Step away from the market

What I went to the Clinton/Bailey Market (piously) to buy: Greens.

My only plants in the garden doing well are the Arugula and the Spinach Mustard. The beans were eaten by something. Chopped off. Chomped off, I suspect. Gone.

So I wanted greens to go with my spinach and arugula. But I should have known better going to the market. Because I bought:

Cherries ($5)

Peaches ($6)

Savoy cabbage ($3)

Green onions ($2). May I point out this is an enormous bunch of green onions. It is about two feet long!

Basil plants ($5)

Oh, dear. The list goes on.

Kale ($1.50)

Blueberries ($4)

Corn ($2)

Cucumbers ($1)

At this point this one girl called out to me, "You just can't stop, girlfriend!" It put me in such a good mood that I went and bought more peaches, what the heck.

There was no stopping me! And you know things are bad when it gets so that you know most of the farmers.

After the market I went to the gym to do the Fat Burner Elliptical while listening to Pennario playing Chopin Preludes. Here it is a sunny 80 degree day but the No. 1 item on my weekend bucket list is making black cherry ice cream.

Desperate times call for desperate measures!

Haha.. I took all these pictures of my market adventure but I have to go figure out how to get them out of my phone. When I try to do it all that comes up are the pictures from Howard's phone, zut alors. So I used one of his pictures up above. It is of me! Before my market adventure.

All right, enough Web logging.

Off to make that ice cream!

Strawberry Island

Pursuant to going U-pick strawberry picking this week, an adventure I got to chronicle in The Buffalo News, I made strawberry jam.

Unbelievable, the feeling of accomplishment! And of having the right garage sale equipment. I have garage sale tongs for the jars and a garage sale funnel to use to pour the jam into the jars, and just recently I acquired a special mini-canner that is good for jars that are pint-sized and smaller. That is it sitting on the Bosch up above.

Strawberry jam!

 

All this while Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts were touring the Darwin Martin House right down the street. I take time out of my life and my kitchen only for Leonard Pennario so I did not join them.

End result, as we say here in Buffalo, I now have six half-pints of jam. The satisfaction (speaking of the Rolling Stones) is unbelievable!

I used this Martha Stewart recipe, just strawberries and sugar, beautiful and simple. It took a while to find just a basic recipe. A lot of online recipes had too low an amount of sugar. "I wanted to be healthy," people write. Fie! The science of canning is such that you need a certain amount -- a large amount -- of sugar to preserve the jam right and get the right texture.

And as long as you are not piously going to eat your strawberries plain, let us not be naive, jam is the least of the evils. It is one of the few things in my life that illustrate the principle of everything in moderation. You have a spoonful on your toast, big deal.

Not like that ice cream I made with the strawberries that did not go into the jam.

Strawberries!

My downfall!