I'm Makin' Jam!

I'm makin' jam!!!
Remember that "Friends" episode where Monica said this and was rather obsessivly canning jam for days? Well, I'm not that bad but here I go! I'm learning the ropes of canning and what better way to do that than to try this recipe that my husband's cousin RaeAnn showed me from a site called Food In Jars. (There's a lot of good ideas on this site by the way!)

Click here for the recipe for Apple-Cranberry Jam.

So, first you have to wash all your jars and stuff in hot soapy water. I ordered a canner off of Amazon.com that was relatively inexpensive just because I didn't have a pot big enough to cover the jars with water. (Apparently, you can use a big stock pot and just use the jar lid rings in the bottom for a rack. But you have to be able to cover the jars with water by a couple inches at least.) It's good to have everything ready before you start. Once everything is clean, you have to preheat the jars and lids in hot water (180 degrees). You don't want to put hot jam in cold jars. Disaster.

Now it's time to assemble ingredients, which of course means the tedious job of peeling, coring, and slicing a ton of apples. I make short and easy work of the job with my Pampered Chef Apple Peeler/Corer/Slicer and Apple Wedger. It took me about 5minutes to do all the apples this way and they were cut to a perfect size. Grate the lemons on a "carpenter's file" type fine grater, juice them, measure everything up and voila...you're ready to go. Wow! 6 cups of sugar seem like a lot! Now I know why jam is so many "points." Maybe this can be decreased, but cranberries are very tart...but the apples are sweet too so it's worth a try. If you try it, let me know how it works out!

Now into the pot and start cooking! Bring it to a boil over high heat. When it first reaches a good boil it will produce foam all over the top that needs to be skimed off. The pictures show the changes that the fruit goes through while cooking. I actually took a potato masher to it towards the end just to break up the fruit bits a bit. I cooked it for 30 minutes but I think it was a little too long because it turned out extremely thick! Not "syrupy" like the recipe describes. Maybe turn down the heat once you get a good boil going on.

Skimming off the foam.

Finished Jam!

Next, ladle into your hot jars and run a knife around the inside of the jar to get the air out. Apply your lids and lid rings.

Put your jars of jam into your canner and remember to fill it with water until the water covers the jars by a couple inches. Then process for 10minutes. Time the processing from when the water starts to boil. Voila! Beautiful ruby-colored jam perfect for gift giving!

That was fun! Now I'm off to make some Apple Butter!

Cranberries and Clementines

Well, what better to do on a lonely Tuesday afternoon than to bake something to lift your spirits! I know that there are those out there who agree with me. So here are my adventures in baking today.

I was strolling through the grocery store the other day and came across this beautiful special edition of "Ultimate Cookies" put out by Better homes and Gardens. It was so festive and fun looking...and since I had some dollars in my pocket, I decided that it had to come home with me.

So this afternoon when I was feeling bored, I decided I'd let the pages fall open and bake whatever it showed me. How perfect that a recipe for "Cranberry-Orange Pinwheels" was the first one I saw. (A link to the recipe is at the bottom of this post.) Being December, I just happen to have a couple bags of cranberries in the freezer (the ones they have by the barrel-full in the produce section this time of year.) No oranges on hand...the kids eat those as soon as I can get them home. But I have clementines! Why in the world do I have 5lbs of clementines in my fridge? I was a sucker for the sale price of a box of them...another seasonal abundance in the produce section. I figure they're in the same family as oranges...so we'll see how they turn out!

So, pecans, cranberries, and brown sugar go into the food processor to be finely chopped. Seriously, what would we do without a food processor? I know I would hate baking if I always had to chop up this kind of thing by hand all the time! The food processor made it so it took about...oh...30 seconds. This will be the filling. Honestly, in hindsight, I could have chopped them up even finer...to almost a puree. Next will be the dough.

The orange zest (or in this case clementine zest) goes right into the dough. I found that zesting a clementine is tricky. The skin is soft and it's easy to go right into the pith which is usually bitter. The dough is pretty typical for sugar cookies with a whole cup of butter (Yikes! Doesn't match with my weight loss plan. But you just can't substitute butter for margarine spread in cookies...unless it's at least 80% fat according to BHG. It just doesn't brown the same.) The dough has a real nice texture and a pleasing scent from the zest. My DS tasted a little hunk and said that it was good! I'm keeping my tasting fingers out!

Now, divide in half, pat each into a disk, wrap, and chill for an hour. Coffee break time! Maybe I'll plan dinner now... One-Pot Spaghetti sounds good. I got side-tracked so the dough chilled for 2 hours and was so firm I had to "thaw" it for about 20 min before I could roll it out.

I love how I can see the little pieces of clementine zest in the dough when I roll it out. I used a French rolling pin which I have found to be the best at achieving the shape and thickness I want. Also, I rolled out the dough between two pieces of plastic wrap. That way I use no flour to make a mess (which also can make the cookies tough); my wooden rolling pin doesn't stick to the dough, it doesn't get dirty, and I save having to use water to wash it which can cause damage. It saves so much work! And look at this little trick:

I often have trouble when I try to roll up dough (jelly-roll style) with it cracking as you can see. So I use the bottom piece of plastic wrap to lift the dough over as I roll to help support it and prevent cracking (sort of like they do when they make sushi rolls). Works like a dream!

So after making the two "logs" of dough, I wrapped them back in their plastic and into the fridge they went again. The recipe says to chill for 4 hours, but who has that kind of time? I haven't been following the recipe to the letter anyway. Maybe 1 1/2 to 2 hours will be sufficient. It just has to be firm enough to slice without the cookies losing their shape. (OK, sidetracked again. They ended up chilling overnight!)

Next, slice them up about 1/4 in. thick and place 2 inches apart on the cookie sheet. I always use parchement paper when I'm making cookies. Here's why:

I can go ahead and place all the next batches on separate pieces of parchement while the first batch bakes.

Then, I can slide them off the hot sheet all at once and stop the cooking. This is my secret to making the cookies soft. As long as they're on the hot sheet, they continue cooking, so it's important to get them off quickly! It's also totally non-stick.

Voila! 8 minutes in the oven and I have yummy, beautiful, tangy-sweet Christmas cookies! The house smells so good! The clementines worked just fine. They're delicious! I suppose if you like, you can drizzle powdered sugar icing over them, but I thought they were plenty sweet just how they are. Here's a link to the recipe:

http://www.bhg.com/recipe/cookies/cranberry-orange-pinwheels/

Gotta love Better Homes and Gardens!

http://www.bhg.com/

Just in case you are wondering: Since these cookies can potentially spoil my weight loss goals, I tasted a small one (how can I post this unless I know that they are good?) and the rest I'm taking to a Christmas party so they can cheer and delight other people who can fit them in moderation into their food choices for the day! :)

What Did He Just Say!!??

This will be a very difficult post to write. Not because I have sad news or anything. Just because I have to come to terms with something…and I thought that writing it down might make it more concrete for me. After all, the first step in a recovery program is admitting your problem, right? (Don’t worry, I’m not an alcoholic.)

Let me start by telling a little story. The night I was admitted to the hospital with my asthma attack, the on-call hospitalist came in to see me. He called from behind the curtain in his thick German or Scandinavian accent, “How are you do-eenk? Is eet OK for me to come in?” A short, stout, jolly man came peeking through the curtain. “Yes.” I gasped out.

He examined me and talked to me about my present condition, listened to my lungs, and asked me about my health history. That was all to be expected. Then it happened.

“Vat iss your BMI?” he asked as he scratched notes on his lap.

“I don’t know.” I answered shaking my head. Why in the world would I know my BMI off the top of my head? What a weird question. Especially since it was obvious I couldn’t breathe. Is that really a priority at this moment?

“I guess I vill haf to compute it myself,” he said under his breath. “How tall are you?...Vat iss your veight?” I begrudgingly answered him. He scratched more on his pad and poked at his pocket calculator. “Ah, yesss! You are obese.” And he left the room.

“Excuse me? What did he just call me?” I thought, quite put out. “Obese? That’s rediculous! I’m not obese!!! Not even close!” and then I thought about it more. “Oh Lord, how could this happen?...I’m…obese?”

I won’t exhaust you by telling about what happened next. You can read about it from my previous post. But when I got home I looked it up, calculated it myself, and looked it up again. Sure enough, it’s true. I’m in the obese category…according to somebody who made up this chart! OK…it’s time for me to be honest with myself.

I’m unhealthy! That’s probably the underlying reason I got sick! I’m “obese,” I don’t get enough sleep, I don’t eat very well, I don’t exercise, I’m stressed out…and now, I got sick because of it all. Something has to be done! My kids and my husband don’t deserve this from me. I don’t deserve this from me! This is not God’s will for me!

OK, so I have to make some changes. I have…(gulp)…to go on a diet. Weight Watchers (www.weightwatchers.com) is a good one, I guess. But I have to ask, and mourn a little bit: how will I…someone who loves cooking and baking as much as I do…give up wonderful, delicious food…which I believe is one of the many gifts God gave us to enjoy! This will take a lot of prayer.

So, I will keep you updated. My goal is to lose at least a pound per week until I’m in the middle of the “normal weight” category (a weight which I haven’t weighed since highschool.) I have been successful so far since I was discharged from the hospital, (even more than that) but the first few pounds are the easiest. If anyone has any encouragement or suggestions for me, please post comments! (Because I doubt I'm the only one who has this problem! I think a lot of my readers could benefit.)

So, here I go!... It will be a learning process.