So lacking my own source of raspberries, I headed to Sara’s to pick her neglected berries. And while I was there, she gave me a taste of Amy’s jam, and also spilled the secret ingredient. It was delicious, I’m not going to lie. But, still, she didn’t give me any, so I picked some berries and brought them back home to try my own hand at it.

I didn’t get a whole lot of raspberries so I made a single pint of jam. I deliberately chose a different “secret” ingredient than Amy, and it turned out pretty tasty as well.

Here’s the recipe:

Small-Batch Raspberry Jam

3 cups raspberries

2 cups sugar

1/2 vanilla bean

Wash berries and crush with a potato masher in a heavy-bottomed saucepan. Stir in sugar and vanilla bean and slowly bring to a boil. Boil rapidly until the jam sheets off the back of a spoon, about 45 minutes. If you can locate the vanilla bean, fish it out, but I wouldn’t sweat it too much if it ends up in the jar.

Since this is such a small volume, I just poured it into a single pint jar for immediate use. If you’re keen on preserving it, pour into two half-pint jars (leaving 1/4 inch headspace) and process for 10 minutes.

In the pot, before boiling

Finished!

Anyway, Sunday was awesome, so I should write about it before it’s so long ago that it’s weird.

A few months ago our good friend Deanna (whom Allan has known since he was in school) finally decided to leave us for her fiance in California. They had a quick wedding to get the immigration ball rolling and she was unable to leave the States for a little while. This past week, though, she and Tim were in town to finish arranging their “real” wedding in September, so we planned an outing to the Heritage Festival to hang out.

The American Duo

The Heritage Festival is always a good time. It’s crazy busy, but it’s in a giant park, so it works out, as long as you’re not crazy enough to try and park down there. The number of food choices is a little overwhelming, but there’s some really interesting stuff if you seek it out.

I always end up feeling like I could’ve chosen dishes more wisely, but that’s life I guess. It’s hard to complain about a beautiful day spent in the park eating.

Bolani from the Afghanistan pavillion, already mostly eaten because I was much more focussed on eating than taking pictures

Falafel plate from the Israel pavillion that made Paul (token vegetarian friend) get a little emotional. I snuck this photo while he was gushing about how amazing it was.

After we’d exhausted all our tickets, we hopped on a park and ride bus back to the university, where we decided to proceed on foot to the Garneau block for Whimsical cupcakes and Transcend coffee. Also, I saw this, which I loved:

:D

Then, because I was really trying to maximize the punishment of my feet over the weekend, we walked across the high level back downtown to where we had abandoned our car at the LRT station in the morning, grabbed some slurpees, and headed home.

All in all, a pretty ridiculously awesome weekend.

Our first order of business (after a taco feast for lunch) was to go out into the woods behind their house to look for wild edible mushrooms. I took pictures of several mushrooms we came across to ID them later, and we picked a few that we knew for sure were edible.

My nephew Micah holding up a green Russula mushroom

Northern Russula (red) and 2 green russula

We brought back 5 mushrooms in total, but only ate the three above. One mushroom we collected was edible but much too mature to be any good. The name of it escapes me – a bolete of some kind? Anyway, it was remarkably spongy. When my brother-in-law squeezed it, it oozed out an enormous amount of water, and then left a sad, flat, tasteless little piece of mushroom. We also picked a “mystery mushroom” which was small and white, which he identified as a small puffball and apparently ate after we left. The northern russula was the tastiest of the bunch.

Saskatoons found on our walk through the woods

We found (and ate) several raspberries on the way as well

There was some excitement along our walk when I accidentally stepped in an ant hill and was attacked by a hoard of angry ants biting at my ankles and crawling into my shoes. Not cool. I’m sure I looked really dignified and awesome throwing off my shoes and running through the grass slapping myself. My companions were thankfully more sympathetic than mocking, though.

After the foraging adventures, we headed to Billyco Junction U-Pick for strawberries. It was a great farm with a huge number of very productive plants.

Rows of strawberry plants

Anders and Nathan in the field

Yummmm

Me and Allan with our haul

Berry glamour shot

After heading back to their house, we relaxed with some pizza and then shot arrows at the pizza boxes, because, well, shooting stuff is fun. Although I mostly just shot the dirt around the pizza box. And by mostly, I mean exclusively.

Jenny takes aim

All in all a pretty great day. Many thanks to our hosts for showing us a good time. And now, to figure out what to do with all these strawberries…

Banana peppers starting to come in. That's a big upside-down one right in the middle there.

Strawberries - getting anxious to eat these.

This is a picture I took a couple days ago of the first blossom of my cucumber plant...

...and here's the same blossom today, turning into a cucumber.

And the star of the balcony garden this week is the cayenne pepper plant:

Look at the size of those peppers!

All in all I’m pretty amazed at how well this little container garden is working out. Crazy how much food you can get out of a few pots on a balcony.

So, wine class is really hard. The memorization of facts is pretty easy, actually – all the history, characteristics of specific types of grapes, general vocabulary, etc. But the tasting part I can tell is going to take a lot of practice. I’m pretty good at the actual taste aspect of it: acidity, sweetness, alcohol level, body, finish. Less so on the fruit character, aroma, bouquet parts. So my teacher’s advice was to give yourself a lot of reference points. While it’s fairly easy to pin down, after a few tastings, things like red fruit, black fruit, berries, tropical fruit, tree fruit, I usually have trouble getting more specific, because when it comes right down it, I just can’t recognize “plum” or “passionfruit” in a purely aromatic sense. So the solution isn’t to drink more wine (although that’s never a bad idea, really), it’s to eat more plums and passionfruits.

So I’ve been doing that. My new default treat to grab myself when shopping is a little piece of fruit that I don’t normally eat, rather than a chocolate bar at the checkout. Red and black plums have been my main go-to, as I feel like I’m still struggling with gaining that instant-recognition familiarity with their flavours, and also because they’re juicy and nice to eat. Apricots are a good one too, as are berries, but they’re usually sold in clamshells so you can’t just grab one or two (free samples at the farmer’s market are awesome for that, though). Pictured above is the single lychee I purchased at Safeway today to remind myself what they tasted like (pretty distinctive and hard to forget, honestly). Next time I’m going to have to start moving on to tropical fruits, I think. It’s a fun little game, trying to taste all the produce at the store.

Another common flavour reference is sour and sweet cherries, so I bought some of one and grew some of the other:

The one on the left is a sweet BC cherry from the farmer’s market, and the one on the right is a sour cherry from my tree. I ate a great deal of both (just to be sure I got it, obviously) and I really like the sour cherry more. I tend to like very acidic things, though. I found the other cherries sort of bland in comparison. Not at all an unpleasant experiment, all around.

Here’s pretty much the entirety of my cherry crop this year. Allan and I made short work of it.

I finally got around to taking pictures of my balcony garden. Not much has changed since the post where I last spoke about them, so I’m just going to post the photos.

One of my Romeo Cherries, mere minutes before I picked and ate it.

One of my celery plants. They started out strong but the leaves are starting to dry up and yellow now.

A mint plant pilfered from my sister-in-law's garden

Swiss Chard

Lavender and marigolds

Garlic chives and marigolds. There are marigolds everywhere.

Blossoming chile peppers

This cucumber plant is kind of my pride and joy

Lettuce (and marigolds)

Tomato blossom

Strawberry

Black currant bush

That’s totally unacceptable and ludicrous. I’m aware.

Let’s back up a bit. I was a fussy eater as a child, and I didn’t grow out of it. Where once I stood proudly among my peers as pro-hot dog and anti-broccoli, by high school I was trying to hide my eating preferences from my friends. It was embarrassing to not like anything, and often insulting to those kind enough to feed me. By twenty it was becoming obvious to me that I wanted to learn everything about food and cooking and to eventually pursue it as a career, and I knew full well that there was no way that was going to happen if I refused to eat, say, any kind of seafood or green vegetable. But it wasn’t just that I hadn’t tried these things and was being completely unreasonable; I honestly found them repulsive and would at worst gag and vomit, and at best eat a few bites and not be able to continue.

I had a bit of a turning point reading an essay by Jeffrey Steingarten from his book The Man Who Ate Everything (which I eventually read in its entirety and is one of the best works of food writing I know of – highly recommended). If you have any “food phobias” whatsoever, I urge you to read at least that essay (published in full at the link above). Here’s the gist of how he felt upon changing careers to become a professional food critic:

“As I considered the awesome responsibilities of my new post, I grew morose. For I, like everybody I knew, suffered from a set of powerful, arbitrary, and debilitating attractions and aversions at mealtime. I feared that I could be no more objective than an art critic who detests the color yellow or suffers from red-green color blindness…Suddenly, intense food preferences, whether phobias or cravings, struck me as the most serious of all personal limitations.”

That might seem over-dramatic to some, but it still rings as absolutely true to me. And since reading it, and truly working towards growing accustomed to a wider variety of flavours and textures, my food preferences have changed dramatically.

But I still don’t like tomatoes. And the thing is, they’re not even a challenging food. I literally do not know anyone else (except maybe some children under 10) who don’t like them. They’re sweet, they’re refreshingly acidic, they’re beautiful to look at. But, just, ugh. I’d rather not.

It should be noted at this point that I’m still very particular about what I eat. There’s all kinds of garbage food that I genuinely enjoy, sure: cheap chocolate bars, Doritos, instant ramen, Kraft Dinner, and the like. But I’m finding that with foods I have only “learned” to like in the past couple of years, such as fish, mushrooms, asparagus, and believe me I could go on…I moved with relative ease towards liking excellent examples of those foods, such as what you would come across at a very fine restaurant or from an exceptional market. I can only like the cheap, run-of-the-mill version of something once I have been introduced to and learned to love the very best examples of it. But I usually can’t get to that step, so I end up being something of a selective food snob. So when I eat at, say, Subway (ugh), I still have the embarrassment of telling the girl behind the counter to please just not put any of those sad-looking vegetables on my sandwich, thanks.

I figured this was probably happening with tomatoes, as they are notoriously degraded in quality by modern food distribution. In order to be sold in large quantities at supermarket, they’re picked green and artificially ripened en route or at the destination with ethylene gas, and the ripening is mostly just softening and turning red, not the massive improvement in flavour that fruit ripening on the vine goes through. That’s in addition to the fact that you’re buying a hybrid breed of tomato developed largely for its shelf life, durability, yield, and pest resistance (not, notably, its flavour). So supermarket tomatoes, or the ones used by major chain restaurants (I’m looking at you, Subway) are a bad place to start for a tomato-hater.

So my next try was the vine-ripened hot house tomatoes from the farmer’s market. I tried several different varieties and never felt anything approaching real enjoyment, just tolerance. But that’s something; if you tolerate something often enough, especially food, there’s a good chance you’ll find yourself really liking it at some point. I was just having trouble reaching that point.

So I looked into the whole tomato thing some more, and another important piece of information surfaced: hot house tomatoes are not very good, either. It’s comforting to have one’s own opinion validated like that. I found myself reading over and over again that a vine-ripened tomato, grown in the dirt, outdoors, is the only way to go, and that eating any tomato out of season is just a waste of time. Good to know. But I don’t exactly live in a prime tomato growing zone.

Nevertheless, at last week’s farmer’s market, I happened to come across a pretty decent pile of good-looking field grown tomatoes. I bought ten or so, hoping for the best – hoping this would be a real turning point for me.

Finally, it was.

I’ve been meaning to bring my good camera home from work every day for the past two weeks, so my apologies for these crappy stills from my video camera, but these are some of the tomatoes that I decided to turn into tomato sandwiches for lunch today, in honour of one of my dad’s favourite late night snacks that I always refused to take part in.

As I started cooking, things got a little out of hand and I found myself deviating quite dramatically from Dad’s typical two slices of toast, several slices of tomato arrangement  – I had too many tomato-compatible ingredients on hand that I couldn’t resist using. These were Prairie Mill sunflower seed bread, Sundog Organic Farm tomatoes, some grated grana podano cheese I had on hand, and olive-oil-dipped basil leaves from my garden, sprinkled with coarse sea salt and freshly ground black pepper. It was a delicious lunch that I legitimately enjoyed instead of begrudgingly accepting, which is kind of a big deal for my relationship with tomatoes. I even found myself popping a few extra slices of tomato into my mouth as I was putting them together.

Now that I’m in a tomato kind of mood, I’m going to dig into this book I’ve been meaning to read since it came out. And while I’m telling you what to read, how about this one if you want to get really sad about modern farming and food distribution in the non-vegetable realm. It’s good weather for reading out in the garden (or on the balcony among potted plants, as it were).

Tonight was my last ISG Level 1 class, and it was a little, er, informal. The sparkling wine not being able to stay open for long, sure, that’s fair. But we were also tasting the fortified wines, and spittoons were conspicuously absent.

I decided it was only fair I really give all the sparkling and fortified wines a chance and drink up. Near the end of the class, however, I noticed I was the only one with empty glasses. The other lovely ladies in my class were all eyeing their glasses suspiciously, discreetly spitting into them, perhaps, and then made a break for it as soon as possible, forgetting to take a bottle home to enjoy afterwards.

Silly ladies. I ended up bringing home a bottle of Fino sherry, which was unpopular with a lot of my classmates due to the rather intense briney flavour. But it’s crazy awesome with salty foods, so Allan and I are kicking back with the bottle and some crackers and good sausage and Archer episodes. Work is rather on the crazy side so I’m enjoying my brief window of fortified-wine-drinking and relaxing in front of the tv before the double whammy of long work hours and studying for my ISG exam next week settles in.

Thank you and good night!

I am, as far as I can tell, a reasonably intelligent and capable human being. I would like to think that keeping a plant alive is within the realm of my abilities. I would like to think it’s nowhere near as complex a task as most things I do in a day. But things just die around me. Whenever a plant comes into my possession it just kills itself, knowing that to try to choke out a life under these circumstances is not worth the pain and eventual failure.

Last year I had, I suppose, my first plant success since sprouting beans in Kindergarten (which I promptly killed while still in seedling stage, never transplanting out of the tiny vermiculite cup). I bought an Aerogarden, a literally foolproof growing system, which requires only that you top up the water every couple of weeks and pop in a little nutrient tablet when a light flashes. I watched as the seeds became seedlings and the seedlings became plants with extremely little intervention on my part, basking in near-continuous florescent light and bubbling mineralized water.

It did “alright”, at best. The basil did fantastic. Did you know that you’re supposed to pinch out growth at the top of a basil plant once it reaches a modest height, allowing it to be bushy and beautiful instead of tall and crappy? Because I didn’t. The basil shot up several times faster than anything around it, growing at speeds I never could have imagined. It hogged the light and cast a dark shadow over all the other herbs. Every day I would come home from work to find it had grown up into the lights again and the top several leaves had ignited and burned to a crisp. I couldn’t give the stuff away fast enough, or dream of a way to cook it all at the rate it was growing. It can be dried but it’s not worth the effort; it loses all its flavour and just leaves you wondering why you went to the effort to grow it in the first place. So I pretty much just let it destroy all the other herbs with its monstrous growth. I got a bit of mint (which I turned into jelly) and dill (which I dried) and a very minimal amount of chives (which I froze into chive-cubes to be used to cool bowls of soup), and wrote off the oregano and thyme as miserable failures.

Somehow, I found that experience promising. It’s a powerful thing, creating food out of tiny seed and a bit of dirt. So this year I took it up a couple notches and decided I wanted a full-blown edible garden on my high-rise balcony. Determined not to fail, I inhaled several books on the subject beforehand. I had a fair amount of success with canning (and countless other cooking ventures) through the failure-research-failure-research method, so I thought it was worth a try. I made a detailed schedule and garden plan in February, intending to begin starting seedlings in April and have everything moved outside for June. I bought organic local seeds in pretty little paper envelopes and set them aside for planting.

I failed to take into consideration the fact that I was moving at the end of May. There was no chance to start seedlings beforehand, and in the move I actually lost all of my seeds (whether they’re around here somewhere waiting to be rediscovered or at the dump, I have no idea). My brilliant planning all went out the window and I was left with precious little time to get my act together. For most of what I wanted to grow, there was no chance that even if I replaced the seeds I could get them planted in time to get much out of them by fall.

So I panicked and bought plants instead. I bought them small so it wouldn’t break the bank, but I skipped all the tricky seedling stuff. I couldn’t find most of what was on my garden plan, so it ended up just being chaos. I planted whatever I could find in whatever it would fit in.

A little over a month later, the plants are (almost) all alive. The poor planning is becoming extremely evident. The plants are getting unruly. But they’re alive, dammit! They’re still alive! And I would prove it, except there is currently a perfect storm of all three of my cameras failing me. So instead of pictures, I’m going to describe them all in loving detail for you. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but, well, you’re getting the words, so deal with it.

Black currant bush: No sign of blossoms or berries since it came home with me. No sign of growth. Just kind of hangin in there. C’mon, buddy. You’re looking a little yellow and sad. Anything I can do for ya? Anything at all? Because I certainly have no idea. Sorry. Keep on keepin on.

Lettuce: I stuck lettuce all over the dang place. It’s doing fantastic in a little container against the wall that it shares with celery, a little less fantastic in the onion bin, and it’s really just dead in the nightstand drawer that I hastily converted into a planter and tossed out on the balcony with four heads of lettuce and a couple marigolds (note to self: do not buy so many marigolds). It should be noted that “doing fantastic” means “grew a bit and didn’t die”. Non-fantastic means it’s yellow and shriveled and sad, but I’m leaving it out there for, I don’t know, good measure I guess. The indestructible marigolds don’t seem to mind.

Marigolds: The aforementioned marigolds are everywhere, shoved in every nook and cranny of every container. In theory, they’re edible, but they’re the only thing in my garden that’s making me look good so I don’t want to pick them (although of course it’s tough fighting off those notorious marigold cravings). I took one of my many, many marigold plants to work to brighten up my cubicle, but it died over July long weekend. I keep watering it hoping it will come back. It’s never coming back.

The Onion Bin: …is what I call the crappy, too-small container full of onions and one sad head of lettuce. As far as I can tell, the onions are not dead, but very sad and not really doing much. Maybe under the soil, out of sight, big beautiful sweet yellow bulbs are forming. I doubt it. But it aint over til it’s over, so I’m leaving them there.

Spinach: is it, though? I bought 4 plants that were labeled as spinach, but the larger they get, the harder time I have believing that they’re spinach, mostly because they look absolutely nothing like spinach. I keep googling pictures of spinach to compare, and I’m just not seeing it. There’s no resemblance whatsoever. These are tall plants with thick, stringy-looking stems and triangular leaves, that are starting to grow weird prickly little buds. I am pretty sure this is some sort of hideous invasive weed, although I have so far been unable to identify it. But there are four of them, all the same, and they were definitely labeled as spinach. I just can’t bring myself to believe in such treachery, so I haven’t picked them yet. I don’t know what I’m waiting for. I can’t imagine a way these horrors will ever turn into something that I would put in my mouth.

Strawberries: Possibly suffering from sharing a container with the “spinach”, but possibly not; it’s hard to tell if they’re just normal ground-loving strawberries or if they’re sad and limp. Either way, they have actually started to blossom, which is encouraging. I know I’m supposed to pinch off blossoms the first year in order to have a better crop of fruit the second, but do I look like somebody who can keep a plant going over two seasons? I’m going to take what I can get this year and replant next spring, because I am not magic.

Peppers: I have 4 pepper plants, all different varieties. Three are in one probably-too-small container. The other is in a container with a cucumber, who is a total jerk of a roommate. They are all starting to blossom this past week. Hoping to get at least a few fruit out of them. May have to sacrifice the weaker ones to get at least one awesome plant; time will tell. I’m going to take a wild guess and say I will probably do nothing, no matter what happens.

Cucumber: Seriously, I feel for the bell pepper, because this cucumber guy is a jerk. He’s big and mean and prickly, and has nothing to climb (see: poor planning), so is just sort of flopped over pathetically on top of the pepper plant. I need to figure out some sort of support system or both these guys are going down. I am struggling with this proposition, as there is nothing with which to support the support system, if you know what I mean (I know you don’t, but trust me). Poor dudes.

Tomato: I have one tomato plant. He’s small but he’s tough. Actually I’m not really basing that on anything, I’m just assuming that if he’s not dead he must be tough. Started blossoming this past week. Is really quite pathetically short – no idea if this is going anywhere. Hopefully not, because much like his cucumber friend, this plant has no support whatsoever.

Basil: Tomato’s container-mate. I’ve been pinching back the top to encourage bushy growth (knowledge is power!). I also started eating it early, hoping to avoid future chaos. Worse comes to worst, the whole thing can always be pulverized into a few teaspoons of pesto.

Mint: The cool new kid on the patio. This plant just arrived on Sunday, a donation from my sister-in-law Tammi’s garden, where mint grows like crazy over huge portions of her beds. Took root quite happily in a cute little pot. I probably won’t have enough for jelly, but I do see some mojitos in my future.

Garlic Chives: I really want these to flower, because their pretty white flowers would look so nice in the garden, and then still look pretty tossed on a salad. No blossoms yet, but I’ve started eating them anyway and they are delicious. Just crazy delicious. This might be the start of a dangerous baked potato addiction for me.

Lavender: I have nothing to say about you, lavender. Start being more interesting. It’s sort of small and not very flowery but looks pretty healthy.

Celery: After I brought this home, I went to look up again how to grow it and the world seems to be in agreement that it’s very poorly suited to container growing. I really want celery, though; it’s my go-to late night snack. It grew very quickly and was looking awesome, but now it seems to be faltering. Shucks.

Cherry tree: It’s totally awesome that I have a fruit tree on my balcony, right? You don’t have to tell me. I know you’re jealous. I’m completely in love with my cherry tree. It is less in love with me, probably because it’s kind of in part-shade which is less than ideal. There are a lot of yellow leaves at the back (against the wall) which I try not to get too down about. It’s already harvest time for the cherries: all seven of them. They’re beautiful and red and plump and ripe, though. Trying not to eat them all at once. Cherries! Off my balcony! The mind boggles. Hoping next year I get some more fruit, by avoiding shoving the eight-foot tree into my Honda Civic just when the fruit is setting.

And that’s all, the whole lineup. If I had to guess which plant would have the most successful year at this point, I guess it would be the spinach impersonator. But only time will tell!