The Mono

Chopped dried apricots look startlingly like chopped dried papaya. I'm hoping they make as decent a sub for figs as I think they will.

Candied citrus peel was impossible to find even during the holidays, when it should have been around. I wonder whether it's dying out?

If you take the peel off an orange, making sure that there is no white on it, throw it in a bowl with an equal amount of sugar, and put it in the fridge for a week, it will candy itself quite nicely. Not bitter at all.

Cranberries were also hard to get this season. Fortunately, dried ones can be rehydrated, at least in theory...

I keep worrying about whether I have enough of this or that... then I remember, I'm making mince. It's whatever dried fruits you have on hand, thrown in with chopped apples and a bunch of spices. It's like worrying about being one carrot short in a vast pot of soup.

The Granny Smiths I had finally turned from "pie apples" into "sauce apples". Pity I need some structural integrity. Time for a run to the store...

Edit: I had to make a second grocery run for lids, and (now that I no longer need them) found candied fruit and peels at FoodMaxx. Who knew?

The mince is done cooking and is waiting until after dinner, when I'll have enough run of the kitchen to process the jars. It's not even pleasantly bitter this time, just sweet and tart in about equal measure, like really good applesauce. And very, very flavorful. Yum.

I have peaches.

They're going for $1.50 a pound this year; I should have expected that, given the rain we had this spring, but it makes canning them more expensive. Oh, well -- it's still as cheap as buying canned peaches, and a damn sight more tasty.

There's a box of about 25 pounds out on the porch, and they should be ready by Sunday. Canning binge!

Next week: nectarines.

I canned up eight pints of ratatouille, three more pints of tomatoes, and five pints of tomato juice. Everything's cleared away except the stuff to go to the cellar; the jars/bands need to be washed and labeled. We've also finished off the last of the 2003/2004 jars of tomatoes.

The heatwave stopped production out there, so the tomatoes are all busy blooming now, with very little to be harvested. So, next project: peaches! Or nectarines, if I've already missed the good peaches. I'll head out to Brentwood for that on Thursday, probably.

Tonight, I'm going to go have some good Indian food, grab a couch, and watch Goonies on the big screen.

I finally bought a dunk pot today -- the kind with holes that fits in another pot, so that you can immerse and retrieve stuff you want to dunk in boiling water. Much better than fishing things out with a spider.

Anyway, $20 to Cash&Carry (and a lot of windowshopping) later, I brought it home and started dunking tomatoes in hot water.

Much is said in various publications about blanching tomatoes to make them easy to peel. Half the time I don't bother -- I just sit down with a paring knife and a movie and do it the usual way. I had a lot of small ones this time, though, so I figured hot water was the way to go.

As I say, lots of people have talked about how to do it. ( Here are my own notes: )

I spent all afternoon and a good portion of the evening peeling and coring tomatoes. After all that, the tomatoes look fabulous. Whatever else might be said about Neves Azorean Red (I think the taste when fresh isn't much, but its other attributes are great) it has a blazing red color. I've also got eight pints of yellow and orange tomatoes, about the color of carrot juice, plus two pints of that juice to do weird things with.

I wasn't able to reach my mom tonight -- she'll be back in town tomorrow, but I had hoped to get our family recipe for ratatouille so that I could do a batch alongside the tomatoes -- but I threw the remaining tomatoes and the uncut veggies back into the fridge, to be dealt with in the next couple of days. It won't kill me to assemble the canning supplies again.

The bomb is depressurizing in the kitchen, and when I open it up, I'll have fourteen pints of chopped tomatoes, some in day-glo orange. Things are looking pretty good.

Oh, and Cash&Carry has a "Cheese/Jam dish" for $10 that would make a great salt cellar. I'll see whether I can get it as a household thing. It would sure beat having the sugar and salt containers look almost exactly the same...

It's the season for sweets. I'm not normally a chocolate person, but I'll take a bit here and there.

Tonight was my fudge night; I wanted to make some fudge for Kathy, who always complains that no one makes the old-fashioned variety anymore. The sort that crumbles rather than bending, the kind where you really can't eat more than a fingertip-sized piece at a time without feeling vaguely sick. Not my kind of thing, but I know how to make it.

I also wanted to make my favorite fudge, which is the polar opposite of what Kathy likes: I warned a friend once that it is the kind of candy where you can eat half a panful without noticing (i.e. the dangerous kind). It is so soft it needs to be refrigerated or it tries to go exploring, and sticky enough that pieces laid on top of one another meld after a while. It was the result of Nick's mother's urge to make fudge when she had no recipe... she threw in things she knew went into fudge, and got something, well, fudge-ish. She considered it a mistake, I thought it was genius. And so are family recipes born.

Another family recipe is possibly in the offing... I forgot to boil Kathy's fudge, so it came out granular and refused to set. I started wondering -- what if I bake it? (So far it's still granular, but I cranked the oven up a little more, to 300, and I'll let it sit for a while.) I just need it to get hot enough to melt the sugar, right? I'm thinking that next time I may make it with powdered sugar to avoid this problem...

At least my fudge came out as expected, and I happily licked the spoon. Yum.