jams of two seasons

The East Coast seasons are so hard-wired into my brain that I am surprised every year when I see strawberries at the farmer’s market in September – much less October. But there they are, alongside the pears and apples and other harbingers of fall.

For the last few weeks, I have thought that each week will be the last of the berries, so I grabbed a flat last week and jammed them up with a violet liqueur that I am in love with right now (hello!, in champagne and over fruit and added to a gimlet).

I am getting more and more ballsy with my canning. I now look at recipes for approximate proportions and then – snap! abandon them and wing it. I only thought of the violet when the jam was in its final boil, when I poured in a generous glug. After a few years of rigorously following a recipe and checking the temperature, I now realize that it’s hard to go too hideously wrong with canning experiments because if the preserves don't set and are too runny, it still makes perfect sauce for ice cream and mixing into plain yogurt.

And to throw my seasonal attunement even more off-whack, I picked the season’s first apples up in Sonoma last weekend. Gravensteins – the glorious heirloom variety that is sweet-but-tart and extra-crunchy. The apples used to fill whole valleys up there before the vineyards and second homes moved in.

I roughly chopped the apples and made spiced apple butter that smells like Christmas on the same night that I made the strawberry jam. It felt timely, because on the ride home from Yosemite we talked with our friends from Ireland about holiday traditions. We were bundled up and still smelled like campfire and even passed a snow plow, so the Christmas talk felt appropriate. Back at home, the apples boiled into a lovely russet color and smelled like warm winter nights after I added brandy and orange zest and ground ginger. I envisioned bringing a jar to Ireland this Christmas and spreading it on toast, while we’re still in pajamas and drinking strong tea.

Ultimately, that’s something I love about canning. While you’re preserving this moment, you can almost anticipate savoring it in an entirely different moment, in an all-together different season.

summer food and drink: mint syrup

If you are a semi-lazy gardener like me, you might not be so vigilant keeping your mint in quarantine in your garden. I actually did go to the trouble of burying a terra cotta pot in the my veggie patch – but that dastardly, determined mint beat me and sent plucky runners out all over the garden.

When it came time for my mid-summer clean-up, I ripped up as much mint as I could, which left me with way more mint on my hands than I could drink in mojitios (and that’s a lot of mint, folks). So I turned to this magic mint syrup elixir. Like all my favorite preserving recipes, you smash everything up, add liquid, let it soak overnight, and then finish it the next day. It’s sort of remedial preserving, since you don’t have to fuss around with precise timing and boiling points. And all the while, your house smells like a Candyland board game come to life, with the sweet-spicy smell of mint forests heavy in the air.

A good glug of this syrup makes everything taste like summer: add some to lemonade, cocktails, or plain seltzer water. And if you’re still hankering to keep making after the syrup is done, doodle up a couple simple labels and presto! You’ve solved a problem in the garden plus you have sweet hostess gifts to last the rest of the season. Sha-bam!

This recipe is adapted from my all-time favorite preserving book, The River Cottage Preserves Handbook by Pam Corbin, which is now available in the US, hooray!

Mint Syrup (makes about four cups)

About a cup of fresh mint leaves

Juice from 1 lemon

2 cups sugar, more or less to taste

1 teaspoon sea salt

Tear the leaves into shreds. Squeeze lemon juice into a large bowl. Add the mint and pound with the end of a wooden rolling pin. Add the sugar and the salt and continue to crush the mint leaves to release their menthol essence. Leave 8-10 hours or overnight to macerate.

Pour 2 cups boiling water over the mint mixture and leave to stand another 12 hours.

Strain the syrup through a very fine sieve into saucepan. Gently bring to simmering point and simmer for a few minutes. Pour into warm, sterilized jars or bottles and seal. The syrup will keep unopened for a couple months. Once opened, store in the fridge.

winter sunshine

You may remember back to my rhapsodizing about making candied fruit peel this winter. Well, the smell of all that citrus and the resulting peels that were bright as stained glass inspired me to circle back and try bona fide marmalade. I used a recipe from this book, which I cannot say enough wonderful things about. Its straight talk and gorgeous photos and preserving wisdom totally and utterly demystify the process. And, whoa! I just this second found out this very book will be published in the US this summer. Giddyup!

One of the great things about traditional marmalade recipes is that you cut all the peel and pulp and let the whole shebang soak for 24 hours. So you can chip away at the process and steal a little bit of a sunny morning to do some prep work, then skip off to work knowing you have a pot of winter sunshine in the works.