making: a shawl, yarn, and jam

Today's post is going to be more cheerful than the last one. Yes, I'm doing better, and have taken constructive steps so I don't implode. Also, I've gotten a short story rejected from two different magazines, and am setting up to take another run at sending it in to another magazine. The rejections didn't crush me (unlike my first book rejection a few years ago did - man, I did not react well to that!); they were pretty much expected. At some point, hopefully, I'll get an acceptance and it'll be a lovely surprise. In the meantime, story rejections aren't exactly personal. I've been going through my other short stories and, unfortunately, classifying most of them as "rubbish," "really bizarre and pointless," "from my way-too-religious high school phase," or "my brief foray into trying to make romance writing work." I don't think I'll give up on that last category, but the take-away has been that I need to write more and better short stories, along with working on Ley Lines.

In the part of my life where I make things, I finished a shawl for a friend and sent it off to her. It turned out beautifully, as you can see below.

Dragon Wings shawl

The shawl pattern is Dragon Wing, by the designer Patti Waters. It's available on Knitty.com. I knit it out of Handmaiden Seasilk, which is awesome, awesome yarn. The colourway is "Glacier," if you're interested. I got it secondhand from someone who was selling off part of her stash, so I got it for half-price. This is expensive stuff, and I've been hoarding my two skeins for a while until I could figure out what to make with them. This left me with about 70% of a skein, enough for a pair of mitts. I love the yarn, though my colour preferences usually lean a bit more vivid. Next time I buy some Handmaiden, I'm definitely picking one of their other colourways. The last skein I had of one of their other yarns was in "Nova Scotia," which is blue and green. It was gorgeous and I still love the mitts I made with it, but I'm really attracted to warmer colours, like purples and reds and browns lately. And Handmaiden has some amazing warm-toned colourways. (No, I don't get paid by them or anything like that; I just happen to live in the same country so their yarns turn up at a lot of local shops and they're pretty).

Silk hankies/mawata dyed with food colouring

I started (and finished!) a spinning project. It's been a while since I've done any spinning, so it's been nice to pull out the wheel and see how out-of-practice I am. I had some silk hankies (mawata) in my fiber stash, which I had dyed with food colouring (see above picture). I spent a couple afternoons working through the hankies, spinning singles. Silk hankies are hard on the hands, since you have to stretch them to prep the fiber. Silk's tough enough that I've actually developed blisters on a couple fingers.

The singles were a little inconsistent; some of that has to do with my lack of practice, but some of it was related to the material. Silk hankies aren't like working with combed top or roving, and silk doesn't adjust as easily while spinning as other animal fibers do. So there are some super-thin bits, and some puffy bits. When I plied the singles together, I ended up with a yarn that runs a little thick-and-thin, from light-fingering to DK/worsted, averaging out to a DK weight through most of the skein.

2-ply silk yarn

The final skein weighed about 45 grams (the last 5 grams are still on the bobbin; I ran out of yardage on the second bobbin and stopped there; it'll be chain-plied later so I can practice that technique), and, measuring with my 1.5 meter niddy-noddy, I ended up with about 155 meters. It's enough to actually do something with. I think it'll probably be a hat.

I've also managed to make time to do a little bit of canning. We do have a ridiculous number of jars of jam to work through over the summer, but it's also that time of year. I'm working my way through the recipes in Preserving by the Pint that pique my interest. Marisa McClellan's most recently released book is a lovely little gem of a cookbook that focuses on extra-small batch preserves. Rather than making half a dozen pints of jam, the recipes usually make a couple pints at most. The recipes I made yesterday gave me two 250-ml jars each.

 

 

Two jars of jam; two jars of strawberries

I made a batch of Whole Strawberries in Vanilla Syrup, because I had strawberries in the fridge that were starting to go. I had to cut some in half because these were bigger ones, unlike the small ones recommended in the recipe. The stuff tastes amazing, and I had a ridiculous amount of syrup left over. There's a 500-ml jar in the fridge that is mostly full of strawberry-vanilla syrup and will be going on pancakes.

The other jam I made was the Apricot Rosemary jam. Apricots are in at the produce store right now, so I grabbed a few (several more than I needed, so more apricots, enough for a different recipe, are on the grocery list) and some rosemary, and whipped these up pretty quickly. It smells fantastic and the taste is pretty unique. I think it'll go well on some kind of meat or with cheese. I got two 250-ml jars out of it. I'm out of empty 125-ml jars, so the last of it went into a container in the fridge.

I'm off to the farmer's market this afternoon, and I plan to pick up some local strawberries there. I want to do a batch of strawberry jam and another round of the strawberries in syrup. I think we may need a trip to the store to stock up on sugar, since we're almost out.

Fermentation

If you're into canning, you'll probably run across the term "lacto-fermentation" at some point, particularly if you read a lot on the subject. I read a bit about the fermenting foods thing, then said, rather determinedly, to J., that I was not interested in trying that.

Two weeks later I was making salt-preserved Key limes.

A couple months later, right after getting home from Christmas with my new canning book in tow, I was chopping cabbage for sauerkraut.

Then I tried homemade ginger beer. Followed by a second batch. Now we're on batch three of the ginger beer, and batch one of a strawberry soda, both mixed up this evening and popped into a cupboard to mature and develop fizz for a couple of days.

What we're discovering with homemade soda is that we like the not-too-sweet taste of it. And once I figure out what I'm doing with it, I can experiment and make bubbly drinks that we can't find elsewhere. I have a number of ingredients to track down before I can make homemade root beer (and one glance at the ingredients list for "root beer extract" convinced me that it would be worth the extra effort to actually use roots to make the concentrate), but I think if the strawberry soda works out, lime soda is next on the list.

What about the alcohol content? Well, there's not much. Enough to make it fizzy, but not enough to even notice that zing that most alcoholic drinks have.* Right now I'm using instant yeast to start the fermenting process, which is easy and reliable. A lot of recipes out there use whey or one of those clumps of bacteria known as bugs (not unlike what's used in kombucha). I often have an absurd amount of whey leftover from making yogurt, so I will probably try using whey for fermenting soda at some point.

It's actually more fun and less exacting than I thought it would be, and I like the results. The next big fermenting project will probably be lacto-fermented dill pickles. Like sauerkraut, that's a longer commitment than soda, and it requires more frequent checking than soda does, too. We'll see how it goes.

*A note: As we don't have the equipment to test the alcohol content of the homemade sodas, but we do know there is at least a little there, we don't share the stuff with our toddler. Better safe than sorry.

Jamming

I've missed out making jam for the last couple summers. I'd do a batch here and there, but I hadn't been very serious about planning it out so we'd have jam all winter. Last summer I was too pregnant, and then too involved with a newborn, so this summer, I'm making up for it. This requires J. to watch the tiny one, since she has a habit of wandering into the kitchen and demanding to know what I'm doing and to see what's on the stove at the most inopportune moments. Now that we have a Learning Tower (no, I am not affiliated with them, nor do I earn money from this link, I just think it's a cool and useful piece of furniture), I'm hoping that this will be less of a problem, but you never know. 

One of the things that's kick-started this interest in canning is the book Food in Jars by Marisa McClellan. My mum gave me a copy when we moved, and I've already worked through a few recipes. The book is a lovely piece of work; it focuses on small batch canning and offers recipes for interesting but not too exotic jams, jellies, preserves, and sauces, as well as some pickling recipes and a few foods that can go in jars but which aren't canned. I plan to try many of the jam recipes and a few of the pickles. The canned tomatoes and tomato sauce are also on my list.

Image from foodinjars.com

Small batch canning interests me partly because I don't like turning an entire flat of apricots into jam--it's very time-consuming and it leaves us with nothing but apricot jam for the winter. I prefer to do several small batches of different kinds of jam.

Thus far, from this book, I have tried the strawberry vanilla jam, the apricot jam, the peach plum ginger jam, the nectarine lime jam, and the blueberry jam. The cantelope and spiced plum jams are also on the list. Pickled asparagus is on the list for later this week, since asparagus was on sale at the produce store (our new home is three blocks from a great produce store--we're already eating more vegetables just because I like going there).

The thing that has revolutionized my canning is the use of a stockpot instead of a canning pot for canning in. It's deep enough, big enough for about half a dozen jars at a time, does not rust after a season or two like the enamel-ware, and is not a uni-tasker. This is one of those brilliant ideas that had never occurred to me before, but is mentioned in McClellan's book as a great option to a canning pot that takes up space and doesn't get used for anything besides canning. I still need to get a round rack to put in the bottom of it, but so far I've yet to break a jar in it.

The other thing that somehow never occurred to me in the past was the use of a candy thermometer to make sure I've reached the jelling stage. That makes a huge difference. I used to mostly end up with syrup instead of jam. Great on pancakes or waffles, not quite as great on toast. And I'm more of a toast person than pancakes or waffles, since I tend not to be hungry in the morning.

Once I check off the spiced plum jam tonight, I have plans for pickles and cantelope jam later this week. Should be fun. I'm rather enjoying the process of filling up the cupboards for the winter.

when distraction is fruitful

This is what happens when someone gives me fruit:

There is jam. And jelly. I used to be confused about the difference between the two, but it turns out that jam has actual pieces of fruit in it, whereas jelly is just made of fruit juice. Believe it or not, these are both derived from the same batch of fruit.

My friend Donna has a quince tree, and this year, she gave me some. Quince need to be picked after the first frost, and because they are very hard, letting them ripen is not a bad idea (turns out the process is called "bletting" and it's the same thing you have to do with persimmons--essentially letting them rot until they're ripe enough to eat). I didn't take a picture of the fruit, but they look much like yellow pears. And they smell heavenly, a combination of floral and pear scents (as quince is in the rose family, this is not unsurprising).

I parboiled the fruit so they would be easier to cut up, and then peeled and chopped them. After that, I boiled the chopped fruit like potatoes until it was soft, drained off the water into a separate bowl, and cooked the fruit into jam. That's how tough these things are. I stirred the jam in between reading and trying to work on a project, and then processed it for ten minutes in a hot water canner, which is my standard procedure with jam. The most complicated part of the process is waiting for the jam to cook to the right consistency. I usually don't add extra pectin, so it takes time.

Later that evening, I started on the jelly. I found a recipe so I could figure out the proportion of sugar to juice, and then started it cooking. I think it took over an hour before it was where I wanted it, which let me take advantage of one of quince's other properties.

The tannins in quince, as they break down, render the white fruit pink, and then red. The jam is in the early stages of this, where it's more pinkish-brown (it's supposed to grow more pink with time, even in the jar). But the jelly is crimson.

Even though I know they came from the same fruits, I am still surprised when I look at the jars. Jam-making, as a process, is endlessly exciting for me. It's always a joy when I come out with jars of jam at the end. It feels like magic.

Perhaps it is.