We score a flat of raspberries. They’re a little burnt from the record-breaking heat, but fine for making jam. It’s a little dream come true, working side by side in the kitchen with Laurinda and Makiya, teaching them how easy it is to make jam. I make the first batch, offering tips while I go, then
Gerry brings home two flats of plump, sweet raspberries. I wash and crush some; cook and stir and sweeten them; fill jars with jam and set them in the water bath canner to process. It’s ridiculously cool outside for late June but in the kitchen where I work you’d never know it. While the jam
It’s been an unexpected whirlwind week. Yesterday afternoon, I sat in my wing chair, reading and highlighting, while beet pickles processed in the canner. Content, I looked over at my open kitchen with its tidy counters and big blue Ball canner boiling on the stove. We picked the last of the beets the day prior
Another long day canning tomatoes and by the time I lift the last bubbling jar from the pressure canner I’m spent. But there’s still the garden that needs watering, and the flowerpots are thirsty, and Gerry promises a caramel sundae in the mix. That’s enough to entice me to change my clothes, freshen up, and
It’s fruit season. I’m tucking raspberries and strawberries away in the freezer, making jam, and enjoying handfuls of the sweet berries throughout the day. Also on ice cream. Of course. I’ve been on a canning hiatus, and the familiar sound of pinging lids and the sight of jars liked up like red-jewelled soldiers on a towel
I pull a bag of fish fins and assorted parts from the freezer. I’ve been saving them since last summer when Gerry returned from his annual salmon fishing trip. We work together when my (not so) old man returns from the sea to fillet fish, tuck little packages in the freezer, and stuff some in
I shoot drooping tulips and wrestle with my manuscript—two sweet ways to spend a morning. When I emerge from the woman cave for lunch (tomato soup, that I canned last summer, topped with fresh basil from the Aerogarden), the sun is peeking out. We have a late afternoon appointment in town, so enjoy a leisurely lunch,
Simple things comfort me on these days when I’m still weary from travel, and longing for ordinariness: plucking a jar of canned tomatoes off the shelf in the cold storage room, the sound of a snow shovel scraping on a driveway, the contented hum of the furnace in the early morning. I wake early—too early,
Value is not made of money, but a tender balance of expectation and longing. Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life I pull a tattered ziplock bag from the freezer drawer. It’s full of onion skin, carrot chunks, celery leaves, and whatever other vegetable scraps I tucked away in recent months. I
Once I committed a couple of hours to being in the kitchen, I found my usual impatience fade and could give myself over to the afternoon’s unhurried project . . . There’s something about such work that seems to alter the experience of time. . . It seems to me that one of the great luxuries
You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, nonapologetically, to say “no” to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger “yes” burning inside. The enemy of the “best” is often the “good. Stephen Covey I think I spent the whole night dreaming about