Green Sheet Friday.

Black Friday?  Perhaps.  But forevermore, in my mind, this is Green Sheet Friday!
Ten Years ago today, on the day after Thanksgiving, Jennifer and I started colluding about how to prepare for a pending engagement and ultimately marriage.  We mutually decided that it was the path that our lives were destined to take, so ever-logically, we started drafting the factors that need to be under consideration to help make it happen.

We pulled out a green sheet of paper and began brainstorming.  Through the years, we've talked about "the green sheet", though I don't know that we've known where it was.  Recently, I stumbled upon it again.

As we look through it, it's interesting to see that our biggest concerns were finances and timing.  We trusted that everything else would take care of itself.  After 10 years, I can attest that we made it through the engagement and early marriage years successfully; finances have worked out and we've never had any regrets on the timing. 

On the back, we made "rules of engagement."  These flowed down from two courses I think.  First, we had a great bishop who counseled single adults to stay "out of the box."  The box was pretty much any private place where a couple was confined away from others.  So we had a few rules about being inclusive.  We had rules about respecting personal space and making the most of our time together.  Together, we felt the rules would put us in a place where we could have a respectful engagement that would keep us out of the box.  Since they include some cultural references that you might not get, and I wouldn't want to embarrass Jen, I've left of the actual images of the green sheet..

For the fun of it, we wrote down the responses of our friends as we told them, as follows, for those who can't read my script:

Jen and Joe (interested party): I just want you!

Steve (my roommate): Well good, Joe.  [eyes roll]

Joe's parents: I'm so happy for you.

Ben and family (apartment-mate): Well, it is tradition to ask permission.

Jen's parents: Oh you are?

Isaac (longtime friend): You're kidding, right?

Amy (Jen's best friend/coworker): ---Awww!

Jared (Joe's best friend):  I can't believe you.  I'll still have you for the next semester.

Shannon and Chris (engaged roommate):  Hahahah! Congratulations!

Matt Duke (the ward bachelor): Oh reaaaaally?

Jenn Alder (Jen's best friend/roommate): Ahhhhh!

Erin Steck (Jen's apartment-mate): --No. Way.

So that is the story of the Green Sheet.  The evidence is clear that everything Jen and Joe were bound to do would be thoughtful, methodical, and structured!

Happy 10 years of commitment, dear!

A Brief Photo Essay: Thanksgiving.

This year is our first ever Thanksgiving on Cape Cod.  We've done Easter, Memorial Day, Labor Day, New Years, and several in-between days at Chatham over the years, but never a Thanksgiving.  Our lucky day!

Here's what it looked like:

The Place-tags, courtesy of Jennifer'ose.

The Serving Buffet: In Action.

My Portion.  Firsts and Seconds on One Plate.

The Company.  Blake slept through the whole dinner.

Happy Thanksgiving! Gourmet.

The other day I was reading about the word gourmet, because it seemed kind of interesting how many foreign food terms are used in regular English.  And I don't mean French fries, spaghetti, or pizza. Ha!  I meant words like hors d'oeuvres, crudite, and the like.  Yes, Julia Child taught us that there is an art to masterful French cooking.  We tend to have a general concept in America of high food and low food.  If I had to generalize, the high food requires a fork and comes in very small portions, and the low food might focus on flavor via fats and include buffet style serving.

A few hundred years ago, gourmet indicated decadent luxury, and was frowned upon as a violation of the Deadly Sin of gluttony.  By 1984, the term foodie was coined, which referred to a fan of food.

Apparently (from Wikipedia), a gourmet food movement picked up in the 1980s after a long-standing division between elitism and populist tastes, and has accelerated through the 2000s due to rising incomes, globalization, and health/nutrition craze.  With the growth in food awareness, we have seen many new cooking shows, channels, and fads.  In some cases, the high-brow version has become very commonplace (gourmet coffee for example).  With this trend, there have been attempts to spiff up low food, and give gourmet flair to your everyday dish.  You can find thousands of "foodie blogs" these days, also.

So now, the question is this:  Does the gourmet (original gluttony connotation or otherwise) apply to Thanksgiving?  I know very few people who will be eating conservative portions or their normal menu this weekend.

Thanksgiving dinner has some pretty weird foods.  Consider it.  Turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes, squash.  Pumpkin Pie.  This is about what our menu looked like, too, though add a couple of varieties of jello salad, heavenly sweet potatoes, and butternut squash to go with it!  And Grammy Mitchell always provides about 6 varieties of pie!

from Wikipedia.

Some of these foods are only eaten once per year, but are delicious.  Not that they are decadent, but because they are traditional, perhaps.  And we don't go for dainty portions.  I had two plates worth.

The long table of loved ones.

Papa working on the bird.

Jen did the centerpieces and place-cards this year.  Didn't she do great?

Yes, that is an edible pilgrim hat, a juicy apple votive, and a cranberry/floral/mason floaty thing.

Let the games begin!

Happy NaBloPoMo Eve, also known as Halloween.

We had a decent Halloween this evening, and I took my two little monkeys trick-or-treating down the street and back tonight.  Ian had a great time of it, and always wanted to be the first one to the door.  Blake politely said thank you in baby sign each time someone put candy in his bag.  Fortuitously for me, his monkey mits made it a challenge for Blake to pick a candy from each of the bowls, so I took the liberty to choose for him (me).  Blake's bag might be biased toward M&Ms, Twix, and Butterfinger.  Unfortunately for me, I carried him on my hip, so my arms were twitchy and achy by the time we had finished traveling door to door begging for candy.  When we got home, we sorted through the loot and put the sticky goey candies back in our bowl for redistribution to the other families in the neighborhood, and kept the chocolaty treats and the hard candy on a stick.

The boys at my office for some trick-or-treat.  I was the tourist, taking pictures of the fauna.

So starting tomorrow, we'll be in November, which I am planning to participate in Blog Posting Month, and Jen said I could "Occupy Funghi Fritti Street" during the staged event.  Should be good.  I've been brainstorming things worthy of a blog post.  Now just to find the time to create my daily record.

As a preview, I make my first offering:  A look at sugars.  After all, it IS Halloween.

This summer, I made a bunch of Strawberry Jam, since Jen went and picked 30 pounds of the sweetest, ripest berries at a PYO (Pick Your Own) farm in Southern Maine with her mother.  Generally, I'm not much of a fan of using PYO as a means to get bulk items, since you have to pay a premium to have the chance to make your own selection.  Most of the time, I'm happy to have the leftovers for the sake of making apple chips, peach jam (free last year!), or tomato sauce.  But.  Pristine strawberries and leftover strawberries have a very wide chasm of quality between them.  The flats of strawberries Jen came home with smelled like sweet nectar and were mouth-wateringly delightful.  Jen said the impetus behind the 30 pounds was to make enough jam to make it through to next summer.  And we go through alot of Jam around here folks.  So I went and bought a few bags of sugar and a whole case of pectin.

Jen said she wanted freezer jam, because it tastes sooooo good.  You get the raw berry flavor, plus the tang from the pectin when you do freezer jam.

I made 12 batches.  Freezer jam takes 2 cups berries and 4 cups sugar per box of pectin.  Catch that?  Twice as much Sugar!  No wonder Jen likes it so much!  I got pretty good at making a double batch, even, but much beyond that and I couldn't get the timing right on boiling the pectin and dissolving all the sugar with the fruit and cooked pectin.  (Raw fruit, remember, so the only heat comes from the boiled pectin.)

Total Strawberries: $60, 48 cups  ~$1.25 per cup

Pectin: $2.00/box

Sugar: 2.78/5 lb bag, 11.25 cups/5 lb, ~$.25 per cup

Freezer Jam breakdown: 12 batches, 2 c. berries, 4 c. sugar=> ~30 pints  (in 12 pints, 10 half pints, and as many plastic containers as we had).  So each batch ran about $5.50 for 2.5 pints = $2.20 per pint.

Those twelve batches were starting to get a bit tedious, because using up the berries only 2 cups at a time was pretty slow going.  I was starting to get worn out, I was looking at a rapidly diminishing supply of freezer-eligible containers, and thought it was time for a change.  Now, last year, when I stocked up on the end-of-season mason jars, there were a few boxes of sugar-free pectin that I picked up, too, just because.  You know, you want to have something for all your diabetic friends.  (Or does the strawberry sugar negate the sugar-free part of the equation?)  It's a cooked recipe, so the jam DEFINITELY tastes different.  Cooked berries and no heaps of sugar, but replaced with honey is quite likely to be... different.  But it was a fun experiment still.

Sugar-free breakdown: 2 batches, 4 c. berries, 1 c. honey=> 5 pints (in 5 pint sealed jars), which puts my estimate around $8 for 2.5 pints, or $3.20 per pint.

Now that I was out of the sugar-free pectin and out of freezer containers, I came down the home stretch with traditional jam for the food storage shelves.  I figured this was the most prudent thing to do, as it used the berries up and prevented our careful investment in the Maine Berry industry from rotting before our eyes.

Regular breakdown: 3 batches, 5 c. berries, 7 c. sugar=> 12 pints (in 12 pint sealed jars), costing about $10 for 4 pints, equaling $2.50 per pint.

So now you ask, "Joe, what do you make of these facts and figures from your Summer Jam Session?"

Here's what I have to say:  The freezer jam, though heavy on the sugar, DOES taste the best of the three recipes, costs the least, and requires the least amount of berries per pint of jam.  I resisted early on because of the sugar to berry ratio, and I just thought it was silly to not take advantage of my mad canning skills.  Turns out that we've barely made a dent in the jam supply so far, and I think if we backed off from 30 pounds to 10 pounds next year, that'd still cover us for a year's supply of freezer jam.  And for my last observation-- I probably didn't need to process ALL of the berries, since we have a freezer and could have kept some whole for milk-shakes.  But I didn't think of that until afterward, did I?


Anything else I should consider for the jam-fest?

Joe's stuff.

The summer has really flown by. Amazing how fast time can pass when you are just living life. So there are several things that are worth mentioning.

1. I had a birthday. Jen invited me to a new decade by hiring a cake to be made that featured one of my favorite styles of neckwear.



BLUEBERRIES!!!









2. August came and we managed to keep up the tradition of going to pick blueberries. We happened to go a little later in the season where there were a couple of rows where we could get the late berries which are a bit smaller and sweeter.







Ian had a quart bucket to fill, and he chose the largest of the berries (easy picking!) Blake had a left and right cheek to fill, so he parked himself under the low-hanging fruit and plucked and stuffed and plucked and stuffed and plucked....etc.








Blake would occasionally crawl around the bushes to find me or look for some more easy pickings. Jen was keen on getting the smallest berries that were ripe, since she knew they would make the best jams and syrups and cooking. The big payoff was the pancakes that Jen made with the blueberries embedded whole. I should just refer to them as cakes, because they were thick and delicious. Add to that some of the blueberry jam that I made, and it was heaven.

3. I planted a garden this year and was relatively disappointed when the zucchini and cucumbers and pumpkins didn't seem to pollinate very well. I would routinely have a few female flowers and would hope that the male flowers would make themselves available to the bees. (I didn't see any birds.) However, the zucchini would just shrivel after a few days because apparently it needed a bit of help with the old pollination routine. I guess I'm not too worried about it, because most of the starts came up in the compost pile from the seeds from last year's CSA vegetables. Today, as I was out cleaning up some of the cherry tomatos that had blown off the plants due to tropical storm winds over the weekend, I thought I'd have a look for ANY fruits on the squashes. I found these two guys hanging out under some tall grass. I call them my squashcumbers. Perhaps they are overripe? Or improperly cross-pollinated?