September KTC Event: Canning with Frank and Anne

Geez louise, folks - If you thought 100 posts was impressive, just imagine--we're up to 101 already!! The technical difficulties nearly did me in this time around, but with the help of a little of High West Whiskey's Rendezvous Rye and a chocolate shortbread cookie or two, I persevered through some late nights and here we are-Finally! 

 It's a good thing, too, because we had such a marvelous time executing Operation: Summer-in-a-Jar recently at Frank and Damian's house. Brainchild of Frank and Anne, the plan was to can the heck out of stuff--a first for me, and an reportedly popular theme! 

Folks were fired up...For starters, Anne herself developed perhaps the best preview email in the history of the group. Since I'll never manage to do it any sort of justice by describing it, I'll let her words speak for themselves:

"Hello friends and family-types!

Frank and I have logged some serious hours on the plan-o-meter (.625 hours and counting) to bring you this thrilling, chilling, better-not-be-spilling KTC event aimed at preserving the best of summer (or, at least, whatever we can scavenge at local farmers markets and (thank you, Henry Kellogg) forage from local blackberry bushes). Details are still sketchy, err, ripening so let me paint this culinary montage in broad brush strokes and we will fill in the details tomorrow:

START TIME: 2 PM  [Be late and risk having to fish out Ball canning lids from pots of scalding water]

LOCATION: Frank and Damian's  (yes, yes, I know some of you were hoping to get an early glimpse of Chateau Kellobach but the neighbors are hosting a celebrity polo tournament in our front yard and we wouldn't want to scare the ponies...Either that, or WSDOT is predicting mass confusion and congestion on I-405 due to 520 closures plus numerous events in Seattle and beyond so do you really want to mess with that?)

FOOD ITEMS LIKELY TO be TRANSFORMED by HEAT and/or PECTIN: blackberries (possibly to be prepared two ways); tomatoes; something else?

But what will we eat?, RIck asks plaintively: Frank has graciously agreed to prepare a lasagne and we will accompany that with a fresh caprese AND some sort of dessert whipped up from among the preserving offerings.  Kitty scratching opportunities will be presented throughout the afternoon.

Meg is bringing canning supplies, as am I.  William, I do not think we need your half-sheets.  Well, ok, maybe one?!  Shawn, I don't think we will need any 5 quart jars but stay tuned.  I am thinking of making tomato sauce or maybe dilly beans on Sunday and if it happens, shit-howdy, come on by!

<...>
Looking forward to it, as always.  Sorry for the long email but Rick fed me coffee this a.m.  Zeeeowwww!

NOTE: If your name is in the TO: line, you are expected to be there.  If you are a Cc, we'd love to see you but never heard that you'd be joining us so you are not yet in the headcount."

This email, as you may recall, was met with much enthusiasm. Besides this, folks scoured their pantries/basements/storage boxes and dug out jars....

...And lids....

Snacks were laid in preparation...

A full box of peaches was at our disposal. Here's one of the kitties having a scratch on the box corner...We understood why, too-the aroma of ripe peaches was intoxicating:

Rick even brought along an apron he reports to have used as a youngster (Something about a first job, I think?). Fernando reports that he had no idea that such vibrantly-colored red dyes had been available during the Paleolithic Era.

 

In short, we were fired up! Ready to roll! ¡Listo, Calixto!

Fernando volunteered straight-away to cut tomatoes for roasting. He'd heard the magic words, "Tomato Confit" and even though he had no idea what the heck that meant, he instinctively knew that time was a-wasting. Here's his handiwork...Please join me in a collective "Wow!" - he's blossoming as a cook, and we're all responsible for that progress! Bravo!

Under Joyce's watchful eye, a gazillion tomatoes were rinsed...

Halved...

 And prepared for roasting:

 

After such hard labor, even Fernando needs to relax a bit. Here he is as the unfortunate subject of Shawn's gleeful abuse. He looks more miserable than he really feels, I promise!

Next, we got busy preparing the fruit. First up, rinse and score about 342,854 peaches. Gawd, they smelled so great! The next step to easily peel far more fruit than is humanly responsible is to drop the scored peaches into a huge pot of boiling water.

After about a minute or so, you fish out the fruit and drop it into an ice bath. I've heard that this rapid temperature change is great for the skin, and it must be true - these babies have a real peaches-and-cream complexion! Hardi, har har...

After a dip in frigid water, the peaches are easy to peel:

Et, voila!

While all the peach-flavored action was going on, young Henry arrived via bicycle, with a knapsack of glass jars filled with blackberries, freshly picked. Someone (was it Damian?) shared an unpleasant story about a batch of blackberries they had prepared for a pie or something that yielded a healthy measure of tiny worms which floated to the surface after the berries were put on to cook. The reported solution was to soak the berries in salt water before cooking, which we did first:

Where are the berries, you say? Why, here are the berries!

They yielded no worms, to my relief, and we drained them for cooking:

Meanwhile, back to the peaches...Rick got to work slicing the peeled peaches:

Ta-da!!! That's only half of them, too!

These babies would go on to cook shortly. Meanwhile, it was time for the roasted tomatoes to come out of the oven. Don't they look lovely?

Here's a closer look:

We realized that we had a dilemma: What to do with the scant pound or so of tomatoes we had leftover which hadn't fit into our sheet pans? Shawn had found a recipe that very morning on the internet for Mark Bitman's Tomato Jam, courtesy of The Wednesday Chef . We conferred with these guys...

And we unanimously decided it was a go. We chopped up the remaining tomatoes and assembled the rest of the ingredients together in a small pan and put them on to simmer.

Henry decided to try his hand at caramelizing onions - after all, not many foodstuffs one stores in a jar are as versatile and delicious as caramelized onions! We sliced up a few pounds of onions, and Henry got to work. Here was the scene:

And here is the action, captured for your viewing pleasure!

Back to the peaches. Christ on a crutch, Helen, we had a lot of peaches!!

We put some of them on to cook next to the tomato jam...

It was hopping in the kitchen! Tomato confit was being assembled, peaches were cooking, onions were browned, tomato jam simmered...Here's a great shot of how snugly we fit in the kitchen. I counted 10 Kissers! Meg couldn't join us that day, so she isn't in there, and Shawn is only missing because she was snapping the photo!

I adore this photo of Joyce's enthusiasm, though - Only Fernando is missing from this one (he probably stepped out to pour more wine), or it would have replaced the one above without a moment's hesitation!

We began to see concrete fruits of our labors. Exhibit A: Tomato Confit!

We ended up offloading what I recall being tomato confit into Frank and Damian's fridge. Frank made a funny comment about how it would surely become lost in the fridge, and they'd pull it out a couple of months later and wonder what the heck it had been. We made a deal that I'd put a photo of it on the blog so they wouldn't forget about it, so here it is, guys! What is in that Athenos container? Is it still languishing in your refrigerator? Go find out! You're welcome!

 

After several hours of heavy labor, our physical weariness gave way to philosophical musings. Henry and Fernando worked at assembling a food mill, truly a feat of engineering on par with spaceship construction or angiographic imagery. This thing was complex. Also, it looked like a time machine! Here's a snippet of that delightful conversation:

The food mill was for the blackberries. I had no idea, but apparently to make a truly superior jam, one must separate the blackberry seeds from the rest. Rick and the guys got started on the task of passing the blackberries through the food mill, and of course we twisted the whole thing around in a most irreverent way, typical of Kiss the Cooks.

Here's a short explanation of the difference between blackberry goo and blackberry poo. Can you guess which one emerges from the backside?

Then, it was back to work. Rick began finely dicing up peaches for freezer jam:

Joyce took a break to play Hangman on Shawn's phone.

Fernando and Damian took a load off, too.

Time to can the peaches! We readied the jars:

Then we got our funnel ready. Here's the first jar of peach jam!

It was beginning to look like we had really and truly done some canning!

The tomato jam was so scant that we decided it should come along to our Lopez Island excursion. That seemed to be the most equitable solution, so we could all try a bit, since there weren't enough jars to go around. Damian volunteered to be the keeper of the jam. Of course, "Jam-Keeper" just begged to be made into a song....I think found the way to embed this as a video, but I'll have to work on it a bit. For now, click here to enjoy!

Next on the agenda was dinner. Frank had made a shitake mushroom lasagna, and we'd assemble a Caprese style salad using our incredible summertime tomatoes.

Here's Shawn showing how easy it is to wow folks when your ingredients are stellar to begin with:

See what I mean? Naturally easy-peasy!

Frank also took full advantage of the delicious peachy abundance to make a peach clafouti - here he is readying it for the oven. Wondering what the heck a clafoutis is? Read about it on Wikipedia!

 

 Peach clafoutis a-baking, dinner was served family-style:

We also ate it family-style. This was so much fun!

Mmmmmmmm, tasty!

Pretty soon, our plates were empty. Here's the Sarah Palin plate. This bear seems to be asking, "Isn't it time for peach clafoutis?"

To our utter delight, it was! Look at this thing!

Frank was so proud (and rightfully so!), that we interrupted the final moments of dinner to present his masterpiece:

I'm tickled to say that next weekend already is our excursion to Lopez Island - woo-hoo! I'm looking forward to seeing all y'all then. Looks like this guy is sort of bummed to miss out on the excursion, though...

See you then, Kissers!