Can-can girl

Or, My “Can-Do” Attitude.

Last night’s meeting with Mike and Steve Borkenhagen of Eulipia was very energizing. They’re being so very generous with our fundraising dinner, doing it for us at cost and being very flexible about menu and seating arrangements, depending on how many tickets we sell. As soon as Amie has a page set up at Brown Paper Tickets, I’ll link to it. But save the date of 17 October!

One necessary facet of eating locally and seasonally is preserving. If you have a flood of something particular in your garden or field (or at the farmers market when it’s cheap) then put it up for later, when fresh is only a distant memory. Such is our tomatillo harvest. I decided just to can them plain, and leave for later the question of cooking and seasoning them for the dinner. So I bought a boiling water bath canner this morning, large enough for 9 one-quart Mason jars, and put up all of the tomatillos.

I had not fully appreciated beforehand the jigsaw aspect of this task, especially as the Ace Hardware down the street had only regular jars, not wide-mouth ones. So the tomatillos softened in their boiling water bath and squished together at the top of the jars.

I’m teaching a tomato canning workshop at Veggielution on 13 September, where we’ll do the same thing, but I’ll make sure to get wide-mouth jars. And I’ll probably use tomato juice as the liquid.

I managed to ripen the pears I took home on Tuesday,

so I also made another batch of jam, this one prune plums and pears mixed.

I read two nice farmer profiles in the LA Times this afternoon (via the Daily Dish.) One about the last farmer on the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which, even when I was growing up in Huntington Beach lo, these many years ago, was already associated much more in the popular mind with huge gated compounds and expensive cars than with farming. And one about the man who makes a 924-mile round trip between Placerville and the Santa Monica Farmers Market, with his “mountain grown” fruit. He sort of inherited an orchard by accident, but has become a passionate farmer.