Pig Roast Teasers from peden+munk

it's somewhat unbelievable, and it's gonna take me a while to come back to life, but the 40th is finally over.

it was really, really hard.  and really, really beautiful.

the fantastic peden+munk were with us for two days, capturing the magic.  here are some of their teaser photos.  i can't wait to get my hands on more so i can share them with you!

dirty girl albion strawberry jam

my love of dirty girl farm is no secret.

neither is my love of albion strawberries.  

so it would only make sense that dirty girl albion strawberries would be my, uh, favorites?  

i got a couple of flats of the berries yesterday, and jo helped me hull them.  i decided to try the christine ferber method, where you macerate the berries overnight, bring them to a simmer the second day, and make the jam on the third day by cooking the syrup down and quickly throwing in the berries at the last second.  this isn't so different than the june taylor marmalade method, which has worked beautifully for me in the past, so i feel pretty good about it.  

i even got to break in my copper jam pot.  yay!

the only weird thing about the christine ferber recipe is how much sugar it calls for: 85% by weight!  yikes!  i know strawberries are low sugar and low pectin, and so you need some extra insurance, but yeesh!  85%?  i started with 20%.  let's see how that works for us.  i'll keep you posted.

today we made tons of tomato sauce, so i decided to can most of it for the winter.

we save all of our tomato scraps and ends, and all of the overripe tomatoes for sauce. i also buy lots of #2 tomatoes from farms like happy boy and dirty girl just for sauce (the dirty girl tomatoes are so beautiful and tasty right now! go out and buy some!).

we cut the tomatoes in half and roast them in the oven at about 300 degrees F for several hours, stirring them occasionally, until most of the juice has evaporated. this intensifies the flavor, and yields a less watery sauce.

then we cook a bunch of red onions (and i mean A LOT) in olive oil, letting them brown. we add garlic, every basil stem in the restaurant, a ton of olive oil, salt, and of course the roasted tomatoes. we let it all simmer for a few hours until the sauce is sweetsweetsweet. right at the end, we throw in a whole bunch of fresh basil, and then pass the sauce through the food mill.

then, i stuff sterile jars full of basil and pour the hot sauce over it. i process the jars for about 30 minutes, and let them cool at room temperature. it's a lot of work (each batch takes us two days), but the sauce is so sweet and delicious, and this way we can taste a bit of summer in the middle of the coldrainygray winter. it's totally worth it!