Emotional Transitions

I'm having a hard time leaving the job I have now (and love) for this new job opportunity. And it's not because of the baby. Strangely enough, I feel more guilty about having a baby than I do about having a new job. yikes. either way, something's up emotionally/hormonally because even after my advisor told me he's positioning me to take over the grant in two years (as the co-head of the grant!), I started to cry when I got back to my office because I'd be away from this job for the next year (and they're hiring someone else to replace me). Rationally speaking, I think I cried because I'm replaceable, but I'm not sure. Also rationally speaking, I know this job transition is the best thing for my future and it will challenge me to try new things and gain new skills. Still, irrationally, I'm having a tough time with the idea of it.

New Job

Our grant was just funded and I now have a new job. No more postdoc for me.

I'll still be working at the same place with similar people, only now I'll have a lot more responsibility. This new position ties my old job to a new one. It is the intersection of clinical research and science education. I'll be coordinating a series of community heath fairs that bring clinical research about nutrition to rural Oregon communities. It's funded by two grants totalling $800K over the next 2 years. Our local science museum is helping with the exhibitry and then we'll be going to communities to educate the public about health issues, mainly nutrition. As an added bonus, people can be tested anonymously for various health markers (ht/wt/blood pressure/cholesterol/etc) and volunteer to have their data be part of a research study.

So it's all of my favorite things... research, collecting data, science education, organization, event planning, evaluation, exhibit design and writing things up. Plus, the science education and clinical research data will be used as pilot data for future grants (both science education and larger research grants). Be still my beating, nerdy heart.

Work starts this week.

Fruit count

My work has a farmer's market on Tuesdays. Here's my in/out takes for the day...

• 6 peaches ($1/ea), now nicely bruised from rolling around in my bag with sharp objects.
• 6 pints of blueberries (2 pints for $5), I have already eaten 3 pints in the past two hours. 6 cups of blueberries are in my body at the moment. Antioxidants, check.
• 4 pints marionberries ($1/pint). They were having a sale on them and they are delicious and sweet. I bought the last four pints. A good thing since I would have bought more if they had them. They gave me another pint of blueberries as a thank you, bringing the blueberry count to 7 pints, just shy of a gallon.

Yes, I am feeling sick at the moment.

Nesting in a jar

I'm having some irrational nesting tendencies lately where I need to do all sorts of projects. As in immediately. I know this is completely irrational but apparently I am not stronger than oxytocin. So, I'm running with it.

This weekend, I decided to start some more projects. I'm fully aware that we already have 6+ gallons of jam in 4 varieties (strawberry, strawberry-rhubarb, blueberry and cherry). But oxytocin told me that I have not processed any figs or plums yet.

And so this post begins.

On Saturday morning, I went to Beti's house to pick 5.25 lbs of figs from her tree. Later that evening, we went to Brian & Laura for dinner and I picked 5.8 lbs of plums from their tree.

Sunday morning was cooler, so I began to process everything:

*For the figs, I washed and halved them before throwing them on the grill with balsamic vinegar and salt for ~20 min. I let them cool while we ran some errands (we needed to get shelving in the closet immediately). When we got back, I ran them through the food processor until they were almost paste-like. Without sugar, they tasted almost like olives to me (in their vinegar-y salty brine). To some of the puree, I made a strong simple syrup and cooked the figs in that until they were soft and preserve-like. I then canned a couple jars of the mixture and made fig newtons with the rest.

*For the plums, I am fufilling my dream of making Japanese plum wine, a la Caroline who introduced it to me in NY when I first started dating Ken. I went online and found a recipe for it that seemed to produce good results. The recipe is below in case the site goes down. We have a local homebrew store, so I wrote down all the ingredients I need in order to make it (~$12 to make 1 gallon of wine). They close at 5:30 so Ken's picking everything up for me today since I'm on the bus these days and can't get there in time. I called into the store and they theoretically have everything waiting for him at the counter.

Ken goes out of town starting tomorrow and I will start my plum wine the minute he leaves (gives me time to clean up any plum puree that has an excellent chance of ending up everywhere). It takes a couple of months to fully ferment. Perfect timing since Katie arrives in October.

STU'S
FORMULA FOR PRIZE WINNING PLUM WINE

This recipe can be increased or decreased proportionately starting with a recipe for 3 gallons of wine.
15 lbs. ripe plums.
3 gallons hot water. About 140 degrees.
1 ½ tbs. Yeast nutrient.
1 ½ tsp. Peptic enzyme powder.
3 Campden tablets.
1 tbs. + 1 ½ tsp. Acid blend.
1 package Cote Des Blanc yeast.
7 ½ lbs. Sugar.

For cleaning and stabilizing

3 tsp. Spakolloid.
1 ½ tsp. Sorbistat stabilizer.

Tools needed

A wine hydrometer, a thermometer and a bucket or fermenter.

Crush fruit and remove stones. The fruit should be soft enough that you can squash it with your hand. Let the juice and fruit fall in a clean bucket that holds about 5 gallons.

Put all of the ingredients except the yeast, sorbistat, sugar, and sparkolloid in the bucket which we will now call the fermenter.

Add hot water and 5 lbs. of sugar and mix until you do not feel any sugar on the bottom of the fermenter. When cooled take a reading with a hydrometer. (I will put a hydrometer correction table for temperatures at the end of this recipe.) The hydrometer should read 1.090 degrees or around 23 brix if lower add a cup of sugar and mix and check again.

When cooled to room temp. (Probably over night) sprinkle yeast on top and mix lightly cover with plastic and use a large rubber band to hold plastic on and keep bugs out before fermenting starts.

Fermentation should start in one or two days. Put fermenter in the coolest place you can find. Stir down cap in morning and evening. After three days of fermenting take a hydrometer reading everyday. When the hydrometer reads 1.020 degrees carefully remove as much of cap as possible by hand and strain the rest through a coarse strainer into a carboy and fill to about 8 inches or more from the top put a baggie over top for two days then use a airtrap.

After three weeks siphon off lees (silt on bottom) into another container and fill as high as one inch from top. You can always top off with water if necessary but remember you are diluting your wine. Rack again in three months.

Use sparkolloid to clear after another two months. When clear you can sweeten to your taste, use sugar or sweet and low. If sugar is used add sorbistat to stabilize.

Hydrometer correction table

Temperature of liquid-------------------Correction

59----------------------------------------------none
68---------------------------------------------Add 0.009
77---------------------------------------------Add 0.02
86---------------------------------------------Add 0.034
95---------------------------------------------Add 0.05
104-------------------------------------------Add 0.068

Week 29 Update

Pregnancy wise, things are still going well. We had an ultrasound today and the baby is 3.5 lbs and in the 64th percentile for growth. No pictures because she was moving around so much and had her hands up over her face. Fibroid is the same size and isn't causing any complications, so that's good. She is kicking quite a bit. I feel them but they're not strong -- it is a good thing that my uterus is made of steel because the technician said "she's kicking the snot out of you". Ken could see one of the kicks from his chair next to me. I'm thankful they're not painful.

I've gained 25 lbs so far and my belly circumference is 41.5 inches. It is in the normal range but I feel ginormous and not very attractive sometimes, especially when it's hot and I have to wear the loosest (read: ugliest) clothing I can find in order to not overheat. Don't get me wrong, sometimes I feel cute with my big belly, which I find comical, but mostly it's the swollen feet and not being able to move easily that make things a bit of an adjustment. This long work stretch has especially hurt my feet and legs. I find it difficult to walk the dog around the block as my feet are aching by the end. I've had them up a lot this past weekend, so I'm hoping this next week will be better when I'm not on my feet as much. But that all said, I'm having a pretty easy go of things, so I can't complain. I'm still pretty mobile and can do just about anything.

My next doctor's appt is Friday, when I'll hear the results of my gestational diabetes blood test. Likely negative, at least that's what I'm hoping since I love berries and fruit. We've gone through 25 lbs of blueberries in the last two weeks! (though 10 lbs of those were frozen or dried -- the rest eaten fresh over cereal or milk.)

We're getting the basement office in order now, which is just about finished, and I'll work on the nursery this week while Ken's on his backpacking trip (from tomorrow to Sunday).

Work

I'm in the middle of running a program for work that lasts 9 days. We're hosting 12 rural middle school teachers from around the state. I've had (and will continue to have) 13-14 hour days until next Thursday, Saturday included. I'm out of the house by 7 am, back at 9:30 pm. Sunday is off, but I'm staying at the dorms as the staff member in charge that night, starting around 6 pm. So if you don't hear much of me for the next week or so, this is why.

Berry Mania

I went berry picking last Friday night with my friend, Mindy. She could be a migrant worker thanks to her ability to pick berries quickly. But I finally, for the first time, beat her picking quantity. I picked 13 lbs of berry wonderment (see bottom two trays). I think she had 12.5 lbs (top two trays). It was a fact that I will cherish.

We picked blueberries and raspberries at a farm about 10-15 miles from Portland until we were asked to leave. Seriously. They had to pull the tractor around to tell us they were closing. I froze one tray of blueberries and made a double batch of blueberry jam out of another 8 cups, but Ken and I ate the rest. Plus, we ate all of the raspberries.

It was a tasty berry weekend. Maybe that's why Katie started kicking.

Kick It!

I felt my first kicks last night!!! 10 weeks late but at least they finally came! Plus, they were strong enough for Ken to feel too. He was very excited and felt about 3 in a few minute span.

So, I guess she's really in there. Maybe she just likes to sleep in like me, which is why it took so long.

Cherry Experimentation

I processed 5 pounds of cherries last week in my quest for the perfect Old Fashioned after Katie is born. I have dreamed of having Oregon cherries to complement my drink but I had never attempted to can cherries before. My motivating factor was a coworker who attempted it with success last year, combined with the fact that my parents are coming to help take care of Katie in October -- and my father makes a mean Old Fashioned.

I read in the Oregonian last week (June 30th Food Day) that pouring boiling simple syrup over raw cherries and sticking the jar in the fridge can preserve them for up to 3 months. But Katie's born in just around 3 months, so I needed a more drastic preservation method to be sure that I won't have cherries-gone-bad come October. That would make me sad. All that work and no cherries.

So I decided to look into pressure canning the cherries, which prolongs their shelf life by years. According to several reports, canning cherries can really change the texture, rending them soft mushy blobs. I also read that brandied cherries are excellent. I couldn't decide which to make. Thus, I created a mini experiment to test the effects of pressure canning and brandy on cherry texture for our delicious drink-to-be.

The Syrup
Most recipes for preserving cherries say to submerge the cherries in hot water or a hot simple syrup when processing. I chose a simple syrup of equal parts sugar and water, boiled. I made 8 cups and added 2 cinnamon sticks, zest of a lemon and 5 drops of calcium chloride (latter for added firmness). According to some food science articles I looked up, adding a 0.04% solution of calcium chloride improves firmness in processed cherries. Since I happen to have a calcium chloride solution in my kitchen for cheesemaking (bottle doesn't say the concentration; just to add 1/4 teaspoon per 2 gallons of milk), I figured I'd add a few drops. Note: I didn't have enough cherries to control for calcium chloride concentration else I would have. Also note: I feel ridiculous for having calcium chloride on hand.

The Cherries
I used Bing cherries from the farmer's market at ~$2 lb. I only used firm cherries, which I pitted and stemmed. I left the stems on two of the jars because my father insists that Old Fashioned cherries have stems. Luckily, I had enough cherries to control for stems vs no stems in pressure canning.

The Experimental Groups
I tested for:
a. pressure canning (used a standard 10 lbs pressure x 10 min, which translates to roughly 240 degrees F -- enough to kill all sorts of buggies)
b. brandy (used 1 part brandy, actually an unsweetened Tuaca base, to 3 parts simple syrup described above)

My groups were (only one pint jar per group due to limited cherries):
1. Stemmed cherries in syrup, put in fridge (control)
2. Stemmed cherries in syrup + brandy, fridge
3. Stemmed cherries in syrup + brandy, pressure canned
4. Cherries with stems in syrup, pressure canned
5. Cherries with stems in syrup and brandy, pressure canned

The Results
I opened jars 1, 2, 3 and 4 this weekend to check for taste and texture. We had 6 tasters.

The cherries in the fridge had a much better texture than the canned cherries. All tasters preferred the texture of the refrigerated "preserved" cherries, which tasted "like fresh cherries" according to one taster. Great for making cherry garnishes in advance for a party, but I was sad since this isn't a preserving option for me for October. The pressure canned cherries were pretty soft but passable (especially for a drink).

The brandied cherries were excellent. Not too strong but gave a nice flavor that complemented the cherries. They were good in both cases but the brandied pressure canned cherries were a really nice distraction from the texture. (Keep in mind that the fridge cherries were by far the winner, but for my drink in October, the brandied pressure canned cherries are the winner).

Stems don't seem to make a difference when pressure canning. All stems stayed on fine and didn't change the texture of the cherries.


The Outcome
I have one jar of pressure canned cherries with stems leftover from this experiment and I canned 3 more jars this weekend (all with brandy) for October. I am looking forward to my Old Fashioned. I even have homemade bitters to use in the drink. It will be a homemade Old Fashioned, that's for sure. Well, minus the booze. I've been saving a bottle of Bulleit bourbon just for the occasion.