BlackDogHair

I think of winter as the citrus season … and in fact what most of us see as oranges typically  have their best color and flavor just after Thanksgiving.  Don’t you remember big lump at the bottom of you christmas stocking?  Well that is true of navel oranges.  Unfortunately there are other varieties of orange but an industry driven, narrow marketing focus has turned the Navel into an equivalent of the  Red Delicious.

Starting in April and peaking toward the late summer Valencia oranges hit our produce stands and this, my friends is an orange of a different appeal.  Velencias are juicing oranges and while they don’t get so big nor as ‘pretty’ as Navels you have no way of knowing just how good OJ can be until you squeeze a pile of these tasty treats for breakfast.

You can use simple reamer style juicers. The production is slow and if you just want to try it once this is a good place to start plus if you don’t already have one then it’s about time. The type that look a bit like garlic presses are going to make your hand sore pretty quickly and electric models are not just silly cleaning is a pain. Admit this is something that you are going to do often and for basic juice production, ease of cleaning and simple operation the lever driven press is perfect. The juice you get will be so much better than that “pulp-in-not-from-concentrat’ stuff at your grocers … do your self a favor pick up a couple three pounds of Valencia oranges while they are in season and for breakfast enjoy real OJ …

I made jelly yesterday. My mother always made jelly and until recently forgot how much better the taste is. Jam is so much easier to make, not that preserving either is difficult with pre-made pectin.  With Jam you are not waiting for the juice to strain off. A fruit’s taste is so intense with jelly and a piece of toast is much better with out the seeds.

I grew up spending summers in a lake cabin … the salad days.  From that time I remember dish cloths tied into bags and suspended from the cupboard handles oozing red juice into ceramic bowls. Jelly making takes time but when you extract the juice from berries you are left with an intense color and the essential flavor. Combine this with a quantity of sugar and some factory pectin over heat and you have jelly. The odd assortment of containers my mother ‘canned’ to were sealed with paraffin, melted in a tin can and poured over the cooling liquid. Current literature suggests, strongly, that you hot water bath anything not destined for the frig or freezer.  It was part of the ritual  to pry a wax seal off the top of an old juice glass.  Jams and jelly didn’t stay our pantry shelves more than a season but  summer fruit preserves were around for a PBJ in January and eaten with out incident. Perhaps the level of litigation today makes in impossible to suggest anything less than 10 minutes in boiling water.  These days our preserving tends to be multiple batches which are held over a couple of seasons. I do miss that look of paraffin sealed jelly glasses … js

It has not been a typical Oregon summer and by that I mean there seems to be a seasonal shift. There was a really cool and wet June which, I think, pushed the growing season off. We would normally have been harvesting blueberries for weeks but they are really just now taking off . Raspberry season seemed to be both shorter and later. We managed to mostly miss the U-Pic on raspberries. That wasn’t a total loss because we have quite a few still frozen. As for blueberries we need to get lots more of those little gems and to that end started picking them this week.

Once cleaned they are laid out on baking sheets, frozen to keep berries separate and then portioned out.  These are vacuum seal and return to the freezer. We’ll have nearly fresh berries any time and at any quantity needed. Harvest in full swing we’ve hit the farmer’s markets to pick up  a few pounds of pickling cukes and made a batch of bread & butter pickles

Notice the eggs in that quart jar in the back? Made use of the  ho twater canner, added extra onion and  covered with pickling juice. JQ also tried fermented cukes and got excellent dill pickles … this is where you brine the cucumbers in a crock and they slowly pickle over a number of weeks.. We did up a batch yesterday of 4 pints and have another 3 or 4 still to do. The other item harvested was the garlic and shallots. Shallots were great,  the garlic heads were a bit small but we have lots so that makes up for it. They are all layed out on the porch drying. In a day or so we’ll bundle them up and off to a cool dark spot where, hopefully, they’ll hold over the winter.

As I said the cool weather in June pushed off the season … but we had a nice warm and sunny July so things are going along. I think the garden soil is in need of more amendments which may make for little or no winter gardening. Didn’t grow as much as planned but there is still more to pick … js

had a very brief get away on Oregon’s North coast which meant a day in Cannon Beach and another in Manzanita. Managed to relax and get in some long over due beach walking … and a few of these great Facebook shots, that is our hotel in Manzanita in the background.

Unfortunately, it seems that JQ has walking pneumonia. She went out to the coast with a cough, which we thought was a summer cold and seemed be be getting better.  When it didn’t we decided to head back to Sandy and got into the doctor on Friday.  The Doc put her on anti biotics and bed rest.

Which is what she has been doing for the last two days. Cough is a bit better but she is still hacking away. So for now it’s sleeping between reading and drinking lots of fluids … doctor’s orders followed.  Anyway we are back from the coast … js

Our garlic is ready to harvest, I think its a bit late this year but finally there are good sized heads to dig from the studio garden. It  still has to dry out a bit so we’ll braid up the now brown stocks and hang them in the back of the pantry. I’m looking forward to roasting whole heads of garlic. Clip off enough to expose the cloves, drizzle some olive oil over them and bake in a medium oven for about 30 minutes. The roasted cloves are soft will pop easily out of their skins and spread on toast or add a mellow garlic flavor to a sauce.

The other great thing about growing your own garlic is the scape. What would become the flower is a curl of green stem topped with a spear point.  Then, just a few weeks before the plant is ready to harvest, you snip these off  to direct the plants energy away from flowering and into the fattening up the root.  This leaves you with a hand full of fresh green that can be chopped and added to a saute like you would garlic or green onion and it brings a similar flavor.  While you wait for the garlic to mature and dry there are plenty of meals seasoned with fresh scapes … js

I’d tried to post this photo when we were downtown last Monday but for some reason the draft didn’t make it to the web …

At Portland Saturday market JQ discovered a vendor with real pie cherries and though we picked up enough for a single pie on reflection she decided it would be nice to have some extra in the freezer.

Turns out the local orchard was going to be at the Farmer’s Market in Pioneer Square so we went down town for lunch. The thing about seasonal fruit is that, well it’s seasonal and when it is gone the wait is 12 months for a second chance.  As of Monday our freezer has enough fruit to bake a couple of cherry pies … js

Ahh, the hardware store, filled with solutions for things that are broken.  Home Depot is not a hardware store, it’s a big box discount mart where you might be able to save some money but never find the right ‘parts’.  The worthiness of fixing has returned. People value well made objects and understanding how things work is growing the ‘do-it-yourself’ movement.  Parts are the points that wear down and to fix it you’ll need a trip to the hardware store.

Ace Hardware in Sandy is a classic hardware store.  I’ve spent hours walking it’s aisles and discovering all manner of ‘parts.  These are usually small pieces, not sealed individually in envelopes of semi rigid plastic but rather stored in bins which have been arranged by type and size. To collect your parts you pull the number of pieces you need from a bin, place in a bag and write on this bag the unit price.

Just the other day I was picking up a handful of eye bolts to terminate a run of twine from plant base to post which will serve as climbing support, when I witnessed the classic Hardware Newb blunder.  This guy and his wife in the parts aisle caught my attention. Don’t get me wrong a second pair of hands is occasionally helpful, it’s just very infrequent that a couple picks parts together. Efficiency typically dictates that if  your hardware store stop requires two people they are on different assignments meeting up at the counter later. Pulling parts is not a team sport and it is not very helpful to have someone asking you questions about how a particular bolt is going to fit when you are trying to decide if a carrage bolt might work better than a machine bolt. In this instance the guy had found the proper size and was counting them into his hand. The wife asked if she could write down the unit price for him, actually she did this a couple of times, in a very helpful tone. The guy brushed the questions aside. A few minutes later as I stood behind the guy and his spouse at the counter there was a question about a unit cost of one type of bolt from the pile he had dumped onto the counter.  He didn’t know, he offered a guess “thirteen no maybe fifteen cents … ” to which the clerk shot him a look and rung up the higher amount. To her credit the wife did not, in the store at least, remind him of her offer to help.  Trust me even a couple of different part unit prices are hard to hold in your head, that bag makes it much easier at check out and the weathered old coot, the one who’s name is know by all the staff , writes down the unit prices on a parts bag. Ace is the place when parts are needed … js