Yesterday I had every intention of picking a few strawberries, making some jam, and then relaxing for the rest of the day. But then I got going, and didn't really stop. I did pick berries. It took longer than I thought because they were a bit picked over, but the ones I got were lovely, small, and sweet. They made lovely jam.
which was even more lovely over homemade bread, toasted lightly of course.
And obviously I picked more than enough for jam,
so there had to be a shortcake, which was also lovely.
And that's when things got really out of hand. A few weeks ago, I decided that I was going to have a try at making my own yogurt. Apparently this isn't too hard if you're willing to watch the temperature closely. I bought some plain yogurt to use as a starter, and then I never got around to doing anything with it. So now, the culture is likely not as active as I need it to be to start my own batch, but it's certainly a long way from spoiled, so I was trying to come up with an idea to use up the yogurt. An internet search yielded quite a few recipes for marinading chicken in yogurt. Coincidentally earlier this week, I made a project of learning to bone a chicken breast, which is much much much easier than it sounds, and the new skill will allow me to cut the meat budget in half. So I had a bunch of chicken waiting for a recipe. I didn't have all of the ingredients for any one of the recipes, so I winged it, using what ingredients I did have from the whole bunch of them, and put them in the frig to marinate until dinner. I eventually grilled the chicken, and it came out beautifully, but I didn't take pictures. This effort left me with half a tub of yogurt still without a purpose. Conveniently though, there was a recipe on the lid... and amazingly I had all of the ingredients, including homemade chicken stock that was cluttering up my freezer and needed to find a new home. The recipe was for Sweet Potato Soup, and I highly highly recommend it.
Having had it for lunch today, I can attest to the fact that it got better with a little age, so it'll be great for make-ahead-meals for busy weeks. Maybe if I pick up enough side work this summer, I'll invest in a pressure canner to preserve some.
Update: In searching around a bit to see what the procedure might be to can such a soup, I discovered that it is apparently some type of sin against the Mason jar gods to include any type of dairy product. I'm not really sure what the trouble is. There's a whole whole lot of technical information out there, and normally, I'm all about the food science, but when I came to this statement, "Rob, you're right, density isn't really the right word. In the canning literature, density seems to be a catch-all non-technical term that encompasses density (mass per unit volume), viscosity, thermal conductivity, convection heat transfer coefficient, and maybe even emissivity." Well, I was good right up to "emissivity", which apparently has something to do with black body radiation (according to Wikipedia). I'm happy to consider the ratio of fats to sugars and the physical properties of each which will result in the desired texture, but when it starts to sound like rocket science, I'm out.
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