Friday Rant - Natural Girl

I've said it before and I'll say it again, natural's the way to go.

No, no, I'm not talking about grooming habits, that would be a whole other kind of blog.

I'm talking food. Jam/preserves to be exact.

You see, I've never been that big a fan of jam. PBJ sandwiches didn't hold much sway on me as a kid, and now, if I make a PB sandwich, it's much more likely to have honey on it than jam.

My mother, grandmother and aunt do make great jam (especially elderberry jam. And I haven't tried my aunt's crabapple (I think it was) jam she gave me at Thanksgiving, but I'm sure it's good). But I never really jumped on the jam bandwagon.

And then I made my own. Apple butter, pumpkin butter, cranberry orange preserves. And man, am I now a serious convert. I'm sure it's partly the fact that I actually made that jam. I guess in my head, jam was kinda like bread - I know that people make it themselves (obviously my relatives do), but I'd never seen it made and so it was all rather mysterious. The first (and only, thus far) time I made bread, I had the same sense of accomplishment, looking at the loaf on the counter and saying "I MADE that!" That's the same way I feel about the fruit butters.

I had a little left over, not a full jar, of each of them (well, actually, I haven't tried the pumpkin butter yet, but I've tried the rest). And man, I'm seriously hooked now. I get to work thinking "oooh, so when's it snack time, I want my toast and jam!"

I think part of it is that the jams you buy at the store are so bland. And they're not usually all fruit and sugar (they have preservatives and such in them). You grab a bottle of Welch's grape jelly and it tastes rather like a grape jolly rancher. That is to say, really fake-ass jam. And bland as all get out. Sure, it's super sweet, you can taste the flavor, but it doesn't have pop. (and yes, I fully recognize that not having much experience in the supermarket jam department, there may be some that are good, but I'm turning a blind eye at the moment, yes I am). Also, I tend to gravitate more towards different flavors. Given a choice between raspberry, strawberry, or apricot, I'll take the apricot any day. The more common ones just aren't as interesting to me.

So I realize that the jam-makers need to keep prices low (reducing the amount of actual fruit they use) and sweeteners high (because with less fruit comes the need for more sweet flavor). And cheap jam definitely is a plus because it makes low-cost meals like PBJ available.

But homemade jam just tastes so much better, and it's all natural. Now, I'm not sure how long it's good for, but I figure, since they're sealed in sterilized jars, that'll keep a good long time even without the preservatives.

My next all-natural food project? Ice cream. I'm considering getting one of those "throw in the stuff and it makes it for you" ice cream makers (not the ones that you have to freeze and the churn yourself. We'll see...it'd be awesome to have natural sherbet and gelato and ice cream, since ice cream sandwiches and fudgsicles are one of the few pre-packaged foods I regularly buy at the grocery store.

Friday Rant - you mean, that comes out of the ground?

I had an interesting conversation with a co-worker the other day. I was headed to the farmer's market and asked if she wanted to come. Somehow the subject of cherries came up, and she said she wanted to get the dark red kind. This made me pause. I'm thinking in my head, "are there other colors of cherries?" (I just did a wikipedia search, and there are red, dark red, light red, and some yellowish ones).

But I didn't get the feeling she was talking about some strange variety of cherry. So I said I thought that cherries were generally dark red. And then she said something that blew my mind - "I want the dark red cherries, not the ones they put in martinis."

And there you have it - I completely understand this, because our society has become so divorced from the concept of growing food that sometimes we just don't know where it comes from. I suppose it isn't unrealistic to expect that a maraschino cherry is just a different variety of cherry, plucked off the tree and bottled (or, if you've never even seen it bottled and only seen it in martinis). And if you grow up in a city and never deal with the growing of food, well then all your information comes with whatever you're exposed to in tv, movies, and books (well, ok, then there's parents and friends too).

I read Small Wonder (Barbara Kingsolver) a while back and she made this very point. She and her family had a garden in Arizona, and when her kids' friends would come over, they'd go out and pick some veggies for dinner. And the friends would refuse to eat veggies that came out of the ground, because they had dirt on them, and they didn't believe that that's really where veggies came from (veggies come from the grocery store, don't they?).

I was guilty of this myself - my boss brought in a box of home-grown cucumbers, tomatoes, and basil for all of us in the office share (yummm!), and I went to grab a cucumber, saw dirt on it, and almost put it back. Then I pinched myself and took it anyway. Because while I wouldn't take a veggie with dirt on it in the big box grocery store, I knew he'd picked it that very morning, so it was perfectly reasonable for there to be dirt on it.

But is this a good thing, that we've come "so far" technologically and culturally and can get any fruit and veggie on earth, but we have no idea where they come from? I read Fast Food Nation earlier this year and it's true, I really didn't have a great idea where the meat I eat comes from. And I don't want to see any remnant of the animal in the food I'm eating (I can deal with fish heads and lobsters, but the idea of killing a chicken just kinda wigs me out). But I really didn't have a great idea of just exactly what the animal goes through between pasture (or pen, as the case may be) and my plate. I would've thought that the process would've improved since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle, but apparently it hasn't necessarily (there are always the abattoirs that buck the trend mentioned in Fast Food Nation, but there are so many that don't).

Have you had any interactions of this, people (or you) just had no idea where the food comes from, or that a particular food was prepared and they thought it was natural? (for the record, a maraschino cherry has been macerated in flavored sugar syrup, then dyed, and is usually flavored with almond. Green maraschinos are mint flavored).