What I'm Not Preserving

I was at Trader Joe's the other day. These organic pears were calling to me. Normally pears don't call to me and I buy my fruit during the season at the farmers market. But I had been reading canning blogs for the last couple of weeks. I kept coming across a recipe for Pear Vanilla Jam from the Food in Jars blog. Everyone was saying it was the best jam in the world. The recipe called for vanilla beans. As luck would have it Trader Joe's also sells those. So I caved and bought them.

The recipe also calls for liquid pectin. I hate using bought pectin. I like to make jam the old fashioned way. Pears have very little pectin but they do have some. I've made jam successfully from the low in pectin fruit before. So I figured I'd try it again. And if it didn't work, I'd have some pretty yummy sauce to pour over pancakes. I did add lemon juice to the ingredients as it does help things gel. Pectin, sugar, and acid are all the things you need to make a jam gel. Most fruit have enough acid, but it never hurts, and the flavor of the added lemon juice is always good (as long as you are not too heavy handed with it). I used four cups of pears, 2 cups of sugar, one vanilla bean, and 1 tablespoon of lemon juice. It was coming together just fine until I stepped out of the room for a bit. I forget why. Probably to visit the bathroom or check the laundry or some such silly thing. I came back to a burnt smell. Ahhhhh! I had burnt my jam. That was something I hadn't done before. Too bad too. As it was cooking it tasted wonderful. I'm so sad to have lost it. So this week I'm NOT preserving pear jam. But I have been eating jam that was preserved.

I made some cardamom bread over the weekend and had the leftovers with some of my strawberry jam (yes made without any added pectin). It is a nice combination.

I didn't take many photos of things cooked from the garden, but on that same trip to Trader Joe's, we had extra time to kill before a meeting. So we stopped at the H Mart. If you have never seen one it is the biggest Asian food market known to man, or at least the one we have is. It has a whole wall of different kinds of kim chi. Acres of noodles, and an aisle of different soy sauces. And the produce section is amazing with things I've never seen before. It is best to come in with a mission for one or two things, or to have hours to wander the aisles in fascination. I wanted to stop in and find some young ginger (not the normal kind you find in the stores). If any shop had it, they would. But no it wasn't there. But the mushrooms pulled me in. At Whole Foods the exotic mushrooms cost a fortune. Here they are about $6/lb. They had both wood ear and enoki mushrooms, which I adore, but I couldn't use up both packages before they went bad, so I picked the enoki mushrooms. I made soup with my Chinese cabbage and a too young Tetsukabuto squash. The too young squash was perfect for soup. It didn't over power it even though it had quite a bit in it. The broth was from my local hot pot restaurant. When I go I always bring some quart containers and bring home the broth. It makes the most wonderful soup.

I'm linking up to Jody this week at Spring Garden Acre, as he has Thursday's Kitchen Cupboard this week.