FRUIT BAT MAKES GOOD!

Yes, I've been busy. So has Z___, for that matter; she's a fantastic 11-year-old sous-chef niece. She gladly chopped, mashed, whizzed, & stirred.

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Saturday we produced my classic summer dessert: Modified Rhubarb #3, which I developed years ago after exhaustive experimenting with rhubarb & crisp variations. It's awfully close to perfect; rhubarb & cherries nestled lovingly under a granola-esque topping. I also got brave (or inspired) and tried something new. Modified Rhubarb #4 has the same topping; but is peaches, rainier cherries, and rhubarb. At the risk of quoting Aerosmith, everything about them was so F-I-N-E, fine.

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(Served on my best Royal Chinet; we had guests for a fish-fry. The man brought home a literal pile of fresh lake fish, which we served with ribs, Taber corn, and the above crisp. Mmmmmm.)

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Sunday, after going to the park to slide with Am, Z & I went to the Calgary & Crossroads Farmers Market's, and hauled back fruit. Blueberries, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, and yellow beans for a treat for supper were all purveyed. It hurt me to do it, but I settled for California strawberries; the man's only jam request was for strawberry, and if that (along with occasionally stocking the fridge with Stella) makes me a good wife, then I'm on it. After hunting through both farmer's markets, the only BC strawberries I could find were $5 for a wee, wee basket. Now, I love my husband, but neither Z nor I could do it. So we got the California ones, and next year, we're going home to SK to visit when NOTHING is ripe. (We had all of our June-bearing, erm, July-bearing strawberries fruit while we were gone. We got the very first & the very last, and all of the heavy bearing days we missed. A savage burn indeed.)

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All of the other fruit was from BC, and the beans were "local", which I imagine means Albertan. And mostly marked down! An unforeseen advantage of shopping at the end of the last day of the weekend.

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And then we jammed! I made freezer jam, because a) it tastes so much better to me b) it uses less sugar c) you don't have to muck around with clean jars & sealer rings & scalding thises & boiling thats NEARLY as much. It's faster, & I can work with the smaller quantities produced; I get to tinker with different blends.

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So I did. I made a batch of strawberry, a double batch of black-blue-rasp-strawberry (quadberry), and a double batch of peach-strawberry last night. Tonite, I made a batch of blueberry & a batch of blueberry-rhubarb (rhuberry).

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All fruit but the strawberry were cooked down - I want jam, not jelly. This is last night's quadberry & peach fruit, in cooking phase.

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I also got adventurous & bagged all the jams; I've rolled them into little tubes, and then stored them in big ziploc baggies to keep them tidy in the freezer. I'm scowling in the above pic because it was getting late, I was getting impatient for bed, and the peach-strawberry was JUST on this side of painfully hot. Also, all of my favorite t-shirts are getting too small.

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After initial taste tests, I think that I like the rhuberry best, followed by the peach strawberry, then the quadberry, then the standalones. I'm interested to see what the man thinks; he doesn't like black or raspberries, so a couple of the contenders are mine, all mine.

This is peach-strawberry on an English muffin. I'm tempted to fib & say that it's a fresh biscuit, but that's pure fantasy*. I haven't gotten that carried away yet, and honestly, given my love of both freezer jam AND fresh biscuits**, for the grand taste-off I should probably invite a panel of judges to join me & tackle me*** when I go in for fifths.

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*I originally typoed that as "fantasty". How Freudian!

**I will typically eat at least four biscuits when I make them; a couple with butter, then a couple with butter & honey for dessert. They're a quickbread, and no good cold or left-over, right? So I don't think I'm being excessive. And I'll share with Am. (The man's a grown adult, if he can't earmark his own biscuits, then that's sad, but I'm not sharing.)

**With love, and don't really mean it until I get to sevenths.