Music and Cats

At the farmers market Sunday morning, my favorite tomato stand had lots of “seconds,” tomatoes that had blemishes or cracks, or were overripe, bruised, or green. I have no problem with a few imperfections, so I snagged several pounds of beautiful tomatoes, as shown in Sunday’s photo. Four pounds fell into the overripe/blemished category; they went into a bowl with a little balsamic and olive oil. I still have plenty for today’s lunch.

A little over two pounds of the tomatoes were green. Earlier this month, Viv at Seattle Bon Vivant was rhapsodizing about green tomato jam. I found a recipe in Jeanne Lesem’s preserving book (I wonder whose copy this is? Must remember to ask around.) for green tomato jam, and decided to give it a try.

As I’ve recently been making lots of chutneys, which in addition to fruit have onions, vinegar and spices, this ingredient list seemed remarkably short:

2 pounds green tomatoes, coarsely chopped
1/2 cup, packed, thinly sliced unpeeled lemons (most of one large lemon); reserve seeds
1 tablespoon finely chopped crystallized ginger
1/2 cup water
2 1/2 cups sugar

I think of preserves made with unpeeled citrus as marmalade, rather than jam, but whatever. Lemon and ginger are two of my favorite flavors, and are wonderful together in tea, so this combination sounded promising. And the prepped ingredients were a lovely combination of light, crisp colors, so different from the hot colors of the ripe berries and stone fruits that I usually preserve.

This recipe is one of those two-day events, in which some of the ingredients are cooked together, then allowed to rest overnight before finishing. These two-day recipes are great for my fits of nocturnal preserving. Even if I start at 9 p.m., I’m finished with either half of the process by 10:30. That gives me plenty of time to get ready for bed, then join Paul for our nightly 11 p.m. date with Jon Stewart.

Evening 1: All of the ingredients except the sugar go into a pot, and are brought quickly to a boil. I secure the reserved lemon seeds in a tea ball, and submerge them in the mixture to add their pectiny goodness. Twenty minutes at a strong boil and the fruit is tender; it then gets to rest for a day. The lemon seeds are discarded. The cooked mixture smells much like the lemon-ginger tea that I like; I am encouraged.


Evening 2: The cooked fruit goes back on the stove, on high heat. When it reaches a boil, I dump in the sugar, stirring madly until the sugar melts into the fruit, and the mixture returns to a boil. The sugar changes the aroma from that of tea to that of jam, and, somewhat to my dismay, darkens the pale color of the jam as it cooks. Thirty minutes pass, during which I stir the thickening mixture with increasing frequency; in the end, I am stirring almost constantly to prevent scorching. Because I really want this to be green tomato jam, rather than green tomato sauce (which doesn’t sound as appealing as, say, peach sauce), I test for set on a chilled plate. It sets, so I ladle the jam into jars, cap them, and pop them into boiling water. Fifteen minutes later, I’m listening to the “ploink… ploink ploink” of caps sealing.

There is about 1/3 cup left over after filling 3 8-oz. jars. (This is a small-batch recipe!) I taste the jam while the jars were processing; the flavors of lemon, ginger and tomato are all there, and nicely balanced. However, this jam is green yet, and like chutneys, definitely needs time to blend and mellow.

There will be words later. Until then, here’s a little Sunday morning eye candy.

It just grew there! That’s what Paul and I still say to one another, with some amazement, when we find a plant growing in our yard that we did not put there. I should rephrase: that’s what we say when we notice that an attractive, non-invasive non-weed has had the fortitude to grow unbidden in our sadly neglected yard. Since we moved to the lovely, temperate Pacific Northwest, this has happened more often than either of us have previously experienced in the hotter/colder/more humid/more arid climates in which we have lived.

Earlier this week, two lilies appeared in a far corner of our yard, next to the driveway of the adjacent building. These lilies had no leaves, only single bronze stems atop which clusters of rosy-pink blooms dipped and swayed in the breeze. They looked somewhat otherworldly, and my sci-fi loving husband suggested that they might, in fact, be aliens. Our suspicions were heightened by our certainty that we had never seen these flowers before - that in the six years that we have lived in this house, there have been no lilies anywhere in our yard. Hmmm…

But guess what? A Google search for “leafless pink lily” turned up Lycoris squamigera, commonly known as the resurrection or magic lily, and the pictures matched. Turns out it’s not a lily at all, but a type of amaryllis. Its foliage comes out in the spring, and dies back in the summer, weeks before the bloom stalk shoots up.

OK, so maybe they’re not aliens. We still don’t know how they got into our yard.
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I had been looking for a small arm chair for several years - a chair that would fit nicely in the alcove next to the fireplace in our bedroom. (Yes, we have a fireplace in our bedroom, though we didn’t know it was there when we bought our house. But that’s another story.) Last Sunday, while wandering the farmers market in Ballard, I stopped into a hip vintage furniture shop. Near the back of the store, I spotted a small yellow armchair, which the tag indicated was a 1940’s vintage Danish chair. The lines were lovely, still somewhat traditional but stripped-down simple, foreshadowing the teaky Danish modern of my childhood.

I sat. Not only was this chair the right size for our alcove, it was the right size for me. I am short, and though my legs are long for my height, I find that most chairs leave my feet swinging just off the floor. This chair, on the other hand, is low enough that I can plant my feet firmly on the floor. And, when I sit back in the chair, and rest my elbows where the arms of the chair meet its back, my fingertips just curl over the front of the chair’s arms.

On Tuesday, Paul went to look at the chair. (There are some things that we buy on our own; furniture is not one of them.) When I arrived home from work Tuesday evening, the chair was in our bedroom alcove. The cats were quite intrigued. Their first assumption was that this was a new scratching post; I quickly - and loudly - disabused them of this notion. And I’ve spent a lot of time sitting in the chair, rubbing my hands over its upholstery, claiming it by making it smell like me. That seems to be working, though I’m leaving the somewhat worn slipcovers from the chair’s arms over its back for a while, just in case.

(Yes, ‘mouse, it’s Friday again. Get to work! Or visit the other animals at the Friday Ark. Annoying Little Twerp [hey, I didn’t name her blog] will be hosting the Carnival of the Cats this Sunday.)

One of the Food Network’s celebrities is the perky, giggly Rachael Ray, who each week eats her way across a different city on a budget of $40 a Day. For the 4th edition of Dine & Dish, Sam of Becks and Posh set this challenge: Be Rachael Ray for a Day in the city in which you live.

Seattle is a wonderful city for those who love to eat well. The Pacific Northwest provides a bounty of seafood, fruits and vegetables, wines, nuts and grains for those who would eat and drink locally. With ingredients of the quality found in Seattle’s markets, it would be hard to go wrong; Seattle’s many fine chefs respond to the region’s offerings with dazzling food. Trying to select a favorite day’s worth of meals from the entire spectrum of Seattle’s restaurants - even the moderately priced ones - was daunting, so I narrowed my scope to an area within a mile or two of my home.

Seattle is a city of neighborhoods, each of which has a distinct look and feel, a very particular sense of place. My neighborhood, Queen Anne, shares its name with the hill that it occupies just north of the Space Needle. Queen Anne is one of the older neighborhoods in this young city, and has the feel of a small town, with a main commercial street, Queen Anne Avenue, that reminds me in scale of many real small towns that I’ve known. To the west of Queen Anne is a low-lying area known as Interbay, bounded on the south by Elliot Bay (along which Seattle’s downtown extends), and on the north by Salmon Bay. Interbay is largely commercial and industrial, but there are treasures to be found there. On the north side of Salmon Bay is the neighborhood of Ballard. A separate city until Seattle annexed it in 1907, Ballard was settled by Scandinavian immigrants, whose cultural heritage is still evident. I’ll be spending my $40 in these three Seattle neighborhoods; let’s start close to home. (more…)