Jamming

Hi Marg,

We have gone from no strawberries, to a few tasteless ones, to 4 different vendors at the market offering taste tests, each claiming to be "the best berry in the market". Extensive sampling led us to settle on The Berry Dude, in spite of his oft repeated motto - there's lots of berries but only one Berry Dude.  Honestly, that almost had Amos asking for his money back.

Speaking of which, I'm all about supporting local ag as you know, but $72 for 2 flats of berries? Really? are the gilded?

They are delicious, and we made two batches of jam and are still pigging out on the fresh berries. I tried to convince Amos to have strawberry rhubarb pie for his birthday but he wants gingerbread. None of this seasonal eating for him!

We made jam the way I've been making it for years - Sure Jell low sugar in a box. The low sugar part seems a bit of an overstatement since you use 4 cups of sugar to 6 cups of mashed berries. Amos' job is to stem and mash the berries, and hand me things and set the timer when there's a pot of berry pulp at a full rolling boil and I'm trying to keep stirring it while not dripping sweat into it. Team work!

The jam came out great and I made bread today so we are Set. The good part of working from home.

Love, Elise

PS and now? the strawberries in our garden have decided to get ripe!

Days of Heat and Salad

Dear Elise,
This is what it said on the news today.

A HEAT ADVISORY IN EFFECT UNTIL MIDNIGHT TONIGHT. A HEAT ADVISORY MEANS THAT A PERIOD OF EXCESSIVE HEAT IS
EXPECTED. THE COMBINATION OF TEMPERATURES IN THE MID TO UPPER 90S
AND HIGH HUMIDITY WILL CREATE A SITUATION IN WHICH HEAT ILLNESSES
ARE POSSIBLE. THE ELDERLY, YOUNG CHILDREN AND PETS ARE MOST AT
RISK. CHECK UP ON RELATIVES AND NEIGHBORS.

The thing is, it has said that for the past three days. The only reason they call the Heat Advisory off at midnight is that the day is over. The new Heat Advisory starts at 12 AM tomorrow.
It is suddenly salad days. (Do you remember Suddenly Salad!? It was a pasta salad/dressing mix combination that was sold together. You cooked the pasta and mixed the dressing pack with oil or mayo and presto, Suddenly Salad! I liked the ads bc the woman always looked so pleased and surprised by the suddenness of the salad.)
I made a tuna salad from The Barefoot Contessa, (yes, I know how you feel about her, but she suits me. I very often don't know how much mayo and celery to add to the shrimp to make shrimp salad and it can start to feel like Sudoku, one mistake cascading into many more until I have to delete the whole thing or throw the salad in the trash, and peeling and deveining a lb of shrimp is about as tedious and tiresome as those wild stabs in the dark when there are too many empty boxes in Sudoku.)
This salad had rare seared tuna which we really shouldn't be eating. There are as many reasons not to eat rare seared tuna as there are ingredients in the salad. 1. it's endangered, 2. it could be dosed with radiation from Japan, 3. it is FULL of mercury, 4. it could contain parasites, (mom's friend's son just got two different parasites from eating sushi and they so compromised his immune system he has had to undergo repeated hospitalizations and now has chronic fatigue syndrome.) 5. the dolphins.
Tuna, lime juice, avocados, wasabi, scallions, tamari, Tabasco. OK, two more reasons not to eat tuna, 6. carbon foot print, 7. it's gross.
Actually, it wasn't gross. It was really good. I served it with a sushi rice salad, many of the same flavors and also pickled ginger.
I served it to friends and they loved it. I was busy with entertaining anxiety (entertaining my social anxiety) and didn't think to take a picture.
Then, the same friends came over and we were still having a heat advisory, so I started obsessing about watermelon salad.
Watermelon, oil, lemon juice, cayenne, salt, mint, olives, feta, sweet onions. Suddenly Swirly!
It was good but in a troubling way, watermelon and olives are just so far apart that one is made uneasy by their miscegenation. So even though it was very tasty, and everyone voluntarily had seconds, I ended up throwing away the leftovers. By the next day I was just too unsettled by the whole thing. And I'm not in a hurry to make it again. Unless I'm invited to a party by people who I don't like but still want to impress. And really, that never happens. Those people never invite me anywhere. But perhaps if the Heat Advisory continues, they'll come check up on me.