This was my food adventure for the day. There’s a local restaurant that posted their Chicken Salsa Chili recipe on their website and I decided to try it. It was a success! But there’s one problem… I should have not planned to eat it all myself.
Usually, leftovers aren’t a big deal. I like to have them. But this was a bigger recipe than I realized. I’m going to be eating chili all week AND I froze quite a bit. It’s a good thing that I like it. Hopefully I’ll be saying the same thing by Thursday.
I took a field trip this week. It was very cool. My friend Margaret had read about the local University selling its food products. Students that are studying food science are busy producing a variety of tasty things. Faculty and Staff are also making products. The sales of their products helps to fund research and maintenance of the facility.
The first stop was the meat lab. I’m glad I went with Margaret because she is a very good cook and knows her prices and cuts of meat. I wanted to try some new things and it was helpful to have her educate me on what all I was seeing. Plus, she sends me recipes on how to use it all too! So here is my stash from the meat lab.
The next stop was the dairy lab. People were actually lined up before it opened. There are limited quantities and you never quite know what flavors of ice cream are available. The main options at the dairy lab are cheese, yogurt and ice cream. I usually don’t have ice cream on hand at my house, but I just couldn’t resist…
In order to take advantage of this, you have to have a flexible schedule. The labs are open for sales on Wednesdays. The meat lab is from 2-5pm and the dairy lab is from 3-5pm.
I have been really busy since the day of the field trip so I haven’t had a chance to taste it all yet. But I anticipate a lot of cooking over the weekend. 
Oh yeah… the ice cream flavors are Chocolate Peanut Butter Truffle, Chocolate Almond Chunk and Gopher Gold (French Vanilla with Raspberry swirl).
Yesterday was the big day. Time to make the jam. I had picked a total of 21 pounds of strawberries earlier in the summer. I had them all chopped and frozen specifically for this purpose. Last summer was when my mom taught me how to make jam. (Click on the link for a pretty detailed documentation of the process.)
Prepping the berries ahead of time definitely helped. There’s no way we would have made as much if we would have started the process from the beginning all on one day. We ended up making a total of six batches. That’s 54 jars of jam. Yikes!
We started off with plain strawberry. We figured we’d start with the basic one to make sure we remembered what we were doing. We did 2 batches of that. Next was the Strawberry Rhubarb. This was my favorite from last year. We did 2 batches of that. At this point we were only about 2 hours into our endeavor. Guess what? We need more jars and we’ve still got strawberries.
So my mom took a trip to get more jars and sugar while I melted the wax and sealed the jars that we had done so far. I have a friend that made jam with strawberries and blueberries. So my mom also got a few pints of blueberries.
So batch number five was sort of winging it. We used 4 cups of strawberries and 2 cups of blueberries. It turned out great! It is this beautiful purpley color. It still tastes like strawberries, but a deeper flavor. Thumbs up on that experiment.
Batch number six ended up being made with what we had left over. We still had 4 cups of strawberries. But we had 1 cup each of rhubarb and blueberries. When I was telling my mom which jars were which, I mis-spoke and accidentally said, “Strawberry Bluebarb” when referring to this batch. I think it’s a perfect name. It tastes like batch #5 but has some tangy-ness from the rhubarb. Yum!
I suppose I need to get some bread now…
I must be relaxed because I completely forgot that it was Wednesday and I needed to put out the trash. It’s a good thing that I hardly had any, because it was already picked up by the time I rolled out of bed.
I’m to the point in the summer where I have relaxed enough and can be productive. So this morning I went for a run and then to the Farmer’s Market. This particular Farmer’s market is held in the parking lot of the facility where we hold graduation. I haven’t been back there since June 1st. This is a nice and relaxed reason to go there, in comparison.
I’ve been strawberry picking twice this week. On Wednesday I picked about 10 pounds and on Friday I picked about 11 pounds. I’ve been a little busy so I haven’t made any jam. But that is the intent of all of this strawberry picking. Last year I made some regular jam, low sugar jam and strawberry rhubarb jam. My favorite was the strawberry rhubarb. But this year, I want to do more strawberry rhubarb and try some others.
This time I washed, hulled and chopped the berries. Then I froze them all! But while I was doing this “work” I made a special treat for myself…
A Strawberry Mojito. 
I had a discussion with a friend last night. We were talking about how we like mangos but they are hard to cut up. I tried to describe how I do it, but it wasn’t working…
I’m sure that they teach you some special way to cut a mango if you go to culinary school. But I just learned by watching my aunt. I figured that she ought to know how to do it since she grew up in Madagascar where they actually had mangos that grew nearby. I had just bought 2 mangos at the grocery store yesterday afternoon. Today I needed a snack and decided to cut one up and document it. I think the pictures are pretty self explanatory.
Do I dare open it? Right now I’m thinking… no.
Last year I took a community ed class and actually learned how to make my own truffles. They’re not really that difficult to make. But my dilemma this year is that I’m trying to decide if it is wise to make them. You see, if I make them, I eat them. If I eat them, I will have an issue with fitting into my clothes. Can you really make truffles and not taste them? And I can’t make just one kind. I have to make a couple…
So today I was on the receiving end of truffles. I’m excited about the gift. But now temptation is looking me square in the eye. Treadmill here I come.
Do you ever get home and not have a clue what you’ll make for dinner? Today was one of those days. I had just finished eating chili for four days in a row. What next? Most of the time I’m not that creative. But in a stroke of brilliance, I looked through the refrigerator and realized I had the makings for a roasted vegetable pizza. My zucchini and yellow squash were from last week’s farmers market. I needed to do something with my portabello mushrooms and red peppers. The herbs I’m growing are fading fast in the fall weather. I had a little alfredo sauce left over from something else.
This really wasn’t that complicated. I’m more impressed with myself for just improvising and coming up with something that tasted really good.
Traveling in Greece for nearly 3 weeks was full of gyros and euros. At first we started off having a gyro each day. That lasted three or four days. Then I moved onto soulvaki and Greek salads. I also had some pasta dishes, moussaka and lamb. The way I could judge how expensive a restaurant was, was by comparing the price of a Greek salad. (4 – 7 euros) I still can eat a gyro any day of the week and a Greek salad.
I knew the food and culture would be interesting. I also knew that it wouldn’t be cheap! The thing I didn’t realize until I got here was how strongly the US economy affects the rest of the world. I knew it was bad at home. But since E1 = $1.61, I thought it would be better in Europe.
The thing that was very apparent was the absence of US tourists. We hardly saw any Americans. Granted, this is a popular destination for Europeans. When asked where we were from, shop owners were always surprised to find out. Sometimes I’m a little reluctant to talk about where I’m from. You never know what the reaction is going to be when you say you’re from the US. But people were always nice and hospitable. We’d joke around about the dollar being crap and get into a more serious dialog about how business is down because they’re are fewer tourists in general.
I’m not going to get into anything political. But it’s sad that our tanked out economy hurts more than just us.
Sixteen pounds of strawberries is a lot. When I went strawberry picking, I really didn’t know how much I needed. Now I know. So far, my mom and I have made three batches of jam. In between each batch we washed the utensils and saucepan. Apparently this is important. I photographed the process, so with any luck, I’ll be able to do it myself one day.
First, it took me a few hours to wash and hull all of the berries.
Mom suggests using the recipe that comes with the Sure-Jel package. Sure-Jel is fruit pectin. There are a few different kinds. The pink box required less sugar than the yellow box. I liked the flavor of the less sugared jam, so I’d use that one the next time. We used a small food processor to chop up the strawberries this time – instead of a potato masher. This worked well. Note to self: Don’t over chop.
This recipe called for the strawberries and pectin to come to a boil. We also got the jars ready by boiling them in water, upside down.
After the fruit and pectin came to a boil, we added the sugar. Once it dissolves you need to have it at a rolling boil for a minute. Mom showed me how to watch for the way it drips off of your spoon to really tell if it’s ready. So we boiled it for about 30 more seconds…
After that, you take it off of the heat and skim off the foam. The foam is just put into a bowl and you can use it right away for jam.
Then you use a funnel type of device to ladle the jam into the jars. My mom melts wax in an old coffee can and then pours it on the top to seal it.
We also made freezer jam which has a different process to it. You don’t have to freeze it in glass jars. We actually ran out of jars today. I chopped up 8 more cups of strawberries to make two batches of strawberry-rhubarb jam later. I need to get some rhubarb still – and more jars and sugar.
I mainly wrote this post so I could have a reference as to what to do in the future. But the pictures are pretty cool and it’s fun to see the process. In the meantime… I have jam coming out of my ears!
