Strawberry-Rhubarb Jam

Last year was my first venture into making jam.  The initial batch was a total flop and I almost gave up.  I have the terrible personality trait that if I can't be good at something, I don't want to try.  Thankfully, after some good advice from a friend, I tried a different method that used pectin and the second batch turned out fabulously.  If I do say so myself.  If you're a new jam maker, forget trying to make it without any additives at all and just get Certo liquid pectin.  Just do it.  Then follow the recipe inside to the letter.

This year's jam was not without its trials.  

Oh, it started out beautifully.  I chopped up a bunch of strawberries.  I wish I could say I used homegrown strawberries, but I can't.  I started a strawberry patch this year, but it's not established enough to produce a lot of fruit so I just grabbed several cartons from the grocery store. 

We do have rhubarb, though.  I gathered rhubarb from our little patch, and chopped that up too.  Did you know that not all rhubarb is red?  It's not.  

If you're a health nut like me, you're going to be appalled at the amount of sugar that goes into jam.  There are different types of Certo for low-sugar, but not where I live.  So I went with the full-on, diabetes-inducing, sugar jam.  Yum.  

This, though, was the point where my jam making took a nosedive.  What's supposed to happen is that you bring your jam to a full boil, then add the Certo, then boil for one minute longer.  Mine came to a full boil alright....but unfortunately I wasn't standing right next to it and it boiled over.  Everywhere.

You don't even want to know how long it took me to get that off the glass top, off the counter, off the floor and all the cupboards between.  Thankfully only the stove was burned, and not the jam--which was the issue last year when I tried to make it without pectin.

  A super sticky pot does not prevent you from ladling out this sugar-luciousness into jars.

And what you end up with in the end?  Heaven.

Though I admit I could eat this out of the jar, I really love it swirled in plain yogurt or slathered on an English muffin.  Try it.  Grab some fruit, some Certo liquid pectin, and a whooooollllle lot of pure cane sugar, and make some.  Don't walk away from the pot, and you'll enjoy it all winter long!
 

Hobo Dinners

Way back a hundred years ago, I was a camp counselor for a summer at a YMCA camp.  I'll just be frank and say it was a terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad experience.  I might be exaggerating on the hundred year part, but I don't think I could exaggerate how much fun I did not have.  Might it have been that I made $75 a week to live in a rustic wood 'cabin' with 12 fourth-grade girls?  Or the huge kidney infection I couldn't kick?  Or the communal showers?  Or the pincher beetles?  I could go on, but I'll spare you the misery.

The one good thing that came from my camp counselor experience was hobo dinners.  Not that I enjoyed making these in the pouring rain with manic mosquitoes for said fourth-graders, but still.  Hobo dinners are great camp food, and just summer-evening-outside kinda food.  I'm sure there are a dozen ways to make them, but this is how we roll here.

Tear off two sheets of about 18 inches of foil for each hobo dinner you want to make.  Don't scrimp here.  You must use two sheets for every dinner or it will burn.  I always use one non-stick and one heavy duty piece of foil for each dinner at our place, because I don't like scraping stuck-on-potatoes.

  
Speaking of...  Scrub up some potatoes. Pick good ones, because they're the backbone of this meal.

You're going to want to cut them into thin slices.  I like to use our 'whack chop' for this.

But be careful!  Don't, whatever you do, forgo that tophat piece that protects your fingers from the blade or you'll end up with a cleft in your thumb like our son Izaak.

Use the tophat thingy, and don't worry about the last little piece of potato.  

 

Arrange some potatoes on each of the nonstick foil pieces.  You might choose to lightly sprinkle them with olive oil and salt, particularly if you aren't using nonstick foil.

Then top with ground beef.  I use the leanest they have, which kind of defeats the whole olive oil part, but I just can't bring myself to buy the 85% lean.  I just can't.

I like to sprinkle it all with season salt, then top it with some onions.

Fold it like a baby now. Twice--once with the nonstick, and then again with the heavy duty. 

Send it outside.  In my world, this is now man's work.  It involves flame, which means my husband will participate in the cooking. 

The heat and the oil do lovely things to the potatoes and onions.  When your man brings it in from the grill (or over to the picnic table), bust out the ketchup and go to town.  It's simple, and tastes almost as summer as sweet corn and peaches.  Almost.

 

 Enjoy!

 

 

 

Saltine Toffee

Back when we were kids, my mom used to make cracker sandwiches.  I think they were the precursor or poor-man's version of Oreos, but to me they were heavenly.  The ingredients?  Saltines and chocolate frosting, as in she slathered frosting between two white crackers, and we loved them.

This recipe is hardly more difficult than that.  I've seen it referred to as 'crack', which either refers to the crackers in it or the way you become freakishly addicted to the stuff after your first taste.  Recently I made these for my mom, and when I told her they were called 'crack' she questioned "Crap!?"  It made me giggle, because my mom-the-retired-kindergarten- teacher doesn't say bad words, and she would never refer to a dessert as the street name for a narcotic.  No, this is the woman who invented the dessert called 'cherry nummy.'  I'll have to show you that one sometime.

If you would prefer to call these something tamer, go with Saltine toffee.  Who would have thought Saltines were so versatile?

Generally I enroll the help of the children to line them in a baking pan.  When I do it, I obsess that the crackers don't fit perfectly in the pan, with corners touching neatly. 

It frustrates me that Saltines don't break in half perfectly, because I need a row of half crackers to fill my pan.  I know.  I'm ridiculous.  But that doesn't stop me from trying.

Crackers with toffee doesn't sound that great.  But it is.

And of course, everything is better with a layer of chocolate on top.  

Speaking of versatile, I love chocolate chips.

Now, some people just break the cooled and set bars into pieces--like English toffee.  You might guess I prefer to cut mine in perfect squares.  If you don't have this bar cutter, you must get one.  I think it was from Pampered Chef.  I use it all the time.

You know what else that bar cutter is good for?  Scraping.  It would be sacrilegious to throw away the crumbs.  Sprinkle them on something--yogurt, ice cream, whatever--or just be like me and eat them with a spoon. 

After you try Saltine toffee, you might want to pack them up into a pretty tin and send them to someone else.  Unless you're good with an overdose of butter, sugar and chocolate.  I guess there are worse ways to go!

Saltine Toffee
Recipe from Elsie's Attic on The Vintage Villiage

1 cup butter
1 cup brown sugar
1.5 sleeves Saltines crackers
2 cups chocolate chips

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Cover an 11 x 13 jelly roll pan with aluminum foil and spray with nonstick spray.  Line with Saltine crackers.  In a saucepan, melt butter and brown sugar.  Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and continue to simmer for 5 minutes.  Pour the butter-sugar mixture over the Saltines, then spread so it evenly covers all crackers.  Bake for 8-10 minutes.  Remove the pan from the oven and allow to cool briefly, about 3-5 minutes.  Sprinkle with chocolate chips, then spread melted chips over all crackers.  Refrigerate until the chocolate becomes firm.  Break into smaller pieces, or cut along cracker lines.  Enjoy!

Crustless Lime Pie

It's been a while since I've had time in my kitchen!  I presented some research at a conference last week for work.  SUCH a good conference, and you can't always say that.  Not only do the people who regularly attend it 'get me', but the sessions are really applicable and I take away a brain-melting amount of new ideas.

It doesn't hurt that it's on Jekyll Island, Georgia.

The conference always coincides with my wedding anniversary, so last year I took my husband and we celebrated together on a work/vacation trip.  It was so wonderful we decided to bring our two oldest boys with this year.  Neither had been on a plane, and neither had seen the ocean.  

 It. Was. Awesome.  Such a fabulous trip.  They embraced the history of Savannah, where we spent a day before heading to the island.  

 They loved the trees, the turtles, the birds and the lizards.  They took to the ocean like they were born for it, and both have mild sunburns to prove it.  We also filled them up with all kinds of Southern foods.  Shrimp.  Grits.  Fried okra.  Fried green tomatoes.  Pralines.  Blackened catfish.  Barbeque. 

 
And while they weren't in love with any fried vegetables (more for us!), our guy Izaak ordered key lime pie at every opportunity.  I, too, enjoyed a bit of pie at each visit because he would eat the top, but not the graham cracker crust.   

The first thing I wanted to make when we got home, to memorialize our trip, was a lime pie.  Sans crust.  Not a pudding, but a pie without the bottom.  Since the graham cracker adds something yummy to key lime pie, I went with a crumble approach.  This is what I came up with.
 

Oh my, it is good!  Refreshing.  Creamy.  Sweet, but the graham cracker gives it just a bit of buttery goodness that cuts some of the citrus.  You must try it!

I had some limes in my fridge, but they weren't key limes.  I ran with it anyway, squeezing the heck out of them until I ended up with a half cup of lime juice.

 
Since lime zest is so pretty, I scrubbed off about 2 tablespoons and used that, too.
 

Like many of the best desserts, this one contains sweetened condensed milk.  I could eat that stuff from the can.  I certainly always lick off the lid.  I know, that's gross.  I'm ok with that.

Though lime juice is green, it's pretty faint.

I wanted mine to look lime-ish, so I added a bit of green gel dye after I heated the mixture to 160 (it has eggs, and I am so uncool with raw eggs.....)  Even though it looks like just a teensy smidge of gel dye on a plastic baby spoon, it turned out quite a bit more fluorescent than I anticipated.  Go easy on that stuff!

While the pie mixture was cooling, I whipped some heavy cream and powdered sugar to deliciousness.  I started just spooning the pie mixture into glasses, but I kept getting it on the sides of the glass.  My OCD was disturbed by that, so I tried squeezing it into glasses from a Wilton frosting bag.

Truth?  It was just as messy, because it's not firm until it's refrigerated.  Oh well.  I squeezed in pie, then whipped cream, then a tablespoon of graham cracker crumble, then repeated.  It all went into the refrigerator for a few hours, and became something magical.

 
Well, maybe not this magical, but still, pretty dang good.  You should try it.  And maybe plan a trip to Jekyll Island, while you're at it.  If you go at the beginning of next June, I'll meet you there! 

Lime Parfait

1/2 cup freshly squeezed lime juice (about 6 limes)
4 eggs
2  14 oz. cans sweetened condensed milk
2 T lime zest
1/4 tsp green gel dye
1 cup graham cracker crumbs
4 T sugar
4 T butter, softened
1 cup heavy cream
4 T powdered sugar

Zest limes until you have two tablespoons of zest.  Squeeze limes until you have a half cup of lime juice.  In a saucepan, vigorously blend lime juice, eggs, sweetened condensed milk and lime zest.  Heat until it reaches 160 degrees, stirring very often.  Remove and allow to cool.   Then mix in green dye, if desired.

With a food processor or beaters, beat heavy cream and powdered sugar until it achieves the consistency of whipped topping.    

In a small bowl, combine butter, graham cracker crumbs and sugar until the butter is very well incorporated and the mixture resembles crumbles.

Into six parfait or wine glasses (or whatever you'd like to use), layer pie, whipped cream, and graham crackers twice: pie, cream, crumbles, pie, cream, crumbles.  Refrigerate until well chilled, at least two hours.  Enjoy!