Irish Chef Darina Allen Jam recipe a winner!

John and I had raised oodles of berries for years, but I’d never made jam. For one thing, I didn’t really eat jam—I put so much sugar in my morning tea I figured jam on my toast would be overkill. Second, faced with a huge bowl of our favorite cane berry varieties—raspberries, loganberries, boysenberries, and marionberries—I’d always made a gigantic berry crisp, and that would take care of any berries we hadn’t eaten fresh. But this berry season, I had more berries than I knew what to do with. Maybe it was time I took the big leap into “putting up” all the lovely fruit I was picking.

I pulled out my favorite cookbook, “Forgotten Skills of Cooking: The Time-Honored Ways are the Best,” and dove into Darina's “Preserving” section. In her Raspberry, Boysenberry or Loganberry Jam recipe, Darina writes, “If you’ve never made jam before, this is a good place to start.” Okay, I’d come to the right place. She goes on, “Raspberry jam is the easiest and quickest of all jams to make, and one of the most delicious.” I was sold.

I wasn’t ready to do any actual canning—in Ireland, they call it “bottling,” but I figured I could freeze half the recipe. 

Raspberry, Boysenberry or Loganberry Jam recipe:

2lbs fresh or frozen berries

4 cups sugar, warmed (I use organic)

Being a bit of a rebel when it comes to cooking, I’m always up for modifying a recipe. And 4 cups of sugar just seemed like so much sugar! So I used 2 ½ pounds of fruit: for a quick measure, that’s 2 quart yogurt containers filled to the brim.

I followed the directions to put the berries into a large saucepan, mash them a little, then cook for 3-4 minutes over medium heat until the juice begins to run. Then add the warmed sugar and stir over low heat until the sugar is fully dissolved. Increase the heat, bring to a boil, and cook steadily for about 5 minutes, stirring frequently.

Within moments, the berry mix started to splatter. I turned down the heat, but I was still getting dark red juice all over the stove. Plus risking burning my stirring hand. OK, time to swap out the saucepan for my big soup kettle. I got the berries back to a boil, and gave them six minutes—on account of the interrupted cooking process—then with more than a little trepidation, pulled the kettle off the heat.

I couldn’t help thinking of one of my favorite passages in the book “Little Women,” when Meg tries to make jelly as a new bride and the stuff just won’t jell! What if I cooked all these beautiful fresh berries and expensive sugar and all I got was runny berry sauce? 

But Darina was spot-on! The berries did indeed set—I had actually made jam! And if I may say so, it was sublime. I put half the jam into two small jars, and the other half into a glass freezer container.

And I do eat jam now—I still have peanut butter sandwiches as just PB, not PBJ, but a couple of spoonfuls of homemade jam on cooked cereal is delicious. And I like to think the vitamins in the ground flaxseeds in my cereal will sort of cancel out all the sweetening!

Bobcat Attack at Berryridge Farm

I’d just finished breakfast when our four hens started cackling like crazy. They were even rattling their fencing. What are they up to, I wondered, some kind of girl fight? I went outside to toss them a few greens from the garden, to get them to mellow out a bit, and there, on the other side of the chicken pen, hardly fifteen feet away, was a bobcat.

The bobcat’s reputation for shyness must’ve been a rural legend. Because it locked eyes with me for a long moment, and didn’t even move when I yelled at it. It pounced against the fence one more time, as if to say, “Ha! You don’t scare me!” and melted into the woods. Then I saw the feathers.

They were all over the inside of the pen. Three hens, Marilyn, Daisy, and Dottie, emerged from their favorite hidey hole next to woodshed #3, out into the main chicken run. But where was Chloe? “John,” I called to him inside the house, “You need to come out here.”

He rushed into his work clothes, and just in case, “weaponed up,” as I call it, with a Bowie knife and a loaded .380 pistol, in case the bobcat got aggressive, or was even rabid or something. “Chloe,” we coaxed, peering around the usual hen hangouts, but there was no sign of her. I got on my muckboots and finally went inside the fenced coop area. In the corner right next to the fence, a hen lay crumpled and motionless. Chloe.

How could the bobcat have killed Chloe, from outside of the fence? We investigated the fence line—and concluded that the cat must have waited for a hen to come near the edge of the pen. Maybe Chloe had been taking a dust bath, and the cat sneaked a paw through some small gap we hadn’t realized was there and mauled her. Well, at least the cat wouldn’t get to eat its kill.

John and I grieved for a bit, then he went to get a shovel. With a heavy heart, I left for my daily bikeride. This month marked our three year anniversary of keeping hens, and after a hawk had gotten one hen, and illness got another, we’d now lost 50% of our original flock. 

I returned from my ride to meet John by the woodsheds. “I want to show you something,” he said. I rounded the corner and what do you know. There was Chloe, standing, if just barely, on our splitting stump. Head drooping, eyes mostly closed, she was still taking tiny sips of water from a little tin camp cup John had unearthed. He carefully parted the feathers on the back of her neck to show me the wound—a bloody patch, but it wasn’t bleeding. “See, maybe it’s just a surface wound,” John said, “and she’s just in shock. She might bounce back.”

Through the afternoon and evening, Chloe hung on, with John encouraging her to sip more water every few minutes. He’d always had a soft spot for Chloe, whom he’d named after the feisty analyst Chloe O’Brien on the TV show, “24.” Since we didn’t want to put her into the coop with the other three hens, who might peck at her injury—the “girls” had often picked at the bald spots of their molting sisters—John fashioned a little temporary coop for the night. He tenderly settled her in, with food and water just inches away. Now we just had to wait.

We never saw it coming.

This morning, I went out to check on Chloe, hoping against hope she'd still be alive, if not kicking. We’d either overestimated the safety of the temporary shelter, or underestimated the determination and ingenuity of the bobcat. Because all I found was a new pile of feathers, and a small mound of entrails studded with flies.

John and I felt terrible. Did the bobcat snake a paw through the steer wire and kill her, or climb the fence? We’ll never know. But the days of our hens ranging freely all over the orchard are over—just like our days of sharing eggs. With only three aging hens, chances are remote we’ll have any extra.

In my Little Farm book, as well as my novels, I generally focus on the lighter side. But this loss really brings home that whether it’s weather, predators, or the sheer unpredictability of life, Mother Nature can be seriously relentless.

I added this Monday, July 15: A sad ending.
Two days after we lost Chloe, I went outside to greet our three hens...and found another death scene. The bobcat had returned, and had not only gotten inside the covered chicken pen, but through the small hen door into the coop. I found Marilyn and Dottie in pieces outside the coop, and Daisy nearby, her body intact but her head bitten off. Our little flock, whom we'd nurtured for three years, and was such a part of Berryridge Farm, was gone.

I'd never thought I could be fond of chickens, but I miss them. I miss the companionable hen clucking and chatter, clamoring for some scratch or to come and hang out with them. I even miss the rattle and squeak of the feeder. I've always loved the silence of our Foothills life, but now the quiet seems unnatural. Even eerie.

All that remains is all the scattered goldy-brown feathers. And the empty chicken run and coop feels haunted.

A-List Chocolate Cake--Perfect for Mother's Day!

Mulching the blueberry patch this week, it came to me that you can always make room for one more blueberry plant. The same goes for chocolate cake recipes!

In my new Irish novel "Mother Love," the main character, Grainne Larkin, loves sweets--especially chocolate, and most especially, chocolate cake. So in her honor, I just baked a celebratory chocolate cake. I tried a recipe new to me, from Irish chef Darina Allen's "Forgotten Kills of Cooking." It was a lovely cake, on the small side, and since it's a one-bowl process, quick to make. But if you want a really luscious slab of chocolate yumminess, here's the recipe for the best chocolate cake I've ever tasted. A friend gave it to me, passed down to her from her grandmother. I renamed the recipe "A-List"... with "A" = Amazing!

A-List Chocolate Cake
2 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup buttermilk
2 teaspoons soda
1cup hot water
1/2 cup cocoa
2 1/2 cups flour
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon vanilla

Mix sugar and butter. Add eggs. Put soda in buttermilk, stir well and add to mixture. (The soda-buttermilk mixture really foams up, making this big cake nice and light.) Pour hot water over cocoa and add to mix. Add flour and salt, then vanilla.

I use a well-greased 9x13 glass baking dish. Bake about 1 hour in 350 degree oven.

It's an easy recipe, and so forgiving you can even mix it by hand--no special time requirements for creaming or beating. I always add extra cocoa and vanilla, and because I like a super-moist cake, substitute some oil for the butter.

I frost the cake with a basic chocolate buttercream frosting, with lots of cocoa--using half-and-half in place of milk makes it extra delicious! But a cooked glaze icing works too. This is such a rich cake, it's perfect for special occasions--you might try it for Mother's Day!

St. Patrick’s Day in the Garden

St. Patrick’s Day has always held a special significance for John and me. Besides the fun of celebrating our respective Irish ancestry, his mother’s birthday was March 17. She was a McDonald, and her Irish forebears took part in the Oklahoma Land Rush back in the 1890s. She was fond of putting on the traditionally American St. Paddy’s Day feast of corned beef and cabbage…but if you ask me, parsnips are the perfect veggie to serve this time of year.

In our Foothills garden, parsnips are the best overwintering crop we have. Parsnips are unfazed by our climate’s repeated freeze-and-thaw cycles, and aren’t bothered by weevils or other insects. Plus you can store them in the ground, and harvest as needed in between freezes! Long after we’ve run out of carrots, beets, and apples, and just as the potatoes are getting kind of gnarly, parsnips are still going strong. I harvested our last row today, and while a few parsnips had rust around the tops, they were otherwise firm and useable.

Lately, parsnip recipes have turned up all over the place. Magazines like More, Whole Living, and Sunset recently featured parsnip salad, parsnip soup, and chicken with braised parsnips. I put parsnips in all our soups and stews, but to me, roasting is the best preparation of all. Simply peel, cut into chunks, drizzle with olive oil and add a pinch or two of salt. Then bake at 350 degrees until tender—easy-peasy, sweet and delicious!

A lot of gardeners swear by planting early spring crops around March 17—potatoes, spinach, peas, etc.  Despite our luck of being in sort of a warm zone—unlike our neighbors down the hill whose yard is in a super-cold sink—our soil here on Berryridge Farm is still too chilly and wet for even the hardiest crops. So we wait until mid-April for planting…which gives us a few extra weeks for early spring tilling, weeding, and raised-bed building.
 
I’d love to hear about your early-spring planting success stories…but in the meantime, Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and Happy Spring!

Homesteader's Resolutions

I’ve always been big on resolutions, New Year’s and otherwise.

And generally my resolutions were all about writing…I would finish my novel, do more blog posts, write every day. But after we moved out to the Foothills, our priorities completely changed…as did my resolutions.

A while back, I resolved to learn how to split wood. So I went out to the woodsheds with John, pulled on my trusty ear protection, and set a small log—a piece of birch, a nice soft wood for a beginner—on our splitting stump. I positioned the wedge onto the log, swung the mallet down on top of it, and Bam!

Ouch! I’d split the piece, but the impact reverbed into my wrists, and shot up both arms into my shoulders. Jeez, that really hurt! I tried five more logs, each time the impact zinged through me harder than the last. My arms were numb for two days. At that point, I made a new resolution: to give up wood spitting forever. It would have to be the one Berryridge Farm chore that I just wasn’t suited for. John could take full responsibility for our wood supply.

Then recently, some unforeseen circumstances put me in charge of our woodpile. Here it was, early January—the dead of winter, with the coldest days ahead. But we had only several days’ worth of firewood. I had to get up to speed on splitting, and fast.

Luckily, since my original attempt, I’d gotten some physical therapy to treat neck and shoulder stiffness—the souvenir from intensive gardening by hand in my Boomer years. Still, with that awful wood-splitting reverb still fresh in my memory, I wasn’t too optimistic about filling our empty woodshed.

However, John had just bought a new, heavy-duty splitting maul. Plus Santa had brought me a great pair of leather gloves—much better than gardening gloves for using sharp tools. So, after a quickie tutorial with the new maul, I was on my own. I set a nice dry piece of fir on the stump, lifted the maul as high as I dared, and swung. Thwack! It worked!

True, I felt the reverb, but not near as badly as before. So I did a couple more pieces, just to give my arms a chance to get used to the impact, then quit for the day. From then on, I resolved to split a few pieces every day. It’s one of the few resolutions I’ve actually kept—avoiding a freezing house is a powerful motivator—and I’ve actually learned a few things.

So after 3 weeks of splitting wood, here are my Top 5 Woodsman’s/Woodsgal’s Tips for Newbies:

*Get to know your wood.

After years of schlepping wood with John and feeding the woodstove, I could identify most kinds of wood—maple, alder, birch, fir, etc. But for splitting, you need to look at the grain, and figure how each kind of wood splits a little differently. There’s a reason maple is called a hardwood, as opposed to fir being a softwood—if you’re splitting maple, you really need to put some oomph into it.  

*Make sure your wood is seasoned.

If there are cracks, or “checks” on the ends of the log, you’re good to go. If you swing your maul and it bounces right off the log, you can pretty well conclude that puppy is too green for a newbie splitter.

*Watch for knots.

If you try splitting a log, especially maple, with a knot in it, you just created more work for yourself. Because your maul will probably get stuck in it. I learned this firsthand, with my maul lodged in the log tighter than the Sword in the Stone. I had to hack at the log with a hatchet to free the maul. But if a log is really, really dry, you aim your maul in between the knots, and luck is with you, you’ll wind up with a nice split log.

*Keep your eyes on the log.

It’s like in baseball, or golf—you’ve got to keep your eye on the ball.  John will tell you, I can’t throw worth a darn, and my aim in pathetic. However, employing intense focus, I’ve actually split some jagged logs—windfall that broke apart in various places—by aiming my maul into one of the crevices.  But I still can’t throw.

*Focus is everything.

No multi-tasking allowed! When I’m splitting, I can’t be daydreaming about my heroine’s escapades in the novel I’m working on, or what to eat for dinner. You don’t want to miss the log and hit your leg with that big old maul. Which brings us back to: keep your eyes on the log.

One last homesteader’s resolution. I resolve that John and I will start splitting next year’s firewood this June—and by September, we’ll have two woodsheds’ full!

Holiday Bonus

I’ve always thought of December 1^st as the official start of the Christmas rush. The trouble is, the first of December follows closely on the heels of the Thanksgiving rush—you know, that frenzied week of shopping/cleaning/cooking/baking/dishes where you’re wondering, what happened to the actual Thanksgiving celebration? Caught up in the busy-ness of family and food, a lot of folks end up with little opportunity to enjoy the feast, much less give thanks.

If Thanksgiving comes early, like it did this year, merchants are all for it—an extra week for people to do Christmas shopping! But I see this year’s post-Thanksgiving week as a bonus for the holiday season…there’s a little break in the action for sitting back, eating some chocolate, fitting in an extra holiday movie, and maybe making plans for a more generous and thoughtful celebration.

Six years ago, our first holiday season at Berryridge Farm, an early Thanksgiving provided the same kind of holiday bonus week. But that time couldn’t have been more different from any we’d ever experienced. A series of unfortunate events, for which John and I were ill-prepared, knocked us sideways. We wondered if we were going to make it through that week…and more crucial, if we had what it takes to stay on our little homestead for the long term. We spent the Christmas that followed being grateful for the simplest things: our health, the roof over our heads, and each other.

In this year’s holiday bonus week, I’m happy the upsets that happened over this Thanksgiving weekend were so minor…like discovering the local, organic cream I’d splurged on for the pies was slightly “off,” or waking up the next morning to find the bunnies had gotten into my wintering-over kale bed and devoured nearly every last leaf. The cream got an extra spoonful of sugar to offset the tang, and the kale gained a more philosophical grower…when I reminded myself that our food supply is much more secure than the rabbits'.
 
And in this holiday breather time, I’m doing just what the doctor (me) ordered. Eating chocolate, contemplating not just more ways we can share with those less fortunate, but the true meaning of the season… and being grateful.

Samhain, aka the Irish Halloween

As Halloween celebrations—for kids and grownups alike—seem to be on the upswing, two related holidays, the Day of the Dead and Samhain, appear more and more on our radar screens. Maybe because who isn’t game for a good excuse to indulge in all the sweets and chocolate we can eat! Or maybe we need something to perk up our spirits when summer is over, and it’s still weeks until the big holiday season starts with Thanksgiving. Whatever the reason, when I look out on our little farm at the end of October, the veggie beds mostly empty, apple trees bare of the ruby fruit of early fall, I’m all for marking a special day between the autumn equinox and the winter solstice.

Since we live too far away from any neighbors to have Halloween trick-or-treaters, the idea of celebrating Samhain is kinda growing on me. As I understand it, Samhain is an ancient Celtic festival, very similar to the Hispanic tradition of the Day of the Dead. At this time, the dead walked the earth, and people could connect with their ancestors, considered sources of wisdom. Given all the spirits roaming around, the Celts would dress in disguises, so any evil ones couldn’t recognize them. Communal bonfires were also a big custom, thought to ward off evil spirits too. On the way home from the bonfire, people would put a candle in a hollowed-out turnip (the Scots used pumpkins, and brought the custom to the US), apparently to keep those witches, ghosts and goblins away as well.

However, Samhain is also notable as the beginning of the winter half of the year. Which fits here in the Foothills. We won’t be seeing any snow for a few more weeks (crossing my fingers), but the glorious fall color has faded. and most plants around our place have begun their winter sleep—save for a few winter greens, that with any luck, will hold their own until April. So now that the hard work of tending and harvesting is over, I’m happy to devote myself to creating more Irish stories!