Jammin'

Okay, so this entry is not in the cookbook, but I just had to share the results anyway.  I spent a beautiful week cooking with my Alaskan daughter and grandchildren.  We ventured into the wild and picked blueberries by the 33-gallon kitchen trash bag full.

While one old-school picker hand-picked blueberries on one side of the field,we picked using our handy-dandy berry pickers (no, not the children, but the red thingamabob), raking in multiple berries, while leaving behind the leaves.  So easy a kid could do it.  

At home, quality control took over, extracting the little worms that inhabit all berries, along with the errant leaves looking for adventure outside the blueberry patch.

Once cleaned and cleared for use, we turned these sumptuous morsels into a yummy blueberry pie.

For future cookbook purposes, watch for my comparison to Seth's Blueberry Pie.  It'll be hard to beat my granddaughter's piemaking abilities (makes me miss the underrated TV show Pushing Daisies).  

Funny, after 33+ years of cooking, you'd think I'd know the proper measurement techniques, NOT!  When I measured dry ingredients using a liquid measure, my daughter was aghast that I did not know that dry vs. liquid measurements are actually different.  I didn't believe her, so I repeatedly poured one cup of flour into a dry measure, then poured that into the liquid measure, which measured a little over 3/4 cup.  I repeated this several times like any good scientist and every time it was the same:  one cup of sugar in a liquid measure is more than one in a dry.... I don't know why, but they are!  All these years I've been feeding my kids too much sugar by using a liquid measure to measure sugar!  Sorry gang.

We also made umpteen number jars of exquisite blueberry-lime jam (image left) and, not content to stop there, turned Costco's big box of plums into jars of fabulous ginger-plum jam (image center)....if you're wondering why the jars on the right contain roots, they're not jam....duh.  It's my affinity for rooting anything that will do so. 

After taste-testing the ginger-plum jam, we decided it would make a delicious baste for fresh salmon, which my son-in-law just so happened to land my last day in Alaska.  What an adventure for another story.

CHICKEN PIE ...p56

"Exquisite"
"Tastes like chicken with cookies on top"
"This is delicious!"
and subsequent midnight raids on the refrigerator to savor what little was left.

And whoever said "less is more" hit it on the mark with this recipe.  With just six everyday ingredients, we enjoyed one of the most commented on meals of the book.  The dish was so simple to make that I thought it would be a flop - but it wasn't - everyone loved it.  The critic asked how I made the gravy - very impressive.  When I responded with Campbell's Cream of Celery soup, she was surprised, thinking it was far more complex. 

Let's face it, everyone loves the smell of chicken stewing in a pot.  Therein lies the most labor of the recipe - deboning the chicken - having accomplished that, the rest is easy.  But I made it a little more challenging by throwing the picked-over bones deep into the woods, hoping that I, like Linda, might attract a chupacabra.  Seems Linda has one lurking in her woods - sighted by both her husband and her separately....  Before she even knew about the legend, she described this eerie, frightening creature they saw devouring chicken bones she had put out at the woodline for her cats.  The description prompted a "that's a chupacabra" from my daughter.  Sure enough, looking at the internet picture confirmed the identification. I'll let you know if one shows up in our yard.

Hardy Appetit!