Bonne Année 2020

Life lessons and sacrificing for love; The central heat is out. It has been out for 5 days. Add to this fun the fact that last weekend I fell and dislocated some ribs. I do not like cold on the best of days and living in ice station zebra when it feels like I have been kicked by a mule is my idea of hell. Last night I had a brilliant idea. It takes 8-12 hours to cook fruit leather in an oven. While I pick every kind of fruit imaginable in the warmest months, there is no way I am turning on the oven to bake fruit in hot weather. Last night I defrosted a large bag of blackberries and a large bag of cherries.

I am not moving very fast this week and I’m slower to get out of bed than my darling husband Geoff Cline. He has been getting up a bit before me, coming downstairs and lighting the fires in the dining room and the office. Today he was also the first one to see that one of the bags that defrosted had a hole in it. I am just guessing it was the blackberries as I know I managed to get a few nice tears in my forearms picking them with their lovely barbs. The juice had traveled across the scratched bamboo counters, down the back and partially down the sad off-white Ikea cabinets. It was mostly cleanable, but my plan to get a new kitchen might be a step closer. The berries were each put in pans to simmer with a bit of lemon juice and agave nectar, blended smooth and spread on silicone cooking sheets and placed on low in the oven to dry for the whole day. Like the four days before, Geoff did what he could to keep me from overtaxing my swollen rib cage and did the lions share of running back and forth from the stockage to get wood and then from one wood burner to the other to keep the home fires burning. Sadly, despite the oven, the temperature in the kitchen did not rise appreciably throughout the day. I did discover that the top sheet cooks much faster than the two levels below. The first sheet out was one of the blackberries. It had gone a bit too far. It was more like parchment than leather. I tasted it. It was not a happy experience. I quietly buried it in the kitchen trash, moved the other two sheets higher in the stove and checked them regularly. Around dinner time, Geoff was looking hagard, and a bit down pin. I took the second sheet of blackberries out. The consistency was leathery all around the edges and if it was still a little soft in the middle, I figured better to benefit from the majority of it and lose the bit in the middle. The last pan, with the cherries, was still not cured so I moved it to the top rack and left it in. The blackberries cooled sufficiently to take off the sheet and taste. (Just as an aside, coughing, sneezing, nose blowing and laughing have all been things to strike terror in my heart since I messed up my ribs.) Those of you who garden will recall that last summer became very hot and arid rather early in the season. I was out frantically picking blackberries much earlier than normal as everything was drying up. As the second tray of blackberries cooled and I tasted them, I discovered that that early drying of the season did nothing for the flavor of the blackberries, indeed, making blackberry fruit leather with this years crop has resulted in something that tastes strangely like blackberry kale chips. I am guessing this is not going to be a popular flavor. I would actually class it as the stuff of nightmares. It was clear to me that my beloved has not had the easiest day and I felt it was my responsibility to get him to cheer up. I knew the pain it would cause me, but I love the guy. I said the fateful words, “hey try this”. He did and as the look of horror dawned on his face, I was sent into spasms of laughter, punctuated by yelps of pain, which made him laugh. The cherries won’t come out of the oven until later. I have people, unsuspecting people, coming to work here tomorrow. I hope to have them try the cherry fruit leather.