers. 

With the luxury of abundance, I opted for some experimentation outside of the culinary. I've been curious to see how blackberries work as a natural dye (since they stain your fingertips so well) and these were so juicy and almost overripe that they were begging to be used. The process was easy and the resulting color is just divine. 

I used the dye bath for a yard of linen (you must use natural fibers or the dye won't take) and I dip dyed sheets of watercolor paper as well (good for gift tags). Here's the process, very simple and so gratifiying. 

Blackberry Dye

Prep:  When working with berries, you will need to prep your fabric with a salt fixative. I used 1 cup salt and 16 cups of water (you can cut this in half if you're dyeing a smaller piece of fabric). Combine them in a pot and bring to a boil; stir to dissolve the salt. Put the fabric in the pot of boiling salt water and reduce the heat to a simmer. Simmer for 1 hour. Remove fabric and rinse with cold water.

 

 

Dye Bath:  You'll find various recipes and ratios for natural dyes, along with varying times for dyeing, but this is what I did to achieve the color that I did. Experiment for other shades.

3 cups of berries
6 cups of water

Combine in a pot, mashing the berries to release as much juice as possible. Bring the mixture to a simmer, and simmer for 30 minutes. (I read here that too high of a temp would release tannins from the berries and give me a more "tannish" color, which is not what I wanted.)

After 30 minutes, strain the berries out of the dye bath and return the dye bath to the pot. Place the wet fabric in the warm dye and agitate it with a spoon for 15 minutes (to get the color shown here. For deeper colors, you'll need to leave it in the dye for longer periods). After 15 minutes, my fabric was a raspberry color, but after washing the fabric with cold water and Woolite, I was left with the delicate color shown below.

 

To dip dye watercolor paper, I just stood a sheet of paper in the (now cooled) dye bath and let it stand for about 30 minutes to get the color here. If you let it stand longer, the color will turn more of a bluish purple. 

Great Resource for Linen:  Gray Line Linen (graylinelinen.com).  I used the open weave linen (Style #8064) in white. It retails for $9.50 a yard.

 

Inkodye Sun Print & the Inkocap Roller

It's been so quiet here, and yet my life has felt so full. It happens to me sometimes, the need to go away and do things without documenting every moment for public consumption. But then I get excited about stuff and I want to share and well, I come back. 

Yesterday was a good day. I set out with my husband just after my son went to school. We were in search of wild blackberries, which we found in plentiful supply, but first was the discovery of mulberry trees (and mulberries that begged to be picked), then photos to take and nature to enjoy. I snipped a few graceful, leafy sprigs to make sun prints with before the day turned cloudy. By early evening I had a new piece of artwork on my mantel (which is constantly changing) and blackberry cobbler in the oven. My kind of day. 

I tend to have a wide variety of craft supplies on hand, not just because it's my profession, but because I want the freedom to be spontaneous, before the moment disappears. I had a few bottles of Inkodye sitting around, waiting for spring, and I also had a kit the kind people at Lumi sent last year. It was a classic kit with a new tool - the Inkocap Roller. That roller, it changes everything! 

The hard rubber roller attaches directly to the bottle cap, with the Inkodye distributed out of a small hole in the cap. It eliminates waste and cuts my application time in half, at least. There's also very little cleanup, just removal of the roller cap and a quick rinse. If you're at all interested in using Inkodye, I can't recommend this little gadget enough. It'll allow you to make faster prints, making each session more productive. I thought it also helped me get more even coverage during application, which is helpful.

I was dissatisfied with some of my earlier botanical sun printing techniques, so I decided to shake it up a bit. I wanted a more moody, ephemeral feel, so instead of using pressed leaves or placing Plexiglass over my designs to weight them down, I focused on printing some areas sharply while allowing others to be less defined.  I love the results of this process, more organic, less structured. 

Yes, I should have taken a photo of the process, but it was breezy with the cloud cover starting to roll in, and there was a lot of moving around in search of light, so this is not the step-by-step tutorial you might have appreciated. But still, it's pretty simple and you can see some of my other tips on working with Inkodye here and here.

Basically, I applied the Inkodye (using the roller cap) onto a piece of white cotton muslin that I taped to a piece of smooth plywood (directly onto the wood, so use a scrap piece that you don't mind dyeing). Then I arranged my sprigs on the fabric, tacking down some of the leaves with short dressmaker pins with a flat head (longer pins are likely to cast a shadow beyond the leaf and then you'll see them in the final print). I used about 6 pins, concentrating mostly on the leaves around the edges so that I'd have some basic structure to the print. Those leaves print the sharpest, then gradually fade as the other leaves allow more light under them.  After about 7-10 minutes exposure (since I was dealing with variable lighting), I washed the fabric until all the excess dye was removed, then let it air dry. To finish it off, I wrapped my fabric around a 16-x-20-inch canvas frame and stapled it to the back.

All in all, a super easy project. Oh, and before I forget, more good news! Lumi has finally released new colors. They were on hold, trying to work out some manufacturing issues. But the old colors are back, along with a couple of new ones, I think. I especially like the new black. It's less blue than the old version. In some light, you see a bit of a navy tone, with dusky lavender/purple tones in some of the shadowy areas. It's really beautiful. I liked the last black as well, but this version feels deeper and richer.

So fun!  I have a million different things I want to print. Have I mentioned how much I love springtime?