Pomegranate freezer jelly

I recently switched out our kitchen oven to a glass-top model, which means I can no longer use my old metal stock pot on it.  I have a new, aluminum stock pot on order and coming soon, but unfortunately my pomegranates needed to be dealt with NOW, so I was forced to make freezer jelly instead of jelly preserved in a water bath canner.  

Immediate action item

The good news is that freezer jelly is exactly the same as regular jelly -- it tastes just as good and, in the case of pomegranate jelly, may even extend its shelf life past a few months (pomegranate jelly tends to lose color and become runny within about 6 months, I have heard).  The other good thing is that freezer jelly is MUCH easier to make, since you are skipping the water-bath step.  The only down side is that you need room in your freezer to store it.  But if you have a chest freezer, like us, its no problem.

Can deliciously check this off the to-do list now

First, get four cups of pomegranate juice, either by juicing the fruit yourself, or by buying some in the market ( I inherited a pomegranate tree when we bought this new house, so I did the former).  Once you have your juice, strain it and set it in a large pot on the stove, adding one and-a-half boxes of pectin, and cook to a full, roiling boil (one that can't be stirred down).  Next, add a quarter-cup of lemon juice and 6 cups of sugar.  Bring back to a full boil for one minute and then remove from heat, stirring constantly.  Ladle the hot jelly into jars, place lids on, and when they are cool enough, put in your freezer.  They should keep for at least six months, possibly more.  Just thaw out a jar and refrigerate it whenever you want some around.

Very easy way to deal with having lots and lots of pomegranates!

Half a year onward and a holiday party

Today marks about the six-month point that we've been living on the Central Coast; perhaps it was appropriate we return to the San Joaquin Valley for a party on Friday night, to remember where we came from and look over the old geography, half a year on.  It felt very familiar being back there, both in good and not-so-good ways.  The valley is never more beautiful (my opinion) than this time of year, the quiet fields, the little farmhouses with warm lights coming from the windows at sunset, and the eastern sky far off in the distance turning a lovely shade of violet...those things all make for a very pretty, Christmas-card kind of setting.  The people are friendly, and the streets are long and straight, with nary a bend in the road to contend with, most of the time.  I first visited the valley during Christmas 22 years ago, and coming from the smoggy glitz of Los Angeles, it seemed like a homespun haven from the city life.

On this latest trip, we stayed in a hotel so we didn't have to drive home after the party.  It was a nice hotel in a good area. Sadly, when we woke up in the morning and took our luggage out to the truck, we discovered the Range Rover parked next to us had been broken into and had its rear window smashed in.  And at that moment all the reasons we left the Valley became quite clear again.  Our move was as much about socio-economics as anything else, and when we saw the Range Rover with the broken glass all around it we remembered that.  

Fresno may have a couple of really good shopping malls, a Whole Foods and an extremely lovely area in the middle of the city called Old Fig, but drive three blocks away from any of those places and you will see poverty and desolation. The same goes for any town in the Valley, and the desolation is continuing its creep towards all the nicer areas.  Even out in the country, there are home-invasion robberies, ag theft, discarded refrigerators, sofas, and even the occasional stolen-and-burned car sitting alongside the road with the litter and old beer bottles.  That's what, in truth, lies in between the bucolic little farmhouses, the small towns, and the orchards and fields.  And they are all increasing in number and proximity to the more unspoiled and/or well-cared for places.  It's frustrating to watch.

It's not a class thing.  It's a pride thing.  People who value the area where they live tend to take care of it, and unfortunately there's just too many people around there who do not care, for whatever reason.  There are caring, genuinely involved people who have set down footholds and whose families have lived in the Central Valley for generations, but they are outnumbered at this point by the ones who simply don't care. And when that happens, anyplace, even the nicest area can become unlivable.  I am still glad we left, and I love where we live now, but I will always feel a connection to and feel worried about the future of places like Fresno, Hanford and the like.

And no matter what, I was extremely glad to see this upon returning to our little house on the hill.

Stalked

Sometimes when I'm alone in the house, I get the feeling I'm being watched.  I sit with my back to the window, reading the newspaper, and suddenly feel a chill crawl up my spine.  Quickly I turn around and....

I see my stalkers.

Messy, but worth it

December here on the Central Coast and elsewhere is the time when the pomegranates become ripe and hang like big, red Christmas balls on their small branches.  Yesterday I picked the last of them off our tree and set about juicing them, which I do by quartering them, submersing the pieces in a bowl of water, and then picking the juicy seeds free while the pieces are underwater, so they don't squirt everything in sight if I happen to pop some open, which I always do.  I do this outdoors on the back patio, because it's still quite messy, even with some of it done by submersion.  And since pomegranate juice makes pretty permanent stains on anything, care is needed anytime you're dealing with this fruit.

And yes, I DO now have a purple splattered concrete walkway in my back garden, but it's better than purple-splattered grout in the kitchen.

At the end of a two-hour session, this is what I had, which yielded about five cups of juice.  Since I drank about a cup right there on the spot (cook's prerogative!) now I have about four cups, which means I only have to replace the one cup and I will have enough to make pomegranate jelly, which I've personally never tasted but am willing to try.  Why not?  Sometimes I wish we'd been given the legacy of some apple or pear trees, but if life gives you pomegranates, make a nice purple walkway and maybe some jelly.  That's what I think, anyway.

2013 New Year's Resolution

Au Revoir, Loreal

I'm not one to make a lot of New Year's resolutions (which more often than not are forgotten by about March) but this year I am making a big one.  I have decided to let my hair revert to its natural color, which is about 75 percent white and 25 percent an odd kind of brownish color.  I did a full coloring  yesterday (my last) and this is how it currently looks:

No gray here yet....but stay tuned.

Not bad, but not natural either.  After all, I am in my early 50's and no one that age has no gray in their hair, except certain very lucky Asians or Native Americans, who don't seem to have much of a gray gene.  

Basically I am sick and tired of coating my head with chemical goo every few weeks in order to achieve a youthful look when I'm not all that youthful anymore.  I strive to live a seriously chemical-free life -- eating organic, reading labels, avoiding artificially-produced products when I could make my own natural ones -- so it makes no sense that every month I give myself an ammonium hydroxide swirly and then sit around letting it soak in for a good 45 minutes.  Surely this can't be a safe thing, long term.  So I've decided to go natural.  I do plan on having some help from a good professional colorist as my current color grows out, mainly so I don't get a skunk-like stripe down the center of my head for months.  But the days of coating my entire skull with hair coloring is over.  Finito. We'll see what color my hair actually is underneath the Medium Blonde #8...Even I am not sure, because I've been doing this since I was about 35 and a lot has changed with my hair since then.  But I'm excited to meet this new silver woman, whoever she is.

So Au revoir, Loreal and Miss Clairol.  It's been great knowing you. Not.

A sad goodbye

My son is currently down in the dumps after his girlfriend of over a year broke up with him.  It was unexpected -- for him -- for us, the older folks in his tribe, not as much of a surprise.  They've been trying to maintain a long-distance relationship, with her still in high school and him 200 miles away in college, for the last four months or so, and it's clearly taken its toll on their togetherness.  

We middle agers know from experience how difficult doing the long-distance thing can be, even once one is well into adulthood and can commute to see the significant other on a regular basis.  Most of us tried to do it once or twice, and most failed miserably. 

My last long-distance relationship was when I was in my 30's, and while it was doomed to failure for many reasons, the long-distance aspect of things definitely hastened the demise of the whole thing. He got a job in the bustling borough of D.C., working for the Bush Administration, and I lived the rural life of a primary school teacher in the Central Valley of California.  Clearly not a recipe for success, despite having everything else going for us. We couldn't even meet halfway, because, really, neither of us would have wanted to join the other in their life, or meet (geographically anyway) in the middle, probably somewhere in Kansas, which we often joked about. It just couldn't work. 

For young people, who have never lived without constant contact with each other, it's even harder....which is kind of a quintessential example of irony, isn't it?  Despite the ability to be in constant communication with your significant other thanks to texting, sexting, and Smart phones, relationships still can (and do) end because of the miles between you.  Technology means nothing in the face of what the heart really wants, which is having the one you love right there, right now.  In person.  No substitutions accepted.

I worry sometimes that maybe this next generation is going to be socially crippled because they have no chance for reflection in the spaces between the togethers in their relationships. We had them. We'd talk for several hours on a date, but then we'd be out of contact for another day or so, maybe more.   And in those hours of aloneness, we'd reflect on how the relationship was going, who the person was we were involved with, and where we thought the whole thing was going.

It's ironic that my son's girlfriend broke up with him after a weekend of (relatively) no contact.  He was working and could not chat at any length for about 48 hours or so.   I think that's when the illusion of togetherness probably ended for her, when in actual reality she'd pretty much been alone for four months already.  Kids today are never alone in one way; they can text people 24 hours a day and fill their hours with typed conversations.  But in another way, they really are alone, if they are sitting in a room by themselves to do it. They just don't know it.

Today's phone technology creates the illusion that there really is togetherness when, in reality, it's just you and a screen.  If this new technology actually worked, i.e, really did improve the quality of their interpersonal lives, their long-distance relationships would be the proof of it -- they'd fare much better than the ones of our generation did.  But instead they're worse, because all that immediate-gratification technology creates a believable illusion of togetherness. But what the brain sees, logically, the heart isn't buying in on for one second as it sits in a room alone. 

The fact is, technology is just NOT enough to satisfy some of the most basic inter-social human needs we have -- for companionship, leadership or love -- and is just one more example where over-reliance on technology will fail us, as it has done in so many other areas. 

Chill chasers

I made these chill chasers for the dining room windows in our old house (this pic is of the new house, which is why they're a bit short for the window).  The old house had windows which were quite drafty in winter, especially along the base of the windows. The chill chasers are made with old socks and rags.  Take the foot off each sock and stitch the ends of several together so they make a tube of wool, then simply stuff the wool tube with old t-shirts or other fabric scraps destined for the thrift store or garbage.  They're really quite ingenious, and they work wonderfully.

I haven't lived in enough houses to really say what is and is not normal regarding draftiness; at the time we built our first house I figured it was normal to feel some air moving into the house from the base of each window and where the top window meets the bottom one at the latch.  But maybe it was not.

The problem is, drafty homes are not only physically uncomfortable in winter, they are also expensive to heat.  At our old house you could crank the central heating up to toasty 78 degrees and still catch a chill if you were sitting next to one of those aforementioned, metal-framed windows.  The dining room and living rooms never seemed warm enough. Yet it was a newer house, built in 2005, so I always figured those windows were about as state-of-the-art efficient as you could get.  They were double-paned, after all. So we lived with the drafts, and I designed these chill chasers to block some of the cold air which entered where the base of the window met the bottom of the frame.  One thing is for sure: today's newer homes have more windows than ever, so it's extremely important they seal up fairly tight.

When we moved to this house, I brought our chill chasers along, fully expecting to use them again in winter.  But, happily for us, these windows are different -- their frames and edges are made of vinyl, which seems to be about 100 percent more energy efficient in terms of sealing up properly when closed. Yet this house was also built in 2005, just like our old one, which just goes to show that it's quality of construction is everything....a new house is not necessarily an energy efficient one.  It all depends on how it was built, and maybe who built it as well.

I must say, it's nice to sit in our dining room and not feel a cold draft coming from the windows.  Makes   us a lot more likely to linger in there and enjoy a second glass of wine or some dessert.