it’s salsa season 2010
August 30, 2010
You can tell it’s canning time again because another heat wave has started.
The kitchen may be steamier than a bathhouse but the first of at least five batches of salsa is chilling on the counter. Hot weather be damned, four more batches will have to be churned out in the next two days, otherwise we’re taking a whole lot of raw Roma tomatoes to Pinery Provincial Park for the long weekend. I wonder if deer would like them?
The recipe I use is adapted from Blue Ribbon Preserves by Linda J. Amendt. Her recipe calls for chopping all of the ingredients but I like to run most of them through the food processor for a less chunky final product, which we find a little more versatile for cooking.
Salsa
This recipe is meant to make about 6 pint jars or 12 half-pint jars. Maybe I just don’t measure very carefully (well, I know full well I don’t) but the quantity often varies for me, and today’s batch yielded exactly seven pints.
Wear rubber gloves while handling the peppers. I did, and even kept the gloves on through the cleanup of all things hot pepper, and then washed the gloves with soap before taking them off, and still 45 minutes later I stuck my finger in my eye and burned it with capsaicin. Argh!
Neither the fresh coriander nor the garlic are part of the original recipe, but I add either one or the other to each batch. Today I added both, because they were there.
12 cups cored and chopped Roma or other plum tomatoes*
3 cups chopped onions
3 cups seeded and chopped Anaheim, Colorado or poblano peppers
1 3/4 cups seeded and chopped jalapeňo peppers
1/2 cup white wine vinegar
1/2 cup strained fresh lime juice
2 tablespoons kosher salt or pickling salt
a couple of handfuls of chopped fresh coriander** (optional)
a head or two of garlic, crushed in a garlic press rather than put through the food processor
If you like your salsa chunky, throw all of your ingredients into an 8-quart stainless steel pan just like this. If you prefer it without the big chunks, do what I do: run 10 cups of the tomatoes and all of the onions and peppers through the food processor for a minute before adding them to the pot. Chop the remaining tomatoes so there’s at least a little bit of variety in the final texture. Now, carry on!
Over medium-low heat, bring the mixture to a simmer and simmer gently for 10 minutes, stirring frequently to avoid sticking. I’m going to assume you know how to deal with jars and canning and whatnot and cut to the important stuff: leave 1/2″ of headspace when filling your jars. Process both pint and half-pint jars for 15 minutes. Then wait a couple of weeks and enjoy your delicious salsa!
* Actually, since I use Romas and they’re not all that juicy inside, I never bother to core them, just take off the stem end and toss them in. This could be why my batch was bigger than anticipated.
** If using coriander, keep it aside until after the salsa has finished simmering, then stir it in just before filling the jars.
Posted by jodi on August 30, 2010 at 8.30pm
the window that wasn’t there
August 28, 2010
We’d owned our house for two years when I moved to Georgia to attend graduate school in the fall of 2005. My only visit home that year was in the dead of winter when we don’t see the neighbours much, so when I got home for the summer in May I had a lot of catching up to do with my neighbour, Joan. She was sitting on her porch steps telling me about a fire they’d had earlier in the spring that had begun in the hydro metres and spread up the side of the house, causing them to have to replace a section of the siding. We never go down the north side of the house (the sidewalk there belongs to the neighbours, and our sidewalk and side entrance are over on the south side) so it occurred to me to have a look and see whether their fire had damaged any of our siding. That’s when I noticed this:
A window, way up on the second floor, on a side of the house where none of our second floor rooms have windows. A window that somebody had covered up, but not removed, in our bathroom. Since I’m self centred enough to expect y’all to care but not quite so much to expect you to keep tabs, click this link to see what the bathroom looked like when we bought the place. It’s a universal truth that all homeowners have better taste than the people who owned it previously, and we’re no exceptions. I was in love with the house but unhappy that the bathroom had no window (always a top-three priority during my many years of bouncing back and forth between divey apartment rentals), and we were deeply, deeply unhappy with the whole awful look of that room. When the woman who sold us the house told me it was her favourite room in the house I bit my tongue. Hard.
Here’s what the room looked like after I plastered two-thirds of a wall with full page photos culled from old National Geographic magazines:
The colour palette shifts from pinky-red in the upper left corner through red, orange and yellow, and had I finished it would have continued in a spectrum all around the room. Peter talked me out of doing any more work on it because “we’ll be renovating it all soon”. Soon being a relative term, I suppose.
Fast forward to summer 2010 when we’re having insulation blown into all of the walls as part of the general energy efficiency fixup that pretty much every homeowner in the province is doing right now (in order to cash in on a government incentives programme). We had the insulation guys take out that window, saw through the wall from the outside, and put a new window in. And look! There’s light in our bathroom! Which otherwise looks the same, with one wall papered in photos only now it’s all ripped around the sawed window hole. Baby steps. We’ll get to it.
Let me tell you, peeing in the night without having to turn the light on is so excellent. I’d forgotten.
I wish I’d taken a photo of the archaeological layers inside that wall before the window guy put the tuck tape all around it. There was wood, then the original plaster (still in okay condition? I hope I hope I hope), then strips of styrofoam, then plywood, then the awful masonite fake tile stuff. And somewhere down along the bottom there is also a layer of ceramic tile over the plaster. Don’t ask me who does such things to houses, because that’s something I can’t quite fathom. All I know is that every single contractor or similar professional we’ve had in this place over the last seven years has said some version of “I’ve never seen anything like this before” and “let me show you how many ways in which things were done illegally here”. And of course there was the plumber who made a series of ablist jokes about our bathtub and then told me the whole second floor of our house was about to cave in.
Also? The punch line? Whoever covered this window up on the inside without removing it properly didn’t even take the blind down first.
Posted by jodi on August 28, 2010 at 8.13pm
first shot with the holga
August 26, 2010
Ambassador Bridge, May 2010.
Fuji Provia 400X.
Posted by jodi on August 26, 2010 at 5.13pm
what i’m working on today
August 25, 2010
A new sample of my Gatsby Girl pullover from the fall 2006 issue of Interweave Knits, in Debbie Bliss baby cashmerino. Since the magazine issue has sold out I’m planning to release the pattern myself, with a few optional modifications (such as, pictured above, no picot edge! plus, some options for a less Miss Manners-ish neckline).
The yarn is wonderfully squashy and lush, and doesn’t pill up in my hands while knitting like the Rowan Cashsoft of the original sample sweater did, undoubtedly a good sign as to its wear as a sweater. I think it’s about time I had one of these for myself.
Posted by jodi on August 25, 2010 at 7.32pm
claire in blue
August 20, 2010
I played around a bit on vacation with using the flash on the Holga, with its coloured gels, as an external flash for my point-and-shoot digital, through the very professional method of holding up both cameras and trying to hit both shutters in sync. Everyone was very patient in allowing me to shoot them three, four or five times before managing to have the digital camera and the flash go off simultaneously. I’ve got to get a better setup, but so far, this is fun. And everything looks better when the flash and the photo don’t come from the same perspective.
Posted by jodi on August 20, 2010 at 1.30pm
pennsic XXXIX: bender’s night out
August 17, 2010
Posted by jodi on August 17, 2010 at 7.37pm
August 3, 2010
I have been waiting all year to bring y’all a photo of this beautiful velvet painting that hangs on the wall of El Rey Azteca restaurant in Lyndora, PA.
I’m pretty sure there’s an interesting story in this painting, as it’s obviously a real mountain range with some sort of legend attached to it. Something to be investigated later, though. Right now, we’re on vacation!
Posted by jodi on August 3, 2010 at 6.24am
mixed messages
August 1, 2010
Posted by jodi on August 1, 2010 at 6.18am
the pre-pennsic quiet
July 31, 2010
The Friday night before the mayhem starts is when we walk down to our campsite, check out the lay of the land (shifts every year) and chain up a picnic table or two to a tree (take that, thieves!). We’re not allowed to bring cars in or start setting up until the land negotiations are finished on Saturday (jumping through bureaucratic hoops is just part of this kind of vacation). Walking through this place when it’s just like any other campground is a little eerie when you know just what it’ll be like in a few days, when the twelve thousand other people get here.
The first few mornings after Land Grab (Saturday), there will still be a few Canada geese on the lake, but by Tuesday they’ll have retreated to quieter places. One of my favourite parts of the early days of Pennsic, which are mostly taken up with the heavy grunt work of setting up massive pavilions and building walls and digging holes, is to take my tea up to the lake in the early morning and wave the last few geese off home. Imagining that they come from the same place I’m from, because I’m sentimental like that.
Peter and Claire in our campsite, block E24, with the lake behind them.
This is a good table. We chained it to a tree before we left.
Posted by jodi on July 31, 2010 at 6.18am
what i’ve been working on this past week
July 30, 2010
5 cholis
2 vests
2 jackets
5 prs. of salwar (poofy pants)
6 shirts
2 ghawazee coats
And all so I have something pretty and not deathly hot to wear on vacation.
Posted by jodi on July 30, 2010 at 9.26pm
