• Jam with a punch

    It’s rhubarb season! So far I’ve made a rhubarb pie (with strawberry juice), a rhubarb crisp (but I don’t think it counts since it was made from last year’s frozen rhubarb), another rhubarb pie (which I will write about shortly), and rhubarb jam. It is the jam I want to talk about now.


    This jam is oh-so-simple to make—just toss four ingredients together, simmer them for twenty minutes and ta-da!—you have yourself some tangy, punchy jam. (Because this jam doesn’t call for any of the traditional jam thickeners such as Sure-jell, the end result is less gelatinous and more like thick, blob-y fruit preserves.)

    While the original recipe calls for rhubarb, sugar, candied ginger, and lemon zest, I did a little research and have come to the conclusion that you can make any number of variations on the theme and the recipe will be none the worse for it: when I was digging around in my cupboard for the candied ginger, I found some candied orange peel which I then decided to add in place of the called-for lemon zest. The chewy chunks of fruit gave the jam a marmalade-like flair—a good thing, in my book.


    Some variation suggestions: Add fresh, powdered, or candied ginger, lemon or orange zest, candied lemon or orange peel. You may want to add other fresh or frozen fruits, too, though you might need to adjust the sugar and cooking times accordingly. I read one recipe that paired red raspberries with rhubarb, and that got me to thinking about fresh cranberries… And now that I wrote the words “fresh cranberries” I’m wondering about dried—I bet craisins (golden raisins? sour cherries?) would be quite tasty and in keeping with the marmalade theme.

    Anyway, as my rhubarb comes in I plan to cook up little batches of this jam. Each recipe yields a pint of jam, so I think I’ll hot-pack it in half-pint jars as I go along. That is, if we don’t eat it all up first.


    Rhubarb Jam
    Adapted from Epicurious, a recipe from the July 1997 issue of Bon Appétit.

    The original recipe called for 1 1/4 cups of sugar, but I cut it back to one cup. Depending on your preferences, you may want increase the amount, or even decrease it some more.

    The recipe doesn’t call for any water, but I added a couple tablespoons because the mixture seemed impossibly dry and I was afraid it would scorch. I needn’t have worried though, because as soon as the rhubarb started heating up, it wept copious amounts of water. If you, like me, want to add a little liquid to appease your qualms, I suggest using only a couple tablespoons of water or fruit juice (orange, grape, or apple would all be delicious, I think).

    (See the body of the post for the other recipe variations.)

    4 cups rhubarb, cleaned and chopped into ½ inch pieces
    1 cup sugar
    3 tablespoons candied ginger, chopped
    1 teaspoon lemon zest

    Mix the ingredients together in a heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring to a boil. Once it is boiling steadily, turn the heat down to a high medium so that it still bubbles pleasantly, but not at break-neck speed. Once the mixture has thickened (it will mound up on a spoon and briefly separate when you cut through it with the stirring spoon) it is done. Note: Stir the mixture quite a bit at the beginning and end of the cooking time to prevent scorching, but in the middle you can relax a little, checking on it once every two or three minutes.

    Either hot pack the jam in jars, or cool it to room temperature before transferring it to the fridge or freezer.

    Serve the rhubarb jam on toast, muffins, scones, add it to yogurt, serve warm on top of vanilla or strawberry ice cream, use as a fruit filling for shortbread cookies and coffee cakes, or drizzle over cheesecake.

    Updated, May 8, 2009
    The second time I made this jam, I added about a third cup of frozen cranberries and they turned the jam nice and red (the variety of rhubarb I have in my garden tends to be mostly green with a few red stalks, resulting in a pinkish jam).


    For that batch of jam I used lemon zest and for the next one I used orange zest. Both were delicious.

  • Making me think

    Some thoughts to chew on, from Marianne Williamson.

    “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

    It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us. You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.

    There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you.

    We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us, it is in everyone.

    And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.

    As we are liberated from our fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

  • The fourth plague

    “What is the purpose of flies, anyhow?” I blurted.


    Friends and family had joined us for dinner and we were still lounging about in our chairs, sated with the multiple pieces of pie we had just eaten: quiche, chickpea and chard, peach, rhubarb, blackberry, and sour cherry (yes, I was a bit insane to undertake such a project, but by the time I realized that, the work had been completed and we were happily full). The annoying black critters were zipping about our heads as energetically as ever, reminding me of the question that Yo-Yo had posed to me earlier and prompting me to toss it out to the group.

    The answers were varied: “For the frogs … A plague to keep us humble … It flies in the face of reason.” In other words, nobody knew.

    Our fly infestation hit an all-time high the following night. When we got up from dinner we discovered that the kitchen floor was covered with flies. Every time one of us walked to the fridge, to the stove, to the sink, swarms rose up into the air, a seething cloud of filth. It was unbelievably disgusting.

    We quickly went about washing dishes, putting food away, hanging an extra fly tape, and vigorously smacking the darn things in a wild wholesale slaughter. I went from one side of the kitchen smack-smack-smacking with my Tiny-Little Brother coming along behind with the vacuum suck-suck-sucking. As soon as he cleaned one area of the floor and moved to the newest battlegrounds, I went back to the cleaned section and dirtied it all over again. After about fifteen minutes of methodical mass murder, we were down to a permissible number of flies.

    The next morning Mr. Handsome attempted a homemade flytrap. I chuckled, but didn’t poke too much fun—if his method worked, I was willing to wreath our house with syrup-and-vinegar-filled plastic milk jugs.


    But it didn’t work, and we’re back to our standard green-and-yellow art decor—at least it matches rather well with our table lamp. Kind of whimsical, I think. The gooey flies occasionally drip off down on to the table, so it’s advisable not to eat raisin bran anywhere in the vicinity.

    During fly season I spend a lot of time thinking about shoofly pie. For real. I go around saying: I am so sick of these flies! This is disgusting! This is unspeakable! Scram! Get out of here. Die! SHOO! And then I think: Pie.

    Shoo + Fly = Pie. It’s a basic cultural/culinary equation. It’s like that word association game that tells how smart you are. Someone shouts out “murder” and then you say “knife, dead, cold-blooded, assassin, and flyswatter!” Or they call out the word “fly” and you say “buzz, annoying, filthy, flyswatter, and pie.” Then the evaluator knows that not only are you a certifiable genius, you also hail from hearty Pennsylvania Dutch farmer stock. Moo.


    In between smashing flies and wiping them up (yes, I’m the heavy-handed swatter-er type—the flatter the fly the better), I’ve been attempting to perfect my shoofly pie recipe. My standard recipe comes from the More-With-Less Cookbook. It’s a cake-top pie with a gooey bottom, but I have trouble with the bottom goo bubbling up and out, leaving me with a mostly dry pie and a very stinky kitchen.


    Then I tried the shoofly pie from The Pie and Pastry Bible. That recipe called for coffee in the liquid mixture, as well as cinnamon and nutmeg, and was baked in a cream cheese crust. It was altogether a different animal from the other recipe, full of complex, intense flavors.


    Even though that recipe (pictured above) was quite elegant, I’m going to go ahead and give you the recipe for the shoofly pie from the More-with-Less Cookbook since it is the most traditional recipe that I know. If you have a shoofly pie recipe that is your all-time favorite, please pass it on to me (keeping in mind that it must have a gooey bottom). There’s a chance it might become my favorite recipe, too.

    Shoofly Pie
    Adapted from the More-with-Less Cookbook

    I suggest using an unsulfured molasses, such as Grandma’s—sulfured molasses has a bitter flavor. If the molasses flavor is still too strong for your taste, you may want to substitute part of the molasses with some light corn syrup, King syrup, or maybe even some maple syrup, though I haven’t tried that myself.

    This pie, if done properly, yields a layer of gooey, molasses-ness at the bottom and a moist cake-top. Make sure your pie crust has no holes or cracks where the liquid filling might leak out, and take care not to over-fill the pie. Mark my words, it is better to throw out a couple tablespoons of filling than to burn up the extra on the floor of the oven!

    1 cup flour
    ½ cup brown sugar
    2 tablespoons butter
    1 cup molasses
    1 egg, beaten
    1 cup water, divided
    1 teaspoon baking soda
    9-inch pie crust, unbaked

    Using your fingers, mix together the flour, brown sugar, and butter until crumbly and fine. Set aside ½ cup of the crumbs to sprinkle on top the pie before baking.

    Dissolve the baking soda in 1/4 cup of warm water (not hot, as hot water will activate the baking soda and cause it to lose its magical powers).

    In a large mixing bowl stir together the molasses, egg, remaining 3/4 cup of water (cold this time—you don’t want to cook the egg), and then add the dissolved baking soda. Add the crumb mixture (not the reserved half-cup portion) and stir well before pouring into the pie shell. Sprinkle the remaining crumbs over the top.

    Bake the pie for about 35 minutes at 375 degrees, until no longer wibbly-wobbly and the cake top springs back when you touch it with your finger.

    Serve warm with cold milk, whipped cream, or vanilla ice cream.