Independence Day Follies

Celebrating Independence Day on a Tuesday was a special gift for me, even though I had to work the Monday. Not that the corporation is stingy with vacation time, I just had all my time already allocated to various activities with family and friends. And since I had been out of town over the weekend, it was nice to have a free day during the week to catch up on housework and do two interesting projects.

Strawberry Basil Jam Redux

I’m a geek. I follow my favorite local orchard on Facebook. Last week, they posted that pick your own strawberries was closing. I hadn’t even realized that strawberry season had started! So, of course, I immediately pulled out my canning book and my preserving book to look for the strawberry jam recipe that I really liked last year. While there were several terrific strawberry based recipes, the one I wanted wasn’t in either book. After some head scratching, I found the recipe in my NetGalley adaptation file. It turns out that it originated in Butter & Scotch, which I always think of as the boozy milkshake book. It also turns out that I had written about my experience using in the beginning of last August. Except I was using California strawberries on sale at the grocery store.

Of course, I forgot the recipe at home on the day that I was able to start work early enough to leave the office before the orchard closed. So when I got to the orchard, I had no idea whether I needed pounds of strawberries or quarts of strawberries, never mind how much of either! Therefore, I faked it. The strawberries were being sold in quarts, but I was pretty sure that my recipe was in pounds. So I marched a quart of strawberries over to a scale and weighed. It weighed 12 ounces. Even given my limited math skills, I was able to figure out that four quarts would probably weigh about three pounds. I was pretty sure three pounds was the highest number I had seen across all the recipes I had looked at, but I bought an extra quart just in case. I do enjoy strawberries!

The next problem was finding the time to hull and quarter all these strawberries. Because they were end of season strawberries, they were already slightly overripe. By the time I got to processing them early Saturday morning, one full quart had already turned on me and had to be tossed in the trash. So I hulled and quartered three quarts, and then weighed them. It was just slightly over three pounds. The recipe called for two pounds, so I could just add an extra half measure of all the ingredients. I set the fourth quart of strawberries aside to deal with when I came home. (Spoiler alert: That was a mistake!)

Using my largest Faberware pot, I combined the hulled and quartered strawberries with the remainder of the ingredients. I was very pleased that I had taken such good notes on the recipe in the file because it was really easy to follow. Naturally, I improvised a few things. I used an entire small package of fresh basil leaves rather than just using 15 large basil leaves; I had recently thrown out a forgotten package of moldy basil leaves from my refrigerator and thought it best to avoid a repeat of that situation. Rather than measure exactly one-half cup of grated peeled green apple, I just grated the entire green apple, peel and all. Truth be told, I hadn’t realized that the recipe called for the apple to be peeled. I did have an extra lemon, which I could have used, but I stuck with the recipe as I had adapted it to do without. Unfortunately, only after everything was said and done, did I realize that I had dark chocolate balsamic vinegar, which probably would have been awesome in this recipe as a replacement for the regular high quality balsamic vinegar.

The final problem was that the ingredients were supposed to stand “at least 30 minutes, but overnight is okay too.” Well, I finished putting everything together in the pot and into the refrigerator just about 30 minutes before heading out the door for an overnight out of state. When I got back home on Sunday night, I was almost too congested to function, so my sister sent me to bed. I felt marginally better when I came home from work on Monday night, but was still in no condition to undertake any complex projects. By 7pm Tuesday, I had achieved approximately 75-percent human and felt capable of making jam and water processing the jars.

I was very fortunate that there were only two minor hiccups in the jam making process. Before I started, I had the fleeting thought that I should transfer the mixture to my red Dansk soup pot because I vaguely remembered jams getting all foamy and out of control while boiling. But I decided not to because I didn’t want to dirty two pots. (Remember, I hate washing pots!) Sure enough, less than five minutes into the hard boil, the mixture was threatening to overflow the Faberware pot. I had to pull that off the stove, transfer the boiling mass into a new pot, and then get the new pot back onto the stove. Being significantly deeper than the Faberware pot, the Dansk soup pot was able to contain the boiling mass no matter how rowdy it got. Unfortunately, I had to stick my hand deeper into the pot to take the temperature and couldn’t stand the steam long enough to get an accurate reading. So I rigged up something safer by threading the end of the wooden spoon through the digital thermometer and then dangling the thermometer into the jam. That didn’t quite get the right temperature, but it was way better than constantly sticking my hand into the steam.

After the jam reached 220F, everything else went like clockwork. Since my notes said that two pounds of strawberries yielded six four-ounce jars, I was expecting to fill nine four-ounce jars. I filled many more than that! Which is fine, because the jam was delicious. Technically, after water process canning, the jars need to stand 12 to 24 hours, depending on which book you read, so that the contents can jell. Either way, I shouldn’t open a jar before I leave for work in the morning. But I was eating homemade hummus with crackers as I was filling the jars with jam, and some of the uncanned jam found its way onto a cracker and into my mouth. Really good stuff!

Eat Your Books

I was skeptical when I received an email from one of my favorite couples that informed me that for my birthday they were giving me a subscription to a website called Eat Your Books. According to the email, the website had most cookbooks indexed for easy searching. But the website doesn't provide the actual recipe because I was supposed to put in cookbooks I already own. The website was also supposed to be a good way to keep track of recipes that I found online. At the time I read the email, I was headed out to an event in Alabama, so all my sleep deprived brain could register was that I had to enter all my cookbooks into another website. Between my kitchen and my library, there are at least 130 different cookbooks. That’s a lot of data entry!

While I was finishing up some electronic errands on Independence Day about a month later, I decided to check out the Eat Your Books website. At first glance, they seemed friendly enough. They let me create an account without using my voucher so if I wanted to just tool around the site with a free account I could do that. After creating an account, they gave me a short tutorial on the features of the website: how to add books to my bookshelf, how to find a recipe, etc.

The free membership allows the user to add five cookbooks, plus one extra book for every book they successfully complete an index for, and to add an unlimited number of food blogs from the list of indexed food blogs. Since my online recipes don’t typically come from food blogs – except for the pan pizza recipe from Serious Eats – the free membership would have limited utility to me. There are food blogs that I like to pass through every so often, like Orangette and 101 Cookbooks, but none that I absolutely have to read on a weekly basis or I must check first when looking for a cool new recipe to incorporate into my dinner party menu. For the latter, I’ll always fall back on Epicurious or Saveur.

So I decided to bite the bullet and enter my voucher code for a yearlong premium membership to the Eat Your Books website. (Thanks, guys!) Now came the dreaded entering of the cookbooks into the website. There was an Import function, but that was for a series of up to 500 ISBNs, which would still require hauling the books to the computer or the computer to the books. Unfortunately, Eat Your Books didn’t have a mobile app with an ISBN bar code scanner like Goodreads. But that gave me an idea! About six years ago, I scanned in all my cookbooks onto a Cookbooks shelf in Goodreads and have been fairly good about maintaining that shelf with at least the new additions to my collection. So what I did was open a separate browser window to show my Goodreads list of cookbooks and then just searched for the author or title, whichever was shorter, in the Eat Your Books library. It was fairly painless and drama free: it took me about an hour to add 127 books (less than 30 seconds each), which included sorting through the occasional instance of multiple versions by double checking the ISBN of my version on the book’s Goodreads page. Like I said, I’m a geek.

Roughly half of the books that I shelved were indexed in Eat Your Books, and I requested indexing on about half of those that weren’t. Even so, I was astounded to learn that I now had a database of over 22,000 recipes at my disposal. Granted, I would still have to find the book in the house and look up the actual copyrighted recipe in the book, but this truly gives new life to some books that haven’t seen the light of day in years! For example, the Cooking Light Annual Recipes volumes that I collected from 1999 to 2009 were all indexed, and some really nice recipes were coming out of those volumes during my test searches. Of course, since the latest pick your own at the orchard is raspberries, I had to see what types of jams, jellies, and preserves the database would find with raspberries as a primary ingredient. It found nine different recipes, across a variety of cookbooks that I never would have thought to reference. I would have just gone to my canning book and my preserving book, and called it a day. Some of the recipes from the oddball books look really good. Unfortunately, my canning book isn’t indexed in the site yet, so I still have to check that for other options.

On a whim, I added three blogs to my Eat Your Books bookshelf: Serious Eats, Orangette, and 101 Cookbooks. Much to my amazement, that added over 13,000 recipes to my searchable database. So my grand total of searchable recipes is over 34,000 recipes. That does not count any books without indices and does not count any books that I read as advance reader copies for NetGalley. It is pretty amazing!

The Verdict

Between my completion of the Strawberry Basil Jam that I started a few days ago and my creation of the Eat Your Books account that I was gifted over a month ago, I feel like I moved the ball forward just a little more. While I did not accomplish everything that was on my extensive list of chores, I did manage to maintain positive forward momentum throughout the day. The strawberry jam coated pots are still in the sink, but they will be gone by the weekend! I’ve got to move on to those raspberries…