Summer Morning Jamming
Summer is such a wonderful season what with the longer days, plentiful sunshine, warm weather, and vacations all over the place, but at the very top of my list of personal favorites is the abundance of farm fresh produce piled high at all the local farm stands, or perhaps right from home gardens if you have the space and have been blessed with a green thumb to go with it.
I have the space, but except for flowers and herbs, all of which are perennials, I tend to come up a little short on the whole green thumb thing. My gardening attempts are pretty much an exercise in futility. Last fall I threw in the towel and got rid of the garden lock, stock, and barrel and planted grass instead, only to lose my mind once spring rolled around and I bought four Big Boy tomato plants. My last hurrah! If this year’s harvest consists of a sum total of four paltry misshapen tomatoes as it did last year, I will absolutely, positively, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-spit, never again put another tomato plant in the ground. Really!
A godsend for me, however, is the whole “U-Pick-‘Em” concept that allows me to pick and process to my heart’s content without having to go through the agony of having to grow it all myself, and with a whole different fruit to look forward to each month.
June is for strawberries and I was out there last month as soon as I heard the season had officially opened. I picked with the sun beating down on my head first thing in the morning on three separate days in one week. My hands and forearms were stained red, my sneakers and socks covered in pink splotches, and my oldest jeans looking a bit worse for the wear, testament to the fact that I tend to throw myself into things. I start out gracefully bent at the waist in genteel fashion, eventually squatting down on my heels, and then before you know it, there I am down on all fours between the rows doing my version of the trench crawl, pushing the basket ahead of me as I go, careful to pick only the nicest ripest berries and not stopping until the basket is full to overflowing.
The total this year was just over thirty-three pounds, some eaten mouth-wateringly fresh and sweet on homemade biscuit shortcakes liberally covered in whipped cream, about two dozen quart bags were stashed in the freezer to be used in smoothies and shortcakes during the bleak winter months, and the remainder processed into three batches of jewel-toned jam that, pardon my bragging, is probably the best I have ever made. Just thinking about it puts a smile on my face.
July is blueberry month and according to what I was recently told, picking should begin any day now. My main objective every year is to have enough in the freezer to provide me with muffins, pies, cakes and cobblers until blueberry time rolls around again next year. I didn’t bother with blueberry jam for the past few years, but this is shaping up to be the year of the jams. I have already purchased jelly jars and pectin in anticipation of it being a good year for blueberries.
August is for peaches. Big, beautiful, juicy peaches the likes of which you never see at any other time of the year, and definitely not trucked in from somewhere down south where they are almost never truly ripe, just soft maybe, which is nowhere near the same thing. If you want really good peaches you pretty much have to buy local, preferably right from the orchard.
The thing with orchard fresh peaches, though, is that once you buy them you have to use them quickly or they will spoil, and when you buy them by the half-bushel you really have to move like your hair is on fire! I don’t pick my own peaches. I buy them from an orchard in New Hampshire near where my daughter Kathy lives. She keeps an eye out and lets me know when it’s time to make our move and we always buy seconds which are generally nicer than what passes for first rate in the local supermarkets, and although not cheap, not prohibitively expensive, either.
Generally speaking making jam really isn’t hard, but peach jam is the exception to that rule, mostly because it tends to be such a messy undertaking when compared to strawberry or blueberry. The peaches have to be peeled. That means dunking them in a pot of boiling water to loosen the skin (which won’t come off easily otherwise), then dropping them into cold water before peeling, pitting, and then cutting them up while they are in their slickest, stickiest, and slipperiest state.
It is messy as hell, but still well worth the effort. It is like capturing summer itself in a jar and parceling it out in bright sunshiny increment throughout the cold dark days of winter when the heat of August is but a dim and distant memory.
