If it is late June / early July in Maine, that means it is strawberry time!

That is 35 pounds of berries… less than last year. Since Joshua is now insisting on only school lunches, and not eating PB&J (peanut butter and jelly/jam sandwiches for those not living in the US…this is a staple of every school child’s diet… peanuts are also called groundnuts, or in French cacahuete or arachides and are ground into a spread) our annual strawberry jam consumption has dropped. Of these berries, we (ok, *I*) decided to indulge and keep about 5 pounds just to eat, eat, EAT! By the way, they are very good with vanilla ice cream and hot fudge sauce. But I digress. And have gained a pound. Ahem.

First I had to wash and hull (remove the stems) from the berries. Then they are supposed to be smashed. Well… in the past I have sliced. This year, I decided to try something a bit different…and faster! I took the Tupperware plastic cake carrier lid and turned it upside down to use as a bowl (do this for potluck salads a lot). Then I smooshed the berries in my exceptionally well-cleaned hands. Messy but effective, and way faster and simpler than slicing. Like fingerpainting with your food {grin}.

Next you start cooking the jam. I break the rules (what a shock!) and make a double batch. If you cook too large a batch the pectin available for home cooks doesn’t work properly; I like to use Pomona’s Universal Pectin (think there is a picture somewhere on the blog from last year or the year before). It is available in health food / organic stores and you can make low-sugar jam using barely half the sugar / sweetener required by regular (even ostensibly low-sugar) pectins.

One of my favorite jam tools is my mom’s old 1950s vintage potato masher (note the classy phenolic handle with stars… talk about RETRO vintage!). It smashes and stirs well, the handle stays cold, and due to the flat bottom (next picture) it stands upright in the pan!

Here’s what the chaos in the kitchen looks like mid-stream:

When the batch of jam is done, there is… if it is strawberry … a lot of foam (blech) on the top. One way (never told or shared in the cookbooks, passed along by word of mouth amongst jam-makers) to tame the foam is to add some dollops of butter…just little bits… around the edge:

Then you get to do the canning. This year I gave myself a doozie of a steam burn lifting the lid off the canning pot…it turned into a blister almost the size of a dime on my thumb…OUCH! Anyway, then you end up with lots of beautiful jam (where the fruit ALWAYS floats to the top during canning and you have to stir it when you open the jars):

When I lived on San Juan Island (Washington), I always volunteered at the country fair, and particularly enjoyed helping at the judges table for Food Preservation (canned fruits, veggies, meats/fish, beers, wines, vinegars, etc).  There I learned from the certified judges that you should always store your home-canned jams with the rings OFF.  That way, if the vacuum seal (created by heating the jam with the new lids in the hot water bath) breaks, the loose lid will be readily apparent.  This is important because if ANY air gets in, nasty stuff can happen, like invisible bacteria that makes you really sick can grow.  If the rings are on, then you don’t know if the lid is lose because you bumped it removing the ring, or because it has been loose a long time  and yucky stuff is growing.

And finally, the birds’ eye view of a day’s labor:

Zoot you say?  That’s the wonderful coffee house here in downtown Camden (hours and directions at the end of the post) where my friend Jan P. and I just hung a show of textile art / art quilts for the month of October.  Here’s a picture of the little thing I made for Zondra (actually, I think it is Sondra?), the owner, and the customer side of the latte bar:

Zoot definitely has the best coffee on the mid-Coast of Maine, even better than Starbucks! Every month Zondra has a new exhibit, and Jan and I are thrilled to be this month’s show!  I made a number of new, smaller (and therefore affordable for Christmas gift giving, including to yourself!) pieces which I’ll be sharing here and on my website over the next few days. I’m happy to ship, too (hint hint!).

Jan and her photographer-husband have a newly launched website, From Photos to Fiber.  They sell his photographs and Jan is working on commissioned pieces of people’s family members, pets and buildings.  Check out the quilt of Ollie, their rapscallion dog…far left in the next photo.

Here’s a view of the left side of the main space, a sunny area with big picture windows facing Elm Street:

Here’s Jan in front of three of my pieces, which are on the short wall facing the front door:

Here’s the back area, with two of my pieces on the left, Jan’s three on the right, and our hanging stuff and jackets on the chairs and tables!

Here’s a closeup with one of Jan’s “house portraits” on the left, and a Trio of small tea pieces and my “Tea” on the center and right. 

I’ll be posting my new pieces, including prices, both on my website and here over the next week or ten days.  Hope you like!

Directions and hours:

Open  6:30-5, M-Sat,  and 7-5 on Sunday

On Elm Street in downtown Camden, between the Rite Aid and Town Offices, opposite the village green.  If you are driving north on Route 1, the old Atlantic Coast Highway, it runs right through town (Elm Street turns into Main Street turns into High Street, all within 4 blocks!); Zoot would be on your left a block or so past the flashing stoplight at the First Congregational Church (intersection  of Union and Elm).

My favorite is a double latte, and love the croissants, lunchtime savories and pie!

Joshua’s girlfriend Kristina comes from a lobstering family, and at least one day a week during summer works on the boat. As a major treat she brought us FOUR lobster. Now, I haven’t had a whole lobster since I was on a vacation in about the mid 80s, and haven’t fixed one since I was in grad school in 1982 (and then I just took them home from Boston to California and Mom cooked them). Well. My squeamishness about raw meat products (I won’t touch raw chicken, and Paul has to do the turkey until it is at least half-cooked) did me in. Here’s what happened:

We set the bag of lobsters (they spent the night inside a bag in the fridge…Paul said when he opened the door in the middle of the night to get something to drink the bag moved….) into the sink since it was drippy:

Joshua picked up a lobster for us to see:

I couldn’t bring myself to pick one up, even wearing rubber gloves. Somehow, awkwardly, I managed to use tongs while wearing gloves to pick one up and transfer it:

Into the pot—fortunately no banging on the sides of the pot (which I have heard…shudder) or screaming/hissing:

The look of the steam/vapor, however is totally cool. I don’t know that I can ever use these photos for a quilt tho…too traumatic.
By the second round of boiling (pot fit 2 at a time), I couldn’t even manage with gloves and tongs, so Eli did the courageous honors (or is it dastardly deed?):

Then, he decided to be cute:

Here are two of the lobsters, truly dead and red, in the sink:

We had to call Kristina and ask her how to get them open. Answer: pull off legs and claws. Grab head and tail in hands and twist apart. Gut. Shell. Eat. That’s when I lost it. I couldn’t do it. Joshua was able to pull off the claws and legs from one, but wouldn’t gut them. I couldn’t. Paul’s shoulder is bad and he only has one hand these days (the rotator cuff surgery thing), so he isn’t able to do it, though he would if he could. So we now have a king’s ransom in the fridge, boiled bright red, intact…. if I can get someone to gut them for me, I think I can get the meat out, but who…… I know. I’m a wuss. I don’t care. I can’t kill and dismember and gut. Sigh. I may have eaten the last lobster tail of my life nearly 25 years ago.  And I feel guilty about such a wonderful gift, and not being able to live up to it.  Anyone wanna come gut my lobsters?  I’ll be more than happy to share  the meat….

Just a quick note to let you all know I haven’t dropped off the face of the earth! It has been busy here… Paul is recovering from rotator cuff (shoulder…torn tendons) surgery. Days are pretty good, nights off-and-on…. some good, others not so great. Joshua is doing quite well with his leg, and the plastic surgeon said on Monday that he doesn’t need to see him again. We are to keep the dressings on for a while longer, then the rest is just growing bone, healing and recovering muscle. Joshua is making up for having lost all that weight in the hospital (I’m guessing maybe 15 pounds in ten days?) by eating us out of house and home.

Today I take Eli to Freeport, home of LL Bean, for school clothes shopping, then this afternoon a first for us: Lobster! Kristina, Joshua’s girlfriend, is from a lobstering family and works on the boat once or twice a week. Yesterday, she treated us to four, so we now have a moving bag inside the fridge… I’ll take pics! Time to run…gotta get on the road (Bean is about 80 minutes from here, and we need to be home early enough to fix and eat lobster before Eli’s soccer practice at 6….).

Quilty stuff eventually, Cheers, Sarah

On Monday, before we knew Joshua would be coming home, I had a quiet moment. Eli was off to camp and I was all alone in the house (a RARE occurrence). There was a ripe mango in the fridge. Not for long…. when I set my things down to eat and read e-mails, I thought this looked so lovely:

So that is my morning beauty break…. Joshua is improving daily, though he has a long way to go. Having friends over all day nearly wore him out yesterday, but he was so happy having first Taylor, then Kristina. And my Coastal Quilter friend Leigh Smith made us the most incredible dinner (which lasted for two!) of homemade lasagna, Italian bread, ice cream, and even some red wine (with two straws, which Paul had joked we would need since we were too tired to pour a glass), and a heavenly smelling candle! I should have taken pictures, but instead we inhaled the dinner. Gotta get her recipe!