Harvest Time

Plums are falling all over the jogging trails, blackberries are starting to ripen in sunny spots, the elderberries are getting nice blue/purple coloring, and even the figs are ripe enough to pick!  This is a very tough time of year, trying to get out and harvest all the wild edible fruits before the birds, bears, or sun ruin you crop.  I have been watching a dozen fig trees for the last two months, waiting and waiting for the telltale droop of the figs that tells you when they are ready to harvest, and the time is now!

During a morning jog, I just picked a 5 lb bag of figs from along the trails of the American River!  i am sure I will be back soon for more!

Lemon Jelly, sorta....

If you happen to live in the Sacramento area in the late "winter" using "foraging vision" you will have noted the crazy amount of citrus available to pick almost everywhere!  In January, Tracy and the boys and I went to a friends house and loaded up on mandarin oranges, navel oranges, lemons, limes, and kumquats.  Then the experiments started - maybe I will write about some of those later, but write now I wanted to talk about Lemon Jelly.

I was on a roadtrip for work in mid-March with a gentleman from another company who I work closely with often.  Three hour drive each way to a meeting, of course the subject of foraging came up!  One end result of this conversation being, that when I dropped him off at his house, I got to wander into the back yard and pick a large bag full of Meyer Lemons.

Earlier in the year, with piles of lemons, limes, and oranges, I had tried multiple different methods of putting up citrus.  Not to say that the methods and recipes did not work, but what do you do with 20 pint jars of bitter marmalade?  I ended up dumping out all but four jars and figure I will bring it out as more of a novelty item on occasion, it just does not fit with what we eat on a regular basis.  Same with the orangelemon chutney and orange jelly.  One nice thing, I do make alot of blackberry jam in the summers, so I had squeezed a bunch of lemons and froze them in ice cube trays for use during the summer canning season.  But with 2 gallon bags of lemon cubes, I had to think of another use for this large bag of lemons!

So I decided to make Lemon Jelly - easy enough:

8 cups lemon juice
6 cups sugar
lemon peels in jelly bag -

I boiled the juice with the skins in a bag for pectin content,
added the sugar and removed the peels,

I usually put two plates in the freezer to test the sets of jellies or jams, especially when trying something new like this.  I boiled this for two minutes, tested the set on a plate, and though it set well - jarred it, canned it for ten minutes in the pressure canner at 5 psi, and ended up with 10 jars of lemon syrup...

What happened?  I am not quite sure, but I think I jumped too soon on the plate test and I never had a jelly set, that or I had too much heat in the pressure canner and something went wrong. 

So I ended up with jars of light lemon syrup, I thought about recanning to get the set, but then thought, "how often am I actaully going to want to use lemon jelly?"  Lemon syrup on the other hand, came in really handy over the last couple of months for making homemade margaritas!  So in the end, I did have a successful use of foraged lemons!

How I Ended Up Inventing Apple Stuff

There I was, a couple hours away from my fated rendevous at my brother's house for dinner, and my beautiful wife and I just realized we had nothing to bring with us.  You always have to bring something with you when you go to someones house for dinner!

Well, important dinner engagements or not, two year-old boys will be two year-old boys, and we knew we had to let our son run for a bit, or he would not get tired, then he would not take a nap, and then for all I know the world could end in a big fireball of cranky toddlers.  My son is very easy going and enjoys all the crazy adventures that his dad takes him on, but he does have alot of energy (I do not know where he gets it I say as I write this blog in the early morning hours).  Since it was a weekend, we stopped at a local school, actually my old elementary school, to let him play on the playground. 

As we let him run free across toys too dangerous for a toddler, my wife and I looked around.  She asked if it was the same as when I went there, and I remembered the apple tree that had some branches that hung over onto the school grounds from an adjacent property.  Lost in memory of foraging adventures as a 5-10 year-old, I said "There used to be an apple tree right there."  My wife replied, "You mean the one with the apples on it?" 

A minute later I was showing my son how dangerous climbing was from high up in the apple tree, shaking and picking a dozen late winter apples from the higher branches.  My son joined right in, gathering all the apples as they fell and taste testing the fruit for quality assurance.  But more importantly, now I had an idea of something for my dinner.  My wife's family is famous for their invention of the classic dessert called "Peach Stuff", which involves dumping a can of peaches in a pan, sprinkling yellow cake mix over the top, pouring a half stick of melted butter on top, and baking for 20 minutes.

So I took the apples home, and extrapolating on the earlier inventive success of my in-laws, invented "Apple Stuff" - kinda a cobbler, but a little different and easy to make!

Apple Stuff Recipe: 

8 apples, cored and sliced
3 cups sugar
2 cups flour
2 cups water
1 cube butter

Add apples, one cup sugar, and water to pot, bring to boil until the apples release their juices
Mix 2 cups flour and 2 cups sugar together
Melt butter and mix with flour and sugar, should be crumbly
Place apple mix in a pan.
Sprinkle flour/sugar mix over apples
Cook for 20-30 min at 350 degrees or until batter is crispy on top.  The apples should be fairly runny still, but the dish highlights the taste of the apples with the crumble on top more as a added filler.
The best was using the wild apples.  The apples are not the perfectly shaped, devoid of taste as with apples you can find in any grocery store.  They have many imperfections, several had worm holes and some had been pecked by birds (I either threw these out for other foraging beasts, or if it was minor just cut around those areas), but all that just means that nature likes them and that no pesticides were sprayed on the tree. The main thing is the taste!  Apples are meant to have alot of taste, and the shelf-ripened apples you buy in a store are seriously lacking compared to what is produced by a tree that had to struggle through the summer to make its fruit. 

And to close the story, the Apple Stuff was baked in time for dinner and well received by all!

Apple Stuff Recipe