We rarely complain about too much sun, and certainly won’t now. On a recent trip to Kauai (the rainy Garden Isle), the weather was so good we had almost too much light for photos. A problem we hope to have again. But we did manage to wake up early one morning to beat the sun and get some photos of the local flora. There is so much to see, this is just a taste. We hope you enjoy it. Aloha.
The Best Strawberry Jam.
So what makes this strawberry jam the best? Well, it is just strawberries, sugar and lemon juice, so nothing gets in the way. If you have ripe, sweet strawberries, this is the real deal. And we use a technique that makes the process much, much easier. If you like jam, but don’t like all the specialized gear and the huge tub of boiling water, we have a solution: the oven.
It turns out you can sterilize your jars and lids in the oven, You can process the jam, too. (Just make sure your oven is true to temperature, they often are NOT, use an oven thermometer to be sure). Simply place your clean jars and lids on a baking sheet and heat in a 250 degree oven for at least 30 minutes. Remove the jars from the oven when you need them. Then fill the jars with jam, leave a 1/4 inch of room, wipe the rims clean, place the lids on, seal them and put the jars back in the oven for 15 minutes. Then take the jars out of the oven and they will seal as they cool. So. Much. Easier.
The other fuss about making jam usually has to do w/ pitting and skinning fruit, or in the case of strawberries, hulling. There are specialized hulling tools, but we use strong plastic straws (flimsy won’t work here) and run them from the bottom through the center of the strawberries. It is the fastest way to hull the strawberries, and something anyone (read, your kids or guest) can be dragooned volunteer to do. It’s almost fun, and you can snack on a few berries along the way.
As for the jam, we adapted the recipe (and the oven technique) from Blue Chair Fruit Company in Berkeley. Blue Chair has fine jams and marmalade, gear, classes and one of our favorite cookbooks. Worth a visit.
Brown Sugar Poundcake.
This is some very tasty poundcake. It uses brown sugar and we serve it with fresh strawberries and sour cream (similar to how we serve strawberries with sour cream and raw/brown sugar). It tastes like a good poundcake with a deeper sugar flavor, as you would expect. The recipe comes from “Sweet Auburn Desserts” an excellent southern dessert cookbook, but it is just poundcake, no special steps, limited hassles, happy faces. We suggest you make it for a summer party. It is also very good toasted for breakfast (not that we would ever do anything like that).
So, since that doesn’t fill many paragraphs, let us tell you about the wild bunny running around in the kitchen. Since we have a large garden “farm”, we get plenty of critters. Some welcome, some not. The veggie beds are caged above and below, but there are still plenty of goodies (mostly in the orchard) to entertain the gophers, wood rats, moles, lizards and squirrels. We have a large deer fence around the “perimeter” to keep most of the deer, coyotes and perhaps larger animals at bay. These are our “passive” defenses, and they work pretty well.
As for the “active” defenses we have some traps for gophers (the enemy) and we happily dispatch wood rats (the ones that steal fruit) whenever we find their nests. But on a day-to-day basis, Oreo the cat is our primary “enforcer”. Oreo is a rescued barn cat that lost her tail to a coyote. She lost her gig at the barn. This ended up being a good deal for the cat, as she gets to practice her “craft” with minimal interference here at the farm. And, until recently, everything was good. But then things started to change…
First, the cat started to catch songbirds. She didn’t usually kill them, but would bring us a “gift”. The sight of Carolyn shaking the cat to release a bird (they usually get away in a puff of feathers) is…..”amusing”, to say the least. Then a few weeks ago some rabbits moved inside the deer fence and, suddenly, here is the cat bringing us bunnies as gifts. Not good. Bunnies are cute, the kids like bunnies. (And are we so “shallow” that we value cute songbirds and bunnies more than ugly gophers and rats? Yes, absolutely.)
So the other evening the cat brings us a still kicking live bunny as a gift. We come out to “free” the bunny and, once free, the bunny runs inside the house and into the kitchen (right past our puzzled dog, I might add). Now we are chasing a very scared bunny in laps around the kitchen island until it tries to hide and we finally catch it (gently) with a towel to move it outside. Great. Then we let it go and it runs right into the open garage! Ugh. Dumb. Bunny. (Dumb farmers? Maybe.) The bunny later escaped from the open garage during the night. We just hope the cat wasn’t waiting….Never a dull moment here at the farm.
Brown Sugar Poundcake:
(Adapted from “Sweet Auburn Desserts”)
Notes Before You Start:
What You Get: Poundcake with deeper sugar flavor and some extra color. Good cake for a crowd.
What You Need: No special equipment required. A stand mixer will really help, though.
How Long? A couple of hours, but maybe 15 minutes of active time. You start poundcake in a cold oven, so it takes 90+ minutes to bake. Plan accordingly.
The Sun Crest Peach Smash.
Every gardener has his/her “White Whale”. And just like Captain Ahab, we chase this object around with a strong, strange, usually sometimes silly, and always often boring (to others) obsession. For us, the Sun Crest peach is our White Whale (more pink, but whatever…). Ever since we tried the “perfect peach”, we just had to grow our own. Sun Crests are big, blush, beautiful and incredibly juicy with sweet/tart flavor that just never gets old. A true delight and something worthy of obsession.
Sun Crest peaches are also a serious pain in the fanny to grow, the trees are finicky and the fruit bruises if you look at them the wrong way. (The Masumoto family has some great writing on the subject of obsession on Sun Crest peaches….sadly, we get it). This year we got a real crop. At last, we are satisfied (temporarily).
So what to do with the Sun Crests? (Or any great local peach?) Well….eat it! Now. Seriously, eat it right now. But, beyond that, it is good to have a few options. And while we are all for cobblers (and pies, slumps, grunts, crisps, etc.), the best peaches don’t need to be cooked. Raw is best. Sliced peaches with vanilla ice cream or yogurt? Good call. But in a cocktail? Oh, yes. Yes indeed.
As for the cocktail to mix, this is the easy part. Ripe stone fruits call for a smash. Smashes are one of the great old-time cocktails from way back in the Jerry Thomas era (like 1880). Originally, a mixture of whiskey, lemon, mint and sugar, the basic recipe is easily extended to seasonal fruit, with peaches and nectarines being a particularly good fit. Smashes fell out of fashion a few generations ago, but cocktail historians like David Wondrich helped to bring them back. And not too soon afterwards, expert mixologists like Dale Degroff came up with variations like the Peach Smash, a smash with bourbon, peaches, lemon, mint and a special honey syrup. A good foundation to work from.
But the Sun Crest isn’t just any peach, we wanted its flavor lead the drink. So we use less-sweet/ more-spicy rye whiskey and basic simple syrup to let the peach shine through. (If you have a good, but not great peach, use bourbon and honey syrup). We also forego double-straining the cocktail. Why? Frankly, we spent all this time and effort growing this damn delightful peach, and we don’t want to waste one ounce of it. Think of it as a Sun Crest peach, lemon and whiskey smoothie. But if you want something a little more traditional, double-strain your smash.
Either way, you get spicy, sweet and tart flavors with a refreshing backbone of lemon and mint. Hard to beat….really hard to beat. So we suggest you find your best local peaches, treat them well, eat them out of hand and then mix this cocktail. It will make for a very good day. Continue reading
Sweet Corn Polenta With Eggplant Sauce.
Yes, another vegetable recipe from Yotam Ottolenghi, but this one has more to do with what is going on in our garden than anything. We have eggplant, lots and lots of eggplant. Why? That is very good question. Most years we get a few eggplant, but this year they are taking off. Zucchini and cukes are behind, tomatoes are also slow (even with the heat) but the eggplant are taking over half of a large bed. Gardening always surprises. At least as surprises go, this is of the “pleasant” variety.
So now we have all these eggplant and need a recipe. Carolyn simply said, “I bet YO has an eggplant recipe”. And, of course, he did. Even better, it combines eggplant with tomatoes and sweet summer corn in a “fresh” polenta dish. We don’t grow our own corn (some epic, EPIC, fails with corn in our past) but there is good local corn at the farmers market so we figured we would try out this dish, and we are glad we did.
This recipe is really two dishes. The first is a corn polenta where you cook fresh corn kernels, then process them and add a bunch of butter and feta cheese. You get something like mashed potatoes with the sweet flavor of good polenta but with a creamy, light(er) consistency. The sauce combines fried eggplant with tomatoes in a quick reduction that yields sweet rich flavors. These dishes are good in combination, but either would work on its own. We served the left over polenta with a bit of bacon and green onion and it was very good. As for the sauce, you could easily serve it with rice or pasta.
It’s the bees’ garden, we just live in it. We do plant some “magnets” to keep them here, and the bees readily oblige. The garden is one big buzz of the honeybees and the occasional singular humm of the native bumblebees. Most of the herb garden has gone to flower (no biggie) and it literally vibrates all day from the bees. The mint cones are flowering and the bees will camp out and work every single tiny flower. Bees like easy work when they can get it (just like us). We like to think we can taste just a touch of mint in the “forest honey” that comes from our hives. Maybe we can, maybe not. Regardless, the honey tastes good and bees pollinate the plants. It’s good to live in their garden.
Putney Farm 
