We be Jamming

Nothing says spring has arrived better than fresh strawberries! Yesterday Andy and I, and our friend Allie ventured north to pick strawberries at Bottom View Farm. It was super fun plucking my own berries and seeing my basket fill up. The last time I picked berries I think I was about the same size as the blueberry bush and ate more berries than I collected. This time around all the berries made it to the basket. With our fresh berries Andy wanted to make 2 batches of strawberry jam. Our poor judge of quantities and fuzzy memory of the amount needed led us to pick and purchase roughly 2 gallons of strawberries. It wasn’t as expensive as I thought it would be, and we weren’t daunted by our gigantic leaking bag of berries.

When I was looking up strawberry canning options the “old fashioned” strawberry jam caught my eye (this is Antique Modernism after all). Old fashioned just means that the jam is made without pectin and utilizes the fruit’s natural pectin. This sounded appealing to me so we attempted this as our first batch. After about an hour we realized that “old fashioned” actually meant boil the crap out of it until you can’t stand it any more, then fill jars and process as usual. From the way things look in the jar it has set nicely and our patience lasted just long enough. The book claimed that this jam caramelizes more and has a different taste than pectin-made jams. It certainly turned out a beautiful deep burgundy color.

Just keep boiling, and boiling, and boiling...

It ends up turning this scrumptious color!

Next up, Strawberry Sauce. I was doubtful about the utility of this one since we don’t put a lot of flavored sauces on things. However, Andy said it sounded delicious and we brainstormed other uses for strawberry sauce. It could be made into to frosting, muffins, tarts, perhaps even a layer in a cake. So strawberry sauce could be versatile. The recipe called for using corn syrup and our corn syrup has high fructose corn syrup, which isn’t something I want to use in my cooking, so I swapped it for honey. I wasn’t sure how it was done, but it turns our you can swap honey for corn syrup one for one. In addition to honey there was apple juice, orange juice and zest. This one was very fragrant with the honey and orange scents. I’m excited to try some leftovers over some pie later this evening.

Strawberry sauce is a brighter red.

Last we made strawberry jam with pectin. Andy concluded that powdered pectin was a worthwhile invention as this jam took only about 20 minutes to make. I’m glad we made both kinds, so that we could learn what it spoon tests were all about and learn to fully appreciate powdered pectin. This was the batch where we finally remembered to let the jars sit in the canner for 5 minutes after processing. So, hopefully the lack of sitting doesn’t affect the jam and sauce too much. I’m feeling confident though that it’ll turn out okay.

Right to left: Jam with pectin, jam without pectin (old fashioned), and sauce.

If you didn’t think that 3 batches of jam/sauce was enough to use up 2 gallons of strawberries you’d be wrong! We had enough berries left over to fill a cookie sheet for freezing. These little guys will be used for smoothies and... well, probably nothing else since smoothies are awesome.

I’m jazzed about the success of our first canning adventure of the season. We came out with 20 jars of jam/sauce and only 1 serious jam burn. On our list for other canning adventures include tomatoes, tomato sauce, pickles, peaches, blackberries, and applesauce. This is a good start; however, 3 batches in one day is a lot of canning activity and we were both dog tired after the kitchen got cleaned up.

Our new dog Cotton! He's tired from jamming too much.

Muffin Madness: Runner Muffins

I received a request! This was the one and only muffin request for the month of madness, so it had to be obliged. My brother, who is training to run Grandma’s Marathon, requested a muffin that he could eat before and after a run. Preferably one that had oatmeal, banana and no nuts. To me, such a muffin should be fairly healthy and sustaining. This called for whole wheat flour and no refined sugar. It takes your body longer to break down and digest whole grains, and honey raises your blood sugar slower than refined sugar, so honey would be the only sweetener for these muffins.

Using honey instead of sugar is a bit tricky. This website was the most helpful at making the substitution. The key to cooking with honey is to realize that it’s also a liquid and takes care of some of the liquid in the recipe, as well as the sugar. It is acidic so you need more baking soda. Additionally, it browns quicker than white sugar, so turn your oven temp down 25 degrees. I did not heed this warning and the edges of my muffins crisped and almost burnt while the insides were still cooking. I’ve adjusted the oven temperature for the recipe to follow. One more thing about honey, is that it’s touted to help mitigate allergies, and local honey is best. This may not be scientifically proven, but who cares, it can’t hurt.

While my brother requested no nuts, and I actually don’t like nuts either, I was tempted to add almonds because I have a new found love for them. We had some sliced almonds already for making granola, so I borrowed some of those, whacked them a bit in a plastic bag and came up with some nice crushed almonds. I dislike eating something soft and coming upon a hard, unwelcome nut. Which is why I chose to crush up my almonds. You can add any nut you like to this recipe or skip them altogether. If you keep the nuts they’ll had some more health benefits. The sliced/crushed almonds blended well with the shape of the rolled oats, so they didn’t interfere with the texture of the muffin much.

An ice cream scoop is a handy tool for doling out batter.

Please note the wonderful texture of the batter, mmmm!

Really, this is a great recipe if you’re looking for a good healthy, sustaining muffin. Also, if you have anger that you need to get out, mashing bananas and smacking a bag of almonds is cathartic. But if they’re healthy they probably taste like cardboard, right? NO! These are quite delicious. The official muffin taster enjoyed them and said that they didn’t taste healthy. Which I take to mean that they didn’t taste like cardboard. At work these little gems went surprisingly quick considering I touted them as “good for you.” Bear in mind, I have no science or data to back up my claims of health. However, what is good for the soul must also be good for the body.

Banana mashing: more stress relieving than yoga.

Some recipe notes: I found a banana oatmeal recipe that used allspice for seasoning, most banana muffin recipes didn’t have spices and I found this intriguing. As a result of our canning last summer, the only allspice we had was whole, and I was too lazy to grind it up (I already ground the flour, that’s quite enough). So I smelled the allspice, realized it smelled a lot like cloves, which I did have, and I used those instead. It’d be lovely to try these with allspice too, but you can really use whatever spice you like. Also, my bananas were fairly large, so I used two. You don’t need an exact amount of banana, but if you feel your batter is too dry or wet, adjust the amount of milk you use to make it all okay.

The Stuff
1 cup whole wheat flour
1 cup rolled oats
½ cup sliced raw almonds, left as is or bashed up
2 ½ tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
½ tsp allspice/cloves/whatever you like
2 ripe bananas
1 egg, beaten
½ cup milk
½ cup honey
¼ cup butter, melted
1 tsp vanilla

The Process

1. In a large bowl, whisk together the flour, oats, almonds, baking soda, salt and spice. Make a well in the center.
2. In a medium bowl, peel (I shouldn’t have to tell you that) and mash the bananas. Add the beaten egg, milk, butter and vanilla, whisk together thoroughly. Add the honey (this is where a kitchen scale is really useful) and stir together completely.
3. Add wet ingredients to dry and carefully combine. Once all ingredients are incorporated, divide into muffin tin until just to the top, there should be enough batter for 12 muffins.
4. Bake in a 325 degree oven for 15 to 20 minutes. Turning once. Stick a toothpick in them to make sure the centers are done, but don’t be confused if you hit a banana chunk. I believe these are best after being fully cooled.

Enjoy!