We’ve been a little bit MIA on the old jam blog here, it’s been a busy summer, what with jamming, farming and shakin’ our jammer booties at different events around town. But Autumn is upon us, [...]]]>

"Farm Frank" hot dog with hot pepper jelly, green tomato relish, radish and carrot pickles, & smoked paprika aioli

We’ve been a little bit MIA on the old jam blog here, it’s been a busy summer, what with jamming, farming and shakin’ our jammer booties at different events around town. But Autumn is upon us, and we’ll make sure to write more often and fill these pixels with luscious picture of jam and things to make with jam.

Here is a tardy update on the 5th annual Great Hot Dog Cookoff, which we always participate in and always find some way to put jam on our hot dogs. The first year we had the Colombian Dog, with pineapple, grape jelly, “pink sauce”, and crushed potato chips, last year we had the PB &J dog, and this year we did a “Farm Frank” with hot pepper jelly, green tomato relish, radish and carrot pickles, & smoked paprika aioli. We used all local produce, and the hot pepper jelly was made from peppers Igrew from seed and tended with love on my man’s rooftop farm.

JAM CROSTATA

SERVINGS: MAKES ONE 9-INCH TART

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 2 tablespoons sugar 1/2 teaspoon grated lemon [...]]]> In our attempts to encourage everyone to live in our jamarchy — a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom from food tyranny –we’re adding to the roster of things to do with jam. Pastry + jam = pure goodness.

JAM CROSTATA

SERVINGS: MAKES ONE 9-INCH TART

Directions
In a large bowl, using a fork, stir together the flour, sugar, lemon zest and salt. Using your fingertips, work in the butter until the dough resembles coarse meal. Make a well in the center and add the ice water 1 tablespoon at a time. Gently blend the ingredients 1 tablespoon at a time until moist clumps form. Gather the dough into a ball and flatten it into a disk. Wrap the disk in plastic and refrigerate until firm, at least 1 hour or overnight.

Position the rack in the center of the oven and preheat the oven to 400 degrees F. Roll out the dough on a floured surface to an 11-inch round. Transfer the dough onto a heavy baking sheet that has been lined with parchment paper. Stir the lemon juice into the preserve and spread the preserves on top of dough, leaving a 2-inch border. Fold the dough border over the filling to form an 8-inch round, pleating loosely and pinching to seal any cracks in the dough.

Bake the crostata until the crust is golden, 35 to 40 minutes. Allow to cool. Sprinkle with the almonds and dust with the powdered sugar, if you wish. Slide a metal spatula under the crust to free the crostata from the baking sheet and serve.

*Note: try making the crostata with two kinds of preserves–it looks pretty!

Note: you can make these as tiny crostata babies instead using the same ingredients and method, but shaping a bunch of small crostata shells. experiment to make your own foodtopia!

Sometimes I’m overcome with a profound sense of quilt. I listen to NPR describe the suffering of people aboard this small planet as I make jam, and I wonder why I decided to start this company in Brooklyn instead of working for the International Red Cross as I intended, [...]]]>

truck farm, photo by ian cheney

Sometimes I’m overcome with a profound sense of quilt. I listen to NPR describe the suffering of people aboard this small planet as I make jam, and I wonder why I decided to start this company in Brooklyn instead of working for the International Red Cross as I intended, or returning to my life of adventure, science and exploration.

But then I open my eyes.

The 20th century was all about exploration: space, the poles, the moon, mountain tops, globalization and corporate expansion. There was great invention and profound devastation, greed, waste and limitless consumption; a foolish Icarus fumble that civilizations can relentlessly expand, relentlessly consume without consequence.

But we, the inheritors of this debt, are changing direction. We have no choice. Here in America, at the cusp of the second decade of the 21st century, the state of existence can seem daunting as we face environmental crisis (pollution, species extinction, loss of wilderness, loss of farmland), energy crisis, economic collapse, and war. But not all is lost. Wendell Berry, that sage of our age, says in his essay “The Idea of a Local Economy“:

The “environmental crisis,” in fact, can be solved only if people, individually and in their communities, recover responsibility for their thoughtlessly given proxies. If people begin the effort to take back into their own power a significant portion of their economic responsibility, then their inevitable first discovery is that the “environmental crisis” is no such thing; it is not a crisis of our environs or surroundings; it is a crisis of our lives as individuals, as family members, as community members, and as citizens. We have an “environmental crisis” because we have consented to an economy in which by eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves we are destroying the natural, theGod-given world.

The heroes and change-makers of the 21st century will be us. We will create solutions for renewable energy and fighting poverty, make tools that provide safe drinking water, create urban farms that make use of wasted space and teach us how to live better, smaller and healthier. We’ll take back the kitchen, the town square, the city. The heroes of the 21st century won’t need to leave home to be heroic, they’ll make home better for all of us by relocalizing.

By now, we know this (right?). We know the tag line that local is better, we even have the overused term “locavore” to describe cultist farmers’ market junkies (it was the word of the year for 2007 in the Oxford American Dictionary). “Sustainable” and “green” are so overhyped they’ve lost meaning, particularly when you can buy organic food at Walmart and “sustainable” products at Target.  They’ve become meaningless through their dilution, being used to describe simply another form of obnoxious soap-box consumer. But the reason they’ve been adopted into the vernacular of the zeitgeist is that their original definition holds meaning.

But what does it mean to “live better”? What does it look like to you? Here in Brooklyn, food from the rooftop farm soaring above your neighborhood tastes better because it gets a lot of love, and because the farmer is your friend and you bought that beautiful bunch of kale from him directly, you feel the love when you eat it. And it gets even better when it’s all connected, when the web is such that everyone supplies something and the fate of vacuous employment and an aimless life dissolves. It dissolves through relocalizing your life. If you give everyone in the community a direct, long-term involvement and stake in the prosperity, health, and beauty of their home, they live better and honor this stewardship. Pete Seeger, the iconic folk singer, knew this years ago and proved it over the last thirty years with his incredibly successful efforts to clean up the Hudson River in New York.

This is not to say that the rich won’t keep getting richer and corporations bigger and greedier to dispense nature’s blood-money for our happiness. But the way I see it, we can change this through reorienting our lives so that we don’t lose what is most vital: the real experience, the practice of living fully and “eating, drinking, working, resting, traveling, and enjoying ourselves” by participating responsibly within our community rather than buying these pleasures as purely wasteful, wasted consumers.

Being a small-scale food producer in Brooklyn, I play a minor supporting role in the interconnected local economy. But everyday I learn new ways to deepen and enhance my involvement, whether it’s setting up barter systems and trading for goods with other local vendors, creating venues for collaborative cooking, sharing jam at a friend’s supper club or cooking at the soup kitchen. This is living better. Not just being a “locavore” consumer but being an active participant in your community. I encourage everyone to do it now–this moment, if not sooner. Don’t let another moment waste.

Jam on.

–Laena

Thanks to all our friends and jam fans who visited us at the Brooklyn Flea in Dumbo yesterday! We had a great time sharing a booth with our friends at Brooklyn Based. There was an impressive number of people in Dumbo, enjoying the beautiful Autumn weather– it was a [...]]]>

Thanks to all our friends and jam fans who visited us at the Brooklyn Flea in Dumbo yesterday! We had a great time sharing a booth with our friends at Brooklyn Based. There was an impressive number of people in Dumbo, enjoying the beautiful Autumn weather– it was a perfect day for strolling and nibbling.