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No Optimism Required; Hope Is Powerful

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sat, 03 Oct 2026 13:00:00 +0000

"Hope is a practice."

— Mariame Kaba

I describe myself as a "pragmatic optimist", meaning that I know I need to put in the work, I'm willing to accept incremental progress as progress, and I do believe we can move toward something better through our commitment and effort. Optimism is defined by some as a less than useful position because they conceive of it as a belief that you already know the outcome will be positive. I'm not that kind of optimist. I don't wait for the best possible outcome; I work for it. Maybe I'm an optimistic pragmatist instead.

I've been publishing the occasional round-up of poems on a theme. This one is a bit different. I collect quotations, and this collection includes quite a few of those as well as links to some poems. I'm putting together sources about hope in the spirit of the quotation from Jane Goodall and the poem below from Barbara Kingsolver, both of them women whose work and spirit I admire.

I hope you find inspiration here.

Quotations

"Hope is often misunderstood. People tend to think that it is simply passive wishful thinking: I hope something will happen but I’m not going to do anything about it. This is indeed the opposite of real hope, which requires action and engagement."
— Jane Goodall, The Book of Hope

"Hope is not a wish but an intention."
— Steven Charleston

"...it’s OK not to be optimistic. Buddhist teachings say, you know, feeling that you have to maintain hope can wear you out, so just be present… The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you’re worrying about whether you’re hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you’re showing up, that you’re here, and that you’re finding ever more capacity to love this world — because it will not be healed without that. That [is] what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world."

— Joanna Macy in an On Being episode discovered thanks to this Brain Pickings post on Macy, Rainer Maria Rilke, and mortality

And then there's this:

"Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone."

— Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

"To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory."

— Howard Zinn, "The Optimism of Uncertainty" (2004)

"Hope is an act of defiance against a politics of pessimism and a culture of despair that depends on us not being able to imagine something better than where we are now."
— Rabbi Sharon Brous

“This is my hope: that the recognition of shared fate might cause us to act as if shared fate is the reality that in fact it is.”
—Jane Hirshfield

"Life is full of mystery. The mystery is our invitation to let go and to embrace uncertainty with the fullness of our being. This is how hope becomes our bearing. It’s how it becomes our compass in uncertain times."
—Joe Primo

"We speak of the light of reason. I would speak here of the darkness of the world, and the light of _______. But I don’t know what to call it. Maybe hope. Maybe faith, but not a shaped faith— only, say, a gesture, or a continuum of gestures. But probably it is closer to hope, that is more active, and far messier than faith must be. Faith, as I imagine it, is tensile, and cool, and has no need of words. Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer."
—Mary Oliver, Winter Hours

"Hope is holding a creative tension between what is and what could and should be, and each day doing something to narrow the distance between the two."
— Parker J. Palmer

"ln a century of staggering open questions, hope becomes a calling for those of us who can hold it, for the sake of the world. Hope is distinct, in my mind, from optimism or idealism. It has nothing to do with wishing. It references reality at every turn and reverse truth. It lives open-eyed and wholehearted with the darkness that is woven ineluctably into the light of life and sometimes seems to overcome it. Hope, like every virtue, is a choice that becomes a practice that becomes spiritual muscle memory. It's a renewable resource for moving through life as it is, not as we wish it to be."
— Krista Tippett, Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living

"Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don't; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.

"Hope is an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed. The more propitious the situation in which we demonstrate hope, the deeper the hope is."
— Vaclav Havel

Poems

"Hope; An Owner's Manual"
Barbara Kingsolver

Pass your hope like a bad check. You might still have just enough time. To make a deposit.

"For the New Year, 1981"
Denise Levertov

Please take

this grain of a grain of hope

so that mine won’t shrink.

Please share your fragment

so that yours will grow.

Only so, by division,

will hope increase,

"Hope"
Barbara Crooker

A thin drizzle of sun slips through clouds, a strand of hope against the icy odds.

"How to Hope"
Katherine Harer

hope is hokey

imperfect full of stumbling little acts

the way a strand of neighbors standing in the rain

on the shoulder of Highway One American flags

in their hands and homemade signs:

Peace is Patriotic

can make another strand start up

even in the imagination

"Hope (A Zen Perspective)"
Richard Schiffman

Hope is not about some future meadow.
Hope is not a triumphal march toward some brighter,
bloodless field. Neither is it lighting a candle
or cursing the darkness or calling the glass half full.
It is this half-empty tumbler turning cartwheels
above the chasm.

"There Was a Time I Disdained Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And isn’t
that what hope
is—a sprout
that grows
when conditions
are poor,
as if to prove

"Thanks, Robert Frost"
David Ray

Do you have hope for the future?
someone asked Robert Frost, toward the end.
Yes, and even for the past, he replied,
that it will turn out to have been all right
for what it was, something we can accept,
mistakes made by the selves we had to be,
not able to be, perhaps, what we wished,
or what looking back half the time it seems
we could so easily have been, or ought...

"Relearning Hope"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

Hope was never meant to be trapped,
to be tamed, commodified, it was always
meant to flow through.

"A Poem on Hope" (video of Berry reading it in an interview with Bill Moyers)
Wendell Berry

Find your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.
Your hope of Heaven, let it rest on the ground underfoot.
No place at last is better than the world. The world
is no better than its places. Its places at last
are no better than their people while their people
continue in them. When the people make
dark the light within them, the world darkens.

Somewhat related reading

*Links in book titles are Bookshop.org affiliate links. Go to your local independent bookstore or get the book from the library. The links are here in case you need them. Any proceeds will be donated to nonprofits advancing hope, social justice, and safer streets for all of us.

Tomato Jammin'

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:56:16 +0000

Today's theme song: Bob Marley and the Wailers, "Jamming."

What to do with home-grown tomatoes that's more interesting than making canned tomatoes that you can buy from the store? Tomato jam, that's what. (I do lots of things with tomatoes, actually, but never, ever ketchup.)

For the past three years I've made the Food In Jars Smoky Spicy Skillet Tomato Jam, in much larger quantities than her recipe. I really love it, so much so that I still have some left from last year. So this year's tomato crop went into two other recipes.

Orange Tomato Jam: Yield from 10 cups of chopped tomatoes: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints.

A couple of years ago I created Citrus Tomato Marmalade because the recipe title had made me think something called Orange Tomato Jam must surely have a citrus element. I didn't grow enough orange tomatoes that year to make an orange tomato jam. The marmalade turned out pretty good, although it was super sweet.

This year, though, my word, the Orange Brandywine! (A Hobbitish name, that.) Tomatoes bigger than my hand and lots of them. I ate plenty and stashed a bunch more in the freezer along with Hillbilly, an orange tomato with red shoulders.

When I tasted this jam as it reached the early jammy stage, I felt the spices needed a bit of oomphing up, possibly because I used ginger paste from a tube rather than freshly grated. Added 1/2 t. paprika and ~1 t. ginger paste. That brought it up to Resident Taste Tester-approved levels of a gentle heat. So I added another 1/8 t. cayenne.

Tomato Jam: Yield from around 6 pounds of tomatoes, some with a firmer flesh than others: 4 half-pints, 10 quarter-pints, and a couple of tablespoons left over so guess I'll just have to have that with some cheese and crackers.

This recipe from Serious Eats uses cumin, cinnamon, and crushed red pepper for its seasoning. I ran out of crushed red pepper flakes, but luckily cayenne pepper is a good substitute. Not 1:1 though! More like 1/2:1 cayenne:crushed red pepper, then taste and adjust. As it approached the jammy stage I tasted and decided I want a bit more cumin presence. I added 1/4 t., then another 1/4 t., then figured I'd better stop since I wasn't going for a straight-up Mexican flavor. I'd forgotten I made it back in 2024. Since each year I grow a slightly different mix of tomatoes, each year's jam will be its own taste sensation.

The eternal tomato skins question: To remove completely or do something else?

They don't "dissolve into the jam," as a different tomato jam recipe promised. They show up as little shreds. I don't mind them; they can't be more fibrous than blackberry seeds. They're not that aesthetically pleasing, though.

For the orange tomatoes I took a chance and learned that indeed, their skins don't melt. I kept my kitchen scissors handy and kept snipping longer shreds into smaller bits as they surfaced in the pot.

For the red tomatoes I took a different approach. I had (yet again) not blanched and removed skins as I threw tomatoes in the freezer in the peak harvest season. If I'd taken the skins off when they were fresh I could have tried making tomato powder. I didn't, though.

The skins slide off pretty easily after freezing for most tomato varieties, although I learned the giant meaty Amish red tomatoes I grew this year like to hold onto their skins even after freezing.

I slid off as many as I could and threw them in the food processor for some serious smashing. Out of around 6 pounds of tomatoes this yielded nearly two cups of tomato-y paste, well worth the effort to extract all possible flavor from the fruit.

I also used the food processor to pulse the fresh tomatoes and those Amish (which really hold up beautifully to freezing!). The frozen San Marzano and Black Prince pretty much fell apart so they were jam-ready right out of the freezer. Yes, recipes refer to chopped tomatoes. In the past I've spent a long time at the chopping board with a knife. Then I realized I was putting a lot of care into chopping things that were going to cook down and lose their shape. You know what a food processor does, used carefully with pulses? It chops tomatoes.

Related reading and recipes

Autumnal Equinox 2026: Thoughts and Readings

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Tue, 22 Sep 2026 13:00:00 +0000

I'm thinking about the idea of the equinox: 24 hours supposedly* divided evenly between day and night, happening twice a year. Half of one, half another, and yet that isn't at all how we experience day or night. My day starts when I wake up, ends when I fall into sleep. This time of year night, meaning darkness falling, begins before I sleep, and I definitely go to sleep more than 12 hours after I awaken. The Latin roots may mean "equal night"—aequus (equal) plus nox (night)—but that doesn't mean we divide our energies equally between day and night or that I rest as much as I wake.

And yet, and yet—

These astronomical grace notes of the year give us reason to pause. Reason to recognize we live within larger and larger spheres. We may pause within our minds, yet we're always moving even when we're standing still, riding atop an earth spinning on its axis at over 1,000 miles per hour (1,040 at the equator) and whirling around the sun at 67,100 miles per hour. The Sun and Earth orbit the center of our galaxy at something like 447,000 miles per hour. The Milky Way Galaxy is moving. Everything is moving. We are never, ever still. Or we are both still and moving, half and half.

The ancient Celts (who provided some of my ancestry), the Mayans and others used the wheel to symbolize or track time and the seasons. We now enter the season of Mabon (a name given to it in the 1970s, not an ancient traditional name). This is a time of harvest, balance, reflection, releasing what we don't need as we approach the dark. A site on the pagan or Wiccan calendar tells me "the ancient Mayans designed Chichen Itzá to mark the equinox sun, while Neolithic and Bronze Age peoples built sites like Carin T in Ireland and Mnajdra in Malta that align with the sunrise on this day." The Goddess moves from Mother to Crone, a journey I'm taking over the decades although the role of Mother stays with me always.

This is harvest season. My shelves are lined with row upon row of jars, jams, jellies, and chutneys, apples making a prominent appearance thanks to an unexpected gift from a stranger. The ground may be cold, the skies grey, as we move toward winter, but blackberry, elderberry, cherry, hot peppers, mint, tomatoes, and other sweet or savory flavors will join freshly baked brown bread on my plate. This comfort food rewards my labor planting, tending, picking, gleaning, cooking, canning, kneading, shaping, baking. I learned this from my parents, who stocked basement shelves and freezer through summer and fall to lay up stores for the cold season. Measuring time by what ripens, what is past, tells me when summer is turning toward fall.

Emergence Magazine provides me with seasonal meditations. These ask that we pay attention, real attention, to the changes in the world around us. This time of year I both see and feel the change in the angle of the light over the course of the day. Seasonal practice #29, "Slanted Light: for when the sun is slung low," speaks to this:

"Place yourself in a patch of shallow sunshine. What hush does this low light bring to the landscape? How is each space listening to the changing of the light? While the glare and warmth of summer feel like an out-breath, this muted, shallow quality of light is like an in-breath. In long shadows and pale hues, what retreats?"

Then there is #38, "Falling Leaves: for when a colorful carpet adorns the ground":

"Lie down in a pile of fallen leaves. Touch them. Smell them. Are they damp, spiced, sweet with the smell of rot? Imagine the cycle of decay and renewal taking place right beneath you—the leaves slowly breaking down, becoming soil. How do you feel this cycle present within you at this moment: what parts of yourself do you feel called to shed and transform in order for new growth to begin?"

I happened across a piece on the idea of knitting the wheel of the year, each season suggesting different projects, different weights of yarn for the changing daylight and temperatures. As a knitter I love this idea of settling into the season as I settle into my chair with yarn and needles (and a woolsucking cat who needs to be kept far, far away from my tasty bag of merino cat snacks).

My hemisphere of the Earth begins to tilt away from the Sun, taking us from warmth into cold, from light into more and more darkness. The leaves reveal their true colors, the scarlet and gold and orange there all along beneath the green of chlorophyll. I gather leaves on my walks and arrange them in patterns by my door, my "leafspedition land art" decorating the earth for a few days before becoming earth. Like the leaves, I settle into what I am becoming, the yarn in my hands becoming something new.

*I say the equinox is supposedly an equal division between day and night because the equilux, the actual half-and-half division, happens a few days after the equinox, much to my surprise. The Farmer's Almanac explains:

"The Latin root says “equal night,” but the day of the equinox is not actually the day day and night come out exactly even at most places. That day is the equilux, and in the Northern Hemisphere it falls a few days after the September equinox. Two effects pull the dates apart: the Sun is a disc, not a point, so sunrise begins the moment the top edge clears the horizon, and Earth’s atmosphere bends sunlight, letting us see the Sun slightly before it rises and slightly after it sets.
Together those effects add several minutes of daylight to the equinox day. For most of the continental United States, the equilux in 2026 lands between September 25 and 27, with northern states reaching equal day and night a day or two earlier than southern ones. After that, the night side runs ahead, and the days shorten in earnest."

It seems to me, then, that we may think we see balance even though it actually falls somewhere else, perhaps a bit later and in a different place than we thought. We may find our balance standing still while moving faster than we can imagine, watching the light change and the leaves fall.

"Equinox"
Richard Wehrman

The Garden releases its last
radiance, not as something failed,
but as its full reason for being: to give
continually, to its last bit of energetic being.
Its giving is its beauty. It is a smile,
it is the heart of love.

“Autumn”
Rainer Maria Rilke

Leaves are falling, falling as if from afar,
as if, far off in the heavens, gardens were wilting.
And as they fall, their gestures say "it's over."
In the night the heavy earth is falling
from out of all the stars into loneliness.
We are all falling. This hand here is falling.
Just look: it is in all of us.
Yet there is one who holds this falling
with infinite tenderness in her hands.

"Natural History"
Sam Hamill

May she
be happy, filled
with the essential,
working in the twilight,
on her knees, at autumn equinox,
gathering the stories
of silence together,
preparing to meet the winter.

"Autumnal Equinox"
Terri Kirby Erickson

Autumn
shakes the summer
from our minds until it falls like leaves,
skittering down an empty street.

Related reading

Apple Mint Jelly Yet Again: The Ratios with Fresh Apples

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 14:44:28 +0000

Making jam or jelly is always an exercise in math if you're not following a recipe precisely. For apple mint jelly the question becomes whether I have enough mint on hand to flavor a given quantity of apples. This set of instructions helps you calculate proportions based on what you have.

X = Cups of mint leaves and stems, chopped (yes, you can use the stems, which also carry the minty goodness; I leave out ones that are very thick and woody)

2X = Pounds of apples, quartered, not cored or peeled because you want to keep the pectin, and including any skins or cores you have from other appley goodness you're working on to provide extra pectin, although it can't be all skins/cores because then you won't have apple flesh to extract juice and flavor from

2X = Cups of liquid: Water, or half water and half white vinegar

If this fills an entire stockpot, split it into two so the cooking goes more efficiently.

Bring apples, liquid and mint to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until apples turn to a soft mush, approximately 20 minutes. Mash it all up a bit with a potato masher

Set the apples and liquid to drain in a jelly strainer set-up or a sieve lined with cheesecloth set over a big bowl. Do not press on the solids. When you do that you end up with cloudy jelly because you pushed some solids into the juice. Let the mash sit for several hours or overnight to get every possible drop with the help of gravity.

Your labors and time yield a given amount of juice. Some recipes will tell you to add water to get to a specific number of cups. Why on why would you dilute the delicious juice you just made? Don't do that.

Your final math problems:

For each cup of juice, add 7/8 cup of white sugar. This is 3/4 of a cup plus 2 tablespoons.
For each 2 cups of juice, add 2 T. lemon juice

You can figure out smaller proportions where you fall short of a full cup or you can accept that cooking is improv, start with a baseline that rounds down rather than up because you can't unsugar something, and taste the juice at some point as it cooks.

I did this the other day and ended up with 6 cups of minty apple juice. That yielded 3 half-pints, 9 quarter-pints of jelly.

I probably skimmed off another quarter-pint of foam from the top to create nice clear jelly. That foam doesn't go to waste at our house; I put it in a little jar that goes in the fridge to be eaten as scrap jelly. It tastes good; it's just not ready for its close-up.

Related reading

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe
Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed (made with commercial apple cider)
Spiced Apple Butter Recipe
My Circular Economy of Apples
Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe
Apples, Apples, Apples!
Canstravaganza 2025
Canstravaganza 2024

Poetry and Place

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 14:29:13 +0000

A story with a happy ending, brought to me by poetry:

I had the great good fortune to go on a family trip to England last year, with a stop in Wales. In a bookstore in Caernarvon I picked up a book of poetry, This Common Uncommon by Rae Howells.

She's following in the footsteps of an earlier Welsh poet, John Clare, who wrote about the effects of the Enclosure Act. Howells' poems describe Clyne Common in loving detail, from the plants and creatures to the people fighting to save it from development. Wales has a national law protecting spaces that hold endangered species and they're trying to preserve their commons, but this one was owned by an English lord who wanted to develop it.

I read the book over the course of a few weeks, resisting the urge to find out what actually happened in the legal battle. I finished the book, read the beautiful last poem "Jays in Love", and promptly searched on "Clyne Commons legal battle."

They won! They saved the commons! Many, many people fought to save it and won.

It isn't that this book of poetry necessarily turned the tide. But it brought me so much joy to know that this place she observed so closely and described so beautifully is still there. The scrubby land the lord had offered up as "replacement value" is a perfectly good place to put houses, since housing is a real need. You can build houses without destroying irreplaceable habitat. And the people who live in those houses can enjoy and appreciate the commons that will still be there, living and breathing.

Reading the first lines of that article moved me to tears. People loving a place and caring and fighting for it can and do make a real difference in the world.

This story of place has extra resonance for me because my maternal grandfather was of Welsh descent, although I have no idea which part of Wales his family originally came from. Welsh mythology has always appealed to me, and in college as a linguistics major I took a semester of Middle Welsh. Going to Wales meant riding on a train that announced stops first in Welsh, then in English, and hearing Welsh spoken as the primary language in the bookstore where I got this book and a new translation of the Mabinogion, the Welsh mythology I read as a child.

I want more poetry of place. If it's coupled with a victory for the planet, so much the better. Know of any?

Elderberry Jam JK Jelly Because Raccoons

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 18:45:42 +0000

This is neither a jam recipe nor a jelly recipe. It's a jam-into-jelly story and you should not do with your elderberries what I did with mine.

That said, I will go on to say that the jelly turned out fabulous. It's the perfect texture for my jelly tastes: soft and pourable, but at a slow pace, not a runny liquid that didn't really set. It's a glorious deep purple color and it tastes good.

Now for the story.

One August night as I read in bed I heard a lot of noise outside, like something breaking bushes or wood. What on earth was it?! I didn’t think a human intruder would be that noisy so after a few seconds I had my suspicions.

I turned out my lamp and looked outside. Couldn’t see a thing even after my eyes adjusted. Turned on my phone’s flashlight and shone it out through the screen. Couldn’t see a thing. Put on my robe and sneakers and went outside, where I discovered a mama raccoon who was BREAKING my elderberry bushes’ branches to get at the ripe berries! I had guessed raccoon but the woody noise had been a bit of a mystery since we don’t have a brush pile out there.

She made a very ominous low rumbling sound. I realized why a second later, as an immature raccoon edged past me on the fence about three feet away. She was clearly saying “Don’t you dare hurt my baby!” I won’t, Mama, but get away from my berries! Once the baby made its way to her we had a staredown for a few minutes. She backed slowly away but didn’t really want to go. Even after I turned off my flashlight I could see glowing eyes watching me, the mama’s eyes higher than the eyes of the baby crouched in front of her.

The next morning, some very sad elderberry bushes awaited. I trimmed off one truly broken branch. With a couple more I’m going to try taping them up as if I’d grafted the branch and see what happens. I’d been planning to harvest anyway. Time to make elderberry jam! Or is it?

Elderberry safety warning!

Elderberry canning comes with safety warnings, though. The University of Wisconsin is quite clear on this point. Their "not safe for canning" headline is discouraging, but that's not really what the article tells us. It says weigh ingredients and make sure you add enough acid!

"For Jam, the weight ratio of elderberry pulp to sugar must be no more than: weight of fruit/ weight of sugar = 47/55 = 0.85. For every 16 ounces (1 pound) of fruit pulp for Jam, your recipe must include at least 18.9 ounces, by weight, of sugar. It is not acceptable to use dry measure cups or assume that a 1-cup measure of fruit or sugar weighs 8-ounces, it will not. You must weigh ingredients."

There's more information there about making jelly, adding lemon juice, not using honey, not reducing the sugar ratio. (You can add more than the recipe calls for, never less.) Read the article if you're going to can elderberry jam or jelly. Honestly, this makes me wish I'd chosen a different food-producing plant for that corner. After the Incident of the Raccoons in the Night, I'm actually thinking about pulling out the bushes (I planted one and it sent out a volunteer so I have two) and putting in something else. Probably also raccoon-tempting, but more conducive to canning.

Elderberry Jam

I had 4.75 pounds of elderberries after all the cleaning, from this saved-from-the-raccoons batch and ones I'd harvested earlier this year and last year. Elderberries keep coming on so it's a while before you're done with them.

Cleaning tricks: Freeze them first. Hold the stem over a big bowl and geeeently run a fork down the twigs. Berries will pop off. Some of the annoyingly minuscule stems will too, and you need to pick out as many of those as you can spot.

My rooky error at this point! I forgot that when you double a jam recipe you really add to the cooking time before reaching the jelling stage. You're (I'm) better off making two smaller batches rather than one big batch. Uh-oh. I'm committed now, though, because at this point I'm using my Dutch oven to cook the batch of apple hot pepper jelly. I made the juice yesterday and left it to drain overnight and I already had it on the stove. So now I can't split this batch.

With the University of Wisconsin guidelines in mind, and an online percentage calculator to do the math for me, I worked out that 4.75 pounds was 85% of 5.58 pounds. Round up, not down! 5.75 pounds of sugar it is. Got a bit edgy here: I used 5 pounds of white sugar, .75 pounds of brown sugar, after checking that it is indeed okay to substitute. I wanted that slightly caramel edge that brown sugar brings.

How much lemon juice, needed to help it gel since elderberries are low in pectin? The Creative Canning Elderberry Jam recipe gave me a ratio: 1/2 cup of lemon juice is 20% of the 2.5 pounds of elderberries she had. That meant 0.95 cups of lemon juice. Call it a scant cup, filled to the line or a skosh below. (If you measure by the titch instead of by the skosh, that's fine.)

And now to get a gigantic pot of elderberries to boil....

They do foam up quite nicely, as promised/warned, and I was glad I had them in my deepest stockpot.

But after 45 minutes of cooking, stirring often, I still had pretty chewy elderberries. It was getting late, I'd already made the apple hot pepper jelly, I wanted to be done.

Pivoting to Jelly

Again, not the recommended jelly method. I should have cooked the elderberries without sugar, left them to drain overnight, then mixed the juice with sugar and lemon juice. The Extension site also noted that jelly required a higher sugar:fruit ratio than jam and I now didn't have a way to measure that because the sugar was in the jam pot.

Onward. I drained the elderberries in my jellybag strainer, not letting them sit overnight, just waiting for the drips to dwindle to an occasional one rather than a stream. I put the juice in my Dutch oven (clean by now), added another 1/2 cup sugar figuring I'd already rounded up the sugar when I thought I was making jam, brought it to a boil, and let it cook, skimming the foam off.

I test readiness both with a thermometer for temperature and by dipping some juice, holding the wooden spoon on its side, and watching how the liquid behaves as it runs off. If it's dripping fast like water, it's not ready to jell. If it's in slow syrupy drips, or better yet running together to form more of a sheet, it's ready. I got t his juice to the slow syrupy stage and called it good enough.

Into the jars, into the hot-water bath for 15 minutes, and done.

The next day I opened the one quarter-pint that had come up a tiny bit short when I filled the jars. To my surprise and delight I had gorgeous jelly. A deep purple, a pourable but jelled consistency, and a taste that for me was a lot more rewarding than those chewy, somewhat woody berries. It has an astringency unlike my other jellies but I like it.

Maybe I don't get rid of those bushes after all. Although I do think next year I'll try elderflower jelly so as to avoid tempting the raccoons.

Again, this is not a recipe. This is what happened because raccoons.

Yield: 5 half-pints, 10 quarter-pints.

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 20:20:38 +0000

My Hot Pepper Jelly made with a mix of 50% sweet bell peppers, 50% a mix of various mild to hot peppers from the freezer, was a hit in our household. Acquiring a big batch of gleaned apples made me think about creating a variation with an apple base. Could be jam, could be jelly. Getting the gift of peppers from friend Mitzi, a regular Buy Nothing connection, made this an even better idea.

Source recipes

Apple Hot Pepper Jelly, The View from Great Island: Fastest and easiest since it calls for starting with apple juice or apple cider and using red pepper flakes for the heat. Note of caution: Commercial apple juice doesn't have as much pectin as what you make at home, per the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This recipe calls for pectin to make up for that. Parking this for someone who might want a shortcut recipe; I didn't use anything from this.

Apple Jalapeño Jelly, Hola Jalapeño: A recipe developer after my own heart: She made this because she picked a bunch of apples. Her pepper combo sounds pretty hot so I might tame it a bit. Bonus: Cheddar Pie Crust Cracker recipe here too. What a tasty-sounding combo! She goes straight from making juice to straining through a sieve and using it. I know from experience this doesn't produce as much juice as leaving the mash to drain overnight in a jelly bag.

Jalapeño Apple Pepper Jelly, Stemilt: Includes optional addition of cranberries for color and flavor. Someone in the Food in Jars Facebook group suggested cranberry jalapeño jelly a while back so this one is intriguing to make again when I have cranberries on hand. It calls for 3 cups of white vinegar, though, and that sounds too sharp for my taste. It does include a handy ratio I've come across before for jelly: 7/8 c. sugar for each 1 c. juice. This one includes the option of an overnight drip for the juice.

I ended up mostly following the Stemilt recipe despite my misgivings about the vinegar. Hola Jalapeño leaving out the overnight drip won't cut it.

"Feeder" ingredients you could live without:

I had some leftover commercial apple cider to use up from a container I'd used to provide liquid for the Salted Caramel Apple Butter and some earlier recipes. I used this in place of the water Stemilt's recipe called for. Hola Jalapeño had noted that commercial apple juice doesn't have the pectin of homemade.
I had a big bunch of peels and cores left over from prepping apples for the Indian Apple Chutne I'd made earlier. I saved them specifically for their pectin contribution and figured that would take care of the potentially lower pectin level in the commercial cider, along with the other apples I quartered and threw in.

Stemilt called for 6 jalapeño, stems and ribs removed to tame 3 of them, 3 of them with stems/ribs left in to hot it up. I went with 5, figuring I'd taste the resulting juice and adjust. This and my 4 pounds of apples, peels and cores with 3 cups of cider, 3-1/2 cups of white vinegar, yielded 3 cups of juice. They suggested adding water to bring it up to 4 cups. I opted to leave the rich flavor I had produced rather than water it down.

The juice seemed just right for heat, but the cooking stage tamed it a bit. Next time I'd go with 6 jalapeños, thinking of it as 2 per cup of juice, and maybe chop one more to provide tiny bits floating in the jelly. I didn't make any chopped pepper bits this time around, opting for the clear (and therefore sneaky) jelly. My Mad Hatter peppers are sweet with only a tiny bit of heat and they're ripe now. They'd add a nice touch of red without the kick of a Fresno or cayenne. Next time!

Yield: 8 quarter-pints

Cran-Rasp-Orange-Berry Jam

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 00:51:28 +0000

Inventing new jam flavor combinations and cleaning the freezer go hand in hand, at least for me. This recipe resulted from having a bag of frozen raspberries from last year's harvest and a container of a cranberry-orange sauce I made for a family meal that produced more than we could eat. I've seen cran-raspberry juice in the store and this seemed like a natural combination. My search for recipe inspiration confirmed the idea.

Two things I think about in jam inventions: naturally occurring pectin in the fruits and berries I'm using, and overall acidity in the recipe for safe canning. I'll read a recipe written for a single ingredient like raspberries to learn whether that jam can set without added pectin. If it can, then something with more natural pectin should marry quite nicely. I don't want to use pectin because I don't want my jam to end up like a block of gelatin.

Two charts I found to help with this particular combination: A UK pectin and acidity chart that doesn't include raspberries(!) and an article from Fruits Knowledge World that focuses on pectin and provides a helpful summary bullet list.

Another handy spot: CoolConversion to calculate how many ounces or grams or cups you have when you have the measurement in some other metric. This came in handy figuring out that my 6 cups of frozen raspberries was just a tad more than the 30 ounces in the Food in Jars recipe below.

Source recipes

Cranberry Orange Sauce, A Mindfull Mom (pause your ad blocker for the site to load)
Cranberry Raspberry Jam, Food in Jars: Genuinely didn't find this until after I had my frozen sources defrosted and was working on ratios. She uses fresh cranberries with frozen raspberries.

Ingredients

Cranberry Orange Sauce, 2 cups. If you don't have this on hand, follow the Food in Jars Cranberry Raspberry Jam recipe and add the orange zest, OJ concentrate, cinnamon and nutmeg from the sauce recipe
Frozen raspberries, 6 cups, which is close to the 30 oz. in the Food in Jars recipe
White sugar, 2-1/2 cups
Triple Sec or other orange-flavored liqueur, 2-4 T. (optional)

Defrost the frozen ingredients. What you do next depends on whether you're starting with fresh or frozen cranberries instead of the sauce, which has already been cooked and has broken down the cranberry skins.

If all ingredients are whole, not precooked, mix them with the sugar and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce to medium heat and cook. If you're starting with the leftover cranberry orange sauce, you could give the raspberries 10 minutes of cook time, then add the sauce. Doesn't hurt to just dump it all in and start, though.

Stir frequently until the jam thickens, approximately 25-27 minutes total.

Toward the end of the cook time, stir in the Triple Sec if you're adding it. It doesn't add a strong orange flavor; I just find it fun to add, but it isn't needed. Taste and adjust. Spices don't affect food safety or canning time. Do you want a stronger hint of cloves? Another spoon of OJ concentrate or more orange zest?

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center for Home Food Preservation. Process the jars in a boiling water bath, starting the timer when the water returns to a full boil after you lower the jars in.

Yield: 4 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

I usually include pictures of beautiful jars full of deliciousness. This time I'm showing some of the wreckage from running a jam batch alongside an applesauce batch.

Plum Jam Spice-Plus Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 13:49:00 +0000

Food in Jars provides a lot of great recipes for small-batch canning. I often size up because I have a bunch of something. Sometimes I have less than the quantity called for and adjust a recipe down rather than up. That was the case with the Spiced Plum Jam. I had some frozen plums, a few fresh, and a handful or two of honeyberries I threw in to use them up.

Ratios are my friend here. Fruit:sugar 1:1? No problem. Scaling spices down can be tricky if I end up with something like 1/3 teaspoon. I round down and taste since it's easy to add, impossible to take away. I look at how much lemon juice the recipe calls for as a contribution to pectin.

But wait...

Two source recipes:

Spiced Plum Jam: Fruit:Sugar 4 lbs:4 cups. 1 lemon juice/zest, which means 2 T. juice. 1-1/2 t. cinnamon and 1/2 t. nutmeg, so 2 t. total spice for this quantity of plums.
Plum Jam with Cardamom: Fruit:Sugar 5 lbs.:4 cups. 2 T. lemon juice, 1 t. cardamom

Higher sugar ratio in recipe #1, higher spice too, and I want to combine these because I love all three spices and they mesh well.

I also have 2.75 pounds of plums plus honeyberries. Some of those plums are a bit on the green side.

Pro tip: If you're going to freeze a bunch of plums with plans for future jam, dice them first. When I defrosted my plums I had plum mush. I ended up using kitchen scissors to cut them into chunks in a bowl. This felt harder than chopping them quickly last fall would have.

Plum Jam Spice-Plus, No Pectin

The "plus" here could be adjusting the spice profile to suit your taste. Spice proportions don't affect the jelling process. It could also represent throwing in something besides plums if, like me, you have a small amount of something to use up.

Plums are relatively high in pectin. Between that and the use of lemon juice, you shouldn't need pectin to get a set.

Plums (plus): 2.75-3 pounds of pitted plums, sliced into thin half moons or chopped
Sugar: 2.75 pounds
Lemon juice: 2 T.
Cinnamon: 1 t.
Cardamom: 1/2 t.
Nutmeg: 1/4 t.
Cloves: Dash

Mix plums and sugar in a nonreactive bowl or post and let them sit for an hour or more to macerate. You could do this the night before if you remember. I didn't. It's fine. Honestly, if you forgot completely just start.

Stir the spices together in a small dish, then sprinkle a bit and stir into the plums, sprinkle and stir, sprinkle and stir, until you've blended in all the spices. This extra step gives you more even distribution of the flavors.

Alternatively, you can mix the spices into the sugar and add them all together.

Add the lemon juice.

Cooking: Bring the ingredients to a boil over high heat, stirring. Lower to medium-high heat and cook at a low boil for 30-35 minutes, until the plums soften and the syrup thickens. When you hold the spoon up on its side, the syrup will run down in slow drips that run together rather than liquidy waterlike drops.

Canning set-up: Prep your canning jars and equipment. When you're ready to start cooking it's a good time to put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get the big canning pot of water started heating up.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight (which means not screwed super tight because air needs to be able to escape).

Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water.

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 3 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints

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Heating It Up: Hot Pepper Jelly and Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 01:38:33 +0000

I really love a sweet/hot combo, don't you? Or sweet/tangy, for when I go deep on chutney. I've had a couple of bags of peppers in the freezer for quite a while and it was time. One of them, a gift from a Buy Nothing friend, was a bunch of green, yellow and red bell peppers, already seeded and cut in half, ready to use for pepper jelly. I had bags of mixed peppers I froze from last year's harvest, now all a mystery because I don't remember how hot they all are. Oops. I knew some were jalapeños, some pepperoncinis (thanks to the wrinkles), those red ones might be Fresnos which are hotter. Basically, a mystery grab bag.

Off to Chili Pepper Madness, where I went down a rabbit hole of various thing I could do with all those hot peppers, and a side trip to Food in Jars. Linking to all these as future inspiration:

Singapore Red Chili Sauce, Food in Jars
Sweet Pepper Jam Recipe: Can't make this, don't have kiwis on hand or another fruit I want to use this way.
Fermented Hot Sauce: I want to do this today, not after a week or more of fermentation time, although I could plan ahead and do this later in the season as the peppers really come on. The madhatter peppers I'm growing this year are so cute!
Cranberry-Jalapeño Jelly: Definitely making this one later in the year when cranberries are in season.
Sweet Chili Pepper Relish
Hot Chili Pepper Relish: Made this a couple of years ago and we still have a jar or two on hand.

This time around, I want hot pepper jelly, ready to put on a cracker with some Cougar Gold cheese or to zing up a sandwich. Plus, that uses up all those bell peppers just taking up freezer space.

Pepper Jelly Recipe it was.

The recipe calls for 4-5 cups of chopped peppers in whatever combo you want, a mix of sweet and hot. Frozen peppers do kind of turn into mush when you chop in the food processor, which is the fastest possible way, but that's okay. I didn't want to go over the top on hot peppers either. I sliced the tip off a few of them to check hotness (okay, that one's a Fresno!) and ended up with 2+ cups of sweet pepper, 2 cups of mild to hot pepper.

Yield: 9 half-pints, one quarter pint. Good heat with a noticeable burn but not one that punishes you for tasting.

On to my next adventure in putting a bit of heat in a jar: Blackcurrant Jam with Chocolate and Chili from Larder Love.

A couple of tweaks:

Subbed in blackberries for blackcurrants. I do have a currant bush but it produces too few to turn into jam. I live in western Washington so, y'know, blackberries. Since they're super seedy, I first warmed them up a bit, then mashed part of the batch through a sieve to do a "reduced seeds" (not seedless) jam.
Larder Love calls for shaving an actual bar of chocolate, 70% cacao, into the jam. I'd already made Chocolate Cherry Jam, which simply used cocoa powder, and it was fantastic. I thought about saving the dark chocolate for actual eating, but decided to make the recipe as written this first time around. (Because who could resist making something like this again, right?) I saved myself the shaving step because I got dark chocolate chips.
She doesn't do hot-water bath canning; she's in the UK. I do and just follow standard jam timing.

I had a really big quantity of blackberries. Two evenings of picking gave me 4-3/4 yogurt cartons (my standard picking container; easy to carry a few in my bike pannier and make a stop when I spot ripe fruit). This turned out to be 1,883 grams (weighed after I had put about one-third of the berries through a sieve to mash out some of the seeds). Adjusting Larder Love's recipe quantities and doing some tasting for heat, I arrived at this recipe. You can shift quantities by maintaining ratios or go back to her recipe.

Blackberry Chocolate Chili Jam

Blackberries: 1,883 grams, or around 10 cups
Sugar: 1,130 grams (60% of berry weight)
Lemon juice: 3-3/4 T.
Chili flakes: 2-1/4 t. (increased from 1-3/4 t. I started with, which was the multiplier of her quantity)
Dark chocolate chips or grated dark chocolate bar, at least 70% cacao: 226 grams

I worked over roughly 1/3 of the blackberries to mash them through a sieve to eliminate seeds. That's a lot of work, which is why the rest of the blackberries went in whole. Fiber's good for you, after all.

Mix together the blackberries, sugar, lemon juice, and chili flakes and stir until the sugar dissolves. Bring ingredients to a boil over high heat and mash them with a potato masher to break the blackberries up. Stir in the dark chocolate chips or shavings, then reduce the heat to medium-high and keep stirring until the jam shows evidence of jelling. It will turn syrupy, and a spoon held on its side will have blackberry syrup running off it in slower drops, not watery like juice. For me this took around 35-40 minutes.

Canning prep: Start this when you bring the blackberries to a boil. Put a baking pan of jars into the oven at 200 degrees and get your canning kettle water to a boil.

Fill and process: Using a funnel, fill jars, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a damp paper towel. Dip the lids in the boiling water to sterilize, then put them on the jars and tighten to fingertip tight. Process 15 minutes, starting the timer once the water comes back to a full boil after you lower the jars into the water.

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 6 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

Related Reading and Recipes

Green Tomato Caponata Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:53:00 +0000

I realized/rediscovered that I had around 7 pounds of frozen green tomatoes left from last year's harvest. (This is what happens when your garage holds both a full-sized freezer and the old fridge with a freezer space you don't look into very often.)

I'm still more than fully stocked up with green tomato chutney and have full confidence that I'll end up with more green tomatoes at the end of this year's gardening. Last year I experimented with a chutney sauce and (unsuccessfullly) with green tomato ketchups (never again!).

This year it's caponata. I've made this before when I ended up with eggplant from a Buy Nothing source. It's delicious on pasta, rice, or bread as a chunky dip.

Sources: Two recipes, one not designed for canning that's essentially a caponata pickle, one that calls for ripe tomatoes and is tested for canning, made with different quantities of tomatoes.

Pickled Green Tomatoes, Food in Jars: 3 lbs. green tomatoes
Caponata Sauce, Ball Canning: 4 lbs. ripe tomatoes

Things I did:

Increased the sugar the Ball recipe called for because I was using green tomatoes instead of ripe. For 7 lbs. of green tomatoes I used 3 T. brown sugar, 4 T. white sugar, basically 1 T. per pound/cup of tomatoes.
Working with frozen tomatoes, most of them cherry or grape size, I gave up on the idea of removing the skins. I know, I know, you're supposed to take them off.

Pro tip/note to self: In future freezing frenzy at the end of a long growing season, blanch tomatoes and pull the skins off, then chop before freezing. You'll thank yourself.

I wanted the balsamic of the pickle recipe. I checked my (store brand) balsamic and it's 6% acidity. In the step where I sauteed onion, bell pepper, and celery, I used 1/4 c. balsamic in place of the 1/4 c. water the Ball recipe calls for. I honestly don't know if the flavor came through, given the strong flavors of all the other ingredients.
Added a sprinkle of red chili pepper flakes, then another one. This honestly could be oomphed more.
I used the green Castelvetrano olives but I don't honestly love olives even though I cook with olive oil, so I reduced the amount. You do you.

(Green) Tomato Caponata

Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Prep a roasting pan by spraying or brushing it lightly with oil. Prep your canning jars.

Green tomatoes: 7 pounds, around 7 cups after smashing in the food processor

Feel free to use ripe tomatoes! If you do, reduce the sugar to 2 T.

Eggplant: 2 small ones, about 2 lb (1 kg) total, stemmed and quartered lengthwise
Sweet red peppers: 2, seeded and halved, or use 3 jars of roasted red peppers
Onions: 2 large, diced
Celery: 2-3 ribs, diced
Garlic: 6 cloves, minced or crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
Water or balsamic vinegar: 1/4 cup for sauteeing step
Olives: Castelvetrano green olives or kalamata black olives, pitted and chopped, 1/2 cup up to 1-1/2 cups
Capers: 1/2 cup, drained
Salt: 1-1/2 T.
Black pepper: 1 T.
Red pepper flakes: 1/4 t., or more to taste
Red wine vinegar, or another vinegar 5% acidity or greater: 1 cup
Brown sugar: 3 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes; feel free to start with less sugar of either variety and adjust to your taste)
White sugar: 4 T. (1 T. if using ripe tomatoes)

Oven roasting

Roast tomatoes, eggplants, and red peppers skin side up for 25-30 minutes, until skins begin to char. Remove and let cool until you can handle them without burning yourself. Remove skins. Chop tomatoes and set aside in one bowl. Chop peppers and scoop eggplants from skin (or peel skin from eggplant, whichever way you do it) and set those aside in another bowl.

Get the canning water heating and prep your jars: Depending on the size of your canning pot you may want to start it warming while the veggies are roasting.

Once the vegetables are out of the oven, reduce heat to 200 degrees and put your jars in there on a roasting pan or cookie sheet to sterilize them.

Sauteeing

In a nonreactive pan or Dutch oven big enough to hold all the ingredients, saute the diced onions and garlic in 1/4 cup water or balsamic vinegar until onions are translucent, about 10 minutes. At about 8 minutes in, add the garlic (which can burn if you put it in too early).

Combining and cooking

Add the tomatoes and all remaining ingredients, except eggplant and peppers. Simmer over medium heat, stirring frequently (tomato can burn quickly), until slightly thickened, about 20 minutes.

Taste and adjust seasonings; maybe you want a bit more salt or more red chili flakes.

Stir in eggplant and peppers and cook an additional 5 minutes.

Canning

By now your big kettle of water is boiling and your jars are sterilized. Fill jars, leaving a 1/4 inch air space. Wipe rims with a damp paper towel. Dip lids in the boiling water and put them on the jars, adjusting to fingertip tight.

Process for 35 minutes. When you take them out, set them on a towel on top of a cookie rack and wait for that satisfying ping/pop.

For full details on canning how-to, go to the National Center for Home Food Preservation.

Yield: 5 pints, 7 half-pints

Related reading and recipes

Living, Every Day

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 13:42:00 +0000

"What are the things you do to make everyday life enjoyable?"

This question in the weekend thread on Ask A Manager, where we can talk about anything but work, sparked a reflection on the many ways I'm able to do just that.

I have a morning routine that gives me a peaceful start to the day. I write in my journal, read some poetry, and if my schedule allows I do a short yoga practice and/or meditate. But first, I sit on my sofa with my cat on my lap, drink good French Press coffee my sweetheart makes for me, let my brain wake up. I read poetry because it won't ensnare me the way fiction will, and nonfiction so often feels like work or homework. Both of my daughters live far away and I often record a poem for them and send the link if it's online, or a picture of the page in the book I'm reading. If I go too long without doing that I get a "where's the poetry, Mom?" message.

As part of my morning routine I visit grateful.org and respond to the question of the day. The community there is warm and welcoming, and the question always reminds me of my generally great good fortune. I read responses from people who haven't been as fortunate and it's clearly helping them too, as we pause to pay attention the way I'm doing with this question.

An element of the journal—and if you stop reading after this paragraph you've gotten the most important thing I do: As I start each day's pages I set one part of a page apart and head it "Today's delights—" thanks to reading Ross Gay's The Book of Delights*. I enjoy doing some decoration of the spot and use a different color of ink so it stands out. And then I pay attention! Over the course of the day I find what I'm looking for, which is the small delights each day holds. It might be that first cup of fresh, hot coffee; the cat's warmth on my lap and the way he leans into my hand to have his chin skritched; putting together an outfit I really love for the color combination; seeing a deer on the sidewalk in our neighborhood (so far I've been lucky and they haven't jumped the fence to snack on my garden); the social energy of a community event; hearing the deep tones of the windchimes outside my office window when the breeze picks up. Whatever I find delightful, which happens when I pause and pay attention to that happy little zing.

Other things:

I got a walking pad that has made a real difference in my energy level over the course of the day. When I can I also go outside for brief walks between meetings. This isn't skipping work, this is work; the brain needs unscheduled time to process and make new connections. I live in a small neighborhood with a loop street and almost no traffic, which makes it easy to do 2 or 3 loops. If I had a linear street I'd probably pick a landmark as a turnaround point.

I turn some meetings into walking meetings, too. I live near both a small park and a big park. Walking and listening makes me a more attentive participant than if I sit at my desk with three screens in front of me and plenty of emails awaiting a reply and inviting me to tune out the meeting. I love being in a green space hearing bird calls, seeing ferns and moss, winding along the soft trails.

When I go outside or when I sit at a table I have near a window, I look at the sky. I might watch clouds moving, which I can do right now, puffy white clouds against a blue sky; appreciate the deep blue if that's what I have; decide that all my walking will be inside because it's pouring rain. Whatever it is, the sky is always there and I feel as if I've ignored it more often in the past than I paid attention to it, once I outgrew lying on the lawn and looking up to identify cloud pictures. (A very delightful thing to do that I'm coming back to)

Thanks to my sweetheart I stay stocked up on dark chocolate sea salt truffles. In the evening I eat one, maybe two, for a touch of sweetness at the end of the day.

An important piece of this: I don't tell myself I've been "good" in what I ate and therefore somehow earned the chocolate. Food is enjoyable and I let myself enjoy it without any calorie-counting or nutritional analysis. (I'm fortunate not to have any health conditions that would require me to do this.) Giving up the societally created pressure to have a body that looks a certain way has been very freeing. My body can move and laugh and hug and that's what counts.

I ride my bike or take the bus for most transportation. I chose to (and could afford to) live in a location that lets me do this. I find driving stressful, whereas when I ride my bike I feel joyful and free and arrive happy. On the bus I see the regulars, look at the houses and yards we pass, maybe listen to a podcast. Either way I don't have to worry about finding or paying for a parking spot when I arrive at my destination.

I grow a garden and preserve a lot of food through canning, freezing, and dehydrating. It's such a delight to pull a jar of jam out in midwinter, open it up and smell the raspberries I grew in the summer. I give away much of what I can and it makes me happy to share the bounty.

I love this question. What's your answer?

*Bookshop.org affiliate link. Go to your local independent bookstore if you can, or get it from your library, but the link is here if you need it.

In Search of Mexican Chocolate Shortbread

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 03:19:31 +0000

On vacation in Port Townsend at the end of June I encountered Oaxacan chocolate shortbread cookies made by Makabi & Sons, a lucky purchase at Aldrich's. A delicious slow burn, a touch of cinnamon, chocolate shortbread—I was hooked. I wanted to replicate this experience at home if I could.

As with my various adventures in canning, I compared recipes to identify key variables. This led to the first baffling discovery: A big swing in the amount of cinnamon relative to the amount of flour and cocoa powder between the first two recipes I read. Why oh why?

I didn't read every recipe I found and try to come up with my own proportions. Instead I decided to try the first two I found, with one small adjustment.

Recipe #1: Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Viktoria's Table. It calls for the same amount of cinnamon as my second candidate but has only half as much flour, cocoa powder, butter etc.

Recipe #2: Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Averie Cooks.

Recipe #3: Mexican Chocolate Shortbread from Rachel Cooks. This one's a little like Recipe #1 and Recipe #2 had a baby with a small mutation on the sugar gene. It has the proportions of #2 for flour, butter, and sugar, but only half the cinnamon; the addition of dark chocolate chips of #1; and it uses powdered sugar rather than granulated sugar.

I baked recipes #1 and #2, saving #3 for later. On #1 I reduced the cinnamon to 1 teaspoon, making the proportions more comparable to #2. The recipe calls for 1/8-1/4 teaspoon of cayenne; I went with 1/4 t. The recipe calls for 2 ounces of shaved dark chocolate. I had dark chocolate chips on hand so I used those, no shaving involved although maybe I should have chopped them to make smaller bits.

Taste test results: I wouldn't kick either of these to the curb, but recipe #2 is my favorite. I thought the addition of dark chocolate chips to #1 might give it the edge, but no. #2 has greater depth of flavor, probably thanks to the additional spices in the mix. I also think the thicker slices of dough in #2 gave a more genuine shortbread consistency. #1 might have fared better with that thickness but it called for thinner slices and I followed the recipe. That yielded a consistency a little more like a regular cookie, perhaps thanks to the dark chocolate in the batter.

The cayenne provides a nice slow, delayed burn at the back of the throat. Either recipe could stand a bit more cayenne for my taste. I was trying to come close to the Makabi & Sons cookies and didn't quite get there. I'm now curious about Recipe #3 and whether powdered sugar would yield the final dryness and snap of the store cookies that was part of the appeal along with the heat. Try those if you find them in the store; they're delicious! And they'll give you a baseline for your own adventures in baking.

ADDENDUM: Came back to add the either genius or over-the-top (or both) idea I had while munching on these. What about making a sandwich cookie with the chocolate cherry jam? Or a bowl of ice cream topped with the jam and the cookies adding crunch. I mean, you do you, but this all sounds decadent and wonderful to me. I'm planning to make a blackberry chocolate chili jam based on this Larder Love recipe later and that's another candidate, but possibly too much chili overall.

Cherry Cherry Good: Pickled Cherries and Chocolate Cherry Jam

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:35:00 +0000

A farmers' market run yielded 6+ pounds of red cherries of unspecified variety, appearance similar to Bing. I had a plan: One tried and true recipe, one new one. And I have the purplish fingernails to prove I executed on all that cherry pitting. Good thing my friend Stefanie has the handy kind of cherry pitter with the little box to catch the pits and the spring-action pitting rod.

The Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries are on permanent repeat. The first year I didn't make enough to give any away. My precious, mine! The second year I added too much salt to one of two batches, then mixed up the jars, so I couldn't give any of it away because I didn't want to give away the batch that wasn't as good. Oh darn, I guess I'll have to eat all of those jars too....

This year I used the tall skinny half-pint jars so I can tell them apart at a glance, besides having the cue on every label that tells you what year I put something up.

Yield: 12 half-pints, and that isn't enough!

The Chocolate Cherry Jam, on the other hand.... It's hard for me to say the words "too much chocolate", but the amount of cocoa powder in the Ball Chocolate Cherry Jam goes some distance toward drowning out the cherries. It's delicious as a chunky chocolate sauce with fruit flavor, but next time I'd use about half the amount of cocoa powder and taste the results before committing any more. That won't affect the jelling.

[EDIT UPDATE TO CHANGE MY MIND! As my taste tester, Sweet Hubs said he could taste the cherries just fine. A couple of days later I put some of this jam on a bran muffin and was more than satisfied by the balance of chocolate and cherry. This jam is awesome. Make it.]

I started out trying to make it without pectin, ended up adding a pouch of liquid pectin when it just wasn't giving me any sheeting action after a fair amount of cooking.

Tiny tweaks:

I added a teaspoon of vanilla early on since that enhances chocolate (but I don't think that created the over-chocolatey results).
At a later taste test when I couldn't really get the cherry flavor I added 1/4 teaspoon of almond extract, being cautious so I wasn't making it an almond recipe, but knowing that the flavors of almonds and cherries show up in maraschino cherries and a bit of almond should enhance the cherry presence. Not by enough, though.

Yield: 3 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints

Related Reading and Recipes

Apple Mint Jelly, No Pectin Needed

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 16:03:50 +0000

What is it with the wildly varying proportions in recipes for making mint jelly?!

I made apple mint jelly once before, using a recipe from a Reddit thread because I had a lot of gleaned apples that year and could make the recipe that involved cooking the apples down, extracting juice, and adding vinegar. Yes, this is extra work, but a number of mint jelly recipes call for this approach. Apple juice as medium, essentially.

Right now it isn't apple season but boy, do I have mint (as one does), so I decided to make it using some bottled apple cider I have on hand.

Various recipes call for cooking the mint leaves in water or juice, then going forward with the recipe. I don't want to use pectin so I'm going to lean on apple juice plus some added lemon juice. I remember doing this with the previous batch and getting a good jell.

The proportions thing, though.... After cutting all the mint in the yard, stripping leaves, and setting the small leaves aside to dry for mint tea, I have 2 cups. Do I start with a recipe based on one cup and scale everything up accordingly? If I do that, which one-cup recipe do I start with—the one that has a 1:1 ratio of mint to liquid or the one that has 1:4?? (That one just sounds weak-ass, if you'll pardon the term.) The National Center for Home Food Preservation does a lot of testing, particularly for whether the ratios are food safe, so I'm inclined to stick with them and ignore their use of pectin. Below my recipe I list the sources I consulted with their varying ratios, what liquid they used, and whether pectin was involved.

Ingredients

2 cups packed mint leaves, roughly chopped
3 cups apple cider (I used commercial cider because I had it on hand and it's time to use it up; this could be apple juice instead)
2 cups sugar
2 T. lemon juice
~1 T. dried mint leaves, optional

So my starting ratio is 2:3:2, plus 2 T. lemon juice.

Instructions

Read the National Center for Home Food Preservation on canning basics if this is your first time on the merry-go-round.

Sterilize your canning jars and get everything ready.

I put my jars on a big roasting pan in the oven at 200 degrees for at least 10 minutes. Timing this right gives you warm jars when you're ready to put hot product into them, which is important; hot jelly going into a cold jar can crack it.
Put a small plate in the freezer to use for your jelling test.
Get that big pot of water warming. If you're using a full-sized canning kettle it will take a while. I sometimes use my soup pot for a smaller batch, placing a metal trivet in the bottom to keep the jars from touching the heat directly. I may also speed things up by using my hot-water kettle for a faster heating of a smaller quantity and pouring that in, maybe doing this a couple of times.

Extract mint-flavored juice. Bring the chopped mint and apple juice or cider to a boil in a large pan such as a Dutch oven. You can muddle the leaves a bit with a potato masher if you like. Once the juice has come to a boil, cover and set off the heat to steep for 10 minutes or so. Strain the leaves out and toss them in the compost.

Make the jelly. Place the minty juice in a Dutch oven or other large, heavy pan. Stir in the sugar and lemon juice. On high heat, bring to a boil, stirring constantly. Cook until the liquid runs together when you lift the spoon, or test on that plate you put in the freezer to see if the liquid will wrinkle when you run the tip of a spoon through it. This will take a while because we're not using pectin in this recipe. I used a thermometer, but I find that even when I don't hit the recommended 220 degrees if I've gotten over 205 my products will set up.

Optional mint intensification. Taste the liquid early on (carefully! It's very hot!). If you'd like the flavor to be a bit more minty (mintier?), place the dried mint leaves in a teaball and put that in the liquid to steep while it's coming to the jelling stage. I did that for this batch and my official taste tester said it's the perfect mintiness, meaning it's very minty.

Canning step. Pour the hot jelly into hot, sterile jars, leaving ¼ inch headspace. Wipe the rims with a dampened clean paper towel; put the lids on. Process 10 minutes in boiling water, timing it from when the water returns to the boil after putting the jars in.

Yield: 5 quarter-pints that jelled beautifully with zero pectin. Picture below only shows four because one has already been used up by Chief Taste Taster, aka my Sweet Hubs.

What I don't do that you may find in other recipes.

I don't add a drop or two of green food coloring because I like the natural golden color. That commercial mint jelly looks like Jell-O to me. If the bright green is important to you, by all means go for it.
I don't save some fresh mint leaves to chop fine and stir in at the end as the jelly goes into the jars. Some people like little things floating in their jelly. I don't.
I also skip skimming the foam in some recipes. I stir it down and mix it in. If it really looked foamy all across the top of the pan I might skim it. When I do, I put the foam in a little jar to go in the fridge because it's perfectly good! In peak canning season I might end up with a jar of mixed flavors from three or four different recipes and it can be delicious, a sort of bumbleberry jam by proxy.

Mint Jelly Recipes

List below has the recipes I consulted and the proportions, along with whether or not they add any lemon juice or vinegar (another element that varies widely) and whether they use pectin.

Ratios listed are in cups for mint:water:sugar, with a note if the recipe calls for apple juice instead of water. I'm listing them in order by the volume of mint leaves and liquid. If the recipe calls for apple juice then it shouldn't need as much sugar for sweetness, although it needs it for jelling action.

Mint Jelly #2, NCHFP: 1:1:3.5; 1/2 c. vinegar; uses pectin
Mint Apple Jelly, Andrea's Recipes: 1:4:4.25; uses pectin
Mint Jelly #1, NCHFP: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
Ball Canning (via Reddit; not on their site now): 1-1/2-2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 4 T. lemon juice; uses pectin
Mint Jelly, Canning Diva: 1-1/2:2-1/4:3-1/2; 2 T. lemon juice; uses liquid pectin
Classic Mint Jelly, Serious Eats: 2:2:2; 1 c. vinegar; uses pectin, specifically Pomona's so you also need to have calcium water on hand and I do not
Mint Jelly Recipe Without Pectin, Learning and Yearning: 2:2:3; 1/4 c. lemon juice
Apple-Mint Jelly with Fresh Mint, Brown Thumb Mama: 2:3-1/4 apple juice:3.5; 1/2 t. lemon juice; uses pectin
Unknown source from that Reddit thread: 1-1/2:4-5 c. (apple juice produced from apples, plus 2 c. white vinegar):3-1/2 c. (helpful ratio here: 7/8 c. for each cup of juice)

Related Reading and Recipes

Mixed Citrus Ginger Marmalade Take 2

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 22:26:09 +0000

Keeping a bag in the freezer labeled "Future Marmalade" ensures that citrus doesn't go to waste in my household. The mixture grows in its own good time, at a pace determined by meetings that offer mandarin oranges, Arnold Palmers and other beverages that come with a slice of lemon, an orange slice decorating a dinner eaten out somewhere. It grows in its own eclectic direction based on what I'm cooking, or think I'll be cooking; this year's mix included 2 limes, a couple of lemons I know I bought for a recipe I didn't get around to making, and a blood orange I don't quite remember acquiring, along with the usual oranges and miscellaneous slices.

This year I used a different technique, following Food in Jars' technique of boiling the fruit and then letting it cool rather than macerating overnight, then slicing the peel into tiny ribbons. I also took her 1:1:1 fruit:sugar:water to heart. When the water you use is the water you boiled the fruit in, it's retaining all the citrusy goodness.

Ingredients

~4 lbs. citrus peel and flesh (I neglected to measure volume; I'd guess this was somewhere around 6 cups)
6 cups of the water the fruit boiled in
3-1/2 lbs. granulated white sugar (this was chosen based on coming close to matching the citrus by weight and not exceeding it; the last batch was a bit too sweet)
2-1/2 ounces crystallized ginger, chopped
2 T. ginger paste from a tube (feel free to grate and chop if that's your thing, and you can leave this out if you don't want much gingery goodness)

Instructions

Honestly, read Food in Jars for good instructions, or the National Center for Home Food Preservation. This is my abbreviated description of what I did and the options I considered.

Prep the fruit: Your choice on handling the fruit. You can boil it all together in plenty of water for an hour, then let it cool. If you do this, you then slice the zest into tiny ribbons, save the seeds and pith in cheesecloth so they can go for a swim in the cookpot to provide pectin, and chop the flesh.

Or you do the zesting/cutting/etc. beforehand and soak the prepared fruit overnight in the water. You still have to boil it at that point so I don't know that you're really far ahead; it's more a question of whether you remembered to set things up the night before the day when you'll have time to cook and can the marmalade.

If you really want to spread the labor out, do the zesting and separate the pith and flesh as you acquire citrus, keeping the zest, flesh, and stray juice in one bag, the pith and seeds in another, both in your freezer. Defrost all, put the seeds and pith in cheesecloth that will soak in the cooking peel/flesh combo, then proceed with boiling for an hour to soften before adding the rest of the ingredients.

Prep jars and water bath: I sterilize my jars by putting them on a pan in the oven at 250 degrees for 10 minutes or more. At about the halfway mark of cooking the marmalade you'll want to get that going. You want the jars to be warm or hot when you put the hot marmalade in them to avoid a big temperature differential.

I've also made use of the hot water bath, dipping one jar at a time in with the canning tongs, but that's slow. I mostly do this when I end up with a bit more product than I'd anticipated and need a couple of additional jars.

Or you can run them in the dishwasher, in which case you started that well before this point because you read the whole recipe before starting to make it, right?

Boil the marmalade: Bring all ingredients to a rapid boil in a heavy pan such as a Dutch oven with plenty of surface area. Stir frequently and keep it boiling.

At about 25 minutes start testing the temperature. You're aiming for 220 degrees. I didn't quite get there with my 2024 batch and it jelled just fine. Do a bit of a taste test here for the balance of bitter, sweet, and gingery. You may decide you want it a bit sweeter or hotter. Add sugar or more ginger accordingly and cook a bit longer. Toward the end, pull the cheesecloth bundle of pith and seeds out and squeeze it carefully; tongs come in handy here. That pectin-producing fruit stuff is now ready for the compost pile.

Put in jars and process: Set your jars up on a towel or baking rack. Ladle the hot marmalade into each jar, leaving about a quarter-inch (halfway up the threaded portion of the jar). Wipe the edges of each jar with a damp cloth so there's no product to interrupt the seal, put on the lids so they're firm but not screwed super tight. Process in the boiling water for 15 minutes, starting your timer after the water returns to boiling once all the jars are in.

Yield: From the quantities listed above I got 12 quarter-pints and 7 half-pints.

My small-batch trick: I have a really big canning kettle. Holds a bunch of water, deep enough to process quart jars, has the nice rack for lowering the jars in. And it takes forever to heat to boiling even if I speed it up by using my hot water kettle to quickly boil 4 cups at a time and dumping that in.

If I'm not going to spend the whole day making multiple things to can, I use my soup kettle instead. I put a metal trivet in the bottom so the jars won't sit directly on the kettle. I have to handle each jar going in and coming out individually with the jar lifter. That takes a bit of time and care, but I figure I'm saving energy by not heating more water than I really need for quarter-pints and half-pints.

Related Reading and Recipes

Green and Growing: More Poems about Gardens and Gardening

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 22:43:35 +0000

The 2025 gardening season began for me in February when I pruned the raspberries and tayberries (oh, those wicked thorns!). I wasn't yet truly done with the 2024 season, in the sense that I still had berries and vegetables in the freezer waiting for me to turn them into something despite the complete canapalooza canathon canstravaganza I put up in jars in 2024.

I created a big garden bed full of poems I harvested along the way that same year. They just keep coming, the way the world keeps turning, the sun keeps rising, rain keeps falling, seeds keep doing their amazing thing and turning into plants that make more seeds.

Now it's 2026 and I'm deep into another year of gardening. Heirloom seeds courtesy of my neighbor's generous daughter populate my raised beds. She shared her large stock and even started some plants for me: peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, five varieties of basil (Genovese, sweet, mammoth, Thai, ruby). Volunteer potatoes showed up early, telling me I didn't get all of them dug last fall. I relocated plant after plant into one raised bed that's now filled with a mass of greenery, the soil beneath where I hilled up the plants completely hidden. The new garden beds I created around a couple of trees give me more space for flowers. One of them bloomed with bulbs that I planted last fall. Those green shoots of hope poking through the soil shouted "Spring!", then died back as a reminder that I need to do more if I want color throughout summer and fall.

"Happiness"
Paisley Rekdal

I have been taught never to brag but now

I cannot help it: I keep

a beautiful garden, all abundance,

indiscriminate, pulling itself

from the stubborn earth:

"Later, You Will Find Me in the Garden"

Maya Stein

There are outlines of what will unfold in the beds.

That first tiny, ripe tomato.

"Putting the Beds to Bed"
Maya Stein

Curled carcasses of leaves all over the paths, kale stiff and starchy,

the basil stalks skeletal. What if, she wonders, I do nothing? A whole season

could pass this way, every death taking its own putrefying time and she

on the other side of the window, warming her toes on the hearth.

"Tomatoes"

Joy Sullivan

I waited so long for love

and suddenly, here it is
standing in the garden, hands full
of heirlooms hot from the sun.

"In the Garden"
Fabiana Fondevila

There’s zeal ripening in the tomatoes

and purpose in the pumpkin vine

trampling its way to freedom.

There is inner city grit in the hydrangea

struggling to bloom

in its chewed up dress and tortured feet.

"Planting the Sand Cherry"
Ann Struthers

It is important for me to be down on my knees,

my fingers sifting the black earth,

making those things grow which will grow.

Sometimes I save a weed if its leaves

are spread fern-like, hand-like,

or if it grows with a certain impertinence.

"In Time"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

In soil not yet worked this spring,

two perfect rows of parsley emerge

in a curly leafed celebration of green,

vestiges from last year’s planting.

"In Defense of Our Overgrown Garden"
Matthea Harvey

I’ve seen the neighbors frown when they look over the fence

And see our espalier pear trees bowing out of shape I did like that

They looked like candelabras against the wall but what’s the sense

In swooning over pruning I said as much to Mrs. Jones and I swear

She threw her cane at me and walked off down the street

"Making Sense - or I Pledge Allegiance" (scroll down on the page to find the poem)
Carrie Newcomer

I lift up my face to the summer sky

The sound of larks

And the feel of dirt

To all that keeps making sense

In senseless times.

Related Reading

Keep It Growing: Poems about Gardening
Root, Trunk, Branch Leaf: Poems about Trees: Growing things are magical whether they're in my garden or out in the woods
Hey Honey: Poems About Bees: Our garden and we humans need them to survive
Flying High with Bird Poems: One of the things I love about gardening is being outside with birdsong
Thoughts on Community Engagement Thanks to Picking Berries: Same raspberries that inspired the poem
"Sweet Harvest": A poem I wrote
Spiced Apple Butter Recipe: When I invent recipes I blog to save them for Future Me
Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce: Shared in the spirit of meh
In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup: I mean it this time
When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam: Title says it all
My Circular Economy of Apples: I live where I can glean a lot of appley goodness
Making Taybarb: Tayberry Rhubarb Jam Recipe: This was tasty!
Seed Snail 'Speriment: Episode 2: And it worked, ish
Seed Snail 'Speriment: Episode 1: 2025 experiment
Canstravaganza! Food Preservation 2024: Those shelves are so full
Blackberry Apple Chutney Recipe: Gleaned yet more fruit
Green Tomatoes. So Many Green Tomatoes.: Did I mention it was a prolific year for tomatoes?
Apples, Apples, Apples!: Gleaned lots of apples
Zucchini Tomato Salsa (Everyone Needs Salsa, or, What to Do with a Really Giant Zucchini): Everyone needs more zucchini recipes
Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!: A prolific year
Pears, Pears, Pears!: Lucked into free fruit; then what?
Future Marmalade: I didn't actually grow the citrus

A Rose Amidst the Thorns: Poems about Beauty Balancing Pain

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 08 Feb 2026 21:58:00 +0000

In the face of horrors visited upon our world daily, in the struggle to protect our loved ones, choosing to let in joy is a revolutionary act. Joy returns us to everything that is good and beautiful and worth fighting for.
— Valarie Kaur

Poetry often gives us implicit messages. The takeaway is there if you think about it, as many an English teacher tries to convey, teaching us to read between the lines.

At other times it's right out there. This collection of poems falls into that category: poems in which the poet reflects directly on the stark contrasts between the many beauties in the world and its many agonies and cruelties.

John Ruskin, a prolific English author, poet, painter, philosopher, and social critic, wrote a book he titled The Duty of Delight. Critical of the Victorian Christians of his time, he wrote that they “dwell only on the duty of self-denial but exhibit not the duty of delight.”

Social activist and writer Dorothy Day used this phrase often, including as the title of a collection of her journal entries (*affiliate link). From a footnote in the book: "this phrase came to serve for Dorothy as a call to mindfulness in the face of drudgery and sorrow."

Or, as the Buddha said, "No mud, no lotus."

Sojourner Truth may have said it best: “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

These poems remind me of how incredibly fortunate I've been for the majority of my life, and how many don't have that same good fortune.

They remind me to recommit to working for justice.

They remind me to pay attention.

As always, I've shared a brief excerpt from each poem. Follow the link to read the complete work.

"A Brief for the Defense"
Jack Gilbert

We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world.

"The News"
Emilie Lygren

Each morning we listen for what is breaking—

the sound of a thousand tragedies fills the air,
shattering that never stops,
headlines, a fleet of anchors tangled at our feet.

"Everything is Plundered, Betrayed, Sold"
Anna Akhmatova, translated by Stanley Kunitz

Why then do we not despair?
By day, from the surrounding woods,
cherries blow summer into town;
at night the deep transparent skies
glitter with new galaxies.

"Testimony"
Rebecca Baggett

I want to say, like Neruda,
that I am waiting for
"a great and common tenderness,"
that I still believe
we are capable of attention,
that anyone who notices the world
must want to save it.

"Adrift"
Mark Nepo

Everything is beautiful and I am so sad.
This is how the heart makes a duet of
wonder and grief. The light spraying
through the lace of the fern is as delicate
as the fibers of memory forming their web
around the knot in my throat.

"Fear and Love"
Jim Moore

I wish I could make the argument that a river
and a sunset plus a calm disregard of the ego
are enough. But whatever comes next must include
tents in the parking lot, that homeless camp
on the way to the airport,
and the hole in your cheek
from the cancer removed yesterday.

"September, 1918"
Amy Lowell

Some day there will be no war,
Then I shall take out this afternoon
And turn it in my fingers,
And remark the sweet taste of it upon my palate,
And note the crisp variety of its flights of leaves.

"Prayer"
Teddy Macker

dear lord in this time of darkness
may we be unafraid to mourn and together and hugely

may dignity lose its scaffolding
faces crumble like bricks

dear lord let grief come to grief

and then o lord help us to see the bees yet in the lavender
the spokes of sunlight down through the oaks

"Sometimes"
David Budbill

I know in the next minute or tomorrow all this may be
taken from me, and therefore I've got to say, right now,
what I feel and know and see, I've got to say, right now,
how beautiful and sweet this world can be.

"Sweetness"
Stephen Dunn

Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source. As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

"Please"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

We need you to remind us we can
be furious and scared and near feral
over injustice and still thrill at the taste
of a strawberry, ripe and sweet,
can still meet a stranger and shake
their hand, believing in their humanness.

"Thanks"
W.S. Merwin

with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is

A question for you: Do you have a favorite poem, or one that's painful to read, that belongs on this list? I have the memory of reading another one that has been reprinted many places that I now can't find so I'd love to get more titles and links.

Related reading

*Bookshop.org affiliate link. If you purchase through this link I receive a teensy tiny commission. Any commissions received will be donated to nonprofit organizations working for social justice and transportation equity.

Canstravaganza 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 02:58:00 +0000

Food in Jars blogger Marisa was holding a canning challenge that started in January. I happened across it after I'd already inadvertently completed the February assignments: frozen fruit and freezer excavation. I love that she includes a community-building item in each month. She also notes that this is all in fun and we should feel free to mix things up. I can say that I did at least one of the two challenges for each month at some point during the year, just not necessarily in the month she listed them.

January

Food in Jars challenge: Root vegetables and brassicas. I didn't check this box. I've made banh mi mix in the past (shredded daikon and carrot in vinegar) and it lasts forever in the fridge so I'll come back to this at some point. Community-building assignment: Share a jar. Definitely did that; I took jars to meetings and gave them to friends. That happens just about every month, actually.

February

Tayberry Jam Recipe by Chef Heidi Fink. 11 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints
Classic Raspberry Jam Recipe by Creative Canning. 7 quarter-pints, 7 half-pints
Blackberry Roasted Plum Preserves by Southern Fatty. 8 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
Blackberry Plum Fruit Leather: No recipe needed. Pureed blackberries and plums in the food processor, dropped in dollops about the size of a Nilla wafer on the dehydrator trays, and dried overnight to produce little fruity coins by the next morning. Those went into the freezer.
The Food in Jars challenge was using frozen fruit, the community challenge was freezer excavation. For me, that came up when the freezer defrosted later this year. But I did make all of this month's jams from berries and fruits I'd harvested last year and stored in the freezer.

March

Working with green tomatoes frozen in 2024, 12 pounds of tomatillos frozen in 2023, I made:

Tomatillo Lime Jalapeño Jam: 8 half-pints, 12 quarter-pints. I added 3 jalapeños to the recipe, wanting it to have a bit of heat because that felt like a fit.
Green Tomato/Tomatillo Chutney: 12 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints. I linked to the recipe although I think in future I'll use my own Green Tomato Chutney recipe whether I'm using green tomatoes on their own or mixed with tomatillos. I can attest that the spicing mix in that is really, really good.
Food in Jars challenge: Make a mix. I didn't make a mix in the sense of a muffin mix or salad, but I did mix green tomatoes and tomatillos. Community challenge, contribute to a community fridge or pantry. I think we did drop something off at the food shelves by the community garden on Yew, and I gave away some herbs when I had more than I could use later in the year.

April

No canning, but the Food in Jars community challenge was to plant something and I did that. The canning challenge was herbs and alliums. I collect and dry herbs when the pots cry out for harvesting, so that happens when it happens.

May

No canning. Food in Jars challenge was berries. Mine are still growing at this point. The community challenge was to learn from a friend. I swap canning recipes with my friend Stefanie' we have different pickled cherry recipes and I like mine.

June

Sweet & Salty Pickled Cherries,: 26 half-pints (I'm not messing around this year. It took a great deal of discipline to stretch last year's cherries to this spring!)
Food in Jars challenge: Jam. I cover that in other months. The community challenge was to attend a potluck. Our neighborhood potluck is in August and I went to that.

July

Tayberry Rhubarb Jam: 9 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints
Food in Jars challenge: Pickles, and I made those pickled cherries in June. Community challenge, support a local farmer or grower. I do that with regular trips to the Olympia Farmers' Market, and I buy eggs from the "farmette" stand down the street.

August

Apple Cardamom Rosemary Jam: 4 quarter-pints, 4 half-pints. Read my notes on seasoning adjustments in my piece on making lots of use of apples
Froze 8 pounds of sliced apples for future apple-pear butter; the apples are ready ahead of pears this year
Food in Jars challenge: Sauces, which I'd thought I would make this year. I ended up doing this in November when I experimented with ketchup (never again!) and ended up making a chutney sauce. The community challenge was to gather or glean, and this time of year I'm picking blackberries. I also get apples as they ripen from a couple of publicly located trees.

September

Last September was a canning frenzy. This September wasn't. I went on a two-week vacation starting Sept. 27 and needed to get things done to be ready for that.
Food in Jars challenge: Condiments, and host a swap. I did the ketchup effort in November. A canning swap sounds like a fun idea; maybe I'll organize that one of these years.

October

Also not a canning month, but the "October Surprise" of a defrosted freezer guaranteed I'd be canning in November.
Food in Jars challenge: Drying and dehydration. I did that back in February with fruit leather, and over the course of the summer I harvested and dried some of the herbs I grow. Community challenge, share your knowledge. I write blog posts to capture and share my recipe explorations so check, did that.

November

Blackberry Jelly: 15 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints.
Tayberry Jam: The tried and true Chef Heidi Fink recipe I used last year.
Sour Cherry Amaretto Jam: I used the no-pectin sour cherry jam recipe from Sourdough Brandon, enhanced by the amaretto suggestion in the recipe from DishNTheKitchen.
"Razzbuzzy Jam": 7 quarter-pints. Followed the Classic Raspberry Jam and stirred in 3 T. of raspberry liqueur. Not very buzzy, but tasty!
Spiced Blueberry Jam: 7 quarter-pints.
Smoky Spicy Tomato Jam: 3 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints. This Food in Jars is on repeat from last year and it's my go-to.
Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.
Salted Caramel Pear Butter: 2 half-pints, 7 quarter-pints
Cranberry Orange Jam with Crystallized Ginger: 3 half-pints, 13 quarter-pints

Read my comments on the Serious Eats site. Allow for more cook time to get softened citrus and cranberries. Try reducing the sugar a bit. You don't need pectin.

This is also the point in the year when I start thinking I should have put up more half-pints, ordered more quarter-pint jars, or both! I like the quarter-pint size for gifts.

Spiced Apple Butter: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz jar, an experiment in reusing a commercial jar and lid that went into the refrigerator because I wasn't confident about the seal.
Food in Jars challenge: Apples. Yep, got that covered. Community challenge, barter with a friend or neighbor. I do a lot in our Buy Nothing group, both giving and receiving. That space doesn't permit bartering but it feels as if it's in the general spirit.

December

Food in Jars challenge: Use it up! Is she kidding? I make far too much to use it up in a year! Community challenge, bake for others. Yep, did that.

Not the blowout year that 2024 was, but then I still have jars of product from that year on the shelves. Anyone want some jam? Chutney? Green tomato sauce? Anyone? And I did actually end up hitting the mark on the Food in Jars challenge, just in different months.

Winter Solstice 2025

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 15:29:00 +0000

In Western society we give ourselves assignments at the new year to make a whole new self. Unrealistic assignments, of course. Between one day and the next we're not really going to flip a switch and go from zero exercise to five days a week at the gym. If we manage that for a week we'll pay for it in aches and pains anyway.

Instead of commitment by calendar, and instead of "improvement" schemes, I'm practicing other ways of marking turning points. This year I got the book Requiem, Invitation, and Celebration: A Collection of Seasonal Practices by Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee and Lucy Wormald, from the publishers of Emergence Magazine. It's a collection of 50 practices grounded in the evolving cycle of the seasons. (More about the book in a talk by Vaughan-Lee)

The book includes "Savoring Light, for when it's the shortest day." The practice:

"Take a walk in the afternoon for as long as the light is present. Give attention only to the rhythm of your breath and footsteps until your mind softens. Take in the presence of the light. Mid-winter, how does your body instinctively savor it? As the light of day quickly becomes dusk--the light grainy, the world looking like it belongs to a roll of old film--what does the fleeting quality of the light open in you before you are lost to the dark?"

I have to say that I'm not "lost to the dark," though, as the sun slips below the horizon, our part of the globe rotating away. I'm simply in the dark, which has its own sounds and sensations. Without the darkness, the glowing lights on my neighbors' homes wouldn't gleam so brightly. Owl wouldn't fly to find food. The coyote pack that sets up a chorus each night in the nearby park wouldn't sing their laughing songs.

The globe keeps turning, and we're really always turning toward the light.

Poems and readings for this year's Solstice, with brief excerpts and links to the full pieces:

I read a lot of poetry but have relatively few committed to memory. One of these--ish--is Robert Frosts's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening". The "ish" led me to look it up to refresh my memory of the spot where I usually get stuck "between the woods and frozen lake." I know the rhyme scheme so if I can get past that I can keep going.

For some reason, reading it this time I realized it's actually a winter Solstice poem. Why, you ask? This line: "the darkest evening of the year."

"Solstice Poem"
Margaret Atwood

This is the solstice, the still point
of the sun, its cusp and midnight,

the year’s threshold
and unlocking

"Winter's Cloak"
Joyce Rupp

This year I do not want

the dark to leave me.

I need its wrap

of silent stillness,

its cloak

of long lasting embrace.

Too much light

has pulled me away

from the chamber

of gestation.

"Winter Solstice"
Kate Belew

Winter is magic

in decay, look what changes,

on the threshold of the year. Oh holy,

hinge. Step across the hearth

(earth and heart as one).

"How the Light Comes"

Jan Richardson

I cannot tell you

how the light comes,

but that it does.

That it will.

That it works its way

into the deepest dark

that enfolds you,

though it may seem

long ages in coming

or arrive in a shape

you did not foresee.

And so

may we this day

turn ourselves toward it.

"On the Winter Solstice"
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

And I have been waiting—

which I might have denied,

snuggled in deep as I was,

drowsy and night-drunk,

certain of my joy in the dark,

but oh, such a way to wake,

discovered by the light of a star

Brianna Kocka, in What the Winter Solstice Asks of Us, provides suggestions for how we might mark the day with rest (all seven kinds), ritual, and restorative practices.

From Starhawk's Winter Solstice Message, a reminder that this year Solstice and Hanukkah occur together, both reminders of the light, and these lines:

"And the message of Solstice, retold every year, is that just when the world grows darkest, the sun will rise again.

"We are each a little light, a small flame that needs sacred fuel to burn. Yet we can keep that flame alight, longer than we might expect, if we commit to acts of courage and compassion. On this longest night, as the Great Mother labors to bring forth the sun of the new year, we are midwives. We tend, we comfort, we empathize, we do the work. Let us bring to birth the warmth of compassion, the fire of commitment, the light of truth this year. The wheel is turning. After each night comes a new dawn."

Jennifer Hall's Lessons from the Universe essay "The Winter Solstice: Sacred Pause Before the Light Returns" reinforces the idea that we can sit with who and where we are without seeking improvement in a season of rest. She offers this invitation:

"The Winter Solstice isn’t here to rush you into the future.

It’s here to remind you that light is inevitable, even when you can’t yet see it.

Honor the pause.

Trust the dark.

Let the return of the light meet you where you are.

That’s how cycles close with grace.

And that’s how new ones begin with clarity."

Brigit Anna McNeill shares beautiful illustrations by several artists in her piece "Winter Solstice: The Long Night that Knows Our Names." She closes with this blessing:

"May this solstice meet you gently.

May it remind you that you are not late, broken, or lost.

You are wintering, as all living things must.

And somewhere beneath the quiet, the light is already on its way."

I went on a fabulous trip to England this fall with family and finally got to see Stonehenge, a lifelong dream. I couldn't go right up to it since they have it roped off. The benefit of that was that we could get pictures of the stones without people all around them. We also visited Avebury, a much larger circle although without the lintel crosspieces and much more worn, and the Rolling-Right standing stones, a small site. At Avebury and Rolling-Right we saw the remains of offerings people had left there at the equinox, just a week or two before we visited. This picture of Stonehenge isn't mine; I'm sharing it for the glow of the sunset through the stones, which people will view on the winter solstice.

When we watch the light pass, we have to remember to watch (and work) for the light to return.

Related Reading

Spiced Apple Butter Recipe

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 10 Nov 2025 02:37:00 +0000

Admittedly not the biggest tweaks I've ever made to a recipe, but here it is. In this year's food preservation I found myself going back to last year's canning posts for recipes and links and I'll keep this running tally going.

I had rounded up quite a few apple butter recipes when I invented my Chai Apple Butter Recipe last year. I wanted one that used apple cider vinegar for the extra tang; some recipes don't include that, or don't use much. For this batch I started with The Pioneer Woman's apple butter recipe.

Since I was simultaneously working on two other recipes I used the slow-cooker method that Food in Jars uses for her Salted Caramel Pear Butter (made a batch of that two days ago). My slow cooker has a steam vent hole in the lid. For the first stage of cooking in this recipe I block that with a chopstick to keep the moisture in and cook the flavor into the flesh of the apples. That comes out for the later stage when I need the liquid to cook off.

The Pioneer Woman calls for adding a cup of water. I substituted apple cider. Why not make it even more appley when you have the chance?

Earlier this year I processed a lot of gleaned apples with my corer/slicer and had both skin-on and peeled in the freezer. For this recipe I used the ones with the skins, for the extra pectin and flavor. This saves the peeled ones for a future apple pie or other dessert use. Go with what you have and what you prefer. You can run the cooked mash through a food mill if you started with unpeeled apples and don't want the extra fiber.

Of course, per the title here, I oomphed up the spice. She called for 1 teaspoon of apple pie spice or pumpkin pie spice for three pounds of apples. I drew some inspiration from British Mixed Spice, discovered along the way in my never-again-will-I-make-ketchup research. I wanted it to be cinnamon-forward. This might sound like a lot of seasonings but it didn't taste overly spiced with that dusty quality I've created at times with over-enthusiastic perusal of the spice drawer.

I needed to deal with the aftermath of the Great Freezer Defrost of 2025, so my quantities are larger than my starting-point recipe: 4 pounds of apples. More than this quantity of pears had worked just fine in the slow cooker. You can scale this back to the quantities in The Pioneer Woman's recipe.

Ingredients

4 lbs. apples, cored and chopped. These can be frozen or canned, skins on or off according to your preference

1 c. apple cider vinegar

1-1/2 c. apple cider or apple juice

3/4 t. salt

1-2/3 c. brown sugar

2 t. vanilla paste or vanilla extract, if you have it on hand

2 t. flaky sea salt or kosher salt

1 t. cinnamon

1/2 t. black pepper

1/4 t. nutmeg

1/4 t. mace (optional; for me this is the essence of pumpkin pie spice)

1/4 t. cardamom

1/8 t. cloves

Directions

Place apples, vinegar, cider/juice and salt in slow cooker and stir to combine. Turn it to high. Cook for 60-90 minutes, stirring occasionally. You want the fruit to be soft enough to be blendable.

Blend with an immersion stick blender if you have one. Or remove a couple of cups at a time, blend in a blender or food processor, then return all the blended sauce to the slow cooker. Be careful when blending hot semi-liquid foods. Don't fill the container at or above the halfway mark, keep a towel over the top, adjust the lid so you're letting steam escape rather than build up. All of this is why I prefer my immersion blender.

Mix the dried spices together, then add the brown sugar, vanilla and spices to the pot. Prop the lid slightly ajar so steam can escape, maybe with your spatula or a chopstick laid crosswise so the lid can rest on it on one end.

Cook on high, stirring often, until it's the color and consistency you want. If you want to be thick and spreadable this will take a while, 2-3 hours. If you stop much sooner, congratulations! You have made a spiced applesauce.

Stirring often means every 15 minutes or so. Food in Jars says to stir every 30 minutes but if I waited that long I'd have apple butter stuck on the bottom of the pot. You can let it go a bit longer early on when the pot has plenty of liquid in it. The more it cooks down and thickens, the more you need to be sure to scrape the bottom thoroughly.

How hot your slow cooker gets will be a factor only you can judge, and that will affect your stirring frequency and total cook time. Food in Jars blogger Marisa notes that the older Crock-Pot had a gentler low temperature than newer ones. That's my experience with my newer model; I really can't go off and leave it.

Prep your jars for canning according to the safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

My yield: 4 half-pints, 3 quarter-pints, 1 6-oz. jar in a reuse experiment from a commercial product (nice straight-sidded jar)

Canning posts usually show something like this as the triumphant closing shot, or maybe a close-up of the delectable contents.

In reality the closing scene is more like this.

I should have taken a picture even earlier I was making full use of every flat surface in the kitchen and had three recipes going at once. Maybe next time.

Related reading and recipes

Green Tomato Chutney Not-a-Ketchup Sauce

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sat, 08 Nov 2025 04:40:00 +0000

I may have noted recently that I don't think green tomato ketchup is worth the effort.

Also noted: Large quantity (~6 pounds) of green tomatoes plus chopped onions plus canned apples, all prepped and in the fridge under the assumption that I'd be making another ketchup recipe.

Third note to file: Lots of green tomato chutney and green tomato/tomatillo chutney already on hand in all their chunky goodness from last year and earlier this year.

Hence the thought experiment: What if I followed a chutney recipe but then blended it to make it smooth like ketchup? I should have some pretty screamin' awesome sweet/tangy sauce that would be great with fries, tofu, on oven-baked yams, maybe over rice, with cheese on crackers if it wasn't too runny to sit there, blend with yogurt to make an interesting dip. Many possible uses! Although not a ketchup! (And yes, blended green chutney sauce looks quite a lot like split pea soup.)

I give quantities as if you had diced or chopped things. I heartily endorse throwing ingredients for this into the food processor and whirling them up to save time. You're going to be pureeing and smooshing to get the lumps out anyway.

This makes a big batch! I'd already committed myself with the earlier prep. This could be cut in half with proportionate adjustments to everything. Cook time will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are.

Inspirations

Green Tomato Ketchup recipe by From the Larder
My own Green Tomato Apple Chutney Recipe, developed last year
Creative Canning Green Tomato Ketchup, which was the winner of the two recipes I tried last weekend

Wet ingredients

Green tomatoes: ~6-8 cups, yield from ~6 pounds
Yellow or white onion: 1-1/2 cups, diced
Apple: 2 cups, diced, canned, or even applesauce if that's what you have
Green bell pepper (or another sweet bell pepper color if that's what you have): 1 whole pepper, diced
Dried fruit: 1 cup of whatever turns your cranks. I like a combination of dates and dried cranberries
Vinegar: 1 cup. Malt or apple cider vinegar preferred; white vinegar will be sharper; red or white wine vinegar is fine. Just needs to be labeled 5% acidity.
Brown sugar: 1-1/2 cups. OK to substitute white sugar if that's what you have
Green or red chilis, optional: 1-2, diced, if you want to add some fresh chili heat. Substitute 1-2 t. crushed red pepper, tasting and adjusting for your heat preference as the recipe cooks down
1 T. fresh grated ginger, or ginger paste from a tube (so handy!)
4-5 garlic cloves, crushed, or 1 T. garlic paste from a tube
Optional: 1-1/2 T. vegan Worcestershire sauce, if available. Regular is fine if you don't have vegan, but then you should label this for any gift recipients who might prefer vegan
Optional if you want a thinner sauce: 1/2 c. sherry, cooking sherry, or something you routinely substitute for these (apple cider or apple juice could work here)

Dry ingredients/Seasonings
Stir the dry spices together in a small bowl, then add to the wet ingredients. Yes, yes, you can absolutely dump the measurements straight into the sauce without mixing them first, but combining them first gives you a better distribution in the liquid than if you end up with a surprise clump of ground ginger.

1 T. fennel seeds, whirled in a coffee grinder or pounded with a mortar and pestle
1 T. ground mustard
1 T. salt
2 t. ground cardamom
2 t. ground black pepper
1 t. smoked paprika
1 t. cinnamon
1 t. ground cardamom
1 t. ground ginger (or increase fresh ginger above)
1/8 t. nutmeg
1/8 t. cloves

Put all ingredients except for the optional sherry or apple juice in one big stockpot (takes longer) or divide across two pans, preferably wide saucepans or Dutch ovens with plenty of surface for evaporation of the liquids.

Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to a rapid simmer/low boil, and cook, stirring often, for around 60-90 minutes. Tomatoes spit when they boil so wear mitts, pay attention. Don't cover the pans; the goal here is some evaporation. Frequent stirring is essential to prevent some of the sauce burning to the bottom of the pan. Ask me how I know.

At 60-90 minutes the vegetables may not be entirely soft yet. Taste the seasonings and oomph up flavor notes you'd like to have a bit more of. Go carefully here, maybe 1/4 t. or 1/2 t. at a time if it's something that could end up overpowering.

Continue to cook until everything is soft enough to blend. I tried my immersion blender first, then went to the regular blender. Be careful blending hot liquids. Put in less than half the container's capacity, have the lid cracked open a tiny bit to let steam out, start on a low pulse and step it up as the contents puree and liquify.

Return to the kettle and cook a bit longer to reach the consistency you want. This is ready to can now, though.

If it's thicker than you want and you'd like a more pourable sauce, add 1/2 cup of sherry (idea borrowed from the Creative Canning recipe linked above), apple juice or apple cider, and cook another 5 minutes or so.

Follow safe canning practices from the National Center on Home Food Preservation. Process 15 minutes at full boil.

Yield will vary depending on how juicy your tomatoes are. My yield: 8 half-pints, 11 quarter-pints.

Related reading and recipes

In Which I Say Never Again to Making Ketchup

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 21:31:00 +0000

I knew this. I knew this. I'd made a batch of homemade tomato ketchup years and years ago in Spokane and learned just how very, very long it takes to cook down. (Why specify "tomato" ketchup? Because, as I learned from The Joy of Cooking, whether you call it ketchup or catsup it's any savory smooth vegetable sauce. Mushroom Ketchup? It's a thing.)

But oops, I did it again. Had a lot of green tomatoes and remembered last year's idea of making green tomato ketchup. I'd even rounded up the recipes. And I still have plenty of my beloved green tomato chutney on hand, supplemented by some green tomato/tomatillo chutney that's a bit sharper, but still good.

Last year I tried making the dehydrated seasoned green tomatoes linked in that same post. Blech. And we'd been saying we'd like to have ketchup on hand without ever actually getting around to buying any. I can fix this!

Sunday I headed out to the yard to pick the many, many green tomatoes left and do a bit of cleanup of the raised beds. Since I started my seed snail 'speriment a bit late, the Mortgage Lifter heirloom tomatoes hadn't had enough time to ripen. They're huge and beautiful and I'll be starting those seeds earlier in 2026 so I get the payoff in ripe red tomatoes.

So, yeah, around 24 pounds or so of green tomatoes.

Brilliant idea: Make batches of three different recipes in a head to head taste contest, then use the last batch of tomatoes to double down on the winner.

Dear Reader, this is not how I'll ever spend another Sunday.

I got through two of the three recipes. Neither of them makes my heart beat faster. One was the winner with Sweet Hubs. Fortunately, that was the batch that had more tomatoes based on the recipe's proportions. I added more sugar to both recipes. Neither of them is a giftable product, which is my yardstick for success.

And the labor! So many steps. So many. The two recipes used two different approaches, too.

Mamta's Kitchen Green Tomato Ketchup: Cook the tomatoes, onions and garlic until soft, which didn't take nearly as long as the four-hour Creative Canning recipe. Put through a food mill, then through a sieve to get the smooth sauce consistency, then cook with spices, vinegar and sugar. This batch had a smaller quantity of tomatoes. I doubled it to 2 kg and was able to fit into my deep saucepan. I normally wouldn't double an untried recipe but I had so, so many green tomatoes and the spice mix sounded really good. Garam masala, mustard, and more.

The recipe indicated that 1 kg of tomatoes would produce around 2 liters of sauce before adding spices etc. My tomatoes must have been super juicy, as I started with 2 kg and ended up with not quite that 2-liter mark. I seasoned based on volume produced, not volume I started with. I added more spices after tasting; mine are getting old, I know.

Yield from all of that: 2 half-pints, 1 quarter-pint.

Creative Canning Green Tomato Ketchup: Cook everything everywhere all at once for a long, long time (four hours), stirring frequently so it doesn't stick to the bottom of the pan. This started with 6 pounds of tomatoes so I used my Dutch oven. I'd already done the food mill + sieve steps for the Mamta recipe. This one called for pureeing ingredients in a blender, then putting it through a sieve. Much easier than the (manual) food mill process. I'd started with more tomatoes so it isn't a completely parallel comparison but I know I threw a lot more tomato skins/seeds/solids into the compost with Mamta's recipe than with this one.

This one was sweetened with honey. I added another cup of sugar after tasting (one-half cup at a time). It came out the flavor winner and was a much brighter green color.

Yield: 6 half-pints.

If I were making either of these again, which I will not be doing, I'd use the blender + sieve technique from Creative Canning. I might use the cooking approach from Mamta's because it was so much faster, but then again that might be a function of the tomato quantity.

I couldn't tell you whether having the seasonings in from the beginning can be credited with the better flavor of the Creative Canning approach. I'd actually think it would be the opposite because seasonings added too early can disappear a bit. Mamta's recipe made the point that sugar and salt both darken the end result, hence adding them in at the end, but the spice profile with several brown spices and blends meant hers was the darker brown sauce anyway.

Another lesson learned: I had purchased cute little 8-ounce stout bottles from Fillmore Container, planning to bottle whatever sauces I might make this year as a change of pace from chutney. But the ketchup was thick enough that it wouldn't pour easily out of the bottle and I realized it would be far easier to can it in my standard jars. I'll use those bottles for something runnier.

In a side note, I couldn't find instructions for headspace with that smaller mouth, which worries me. Need enough air to suck out for the vacuum, not something that creates so much pressure the bottle gives way in the kettle. The functional headspace with a much smaller circumference is obviously less so I think I need to do the geometry calculation to figure out how much headspace yields the equivalent air volume of a 1/4" headspace on a regular mouth jar. I'll keep poking around to find that or do the math before I try making some other sauce.

I did the prep for the third batch while the others were cooking down. I'd always known it would have to wait, given the amount of time it takes ketchup to cook down. So I whirled the tomatoes and onions in the food processor and stuck them in the fridge.

Know what I'm going to make with them instead of the third ketchup recipe?

Chutney.

Related reading and recipes

When Life Hands You a Defrosted Freezer, Make Jam

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 02 Nov 2025 22:34:00 +0000

I spent much of last September in a canning frenzy. This September wasn't. I went on a two-week vacation starting Sept. 27 and needed to get things done to be ready for heading out of the country to England.

October? Also not a canning month. That two-week vacation went into mid-October, then we had a family weekend trip (which involved giving away jars of tasty treats), then I had a business trip.

Oct. 31, however, brought me a nasty surprise that meant November would start with a lot of canning. Went out to the freezer and discovered the door was open a tiny, tiny bit. Just wide enough for long enough to have defrosted every last thing, including all that produce I'd prepped and frozen earlier in the year. My visions of cozy winter weekends making a batch of this and a batch of that when the mood struck turned into a salvage situation with the clock ticking.

I made some fast decisions about how much I could get through in a weekend and put those thawed bags into the refrigerator. I figured since the apples and pears were mostly destined for apple-pear butter they could stand the freeze/thaw/freeze cycle a bit better than berries and tomatoes, so they stayed in the freezer to go back into their cold slumbers.

Saturday production:

Blackberry Jelly 15 quarter-pints, 6 half-pints. This no-pectin recipe jelled like a dream. I usually make jams but I had two big bags of blackberries and I still have seedless blackberry jam from last year, or was it the year before? The pulp and seeds will go into fruit leather with some plums a neighbor gave me.

Tayberry Jam: 16 quarter-pints, 8 half-pints. Pruning those bushes really paid off in production! The tried and true Chef Heidi Fink recipe I used last year. My experience has been that it takes much longer to get to the jammy stage than her recipe suggests. I use two tests: Does it run together in a sheeting action when I dip some up in a spoon, and does it hold together and slide down a plate from the freezer without a lot of juice separating out when I tilt the plate? I picked the latter tip up from a recipe somewhere and really like it, as it doesn't involve burning my finger in the jam.

Sour Cherry Amaretto Jam: 5 quarter-pints, 2 half-pints. The cherries are courtesy of a Buy Nothing you-pick offer. I didn't get a lot, around 3.25 pounds. I used the no-pectin sour cherry jam recipe from Sourdough Brandon, enhanced by the amaretto suggestion in the recipe from DishNTheKitchen. Honestly, a tiny bit disappointed on this one. The sour tasted more of the lemon juice than the cherries to my tastebuds.

"Razzbuzzy" Jam: 7 quarter-pints. Going with the "let's add liqueur to jam" theme, I made the Classic Raspberry Jam recipe from Creative Canning. I only had about 2.5 cups of raspberries. I used a 1:1 fruit:sugar ratio per the recipe and added 3 T. raspberry liqueuer. Not all the alcohol cooks out, or so I've read, but this isn't really enough for a buzz. It's just a fun word.

Spiced Blueberry Jam: 7 quarter-pints. Another tiny batch. I had just about 1.5 pounds, perfect for one of the Food in Jars small-batch recipes.

I'll cover Sunday production and beyond in another post.

Related reading and recipes

My Circular Economy of Apples

noreply@blogger.com (Barb Chamberlain) — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 22:09:00 +0000

Every apple recipe I made last year—and that's a long list—started out with fresh apples to which I applied some labor. Peel, yes or no depending on the recipe. Core, yes or no depending on the recipe. Slice, dice, or shred. Cook with spices. Discard something.

Bear in mind that my parents grew up during the Depression and raised me to be thrifty. I minimize my food waste as much as possible. What there is of it goes into the garden beds in the central composting square. I use the keyhole gardening technique, AKA dump food scraps into a space in the middle of the raised bed, let Mother Nature and Father Time do their thing. (My raised beds are rectangular, built by my Sweet Hubs from a kit, rather than the round shape most often illustrated. Compost happens either way.)

But why compost before you've gotten every last possible bit of use? Although there's such a thing as taking it a bit too far. I present my lessons learned for your entertainment and possible benefit.

A typical two-day cycle starts with the apples I glean from various roadside trees and pick up when a neighbor leaves a bag by the curb. (So really, it's a three-day cycle. Day one, collect apples.)

First, I use my handy-dandy apple corer without peeling and prep 8 lbs. of sliced apples to freeze for later use in apple-pear butter, or possibly this Apple Caramel Sauce from Food in Jars, which sounds scrumptious (recipe can be made using other fruits too!).

Put all the cores in a bag. Plenty of apple-ness left there that can be rendered into juice.

Use the apple corer with the peeler setting to slice another 4 pounds of apples, then dice those up to macerate overnight with sugar for Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam. Throw the peels in the bag with the core; they carry pectin that will help the juice jell.

Simmer those cores and peels until soft with some ginger in preparation for Apple Ginger Jelly. I made this one last year and it's going on annual repeat. Set that up to drain overnight.

The next morning, discover that the apple juice is maybe a trifle bland. I really should have gotten fresh gingerroot, not just used the ginger paste from a tube that I had in the fridge. Okay, I can fix this, I still have pounds and pounds of apples. Quarter a bunch of the smaller ones and throw into the strained juice so it will reduce and pick up more appley goodness. Add more ginger paste. (Really should have biked to the store.)

Update on Apple Ginger Jelly: Sweet Hubs ended up running to the store and getting gingerroot. Sliced that up (the recipe calls for 3 oz. to go with 2 lbs. apples, and I had 3 lbs.) and simmered it in with the apples. Makes all the difference!

In the meantime, use my food mill to smoosh the cores and peels and squeeze out every bit of apple pulp I can. I figured I'd throw that into the future apple-pear butter, but hey, that looks a lot like applesauce! Granted, these apples have already given up some (most) of their flavor. Here comes the Maple Applesauce recipe from Food in Jars to the rescue, with its cinnamon sticks and maple for some extra flavor oomph.

But wait, those apples I added to the juice are also going to be nice and soft. Slow my roll on the applesauce plan until I can get those smooshed up too. Ideally they would drain for 6-8 hours per the recipe, but y'know, it's okay if some of the juice goes into the applesauce.

After tasting the apple mush, though, I decide it really has lost almost all its flavor. Even the addition of the apples that had more flesh and a tablespoon of lemon juice didn't really fix it.

At that point I have a few options: Blend up some blackberries with the bland applesauce and make fruit leather. Freeze this stuff in a muffin tin, which makes handy half-cup quantities, and save it to bake into future muffins and breads, recognizing they'll need more spice. Bake a batch of muffins or bread right now, for that matter. Or head into a fresh batch of applesauce with whole apples that I can mix this into and resist the urge to restart this whole circular economy again.

I do have an entire bike pannier full of apples still to process....

Clearly Indian Apple Chutney lies ahead. I made that last year and it tasted fantastic with some Cougar Gold aged white cheddar on a cracker. But not today. Chutney takes a while to cook and I have apple mush to deal with. That muffin tin of apple mush for the freezer sounds like the easiest way to go. I just have to label it with honesty: "Bland Applesauce 2025".

Recipes in this post

Apple Caramel Sauce
Apple Cardamom Rosewater Jam: Flavor notes to read before you make this!

She says to cook 40 minutes minimum, longer for deeper color. I probably cooked twice as long to get it to a consistency that looked like jam and yet still had some apple bits. Cook for the texture you want in your jam.
She calls for 5 cardamom pods. I used 8 pods and it was so subtle I couldn't taste it, but my pods were a bit old. Ended up adding something like 3/4 t. ground cardamom. Definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.
She calls for 1 T. rosewater or "a splash". I appreciate subtle rosewater, but too much and it will taste like hand lotion for me. I started with 1/2 t., stirred in, let it cook a minute, tasted. Did this until I was at 1-1/2 t. rosewater, so half what she called for. Most definitely a taste and adjust seasoning.

Apple Ginger Jelly: I didn't have fresh ginger root on hand (gasp!) so I used the ginger paste in a tube I find so, so handy. That really didn't cut it and I had to do make some amendments (add more apples and cook down more juice with gingerroot). Get fresh gingerroot.
Maple Applesauce
Indian Apple Chutney

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