Those Lazy Hazy Crazy Days of Summer

peach jam

Summer is winding down in my neck of the woods, perhaps sooner than normal as we have been blessed with temperatures in the 80s during the day and 60s overnight. Peaches are abundant right now, so I decided to try my hand at making peach jam. For the first batch, I made five jars of peach and five jars of a peach/blackberry mix. As the peach turned out well (haven't tried the mixed jam yet), I made a second round of peach on Saturday. For whatever reason, the peaches did not ripen as much as I would have liked, which made them challenging to smash with the potato masher. Consequently, I'll have to say that the end result is more peach preserve than peach jam. But I'm okay with that. The flavor is still quite good.

St. Louis Zoo

Sunday morning I met my photographer friend Caren at the St. Louis Zoo. With temperatures in the 60s when we started out, it was a perfect time to experience the animals. Because it was a Sunday, the zoo was not yet crowded so we were able to stroll and photograph at our leisure for the first hour or so. By the time it got really crowded, we were ready to head out anyway.

I had yet to visit the Grace Taylor Broughton Sculpture Garden behind the St. Louis Art Museum, so we walked there next. It was slightly disappointing, to say the least. There are no paths leading to each sculpture so you have to walk on the grass. As the irrigation system had been on that morning, it was a soggy endeavor. And I have no idea how the project met ADA requirements as I can't imagine pushing a wheelchair (or a stroller, for that matter), let alone trying to maneuver a walker through the area. Over 400 hundred trees have been planted, some purportedly representing "rooms", but all I could see was too many trees planted too close together. There will be tree casualties due to this, and that is a shame. Perhaps they should consider using a local landscape architect next time, instead of bringing someone in from France.

Sculpture Garden

We then headed inside to have an early lunch at Panorama, the restaurant located inside the museum. This was my second time eating here, and I have found both the food and the service to be quite good. Caren and I had both parked in the open lot across from the museum when we arrived that morning, so it was an easy walk back to the cars following our meals. It was good to get out and photograph again. It's been too long since I have taken time to do that.

Happy Independence Day, America!

graduation

One blog post in June - that is pathetic! I should have posted before now, but I had a great time with my sister shooters taking pictures of the graffiti wall downtown. I hadn't been down there since I photographed my great-niece for her high school graduation. It's hard to believe that was two years ago already.

They have really cleaned up the area near where the wall begins. That bike trail tax we all voted for sure does come in handy. You never know where it will pop up. At any rate, while the day was bright and a little warm, it was still fun to be out with like-minded women. A few of us went out for lunch after taking the pictures. Here are a few of my favorite photos from the day.

St. Louis graffiti wall

Last weekend we attended an open house for a presbyterian church in Kirkwood. The congregation took an old school building that is located in the historic area of Meramec Highlands and repurposed it as their church. Our interest in the renovation lies in the fact that the school had once been owned by St. Joseph Hospital to house their child care center. The center was open to non-employees of the hospital as well, and our son went there from 1987 until he began kindergarten in the fall of 1990. It was amazing to see the pictures of the mess the church started with when they bought the property, and the transformation into what it has become. It is truly a great re-use of an old school. It was fun for us to walk through the school and see the rooms our little guy once played in.

the new church in 2016

school party in 1990

A gal on the Facebook page of my community posted that she had more plums on her tree than she could possibly eat, so she offered them up to anyone who wanted some. I had never tried to make plum jam, and thought this would be the perfect time to try my hand at it. Not wanting to seem greedy since I needed quite a few to make a batch, I asked her if she wanted a jar of my finished product in exchange for the plums. She knew that I had also made some blackberry/raspberry jam recently, so she eagerly offered a trade for a jar of that instead. I'm thinking she was probably pretty tired of plum anything by that point. The exchange was made, and I had to wait a few days for the plums to ripen. Personally, I wasn't a fan of the flavor of these plums, so I was unsure what the jam would end up tasting like. At the end, I was pleasantly surprised. The plum jam has just the right combination of sweet-tart taste. However, plums are way more labor intense than any other fruit I have tried so far. I won't be rushing out to make more anytime soon. Having quite a few jam sessions (har, har!) under my belt now, it is a mystery to me how anyone makes money selling homemade jams and jellies at markets.

plum jam

 Tomorrow Jim's aunt, uncle and cousin are coming from Minnesota for a visit and to attend a Cardinals game. It will be fun to show them our little Americana town in all of its 4th of July finery. Happy 4th, everyone!

July 4th

Ball Fresh Tech Jam & Jelly Maker - the Gift that Keeps on Giving

My husband got me this jam and jelly maker for Christmas as it was on my list. Typically I make strawberry jam and peach butter, and when I saw that this machine does all the stirring for you I knew I had to have it. For me the worst part of making jam is standing over the hot stove making sure that it doesn't stick and burn to the bottom of the pan. There is also the added risk of the hot mixture splashing and burning your skin.


After reading the instructions and washing the parts, I was ready to

go. My local grocery store had raspberries on sale, so it was easy to decide what my first jam would be. The recipe calls for four, six-ounce containers of fruit, sugar, pectin and a little butter to help keep the frothing to a minimum. After 21 minutes in the machine, it was all done! The one mistake I made was that I thought it said the recipe would make four pints of jam, so I purchased a box of pint jars as I didn't have any. I was aggravated when I poured the finished product, and found that it filled less than two and a half of my jars. I re-read the recipe and it actually said it would fill four half-pint jars. Whoops! That was my mistake. Now I need to go and purchase some half-pint jars. After the jam is placed in the jars and the lids secured, you can either process the jars in a hot water bath or you can simply freeze them. In either case, the jam must be refrigerated and eaten in three weeks due to the fact that there are no preservatives added. I kept the partial jar in the refrigerator and froze the other two.

I have to say, the jam is amazing! I passed one of the frozen jars on to my sister, and am eager to hear what she and her husband think about it. The included recipe book is pretty sparse, but I have found some recipes from other people online that I want to try. So far I have not had any luck finding one that converts peach butter for this machine, and I don't quite know how to go about doing that.

An obvious drawback is that each batch makes a small amount, and the instructions are explicit about not increasing the size of the recipe. For someone who has a lot of fruit to can, this might not be the machine for them. But for the two of us, it will be just perfect.

What a Crock!

Peach Butter

After finishing up with the cupcake challenge on Sunday, it was time to turn my attention to the 40 peaches that were sitting in the garage for ripening. Since I had already canned the other batch of peaches, this group was destined to become peach butter. Making peach butter is usually an all day ordeal as the concoction has to slowly cook, while quickly splashing every nearby surface with sticky goo, for hours. To my initial delight, I had found a recipe that enables you to use the crock pot. While there is still splattering involved, the website declared that you could put your peach mixture in the pot and cook it on medium all night (up to 12 hours), and then can the next morning. Woo, hoo! No more standing over a hot stove frequently stirring the peaches so they wouldn't burn on the bottom of the pan.

I followed the instructions, except that my crock pot has two settings: low and high. No medium. Hmmm...I elected to go with low since I knew I could let it cook a while longer in the morning if need be. The mixture is supposed to reduce by half. At 8:00 Monday morning it had maybe reduced an inch. This was 12 hours into the cooking time. I bumped my setting up to high and by 2:00 in the afternoon I still had a soupy mess. So out came two large pots and I ended up cooking it on the stove the rest of the afternoon anyway. What a crock! And the biggest sad side note to the whole story is that I only got 6 pints out of the whole batch. Such a lot of work for so little reward. Every year I wonder why I go to all the trouble when you can buy a jar of peach butter for a few bucks at the store. But then in the middle of the winter when we open up a jar I think, "Oh yeah, this is why I do it!" It is incredibly good stuff. So I might need to make another batch while peaches are in season.

Everything is Just Peachy

My daughter had her wisdom teeth taken out last Thursday. Did you know that, according to her oral surgeon, wisdom teeth are named such because they appear around the age of 18 when people should be gaining wisdom? Who thought of that crock of crap? At any rate, things went pretty well except for the fact that both nasal cavities were nicked in attempting to remove the long roots of the upper teeth. So she has a couple of stitches there as well as in her gums, and isn't supposed to blow her nose for a week. Good thing she was already over her cold. After seeing all she has gone through, I am really grateful that I never needed to have mine removed. I have all four but they never came down, and don't bother me at all. She is flying to Chicago on Wednesday to interview with 3 people at a communications agency that has offered her an internship in Shanghai while she is studying there this fall. This is the same agency that her class worked with in Prague this summer, so obviously they were impressed with her. I just hope that the flight poses no problems for her mouth. The surgeon said it was okay for her to fly.

Around playing Nurse Nancy, I picked up some peaches at the Kirkwood Farmers Market on Saturday. The vendor assured me that the peaches (which were seconds) would be ready to can on Sunday. Hah! They were barely ready to be canned today. It took me three hours to get the job done, and all I have to show for it are six quarts and one pint of peaches. Every year I wonder why I go to the trouble, but then in the winter when we open them up I remember why. So nice to have fresh peaches in the winter. I also make peach butter every year, so I need to go back out and get a second batch of peaches. I should have made the peach butter first, because it is an all-day ordeal as you have to cook the peaches for hours before canning them. Oh well. The peach butter is definitely worth all the work. I think I will wait for the weekend because then I might be able to coerce Jim into helping me peel and de-pit the peaches. Hate that part!