Day 10 of WordPress Writing 201: Poetry gives us sonnets with a prompt of pleasure and use of apostrophes.
I’m trying hard to get these done, and I finished this on my iPad just as we lost out Internet connection which was very frustrating. I lost most of what I wrote because the WordPress app on my iPad mini reverted to an earlier saved version. So I tried to reconstruct this the best I could. (Also the line breaks are all wonky now because I had to do it on my phone. Not sure how to get the line breaks right on the app on my phone. Maybe I can fix it later.)
Autumn Pleasures
My summer sun is fading.
Fear not, the autumn leaves are bright.
Green ones trading, upgrading, then parading.
Find a candle and a hoodie, winds are cool at night.
Grasshopper, still, in my tomato plant.
Do you seek food? Come, let me throw thee over.
Jump to flee me and enchant.
See you later. There’s more to try than clover.
Air of spices, leaves and cider, apples, homemade pies.
Blue and crisp, blows fabric ghosts and skeleton attire.
Hug me, warm me, carve our squash surprise.
Glows and flickers, marshmallow roasts on sticks afire.
While watering my balcony plants this morning I discovered I had a visitor. A grasshopper was perched high on my Celebrity tomato plant. (That’s the name of a hybrid tomato — it isn’t that my tomato plant is famous). We’re four flights up on this side of the building, so some of our balcony visitors are quite a surprise.
My first thought was, “oh cool, aren’t grasshoppers good luck?” Then my scientific brain kicked in. It said, “don’t think of it as so much of a lucky grasshopper think of it as more of a plague of locusts.”
Thanks science brain — always there to burst my bubble. Grasshopper on the hearth — good luck. Locust on your crops — bad.
Grasshopper or locust — those things do eat plants. I know the frost will get my container garden soon anyway, but I don’t want my few tomatoes to get chomped on in the meantime. So I decide to take a few photos (he’s really cool looking) and then relocate my little intruder.
Thinking I can just scoop him (or her) up with my hands and fling him over the railing of the balcony, I go for it. This startles the grasshopper, who can indeed hop very forcefully. He jumps off the plant, banging right into my chest as if to say, “back off, b****, this plant is mine.”
I scream, loudly and flail my arms at my chest in case he’s still there. He is not. He apparently bounced right off my chest and back into my tomato plant. So now he’s still there, and I need to remove him.
I know at this point that using my hands is not the way to go. So I pick up two unused drainage dishes from nearby and use them to form a sort of clamshell over and under the grasshopper. It works very nicely. The makeshift clamshell holds just long enough that I can fling him over the side of the balcony. Since we’re four flights up, I’m not sure if he’ll survive. Never fear. That’s when he sprouts big fluttery wings and uses them to glide softly down — all the while looking back at me like, “you may have won this time but I’ll be back.”
Searching a bit online, I guess they are lucky in many Asian and Native American cultures. (It might be crickets on hearths that are considered lucky though. Meh, close enough. Probably better for all of us that I didn’t try to bring him inside. The cats would go wild!.)
My search found this: Grasshopper Totem. It was actually cool to have him visit. And it just figures that a symbol of good luck visits my plant, and I rationalized that I should throw him over the balcony. Maybe I’m okay if he has a little nibble, he may have left some good-luck grasshopper poop, but I still don’t want him to eat much of my tomatoes. There’s plenty of stuff to eat down below.
Wow, I am really not good at poetry — writing or understanding it except maybe in picture form. Like, “wow, that sunrise was pure poetry.” See, I get that.
But this Writing 201: Poetry thing is really throwing me for a loop. Here we are on Day 7 Day 8 and I’m still working out days 2 through 6 7.
There are three poetry-y components to think about for every assignment. For day 6 of Writing 201: Poetry it’s “Faces, Found Poetry, Chiasmus.”
I’m a beginner here. I think my speed is set to one. I’m still trying to work out what “Chiasmus” means when, all of a sudden, we’re on the next assignment. Now I gotta figure out five new things and fold the laundry in the same day.
Chiasmus means:
A.) Christmas for Chia pets.
B.) Chalupa, a yummy food (topped with sprouted chia seeds?).
C.) Another word for Chupacabra, a scary animal in Latin America that sucks goats.
D.) An inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases, an inverted crossing.
Haiku is my speed. I know what syllables and lines of text are. Yay! But I think I ignored the “alliteration” part of the Haiku assignment. My brain just skipped right over that. I kind of know what alliteration is. I had that in school back in the day. So maybe a little alliteration got into my haiku but it was purely my subconscious brain making itself heard. I think I alliterate by accident a lot.
So maybe going forward with these assignments I can just skip parts of the assignment when my brain wanders off. That is my current plan. Otherwise I’ll be stuck forever in a poetry world that exists only of haiku. (Which isn’t exactly the worst place to be. I like haiku. But I should venture out more.)
Here’s something for Day 6 which involves “found” poetry. It seems a lot easier to just find poetry stuff than to start from scratch. I find unexpected things all the time— sometimes in the laundry.
So I’m just going to Google “face laundry” (as in I can’t face laundry right now), and then I’ll find a poem and maybe eat a Chalupa for lunch. That counts, right?
Dang, “Skin Laundry,” shows up in the first and second spot of my search. What the heck is skin laundry? Do I want to know? I’m just going to use the first few lines of each search result (more or less). OK, then. Here’s my poem.
Face Laundry
Skin laundry. Nearest laundry. Skin laundry stamp. Find a laundry near you.
Shop. Skin laundry.
I tried skin laundry, the “drybar of skincare.”
Express beauty service: Sure, it’s fast, but are the results long-lasting …
Chinese laundry women’s face off bootie: shoes.
New ‘skin laundry’ clinic wants to dry-clean your face.
I picked two newly ripened Patio tomatoes yesterday morning. There are several varieties of green ones left, and about five tiny green ones that just started on my Celebrity tomato plant. So, hopefully, it’s not over yet. All the rain and cool temperatures the week before last had me worried.
There are a bunch of jalapeño peppers that just started growing too.
I don’t know if the new little green tomatoes or peppers will fully grow and ripen — probably not. But I hope the get some size before a hard freeze hits us.
I picked some of my green tomatoes before Hurricane Joaquin hit or, more accurately, didn’t hit here.
I may fry a couple but what I did with some of them was dice them and add them to a mix of hot peppers in vinegar and spices. So, yes, I pickled them. They were a really nice surprise. They’re tart, spicy hot from the peppers, and have a nice crunch. I could see adding this mix to many types of food for a nice pop of flavor.
Also I picked most of my ripe tobasco peppers and put them in vinegar. They are beautiful colors — yellow greens to yellow orange and finally reds. This variety is so juicy it’s almost like tiny bottles of hot pepper sauce grow right on the plant. Even the stems and “caps” easily pop right off a ripe pepper. There’s no need to cut them. They pack a wollop!
Here I am — already one week into this thing called “the future” that our Day-20 assignment, from WordPress Writing 101, asked us to look toward. I’m a veritable time traveler. Look out world! Bam!
I still have more posts both to finish and to start. Some from Blogging U. and some that I just want to do. I expect this to be the case for a while longer. Possibly a long long time.
First there are ideas. Then starting to write. And then finishing a post or story…
All that life stuff keeps happening too — feeding the foundation, pumping fluids, circulating air.
It’s a cycle kind of shaped like a Christmas tree for me – lots of ideas form the wide bottom, somewhere in the middle I have all the stuff I’ve started. At the top are the those I’ve finished — this section is a little sparse. But if I plant enough trees and help them grow, hopefully I can keep some alive and some might thrive and maybe I’ll even manage to put a shiny star on top once in a while. (Then I’ll just have to manage to take it down before February, right? Oh, wait.)
I’m happy when I manage to finish a blog post and even happier when I finish a story. So going forward that’s what I’ll continue to aim for. More of both with special emphasis on stories. I’m even working on a schedule for myself.
Along the way, I look forward to gatherings of friends and family, old and new.
Way in the future, perhaps I can look back at my little Christmas tree farm and remember each one with fondness — even the ones that twisted and turned unexpectedly. And hopefully I’ll manage it all well enough that the laundry still gets done, some of the fish survive (gotta pick your battles), and the cats and humans in our family are happy and fed.
The cats do love to play with Christmas trees. The humans like them too (just not quite so much February to September … Or maybe October.)
It’s that time of year when warm days fade into cool. Colors turn orange, Brown, and red. And pumpkin spice everything can be found just about everywhere. It’s great if you like pumpkin spice! And may be tiring if you don’t.
There are more pumpkin-spice-flavored products than ever — it’s invading practically everything edible (and some not so edible)! To name just a few, there are M&Ms, cake mix, potato chips, breakfast cereal, Greek yogurt, and Oreo cookies! (The Chobani pumpkin spice Greek yogurt is surprisingly good.)
As WordPress Writing 101’s Day 16 Assignment is to “Search your stats for a post idea” this is a perfect time to revisit my Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer review from 2013. I’ve noticed those search terms popping up in my stats again lately.
I love actual pumpkin pie and pumpkin bread and so does my daughter. We also like the spice in other things but it depends on what and on the spice blend itself. I can get sick of it. No thank you to pumpkin spice steak for example. Or maybe yes? Hmm, I might actually try that.
This year I’m revisiting two supermarket coffee creamers and adding two new ones.
International Delight: Pumpkin Pie Spice
Coffee-mate: Pumpkin Spice
Target’s Market Pantry brand: Pumpkin Pie Coffee Creamer
Coffee-mate’s Natural Bliss: Pumpkin Spice
The last two are new to the party. Good news — gone are the hydrogenated oils and fats of previous years’ coffee creamers! This is great if you watch the types of fat you ingest, and you should. Also gone is the corn-syrup sweetener. All four of these sweeten with actual sugar. (There are sugar-free versions of many of these too.)
Three of them have the same 35 calories per serving with 15 of those calories from fat. The Target MP version has only 30 calories per serving with only 10 calories from fat.
International Delight: Pumpkin Pie Spice
Pumpkin spice is usually a blend of cinnamon, nutmeg, clove, and ginger. My review from 2013 stated that International Delight’s offering was heavy on the ginger so that their Pumpkin Pie Spice coffee creamer tasted more like ginger bread. While I can still taste the ginger in their mix, this year’s seems somewhat less gingery and more balanced. I like this one overall. It isn’t as strongly spiced as Coffee-mate Pumpkin Spice. It’s fairly good when poured directly into coffee or tea and I don’t feel like I have to doctor it much if at all. I’m not too sick of it by the time I get to the bottom of my cup. The oil in it is palm oil which makes it nicely creamy but not too oily and filmy on my tongue. This is tied for first place as far as I’m concerned. Dave likes this one second best.
Coffee-mate Pumpkin Spice Coffee Creamer
This one HAD partially-hydrogenated oils in its 2013 offering. I’m happy to say that the 2015 version no-longer lists hydrogenated or partially-hydrogenated oils in the ingredients. It has what I consider to be the most classic pumpkin-pie flavor of all of them. When I taste it, that’s exactly what I taste — pumpkin pie spice. As it was in 2013, this is still the heaviest on the spice flavor! It is so strong that I can’t put much of it into my coffee or tea without making it too spicy. That’s easy to fix though — if you want really creamy coffee that isn’t as spicy just add some extra plain or vanilla creamer or even real milk or cream. It’s nice if you want to add flavor while keeping your beverage light on the sweet creaminess. A little dab will do ya! The strong spice is also good if you want to experiment with mixing flavors like pumpkin spice with caramel. It really holds up. So it has advantages and disadvantages. The texture of it is a typical coffee creamer effect. This is also tied for first place as far as I’m concerned. This is third in Dave’s opinion. It’s too spicy to him.
Target’s Market Pantry brand: Pumpkin Pie Coffee Creamer
I was happy to see this as an option this year, but I’m not that crazy about it. While lowest in calories and fat, it is the thickest creamer of all. The spice flavor isn’t bad. It’s slightly heavy on the ginger, but a pretty good blend. The problem is that it’s almost cloyingly sweet and my tongue feels a coated after a cup. It’s weird that it’s so thick yet lowest in fat, so there must be something in it to give it more body. This backfires. I’m ready to be done by the time I get to the bottom of my cup (or even sooner). If you like really sweet, thick creamers, lighter on the spice flavor then you might really like this one though. The oil in it is sunflower oil which is actually a good thing so I wish I liked it more. This one is tied for second or last for me. Dave, who doesn’t like incense or scented candles, likes this one the best!
Coffee-mate’s Natural Bliss: Pumpkin Spice
I was excited about this one because the ingredients are so simple and awesome: nonfat milk, heavy cream, sugar, and natural flavor. That’s it! The blend itself isn’t bad, but it comes off little hodgepodge and maybe a bit heavy on the ginger and nutmeg. Not so much nutmeg that it tastes like eggnog though. It has more of a fresh-ginger taste as opposed to the others which seem like more of a dried-ground-ginger taste. Maybe that’s what bothers me. I like fresh ginger but that’s not what’s normally found in pumpkin pies. This one has a strange aftertaste too. I like it okay but I definitely don’t love it. This one is tied for second or least favorite for me. It is last on Dave’s list.
This year’s Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is supposed to contain actual pumpkin flavor! I haven’t tried it yet. (I’ll have to fix that soon.) In previous years it was just a creamy spiced drink topped with whipped cream and chock-full-o calories. You can purchase an entire bottle of supermarket coffee creamer for the same price as one sweet beverage from Starbucks. While the Starbucks version was very yummy in the past, I still like the convenient budget- friendly option of a flavored coffee creamer for home.
There you have it, supermarket coffee creamer offerings for 2015! These are found with the other refrigerated coffee creamers in many grocery stores. Some even have special holiday-creamer displays. They’re a fun, seasonal offering for coffee, tea, or even flavoring plain milk and grown-up beverages. Enjoy!
I signed up for WordPress Writing 201: Poetry. Poetry isn’t my usual forte, but I’m looking forward to trying something new. Mostly I’d wanted to do more with Writing 101 and Blogging 201 that I haven’t finished yet. So Writing 201 may be my penitence. No, it’s not that bad — probably not that bad anyway. It may even be lots of fun, so I’m keeping an open mind. I like the first assignment!
Write a haiku on screens — mostly computer screens but other screens like those in windows are okay too. Sun screen? Security screen? Really, I’m fine with computer or digital device screens so here’s my haiku:
Screen Haiku
It glows and it knows.
It may interrupt your sleep.
Ping ping ping, I look.
Bonus haiku!
Not being much of
A poetry type, I like
Haiku since it’s short.
Is there supposed to be punctuation in haiku? I’ll have to look it up. In the meantime, I’m leaving it in.
I want to remember these tidbits of advice as much as I want to share them. I’m putting these links here so that I can find them on down the road. This also happens to fulfill the assignment for Writing 101’s Day 19 assignment*. (Yay! I fulfilled an assignment!) I may even make a separate page with this stuff that I can add more links and keep it all convenient.
10 Ways to Overcome Writer’s Block by Vincent Mars from his Boy with a Hat blog:
We can strive for perfection — always trying to make our writing and ourselves better. That’s good. But the quest for perfection can lead to paralysis too. We can be so afraid of making mistakes that, instead, we make no moves at all. Nothing. In all likelihood, most of us will never reach actual perfection. That’s fine. Sometimes it’s better to just DO. Write. Let it happen with all it’s beautiful flaws. We are supposed to be flawed. Aren’t we? I’d rather have 1000 words period, than to have felt like it none of it is good enough and end up with zero. I can find “flaws” in some of my very favorite books and blogs. I still love them! (In the for-what-it’s-worth department, I don’t really like overly perfect teeth, so take that.)
Actual Writing Advice: Online Presence, Blogging by Melina Moore on her Enchanted Spark blog:
I often feel pangs of inadequacy when I see some new blogger with 5000+ followers. I’ve been blogging for over five years now, and I don’t have that. But I remind myself that I didn’t start my blog in order to gain followers. I started it to give me a place to write. I love my followers and commenters (heck even just a quick Like is appreciated), but ultimately the writing is why I’m here. I love visiting other blogs too. In fact, I’d like to read more of them. Most days I’m lucky if I can manage a quick fly-by of other blogs. Hopefully, I’ll get some free time at some point and focus on the process. (Is what I say to myself more often than I’d like.)
Sometimes I also spend more time blogging than writing my stories. I do the reverse too. So I want to be more conscious of where I spend my word counts. I love blogging and writing stories, but I don’t want to wake up with way too much blogging and no finished stories.
*If I actually managed stay on top of Writing 101 like I thought I was going to do, then I might actually have had a guest blogger here. I know some good ones I could ask. It could be fun. Did I manage that? Nope.
I’ve been letting stuff like laundry, leaky aquariums, helping my mom move, and a sizable list of other stuff fill my time instead of hitting those alphabet keys in any kind of efficient way. It’s really good that a lot of that other stuff got done — very important even — but I’m still hungry to get more words down (not on paper). It’s kind of like doing my nails — been meaning to do them for over a month and still have pathetic, naked nails. I did manage to shave my legs and shower. That’s something! My nails are not just bare but in need of a trim now too. They click on the keys as I type. I feel like a stray dog that escaped from a groomer before the job was done.
According to Writing 101, Day 19, directions I can do the next best thing to having a guest blogger. That is, I can publish a roundup of great reads and share some blog posts that resonated with me. That is what this is. I’m excited about it too because I’m afraid I might forget where I read a few things and I want to keep these links handy.
Tuesday’s storm blew over one of my tomato plants. It was a little top heavy. That’s the risk of not being rooted in the earth or tied to the balcony. I’ll have to fix that. Two hard green tomatoes flung off the plant and rolled under the table & chairs on our balcony. Maybe they were ducking for cover.
I’ve been hoping the few tomatoes we have left would ripen and be yummy. Now I might have to look into green tomato recipes like pickled tomatoes or the classic fried green variety. I hope I can still coax some to ripen on vines or the windowsill if nothing else.
Bonnie Plants just posted on their Facebook page that now is the time to pick green tomatoes still on the vines. “Nooooooo!” Where? Everywhere? Or just up North? I still want to leave some on the vines to grow and ripen, but Mother Nature may have other ideas for them. Maybe I’m a little ahead of the times with my two green tomatoes.
We’ve had more rain here this week than most of the summer combined with the exception of early on when it seemed to rain every single afternoon. It’s like bookends.
Hurricane Joaquin may hit inland near here in the next few days. Or not. Who can say. The rain seems to be announcing it’s approach as if a red carpet were rolled out. But winds change. The scruffy superstar may not show up inland. It may only rain a lot.
I’m both a little relieved and a little worried that my mom and stepdad have moved out of their old house and into a newer house that’s farther away. The new home isn’t yet storm-tested but the old had a beautiful large oak with branches over and behind the house. It is somehow both protective and precarious.
In the meantime, I’ll need to move our table & chairs to someplace less exposed just in case part of the storm reaches us. Our balcony gets very windy. I’ll also need to move or tie down any remaining plants. The rest remains to be seen.
Crud, I started this post before summer was over and here it is, autumn already. Happy Autumn, folks!
I love fall, but I’ll miss summer and one of my favorite things about summer — all the yummy, fresh, local produce. Never fear, summer fruits are still to be found. The fresh local ones will be gone very soon though! Around here, this weekend will be the last for pit fruits like peaches.
Luckily, I can take some of summer’s fresh fruit with me into fall by making macerated fruit. These juicy morsels stride the line between fresh fruit and preserves like some kind of zombie fruit. Living and dead. Summer and Autumn. Maybe I should call it Zombie Fruit? I think I will. The yummy goop doesn’t smell anything like zombies. As far as I know zombies don’t smell peachy, but the macerated raspberry juice can look kind of like blood so there’s that.
Like jams, jellies, and pickles, a lack of free water and a high concentration of sugar (or salt or acid like vinegar) actually helps prevent or slow the growth of mold and bacteria. Check out the science behind it here at wisegeek.org. That’s part of how jam came to be — folks used the process as a way of preserving their fruit harvest. But even great jam tastes like jam and not so much like fresh fruit. So without cooking or freezing we can keep some of that fresh-fruit taste in the fridge for weeks (or sometimes even months) by making macerated fruit in sugar. Even with the added sugar, the juices and wee morsels of fruit are softened but manage to keep a lot of the fresh fruit taste since it isn’t exposed to heat.
All it takes is fresh fruit and sugar and a refrigerator and, for some fruit, a little bit of a product called Fruit Fresh. Spices can be used too. Note that this will work best if you use the FULL amount of sugar. This isn’t the time to watch carbs. The sugar draws the water and juices out of the fruit and is a critical part of preventing nasties like mold and bacteria growth. While it will take some time to completely dissolve without heat, it will eventually dissolve though it may take a week. If a small amount doesn’t dissolve it will settle to the bottom where you can scoop it out when you’re done with the rest of the goop and add it to hot tea or oatmeal.
Zombie Peaches and Zombie Raspberries (aka macerated peaches and raspberries) after several days.
Zombie Peaches (aka Macerated Peaches)
1 cup fresh peaches cut up
1 1/2 cups granulated sugar (preferably raw sugar)
1 1/2 teaspoon Fruit Fresh
The peaches should be cut in to bite-size pieces or medium-to-thin size slices to allow the juices to flow. Be sure to cut out any bad or bruised spots. You can leave the skin on (wash really well before slicing) or you can remove it.
Mix the Fruit Fresh powder into the cup of sugar. Using a clean, sanitized mason jar put a layer of the sugar mix in the bottom of the jar. Spoon a layer of sliced peaches over the sugar. Add another layer of sugar mix over the peaches. Repeat until you’ve used all the peaches and sugar or until the jar is full but not overflowing. Finish the last layer with sugar so that the peaches are covered. Put the lid on the mason jar and allow the sugar to dissolve in the peach juice. The sugar will draw the juice out from the peaches and then gradually dissolve. There will be a lot of juice! This can take quite a few days (even a week) since we’re not using heat to speed it up. Air from between the peach pieces and granules of sugar will slowly bubble out. In the first few days, stir the sugar up from the bottom once or twice per day to help it along. (Lick the spoon. It’s yummy.)
Alternative method: mix all the ingredients together in a large bowl then spoon into mason jars. Then follow as above, stirring regularly. I find it less messy to do the layers in the jars.
Store covered in the fridge for weeks.
We spoon the mix over ice cream, pancakes, shortcake, or fruit salad. Use the syrupy liquid to flavor beverages. Sometimes we eat some on a spoon ’cause it is sooo good. While obviously sweeter than fresh fruit, it retains a lot of that fresh fruit taste and nutrition that is usually cooked out during canning or making jams. This also makes a great start to jam or preserves so you can also cook it down later and can it later for even longer preservation. You can also freeze it later too.
variation: Spiced Zombie Peaches
Same as Zombie Peaches, above, but add:
1/8 teaspoon of cinnamon
Mix cinnamon with the dry ingredients and layer as above. Cinnamon does more than just add flavor, it also suppresses bacterial growth so it can help the concoction last even longer. It does taste like cinnamon, obviously, so you gotta like cinnamon. 1/8 of a teaspoon may not seem like a lot, but the juices and sugar will draw out the flavor and you will definitely notice it.
Zombie Raspberries (aka Macerated Raspberries)
1/2 cup raspberries
1/4 cup sugar
Put a layer of sugar in the bottom of a mason jar. Then add a single layer of raspberries, then another layer of sugar. Repeat until you’ve used all your ingredients or until the jar is full. Try to finish the last layer with sugar so that the raspberries are covered. Since we aren’t cutting up the raspberries, press lightly on the top to squish the raspberries a little. This will help get the juices flowing. Cover and store in the fridge, stirring occasionally, as the sugar draws out the raspberry juice. Scientifically the solution is trying to reach a balanced concentration of sugar and water. Juices flow out of the fruit through osmosis. This reduces the free water in the fruit which slows spoilage when kept in the fridge. Keep stirring periodically until the sugar dissolves. It can take several days.
Store covered in the fridge for weeks (up to a couple of months). We spoon over ice cream, pancakes, french toast, shortcake, or even fruit salad. I use the syrupy liquid to flavor beverages. This also makes a great start to jams, preserves, or even cobblers which you can cook later.
You can use the same process with other types fruits too. For really juicy fruit, like nectarines, you’ll want to use the larger amount of sugar (like Zombie Peaches) while fruits with less water content, like blackberries, use less sugar (Zombie Raspberry recipe).
Note that this process doesn’t preserve the fruit as thoroughly as jams, so it must live in the fridge. It will, however, last a lot longer than keeping plain fresh fruit. I’ve had a couple of jars last almost a year. I’ll warn you right now, too, that there can be a small amount of fermentation. But even if fermentation starts, it will stall out with all that sugar and the refrigerator will keep it to a minimum. So you won’t end up with much of an alcohol content — about as much as a ripe banana.
Fruit Fresh is in the tall, green, sprinkle jar. At this store I found it near the Jell-O along with the Sure-Jell and fruit pectin used for canning.
Fruit Fresh is a product usually found near the mason jars and other canning supplies in a lot of grocery stores. It’s a powdered mix containing mostly citric acid and ascorbic acid (vitamin C) which help prevent oxidation, so Fruit Fresh keeps fruit from turning brown. It’s really helpful for peaches, apples, and other fruits that turn brown quickly once you cut them. It’s like lemon juice but without adding any extra liquid or lemon flavor. It also ups the acidity so it may help to preserve the food some just like lemon juice or vinegar. It can also affect the taste so keep that in mind. This is usually fine with foods that work well with a little tartness, but you’ll want to be careful with food like bananas or avocados.
Note that this yummy fruit goop isn’t shelf stable so you’ll need to keep it in the fridge. You can also freeze it or can it later following typical canning protocol for food safety. As a general rule, if something goes wrong and it smells bad or tastes bad or it ends up growing mold then don’t eat it. If that happens, it means you should use a higher sugar-to-fruit ratio for future batches.
Here’s the process in pictures:
The last two photos were taken after several days of sitting in the fridge and stirring periodically. Remember ALL the juice you see in the jars came from the fruit. I didn’t add any water! So don’t throw that juice away, use it, drink it, mix it into stuff. It’s crazy yummy!
aLightningbug 