Yesterday, my good friend, Karen Pryor, stopped by for what has become an annual June event – making Jam. As a teenager she developed a love of making jelly. There’s something both scientific and magical about transforming only two ingredients – fruit and sugar – into something so delicious. Like everything that Karen does, she takes something that can seem daunting, and turns it into something doable and worthwhile (if you’re not familiar with her work, take a look
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This year, we made strawberry jam made from fruit purchased locally at Verrill Farm. Their berries have that ripe, just-picked flavor of fruit grown for what they taste like, not how well they ship. So good!
Watching the process of the sugar liquifying and the fruit gelling is ever so satisfying. As is eating the results. Jam needs to be served on something, preferably some sort of bread, with good butter. So, before Karen came, I mixed up popover batter. As the jam boiled, I put the popovers in the oven. Like the jam, the popovers were easy as could be to make.
Perfect Popovers from the HenCam
3 eggs
1 1/4 cup all-purpose flour
1 cup milk (1% to whole is fine)
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon melted butter
1. Coat a popover pan with non-stick spray. You can use a muffin tin, but the popovers won’t have the classic cylinder shape or rise as high.
2. Put the eggs, flour, milk and salt into a blender. Puree. Scrape the sides down a couple of times to make sure that dry flour doesn’t remain in the corners.
3. Blend in the butter.
4. Popover batter is best if it has a couple of hours to rest in the refrigerator, but you can use it right away. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees. Pour the batter into the popover pan.
5. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until risen and golden brown.
makes 6 popovers
My auntie used to make Æbleskivers…have you ever had those? They are kind of like a popover…you could put jam or butter in the middle. Yours look amazing!
I had to look them up – they look delicious.
Yum! Last week I made strawberry/rhubarb jam with fruit from my yard. I love making jam, too. This morning I am going to make raspberry jam with fruit from my raspberry patch…it is one of my favorite things to do in the early summer time.
Love her training videos, especially the one with the Oscar Fish. My mother was wondering if she still trains Oscar Fishes and if so if they still sulk and get upset if she is slow in giving them the treat for the correct behavior.
Karen no longer has a pet fish to train. She’s busy applying positive reinforcement to the training of surgeons. Very exciting work.
I hope you meant “sturgeons” but I suppose that surgeons could also use some positive reinforcement training! He he he!
Actually, I did mean surgeons. She’s teamed up with an orthopedic surgeon, and they’re transforming how medical students at a prestigious hospital in NYC are being taught tool skills.
That’s awesome! Positive reinforcement is good for everyone and I was just being species-centric to think that it didn’t apply to humans. Sorry.
I made a small batch of strawberry jam last week from 2 pints of berries. My favorite is apricot jam but our tree had a small crop this year so I dried them instead. Jam is a magical process.
Good apricots are impossible to find around here.
Oh boy did you bring back the memories. BAD ONES!!!!!!!!
(hit enter too soon).
Growing up we had a huge garden, fruit trees and the worse was picking wild black and raspberries in the heat of the summer with long sleeves that were taped to the wrists and jeans.
We did a lot of canning.
I swore canning and cutting firewood would be two things I would never do again once I moved out of the house.
I’ve kept that promise to myself with the exception of cutting and stacking wood but a tornado forced that on me.
It does look delicious.
I know people who never ever want to take care of another chicken, having done that as children :)
You are correct.
I really liked my ex mother-in-law (it was the daughter I had problems with ;-) ) and she likes me, still calls me every once in a while. Any way her and I grew up in the country doing all kinds of things and when the discussion of what we would never do again comes up the first thing out of her mouth is “hang clothes up outside to dry”. And of all the things that one I probably wouldn’t even put on my list.