We need homemade bread if you’re going to make all this jam, Michelle told me.

She’s right. So we can say we’re on a roll.

Meantime, at an Iphone angle, a better shot of the doodle that is Parker’s sweater.

We got home about 10:30 pm. I had a choice between writing a post and making a batch of jam to give to Kim and her mom and sister and her family before they go on their way home; Kim said they hope to stop by in the morning.

Family wins.

Pluot raspberry peach. Upside down now, cooling. I had run the jars through the dishwasher before we’d left, just in case.

Parker pictures tomorrow.

No time for a Costco run tomorrow…

A teenager with his parents there tonight pleaded with me to let him help me. I told him it would make my day so much easier if he got that box of milk (2 gallons, 15 pounds) off the bottom of the cart where the clerk had put it and back on up into the thing.

He was glad to be able to do something. His mom was glad I let him. Good people.

Then as I got to my car, having peeled off in a different direction from them, it hit me by surprise that I was tired–who knew. I wished it were easier with this whole funky balance/holding a cane/maneuvering the groceries thing. The moment of regret at the guy who smashed my car 12 years ago snuck up and pounced on me ever so briefly as I swatted the thought away: shut up. It is what it is.

A middle-aged man walking by just then took a step right back and asked, Can I help you get that in there for you?

I was so not expecting that. And so he did. I thanked him profusely and wished I could do something back–and then noticed he was walking with a definite spring in his step now as he waved goodbye. A good man.

And so a chocolate hazelnut torte is in the oven right now just because I wished I could offer them each a piece, whoever they all were.

Our daughter-in-law Kim and her Mom and Parker are in town for Kim’s cousin’s wedding. They stopped by late this afternoon between airport and rehearsal dinner and we got a short visit before they had to run, glad for what time we could have. I confess no pictures yet: I didn’t want a camera between us, I wanted simply to be us.

Parker is even cuter. Even very tired, he is a total charmer. Kim is a sweetheart. Her mother shows where they get their good-natured selves from. We are all so blessed.

And tomorrow we get to see more of them and I can’t wait. Chocolate hazelnut torte was, again, the best food celebration I could think of.  (I know, I know, they have a whole wedding, foodwise. I’ll take whatever excuse I can get. I just plain wanted to make one.)

Parker, 18 months+, blew me a kiss goodbye from his carseat on their way out as his mom and grandma exclaimed in delight with me. The Granny who lives close to him had called me a Granny too. Worked for him.

Fire up the works! Happy Fourth of July!

The whole thing took less than an hour.

Richard was being too busy.

You need to go in the kitchen and (I made a dramatic gesture) say Wow, those are gorgeous!

He looked at me the way long-married people do, okay, then, got up, walked in the kitchen, made an exaggeration of my drama moment and pronounced, Wow. Those are gorgeous!

And then we both cracked up. Because hey, we both knew they really are.

Note: DebbieR gave me her favorite recipe; I had never thought of putting plum and raspberries together before. Cool! I was hoping for a little less sugar, though, and found this. Skipped the spices. Debated adding pectin. Didn’t. Should have, maybe half a packet. (Nobody’s going to mind, though.)

Pectin? the woman at the grocery store asked me. What’s that? I explained that it helps the fruit gel when you’re making homemade jam; she said into her walkie-talkie as we searched, This lady needs this stuff for making jello.

Um no actually.

Thinking I just didn’t need that many, I had given dozens of canning jars away the day before all those plums arrived and now I didn’t have enough. The only part of making jam that was easy to find was the sugar–everybody’s summer fruit trees must be producing at once. Before this was Silicon Valley, it was Valley of Heart’s Delight, orchard after blooming orchard, and the idea of having at least one producing tree endures in the culture.

I got some raspberries to try raspberry plum jam with (thank you DebbieR!) and I found the pectin at the fourth store. A few strange squat jars at the third store. They’ll do for now.

And…I spent a little while thumbing through the online Stark Bros catalog. They know what will grow here, including–Seckels? Really!? Seckel pears, my absolute favorites, the ones I’d been told needed mega-cold hours? (The Moonglow pollinator looks good too.)

We shall see. Discussions have begun.

But the other thing that happened today.

Another neighbor showed up at our doorstep with misdelivered mail, shaking her head at the mailman who couldn’t read an address–but I was suddenly glad for the moment. Richard thanked her for bringing it over, while, me, I was running into the kitchen. Then I chased after her with a bottle.

Was she on a diabetic diet? Or could she eat–did she like–plum jam?

I *LOVE* plum jam! she exclaimed.

This is all A’s fault, I told her as I held out the jar; she gave me the plums from her tree.

I did not expect what happened next. For me? in a voice so…vulnerable, and she turned away a moment not to burst into tears. I pointed out the delightfully silly bottom of the jar, trying to help.

But I came home so very very glad.

Many years ago–Richard thinks 20–our neighbor knocked on the door with a bag of plums from his tree, wondering if we and our children might like some?

The childhood memories that brought back! I made plum jam in great delight–did you know having the skins pureed in there gives a sour-cherries effect? I showed up on his and his wife’s doorstep with a bottle; he thought that was great and promptly gave us more when his wife wasn’t looking. She was embarrassed, but I assured her quite honestly that please, no, I was thrilled! And so they got a bottle from that batch, too.

But we’re certainly not the only ones around for them to share with.

I wanted a steady supply of my own. And so, my kids gave me a Santa Rosa plum tree for Mother’s Day a few years ago, to my intense delight. This year it was producing for the first time. The squirrels stripped my Fuji apple next to it, day by day, but the plums they left alone.

Until they didn’t. Several dozen newly purple were suddenly just three. I was disappointed but not terribly surprised.

And yet. That very afternoon, while I was off running errands, the phone rang and my daughter answered. I came home to a bag and a bowl full of plums and a message…that… They have some worries to worry about. The fruit became the way to share the message.

I needed to do something.

That was Friday. With the wedding Saturday, then a family barbecue thrown by my niece and all the other things going on this weekend, today I finally got down to business.

It’s been awhile. I realized I was a bit out of practice–I had to doublecheck the instructions rather than just breeze through, making sure I didn’t forget any steps.

My mom always taught me that after you fill and wipe and close up the jars, you twist the screw-on part all the way–and then back it up just a nudge. Turn the jar over and let the heat of the jam help make sure that top is truly sanitized, then when the jar is cool, flip it back over and tighten that thing good and tight now. Wait a few hours and then that reassuring pop pop from the kitchen as each seal becomes sure.

Did I overcook it? The jam must have compacted quite a bit in the settling, I filled those jars up a lot more than that. I don’t remember seeing quite this effect before.

The neighbor, pleased, declared her halfpint cute.

Stephanie Pearl-McPhee wrote a much calmer post about All That than I did. Good for her, and I’m grateful she did and for her example. (And thank you DebbieR for the heads-up).

And after some discussion around here, too, here are some more thoughts. The patterns that clearly mimic the Olympic logo? Infringe if they’re for sale, if they’re free, no, unless the things made from them are sold.

The USOC thinks the word ravelympics infringes too. Personally, I think it’s close but that it does not and that nobody’s going to confuse the two. The USOC’s letter was far from well thought out, though, and it just didn’t help their cause when, after having called ravelympics “denigrating,” they then apologized (though they did not retract the cease and desist) and added an offer to let (you know that’s a  non-knitter, right there) us knit for the athletes. Trying to make peace in the storm.

Wait, wait, guys: knitting usually takes mega-hours. You have to let people calm down first before you can just assume they want to give up their life’s time to you.

They handled it badly. So did I by letting it get under my skin so thoroughly. I apologize.

Meantime. Bryan left this morning. He’ll be home in New Jersey in time to see my oldest on her way during a move; he saved the last cookie for breakfast before his trip, grinning when I made sure he’d gotten it.

It was a small batch last night. I pureed about a half cup toasted hazelnuts with an egg and three packets of Splenda. Baked them as cookies that came out of the oven looking cake-like but quickly fell and looked cookie-ish again. Then I spread them with premium Bergenfield unsweetened chocolate, melted with packets of Splenda mixed in to his taste.

I saved them all for him. We like good stuff around here and that one he could eat.

All those good nutty chocolatey smells…

I just took a chocolate hazelnut torte out of the oven.

(Ed. to add: Channon got me thinking of when we went to hear Sally Rogers sing at the Folkway Inn in Peterborough, NH, ~26 years ago. I’ve hoped to live up to this song ever since.)

It was Ryan’s birthday today, and his girlfriend’s parents invited us all over to dinner.

Our part of it: one homemade angel food cake.

One bag frozen raspberries cooked with about a half cup mango juice and a not-full 1/4 c sugar in the microwave for about three and a half minutes, then cuisinarted so that the seeds (which do add to the flavor) become one with the puree. Pour over diced pieces from six ataulfo-type (smallish yellow kidney-shaped) mangoes.

Chocolate sauce: fill a measuring cup to yay high with pieces of good dark chocolate, then pour coconut cream to almost that high. Dunk every bit of chocolate below the surface once before nuking so the chocolate doesn’t seize, then one minute for my about a cup and a half’s  worth of chocolate.  Stir hard while the pieces melt. Can serve as sauce or refrigerate till hard, scoop into balls, roll in cocoa, and call it truffles. (Mine was still sauce when it was time to go; it’s all good.)

One portabello mushroom/onion side dish, sauteed by Michelle.

Two other cakes, one by the girlfriend and hers was the best. Chocolate pear torte. I’d really like the recipe.

And a good party was had by all.

Michelle was hoping for lemon cake: Please? (Bambi eyes.) It always came out wrong when she did it, she claimed.

And then she just happened to mention that she and her father had bought a big box of raspberries on Saturday and we should eat them. Soon. (Checking, she added,) They all look great so far.

I protested, I never write it down, I just do, and I haven’t made it in awhile. (I should have checked the blog.) So I forged ahead: only, this time I used a cup of just-juiced lemons and a half a cup of almost-too-healthy Earth Balance. Butter would have been better, only, not around her dairy allergy.

Meanwhile, she rinsed the raspberries; we had about 10 oz left to play with. We patted them dry over and over with paper towels. Then I sprinkled them across the top of the cake (you have to work fast with that recipe) and about 1/4 c brown sugar over them.

Got it right this time. Oh most definitely.

The box sits there. Unopened. I haven’t even looked at the bars inside because if I did it might all be over. They need to be pristine.

Michelle comes home tomorrow and there are two critically acclaimed bars of Potomac Chocolate sitting inside their Priority mailer, having come from near where we grew up; Richard ordered them for me with Mother’s Day as an excuse after the fact and they arrived a few days ago.

Isn’t it everybody’s dream to set up a tiny chocolate factory in their basement? Buy directly from the farmers, claim the quality because you made it come to be and you did it right? Paying for the best cocoa beans, then grinding them down, tempering, a little sugar going in. Nothing more. Picking up where Scharffenberger sold out and left off. Getting growing praise for a great product.

One. More. Day.

Meantime, I baked a second chocolate hazelnut torte tonight, substituting coconut oil for the butter so Michelle could eat it. It’s only fair; she’s the one that got me hooked on working with hazelnuts. I went researching a bit, and oil swaps out for butter best where there are a lot of nut oils present.

Hey.

Looks perfect. And now it has to refrigerate overnight before unmolding and slicing.

One. More. Day.

Meantime…

I went off to buy some birdseed today, and while I was in Los Gatos, out of curiosity I decided to swing by their Trader Joe’s on my way back to the freeway. Never been there.

As the clerk was checking me out I mentioned to him that after you toast those raw hazelnuts you want to rub the skins off–they’re bitter.

Oh! Thank you, good to know! He was very pleased and I thought, now, there’s a foodie.

I have always loved to bake. With Ryan here, we have someone in the household again whom I can go to town around without feeling quite so guilty–it’s a problem when one person needs to lose weight and the other could sure stand to gain some.

Well, nuts. And so I went looking for recipes.

Which is how I came across this flourless chocolate hazelnut cake on a site that won a clearly well-deserved culinary award.

Caution, though: definitely read through before starting.

I told Richard in the middle of it that next time I would know what I was doing and it would go a whole lot faster. It took me something like an hour and a half to get it into the oven, checking and doublechecking that I wasn’t forgetting anything, figuring out why you do this and then that on the two sets of hazelnuts in definitely the order she said. And I’m glad she said a half pound here to let me know that the four ounce measure of them there was to be in weight, not volume–it made a cup, not a half cup.

Six eggs, two extra egg whites, dark chocolate, and 3/4 lb of nuts. We can live with that.

I didn’t add the liqueor nor the espresso powder, good little Mormon that I am, but I will say that only bourbon vanilla will do for chocolate. I scooped the last of the batter from the spatula and bowl and cuisinart and onto a plate and nuked it. Wow was it good!

She suggests topping it with ganache.

I think my old chocolate torte recipe just got totally upstaged.

The hawks haven’t (as far as I know) flown through any of the amaryllis stalks. Yet. The hummingbird did check them out but didn’t stay long.

The Malabrigo yarn in Solis: I finally finished it.

Oh wait, I realized, no I didn’t–those stretches of stockinette in the lace? The castoff curled there. Tink x 324, do k2tog, yo across and purl back and the only reason I didn’t do that in the first place is I didn’t think I had enough yarn. I did. Done! It is drying, and I can’t wait.

And that was going to be the whole post, till I went into the kitchen and saw the leftover toasted skinned hazelnuts in the fridge.

My usual peanut butter cookie recipe is one I discovered in an old hand-me-down cookbook given me in New Hampshire 25 years ago: one cup peanut butter, one cup sugar, one egg. (The Skippy type works best, the natural, not so much.) Great for celiacs. I do occasionally add a tbl of flour for a little bit of extra crispness at the edges, but it’s not necessary. 350, 8-10 min. That’s it.

What if…

So I buttered the cookie sheet. One cup hazelnuts into the Cuisinart. I let that run a long time, trying to get hazelnut butter, not meal, then added 2/3 c sugar, 1/4 c. cocoa, hmm… about 2 tbl butter, how ’bout a little more in there, possibly three, wasn’t measuring… 1 tbl flour just because, and 1 (extra large) egg. Trying to put teaspoonfuls of batter down, it was like sticky silly putty but soon settled down and behaved–ie, it held to itself rather than me after being on the cookie sheet a minute or so.

Which I figured out when I found some extra dark chocolate chips and pushed a half dozen into each cookie. Eight minutes at 350 again did the job, and there you go: the best cookie recipe I have ever come up with.

Toasting and skinning hazelnuts is a pain, but I totally just got over that.

(Ed. to add, if you prefer yours sweeter, go for the full cup of sugar.)

Keep me away from my kitchen for two weeks of traveling and then you can’t get me out of it. A pair of chocolate tortes yesterday, with one going to the neighbor who took in our mail; Alice Medrich‘s  Marjolaine (minus the espresso powder) today, (her chocolate cookbooks are the best!) and then chocolate pudding for tomorrow’s breakfast to use up the leftover egg yolks.  That one’s cooling as I type.

Note that when you toast hazelnuts you have to rub the skins off afterwards: they’re bitter. And after all that work, the nuts go rancid within a few weeks and must be used.

Twist my arm. I have at least another cup’s worth in the fridge to go play with. If you ground them into a paste and added ganache…? I may have to find out. Anybody got a favorite hazelnut recipe? For me to be able to eat it, it has to be in pretty fine pieces at least, hence the marjolaine, which is ganache of varying intensities covering four layers of ground hazelnuts and almonds embedded in meringue. And then the darkest ganache to cover it all.

This is also what happens when I need to gain weight.

Only, my sweetie wishes he had that problem…

“Wait a minute. Say that again?” She zipped around to my side of the counter to hear better.

I was explaining the term manufacturing cream to the clerk at Trader Joe’s as an explanation for why I had a five-high stack of their Pound Plus 500g bittersweet bars and not much else to check out; one bar, I told her, a cup and a half of that super-heavy cream that I bought around the corner at Milk Pail, and you’ve got the glaze for two chocolate tortes.

And a half gallon of that cream is enough to make ten of them. (Or lots of truffles to go with.) Hence the stack.

“You’re a baker!”

I grinned.

The first two tortes were already cooling. I got home, threw the first bar on the floor over and over inside its sturdy paper wrapper (usually I put it inside a ziploc too, but I was living dangerously) to break up the chocolate for melting into the cream, and glazed and cooled the cakes.

And then I took one to each friend who’d played airport taxi for us on last week’s trip. I loved loved loved seeing the looks on their faces as I rang the doorbells and handed them over.

I saved a spoonful of the glaze for melting into my hot cocoa tomorrow.

Ruth and her friend Margaret drove two hours each way from beyond Sacramento to come here for a visit, something we had long hoped and planned for. Ruth is the friend who gave me her treadmill. (Here–read way down in the comments for the huge surprise she gave me at the end of the post, and then here. I’ve used it very nearly every day since.)

The moment I laid eyes on Margaret I exclaimed, Oh of course! I’d met her many times at Stitches West over the years with Ruth. Ruth brought me dark chocolate, Margaret gifted me with some Avon goodies, lovely of both of them and the start of a wonderful day.

After chatting, knitting (well, they did, my projects were both ones that command attention), and lunch with Richard joining in, we went off to Purlescence.

There was a table set up for people to offer up stash yarn they didn’t want and for others to take it. I’d had no idea.

Ruth found two skeins of a lovely heathered gray and asked me, wondering, Aren’t these handspun?

Sure looked like it to me. I told her I thought it looked like it had some silk in there, too.

She hadn’t known and she hadn’t brought anything and she left them there. But they were soft and quite pretty and she kept wishing and going back to them.

There were plenty of people in the store but nobody took them, so at last, when it was time for us to go, she picked them up again.

I asked Sandi if she knew who had spun those. Her face lit up and she said that she had, about ten years ago, that they were merino and silk and had just sat there in her stash unused. She wanted them to go to someone who would actually create something with them.

Oh, I’ll knit it! Ruth assured her, clearly thrilled.

So now it wasn’t just nice yarn, it was a gift from the heart from Sandi, and as I mentioned to Ruth later, those two skeins had sat there all day and nobody else had claimed them. (And I knew several people in there who would have loved the colorway.) This was for you all along.

We got back to my house, I opened my freezer, and they headed towards home with a chocolate torte and a blue-ice pack in Ruth’s insulated bag that she just happened to have in her car. I’d been telling her for two years that if she ever came to my house I was going to give her a torte.

And I sent her home with a box of Kara coconut cream, which for me is available locally, so that she could experiment with it for her friend, who, like our younger daughter, is allergic to dairy. A box of that and dark chocolate gets you a good ganache; the larger box, you’ve got enought to make my chocolate torte recipe, which makes two. The coconut cream substitutes straight across for extra-heavy cream and it can sit on a shelf.

Unless someone really enthusiastic about it gets their hands on it and uses it all up.