Sidetracked: A Day in the Lives of Foodies

It’s Saturday and we just got home from spending over five hours driving about a hundred miles and visiting some of our favorite food sources. Crazy? We both agree it was crazy…Crazy Fun! It was our idea of a good time. This is how the day started...Jana reminded me that I’d promised to can (and deliver) several pints of Pickled Jalapenos and Carrots. Like the kind you occasionally have at Mexican restaurants. I’d bought three large bunches of carrots (all different colors) the prior week in Portland and had plans to pickle them. Combining them with jalapenos was a great idea. A quick trip to town and we’d be ready to can.

Before we got out the door, our friend Otti called and asked us to drop off a couple dozen eggs. No problem. She lives about 15 minutes from us on the way to town. Otti greeted us with a box of produce she'd just picked from her garden/orchard: heirloom tomatoes, plums, Babcock peaches, early apples, and more. Perfect. This is my idea of fair trade. Back in the car, we drove on to our local grocery store prepared to buy the jalapenos and be canning within the hour. Big disappointment…their hot peppers in general were well past their prime. Verne is always ready for an adventure, so it took no convincing to drive another 30 miles or so to our favorite farm stand on the east side of Sacramento, Davis Ranch. We love it and rarely go more than a week between visits. When we got there, I was reminded that Tuesdays and Saturdays are open to the public for picking. Only $25 for a minimum of 100 pounds of produce. It was Saturday and the thought of getting out in the field and picking was tempting, but it was near noon by now and over 90° and our canning project was calling. We decided to postpone that adventure for another day when we could be there at sunrise. We bought 4 pounds of beautiful jalapenos, fresh corn, the best watermelon of the year, more tomatoes and were soon back in the car headed towards home. Another of our favorite farm stands, Strutz Ranch, is just a few miles from Davis Ranch and we hadn’t stopped since last fall when we got hooked on fresh pomegranate juice. The owner grows several acres of pomegranates, all kinds of citrus, and rare fruits. We saw that he was open (he parks an old pickup on Jackson Highway with an open sign, of sorts). It was our lucky day. Besides plenty of organic produce he had Asian Pears, the missing ingredient for one of our recipes we’d been wanting to make. FYI, they are actually more like an apple than a pear. Another success. We got back on Jackson Highway and again headed for home. As we were approaching the turnoff for Ione I suggested we stop by Maria’s house and check on the yard (she and Ruben are fishing and won’t be home until after Thanksgiving), including the two plum trees in her back yard and her neighbor’s Elberta peach tree that hugs the common fence with its branches reaching several feet into Maria’s yard. Easy pickins’ for an enthusiastic food preserver. It was perfect timing. About half of the peaches within reaching distance were ripe and ready for canning. The rest will be ripe in about a week. Memo for next time: bring a ladder. We left Maria’s and headed home with our bounty. Much more than the 4 pounds of jalapenos we’d set out to buy. But then the day would have been quite dull had we stuck to our original plan. And, we were going home with a week’s worth of good eats.

While on the topic of food and canning, I’ll bring you current on our Fair participation this summer. Last April we decided to enter some of our canned goods in three local fairs: Calaveras, El Dorado, and our local fair in Amador. I wrote about the Calaveras Fair in an earlier blog, but to recap (and brag), I was awarded a first (blue ribbon) and second (red ribbon) for my two entries. The first was for a perfect strawberry preserve (much harder to make than you might think).  Verne got a third place for his salsa and nothing for his BBQ sauce. Actually, he never received the white ribbon for third place and we only knew he was awarded a third because he received the $1 premium in the mail. The ribbons were amazing, large and more the quality of a “best of show” ribbon than what I’d seen at other fairs. For the record, I got the ribbons but never received the $5 I was told “was in the mail.” At our next fair in El Dorado I came home with a first place for my pear conserve and Verne came home with nothing. Sad. They were small silly ribbons but still worth displaying next to my previous win. I was very hopeful for our final fair and entered four products and encouraged Verne to enter his salsa, BBQ sauce and a peach ale mustard he made. He’d been whining about his “crappy” salsa and BBQ sauce (and no ribbons) for the previous two months, so I was really hoping he’d receive some kind of acknowledgement. I was quite confident I’d go home with four ribbons. Nothing went as expected. I received a first place for my blackberry jam infused with lemon verbena, which was my least favorite of the four, my cranberry pineapple preserve and my personal favorite, peach marmalade were both disqualified (technically they were just not judged because they didn’t meet the definition of the division and class). Major disappointment! I’m not sure what happened with my fourth entry…at that point I was numb from shock and embarrassment. Me, the “jam expert” in our local master food preserver program sitting in the audience surrounded by several of my MFP friends (I’m sure I heard some snickering)…well, you can imagine how I was feeling at that point. On a positive note, though, Verne was awarded ribbons for each of his entries…it would be unkind of me to mention the lack of competition, so I won’t. I will say the judge was quite taken with the BBQ sauce and even though, according to her, “it needed to be thicker” she sampled it at least four times and said it was delicious. Verne calls it “Best in the West High Sierra BBQ Sauce” and rightly so! He plans to add to the title “Blue Ribbon Winning blah, blah, blah”. That’s going a bit far. The important thing is this – no more whining! He’s got his ribbons! This was to be a one-time effort, but after my poor showing we’re already talking about next year. I’ve got to do something to save face. Maybe enter more products and more fairs, thus increasing my odds of winning. Something to ponder…