preserving the harvest

been doing a bit more preserving. my mom, sister and i picked up a flat of strawberries and a basket filled with asparagus (split between the two of us) at a farmer's market in london last week. i turned half of the strawberries into jam early this week with leah's help and brooke did the same with the rest later on, with some black pepper added.

jam was new territory to me but it went pretty smoothly. i mean, i'm pretty sure strawberry jam is almost a no-fail, especially when you're making the over-sugared, pectin filled variety straight out of the Bernadin book of home preserving. the asparagus however...a bit of a nightmare. because my mom and i had split the basket, i didn't have quite enough for the recipe, but i thought no big deal! this isn't a jelly, these are PICKLES. no problem! very wrong. i'm still a bit confused about what happened but somehow i ended up with not enough liquid to fill the jars and so have just these two measly jars of pickled asparagus and a tupperware filled with some much less pickled & unpreserved.

oh well. this was once again from the Bernadin cookbook and though i haven't cracked either one of these puppies open, the ones in the tupperware taste like they will be a little sweet for my liking. they did have some good tips though, like putting your asparagus into the jar floret side down so that you don't make a mess of them trying to get a spear out to snack on. we had spicy pickled asparagus from Hy Hope a couple of weeks ago (the inspiration for this undertaking, actually) that were head side up and they were so delicate that they pretty much disintegrated when jostled by a fork or someone's finger (mostly alnis's fingers...).

 if anyone reads this and has a recommendation for a great preserving cookbooks, please pass it on :)