Posts Tagged ‘black cap jam’
Unfortunate Crashes
This year’s Tour de France bike race has been entertaining but I do not enjoy the added drama of nasty crashes. The worst is when an incident is triggered by the carelessness of a fan as happened this morning.
I love having access to watch from home but it is sad when the motorcycles with the camera operators get in the way of a racer trying to break away from a competitor.
I’m soaking up the race while enjoying fresh-picked wild black raspberries on my yogurt with eggs and toast spread with Cyndie’s blackcap jam.
We are enduring the latest onslaught of dangerous air quality from Canadian wildfires that turns the splashes of color in the woods to an eery shade of orange.
You can see speckles of it on the fresh dirt Asher has thrown as he created a new canyon in a matter of seconds yesterday. He and I spent much of the day alone together while Cyndie attended a funeral in the Cities and then met with a group of her gang of high school friends who got together for lunch to celebrate a series of birthdays.
When Asher wasn’t napping, he demanded constant attention that had me kicking him a ball to chase and then I would need to retrieve it from beneath furniture where he pretended to “bury” it.
He’s almost a year and a half old and shows little indication of growing out of puppy energy any time soon. During this phase, I find I am much more inclined to ‘crash’ long before he does throughout each day.
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Orange Rust
It’s a sad year for our wild black raspberries. An outbreak of highly contagious orange rust disease has infested many, if not all, of the brambles that are scattered about our property. It’s the first time we’ve faced this calamity in the nine years we’ve been here.
The devastating thing we’ve learned about this disease is that it can’t be cured. The infected plants must be dug up or killed. Before moving on to a different stand of plants, the tools need to be cleaned to avoid spreading the disease to healthy plants.
The thing is, the spores spread in the wind and we’ve already seen evidence of infection in so many places that it feels rather hopeless to assume we still have plants that aren’t already infected. At the same time, we don’t have much choice if we ever want to have black raspberries again. The fungus doesn’t kill the plant, but there will no longer be any flowers or fruit.
Part of me wants to just let nature take its course since that’s how the multitudes of berry brambles showed up in the first place. Easy come, easy go, as they say. But Cyndie has been making the most delicious black cap jam from the bounty of fruit we were finding the last many years, I’m finding it hard to face the possibility that might come to an end.
I’m also lamenting the addition of the unexpected chore of hunting down and digging up the infected plants when there are so many other tasks needing attention.
One consolation I am going to cling to is the fact we have recently planted some red raspberry canes that our daughter, Elysa, brought from her house (originally transplanted from my sister, Mary’s plot!) and orange rust does not infect red raspberries.
I know Cyndie can make a worthy raspberry jam out of red berries, and I’m willing to adjust my desires out of necessity, but oh, that black cap jam was somthin’ else!
Dang orange fungus.
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Star Spangled
Cyndie cooked up some star-spangled black cap jam yesterday! It all started with some pre-canning berry picking when Elysa and Ande arrived to join in the fun. Made from real fresh berries.
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Then the cooking magic in the kitchen commenced, using more sugar than I am allowed to be in the same room with, leading to jars upon jars of the precious dark jam.
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And a filled kitchen sink.
Just to top off the busy afternoon over the stove, Cyndie baked two loaves of bread so we could test out the jam while it was still warm. The flavor treat set off fireworks in my taste buds!
Speaking of fireworks, one of my trusted news sources (who shall go unnamed to protect their reputation) let me down royally with a timely story offering four tips to help dog owners ease the stress of frightened pets during the sunset hours of exploding ordinance this time of year.
One: Don’t take your pet to the fireworks show.
Really?
Two: Keep your pet safe at home.
Isn’t that the same thing as not taking them to the show?
Three: Try over the counter remedies.
Oh, why didn’t I think of that before?
Four: Make sure your pet is microchipped.
July 4 is the number one day dogs and cats get lost, it says.
Well, that is not a tip that will ease my dog’s stress, so that was only three morsels of expert advice.
Color me thoroughly disappointed in that “helpful” tidbit of intrepid journalistic expertise.
We ushered Delilah into her “den” for the night, and she was able to quietly ignore the repeating echoes of small arms fire sounds percolating well past my bedtime. Delilah sleeps in a crate with a cover draped over it, which seems to provide her with enough comfort that she will generally ignore most activity overnight.
Last night, I could have used a sound proof cover over my bed. Regardless, once I got to sleep, it was dreamy visions of star-spangled black cap jam dancing in my head all night long.
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Berry Bounty
‘Tis the time of year when raspberries suddenly appear in significant numbers, materializing magically against the dominant green backdrop in every direction we turn. Sometimes they surprise us by showing up in a cluster of growth that we didn’t even realize included raspberry canes.
Cyndie has tried pruning some of our wild berry patches in the past, hoping to make it a little easier to walk through for picking berries, but the vigorous bushes seem to grow themselves into a solid mass again as soon as we turn our backs.
Time to dig out the Ball jars with the two-piece metal lids in preparation of preserving the harvest.
As is clearly visible in the image, we are lucky to be getting Black Cap Raspberries. I am not clever enough to successfully describe the flavor distinction between a red raspberry and a black cap, but after developing a taste for the unique flavor of the black caps, I have truly become a snob about the black cap supremacy.
One of my absolute favorite treats is well-toasted New England Brown Bread spread with a layer of cream cheese and topped with Cyndie’s home-canned black cap jam. It’s an explosion of texture and unparalleled flavor that is pure culinary bliss.
The first year she canned berries here, we gave the majority of jars away to friends and family before we realized the distinct difference of the black cap flavor. It was a minor disaster when we discovered there were no more jars of the preferred black cap jam left in the house for us.
Now we know to hoard a secret stash of our own, separate from the stock that gets shared.
Honestly, of all the different ways we have considered monetizing our activities here, Cyndie’s black cap jam is probably the most valuable. Too bad we aren’t willing to part with enough of that black gold to make that idea worthwhile.
The yield looks bountiful this year. Something tells me I should be stocking up on loaves of brown bread, too.
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Relative Something 